The Illusion Of Life: Essays On Animation 0909952183, 9780909952181

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ESSAYS ON ANIMATION EDITED BY ALAN CHOLODENKO

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE ESSAYS ON ANIMATION

|

© 1991 Power Institute of Fine Arts

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

Printed by Southwood Press

Published by Power Publications Power Institute of Fine Arts

University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Executive Editor

Virginia Spate General Editor Julian Pefanis

Managing Editor Rod Ritchie Cover design Matthew Martin Chart design Patrick Crogan Published with the financial assistance of the - AustralianiFilmCommission

ISBN 0 909952 18 3

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the following individuals and institutions for their assistance in the production of this book. First, the Australian Film

Commission, for its generous grant which made this book possible. Second, the Power Institute of Fine Arts, for its financial and other assistance with the book. Third, those who provided illustrations

for the book: Warner Bros. Inc., for the four images from Long Haired Hare, Rabbit of Seville, What's Opera, Doc? and Zoom & Bored; The Blade Runner Partnership, for the image from Blade Runner;

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, for the image from The Fly; Teri Yago and Hemdale Film Corporation, for the two images from The Terminator; Orion Pictures Corporation, for the image

from RoboCop; Gaffney International Licensing Pty Limited and Chrysalis Visual Programming Limited, for the image from Max Headroom;

Dover

Publications,

Inc., for permission

to reproduce

Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs, ‘Lizzie M.’ trotting, harnessed to sulky; and Olive Smith, who provided us with the three photographs of optical toys taken by Edwin Smith. Fourth, those who so capably assisted me with the preparation of the texts: Patrick Crogan, Assistant to the Editor, who kept things moving forward while I was overseas on sabbatical in 1989 and who also designed the three diagrams for Philip Brophy’s essay; Rod Ritchie, Managing Editor, for his help in innumerable ways; Lisa Trahair, for wordprocessing the essays; Alexei Mazin, for videotaping Chuck Jones’ talk at THE ILLUSION OF LIFE conference; and Freida Riggs, for helping me transcribe Chuck Jones’ talk from the

videotape and for proofreading this manuscript. Fifth, a personal thanks to Chuck Jones, for his help and his inspiration. Sixth, thanks to Matthew Martin, for the wonderful cover design. Seventh, to Madame Barbara Gré, who established the Mari Kuttna

Bequest in Film, my eternal gratitude for suggesting that I organize an animation event and for supporting it every step of the way, including this book. Eighth, thanks to the authors of the texts, for

their contribution, their perseverance during the lengthy period of editing and acquisition of illustrations and their faith in the book. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my graduate and undergraduate students in the Power Institute of Fine Arts for their enthusiasm for and facilitation of THE ILLUSION

OF LIFE event,

their unstinting support of this book and their joining with me in this adventure in theorizing animation. Alan Cholodenko April 1991

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Alan Cholodenko

WHAT'S UP, DOWN UNDER? Chuck Jones talks at THE ILLUSION OF LIFE Conference THE ANIMATION Philip Brophy

ay

OF SOUND

SATURDAY MORNING Ben Crawford

FEVER

LIFE -THREATENING LIFE: ANGELA CARTER AND THE UNCANNY Robyn Ferrell

131

ANIMATION —- AIDS IN SCIENCE/FICTION Rosalyn Diprose and Cathryn Vasseleu

145

THE WORK-SHOP Peter Hutchings

161

OF FILTHY ANIMATION

FOR THE NOISE OF A FLY Lisa Trahair

183

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, OR THE FRAMING OF ANIMATION Alan Cholodenko

209

HPHATHP: THE T(R)OPOLOGY OF PYROMANIA Keith Clancy

243

THE ILLUSION OF ILLUSION Keith Broadfoot and Rex Butler

263

MOSAIC INFINITY Edward Colless and David Kelly

299

APPENDIX

303

This book is dedicated to Mari Kuttna,

whose love of animation inspired it and the event from which it is drawn.

INTRODUCTION ALAN CHOLODENKO

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE: Essays on Animation is the world’s first book of scholarly essays theorizing animation. It is based on an event of the same name, THE ILLUSION OF LIFE, the world’s first

international conference on animation and Australia’s first large-scale international festival of animation. This event was held in Sydney in July of 1988 and was sponsored by the Australian Film Commission, the Mari Kuttna Bequest in Film and the Power

Institute of Fine Arts, The University of Sydney.' (For details of the program, see the Appendix.) I think it is undeniable

that the conference,

festival and this

book were long overdue. The underlying purpose of all three is to begin to remedy the state of neglect in which animation has existed as a film practice and as an object of theoretical inquiry. In terms of scholarship,

animation

is the

least

theorized

area

of film.

In

neglecting animation, film theorists—when they have thought about it at all—have regarded animation as either the ‘step-child’ of cinema or as not belonging to cinema at all, belonging rather to the graphic arts. In the former case film theory still sees animation as a form of film, albeit its most

inferior form, as child to live

action’s adult form. In the latter case, it would no longer be possible to speak of animation as the most neglected form of film nor to attribute any responsibility for that neglect to the discipline of Film Studies. If one may think of animation as a form of film, its neglect would be both extraordinary and predictable. It would be extraordinary insofar as a claim can be made that animation film not only preceded the advent of cinema but engendered it; that the development of all those nineteenth century technologies—optical

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

toys, studies in persistence of vision, the projector, the celluloid strip, etc—but for photography was to result in their combination/ synthesizing in the animatic apparatus of Emile Reynaud’s Théatre Optique of 1892; that, inverting the conventional wisdom, cinema

might then be thought of as animation’s ‘step-child’. And cinema

if this turn, this ironical inversion of the relationship of to animation, is to be accepted, then the neglect of

animation by film theory would be only too predictable. One would then have to conclude that cinema cannot be thought without thinking (its relation to) animation and that that thinking of the nature of animation would not only bring the film theorist full circle in a necessary return to the proto-history of cinema but would

in that return challenge, even

suspend, certain axioms

of

film theory and Film Studies. This is to suggest that the thinking of animation, the animation of animation studies, could have profound repercussions for Film

Studies—its reanimation. The essays in this book participate in such a process; and as they propose or presume, animation is never

only a benign activity. It troubles, and its troubling includes troubling thought. Arguably a certain turbulence, a certain ‘uncanny’ fatality, to animation itself marks the very ironical process of such a spiralling return by film theory to animation, from which arguably it came. Many of the authors of these essays, including this writer, come to animation from film theory.” It had long been obvious to us that the traditional apparatuses of Film Studies had ignored animation. There had been little if any incorporation of animation history and/or theory in Film Studies courses and programs; addressal of animation by film scholars through research, publication or papers at conferences; encouragement of animation filmmaking in university studio and workshop courses, etc. Moreover, there had

been little acknowledgement of the ments and cultural contributions of (including Australian animation), to gation of it, in the popular and mass and legitimation.

existence, history, achievethe practice of animation say nothing of the propamedia forms of publication

Yet, since THE ILLUSION OF LIFE event, some developments

seem marked. In 1990 panel sessions on animation were for the first time included in the Society for Cinema Studies Conference in Washington, D.C.—one on Disney, entitled Animation: History, 10

ALAN CHOLODENKO

Images, Modes of Production, and one on Warner Bros., entitled Text and Intertext: Critical Discourse and Warner Bros. Cartoons. Moreover,

the newly formed Society for Animation Studies staged its first two conferences at UCLA in 1989 and Carleton University in Ottowa in

1990. Conferences on animation should mean not only oral presentation but the publication of essays participating in redressing the neglect in this area. Such writing should be of benefit not only to animation theorists and film theorists but also to animators and filmmakers.

This is not to suggest that there has been no writing on animation. To the contrary, there has been substantial writing, but nowhere as much as on the live action film. But such writing has

largely fallen into one of two areas: practical guides to animation, such as John Halas’ and Roger Manvell’s The Technique of Film Animation (New York: Hastings House, 1959, 1976); and histories of

animation, be they general histories, like Ralph Stephenson’s The Animated Film (London: The Tantivy Press, 1973) or Giannalberto Bendazzi’s Cartoons: Il cinema d’animazione 1888-1988 (Venice: Marsilio, 1988); histories of national animation industries, like

Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), on the Hollywood cartoon; monographs on animation studios, such as the Disney

studio, for example, Christopher Finch’s The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to The Magic Kingdoms (New York: Harry N. Abrams,

Inc., 1973, 1983) or Frank Thomas’

and Ollie Johnston’s

Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (New York: Abbeville Press, 1981); or monographs on individual animators, for example, Walt Disney and his studio, like Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1968, 1985) and Leonard Mosley’s The Real Walt

Disney (London: Futura, 1987). What has been missing, in my

opinion,

and

what

THE

ILLUSION OF LIFE book seeks to redress the lack of is the extended scholarly theorization of animation. Not that scholarly work does not exist but most of it has been inaccessible in one if not more ways. I refer here to such classic texts as: Marie-Thérése Poncet’s thesis at the Sorbonne in 1952, L’Esthétique du dessin animé;

Robert

Benayoun’s

Le dessin

animé

aprés

Walt

Disney

(Paris:

Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1961); Gianni Rondolino’s Storia del cinema d’animazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1974); Sergei Asenin’s Volshebniki

iH

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Ekrana

(Moscow:

Iskusstvo,

1974); and Ranko Munitié’s book

in

Serbocroatian, Uvod U Estetiku Kinematografske Animacije (Zagreb: Filmoteka 16, 1982).2 In my own researches I came across two books which I felt were of singular merit: Eisenstein on Disney, edited by Jay Leyda and translated by Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988), an extraordinary meditation by one of the greatest theorists and directors of cinema,

Sergei Eisenstein,

on what

he

takes to be the profound nature of Disney animation (which text two essays in our book—Keith

Clancy’s ‘Tpnotnp:

The T(r)op-

ology of Pyromania’ and Keith Broadfoot’s and Rex Butler’s ‘The Illusion of Illusion’—explicitly take up); and Donald Crafton’s Before Mickey: The Animated (Cambridge, Film 1898-1928 Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1982), a history of the animated film

prior to the advent of Mickey Mouse.* Crafton’s text evidences considerable scholarship and research zeal; and his bibliography not only offers a fine guide for the novice but indicates that more than a little theoretical work has already been done on animation,

the most interesting seemingly that undertaken in France, particularly in the ’20s and ’30s by those associating animation with Surrealism, especially such writers as Gus Bofa and Marcel Brion,

and in the 40s with the work of Giuseppe Lo Duca. If there is any one book on animation which seems to be a precursor to THE ILLUSION OF LIFE, it would be The American Animated Cartoon, edited by Danny and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980), self-described as a ‘critical anthology’, comprised of

short pieces focusing on authors, history, characterization, style and studios, as well as containing a substantial number of inter-

views with animators. While a number of scholars have pieces in the Peary book, this would be the first that, with the exception of

the talk by Chuck Jones which begins the book, is exclusively of an academic nature, marked not only in the subjects addressed but in the approaches taken. And here I am impelled to add that Chuck Jones’ piece harbours a wealth of observations, speculations and implications relevant to any scholarly theorization of animation, in this sense setting the stage for the essays which follow.® Moreover, it is a text whose

very

flow,

spiralling

return

to its ‘subject’,

irreverent wit and vivacity bear special relation to animation. As for the other essay closest to what is in Peary—Philip Brophy’s ‘The Animation of Sound’—this compelling stylistic history of sound and sound/image relationships in Disney and 12

ALAN CHOLODENKO

Warner Bros. cartoons has a scope far wider and deeper than the conventional history, offering us rich new ways to think not only animation but (its relation to) cinema. Brophy challenges the conventional formulation of the cinematic apparatus insofar as it presumes an idea of animation as animism by instead positing animation as dynamism, such dynamism the basis of what Brophy calls the animatic apparatus. The acknowledgement of the animatic apparatus—its existence, nature and operations—would call for a dramatic rethinking of our understanding of and approach to cinema as well as to animation. Furthermore, unlike the Peary book, the subjects here are of a character and range foreign to the conventional texts on animation or cinema. Not only does the book combine essays on animation film with those on live action film (but approached in terms of animation) but it has essays on topics ‘outside’ the animation film: Robyn Ferrell’s ‘Life-Threatening Life: Angela Carter and The Uncanny’, conjoining Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (literature and film) and psychoanalysis (Freud’s ‘The ‘Uncanny’’); Rosalyn Diprose’s and.Cathryn Vasseleu’s ‘Animation—AIDS in Science/ Fiction’, which

addresses

AIDS

in terms

of animation

film and

animation as concept; and Edward Colless’ and David Kelly’s ‘Mosaic Infinity’, on Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph and Zahir, outside of which nothing would seem to ‘stand’. As for the approaches taken, what is also new about this book is that most of these essays (including most of the essays by the film theorists) share an intimation that French ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ approaches to film, art and culture in general offer the richest ways to account for animation both as film and as concept. And the authors, if not coming out of Film Studies, come

from literary theory or philosophy and, in the case of both Rosalyn Diprose and Cathryn Vasseleu, from philosophy and biomedical science. Literary theory and philosophy are, like Film Studies today, of a profoundly interdisciplinary cast, ‘meeting grounds’ with contemporary French literary theory and philosophy, which disciplines not only promote interdisciplinary approaches but take as a major area of inquiry the very question and problem of the ‘meeting ground’, the ‘in between’. In this regard I see these essays as ‘inbetweeners’, the ‘meeting grounds’ of animation with philosophy, film theory, art theory, media theory, literary theory, critical theory, psychoanalysis,

13

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

sociology, the biomedical sciences, etc. They suggest that animation is itself of the order of the ‘in between’, that it cannot be

thought without

thinking the nature

of the ‘in between’

(the

‘meeting ground’), whether it is the relation between the idea of animation and animation film, the relation between the idea of animation and live action film, the relation between the idea of animation and the relation of animation film to live action film, etc.

Thus, and as a way of acknowledging the nature and significance of the work already done, perhaps it would be more apt to see this book as endeavouring to reanimate animation studies by endowing it with subjects, themes and approaches not heretofore

brought to thinking and writing about animation film nor for that matter, at least explicitly, about animation: subjects the criteria for addressal of which are not their aesthetic merit nor inherent propriety and good taste; themes and approaches not of the banal humanist ilk, not pietistic and platitudinous, not naively empiricist

or ‘exclusively’ historical, not focused only on the subject as animated and animating authorial (and artistic) agency, not taking animation as only productive and ‘life asserting’, not reductivist and simplistic. Rather, these essays seek to account for the complications, implications, duplications, perplexities, indeterminacies and dilemmas which for them animation marks,

including animation’s special association with the ‘abject’, the double, the ‘uncanny’, the sublime, seduction, différance, disappearance and death—all those improper, unseemly things which would likewise count as reasons for the ‘exclusion’ of animation by Film Studies. And in articulating animation with these complications

and

associations,

these

essays

are

reanimating

not

only

animation studies but the very idea of animation. In this regard the approaches to animation in almost all the essays by film theorists in the book are informed by ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ critiques of that mix of literary semiology, Althusserian Marxism and ‘Lacanian psychoanalysis’ that coalesced in a theory of film in the late ‘60s in France and was disseminated worldwide primarily by the English film journal Screen. Thus it might be suggested that the film theory brought here to the thinking of animation film and animation as idea represents the very latest approaches to their subjects, bringing the latest theorization of film together with the latest theorization of animation, which is also to say that this animation theory is also

14

ALAN CHOLODENKO

and inevitably film theory, animation/film theory endeavouring to reanimate not only animation theory and animation studies but film theory, Film Studies and the very idea of film.

Most of the essays in this book presume that the thinking of animation necessitates consideration of animation as both a kind of film (which consideration includes putting this assumption into question, asking how the thinking of the nature of animation film would reanimate all film) and as an idea, concept or process (which consideration includes asking how the thinking of the nature of animation would reanimate the idea of film—film (as) animation). Further, these essays presume that animation as both film and idea must be thought together, that one cannot be thought without the other, that each implicates the other. And this means that, to seek to account for animation film, the theorist would be

compelled to approach the idea of animation precisely as not delimited to and by the animation film (and conventional ideas of it) but as a notion whose purchase would be transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, implicating the most profound, complex and challenging questions of our culture, questions in the areas of being

and

becoming,

time,

space,

motion,

change—indeed,

life

itself. In this regard the Websters Dictionary sets what I take to be the two major ways of thinking about animation in play: animate ...[< L. animatus, pp. of animare, to make alive, fill with breath

< anima, air, soul]. 1. to give life to; bring to life. 2. to make gay, energetic, or spirited. 3. to inspire. 4. to give motion to; put into action: as, the breeze animated the leaves. adj. 1. living; having life. 2. lively; vigorous; spirited. SYN.-animate implies a making alive or lively (an animated conversation) or an imparting of motion or activity (animated cartoons)...

Thus two major definitions bedevil animation: endowing with life (be the enlivening agency, substance and that which is enlived material or immaterial) and endowing with movement (be the pulsion and what is moved or altered in its movement material or immaterial). Animation thus poses the very questions of life itself,

movement itself and their relation, questions which the essays in this book implicitly or explicitly engage with in various ways. And if animation as film and animation as idea form a first level of implication, each only capable of being thought through the other, here would be a second level of implication, suggesting that the 15

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

only be two major ideas of animation—life, movement—can thought through each other. This means that, even when we are in the familiar terrain of animation as ‘endowing with life’, where various forms of energy, animism, magic, élan vital, etc., catalyze or transform the inanimate into the animate, we will find animation

as ‘endowing with motion’ engaged in some form or manner, be it metaphor, acceleration, etc. And

metamorphosis,

transformation,

this is to suggest the inescapable implication of the modes

of

animating as endowing with life, authoring, creating, etc., given us

by the creationist myths of religion, classical mythology, magic, the supernatural,

etc.,

and

the

institutions

and

discourses

which

propound them—notably the arts and humanities—with the modes of animating as endowing with motion proffered by science and

technology

over

the

centuries

and

now,

with

biomedical

science and genetic engineering, and arguably computer science and engineering (including the engineering of intelligence), as endowing with life, a life whose artificiality or genuineness would itself be subject to question. To say this is to suggest that the essays in this book inevitably take up a place in the debate from classical times onwards between the animists, who believed that the world was alive with spirit or material substance, that all that moved was alive, and the mechanists, who believed that motion was obedient to physical

laws and necessitated no presumption of organic or spiritual vivifying agency. In this regard many of the essays problematize by their very thinking of animation any simple distinction between animism and mechanism, life and movement,

as their thinking of

animation would problematize any simple distinction animation as film and animation as idea.”

between

Such a challenge to either/orism, including the either/orism of

the dictionary’s split between ‘a making alive or lively (an animated conversation) or an imparting of motion or activity (animated cartoons)’, would be a challenge which arguably animation would itself pose to its (or any) definition, a challenge which the doubled definition

itself already

marks.

Even

more,

that

this

is what

animation itself tells us—that a certain indetermining and suspending of distinctive opposition in a complicated dizzying coimplication of opposing terms and attributes always already defers the possibility of definitive fixed understandings of things, including animation, which both needs to be and is impossible to be thought.

16

ALAN CHOLODENKO

Indeed, in this regard, despite the dictionary’s associating the animated

cartoon only with the ‘imparting of motion or activity’,

cartoon

the animated

arguably

issues

the same

challenge

to

either/orism, declaring that it makes characters ‘alive or lively’, or,

as Chuck Jones puts it of his own authoring /animating, ’...the term ‘animate’, in my mind, and what I do, is—as the dictionary states

it—‘to imbue with life’. Here Chuck Jones’ marvelous anecdote

about the boy who would not accept the characterization of him as the person who draws Bugs Bunny, insisting rather that he draws portraits of Bugs Bunny, would suggest that these characters are not ‘only’ or ‘merely’ ‘alive’ in the animated cartoon but live autonomously. Bugs is alive. At the same time, Chuck Jones is alert

to mark the integral importance of motion in the process of imbuing with life. And here he draws on the noted Canadian animator Norman McLaren’s famous definition of animation for support: ‘Animation is not the art of drawings-that-move, but rather the art of movements-that-are-drawn’.® But significantly, in his talk Jones offers what

I take to be a variant of McLaren’s

definition, one which joins those movements to the vivifying nature of the animator’s mind: ‘Animation is not drawings that move. It’s drawings that move as they already exist in the director’s mind’. Thus, what could appear to be two opposing definitions of animation are themselves inevitably inextricably implicated,

as

implicated,

one

might

say,

as

the

‘animated

conversation’ between Chuck Jones and the boy is with ‘animated cartoons’. McLaren’s definition is likewise drawn upon by a number of the essays that presume that in order to theorize animation one must theorize movement as well as life. It is a definition which, for

instance, Diprose and Vasseleu, in their groundbreaking essay on the science/fictionalizing of AIDS, invoke to set in play the figure of the between, the between

the cel of animation and the cell of

biology, (re)animating thereby the space between with what the cel(1) models

and what the model

of the cel(1) animates,

that is,

allows and disallows. Their essay argues for the impossibility of thinking science as distinct from the modes of its representation, its fictioning—its animation. It argues the necessity of an articulation of the bridge between science and media, including the necessity of conceiving the bridge as metaphor, the metaphor as model and the model as metaphor, as well as understanding the role of metaphor i7

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

as transport of models between cel and cell and as model of the between, suggesting not only that the cel animates the cell and vice versa but that the forgetting of the metaphoricity of their animating models and processes by scientists bent on naturalizing and literalizing their models has had profound consequences in the social construction of AIDS.’ In my essay, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or The Framing of Animation’,

I suggest

that

McLaren’s

definition

though he might wish it to stand as formulation—not drawings-that-move but drawn—itself

resists

such

a reduction

and

of animation,

a simple either/or movements-that-arein its vibration,

its

oscillation—its troping—itself spins, whirls, turns with/as movement and life: zootrope. It draws me to three places simultaneously—the proto-history of cinema, the advent of cinema and the advent of cartoon animation—and to a fascination which traverses all these places. This fascination is with the mysterious imbrication and reanimation of life and motion by means of an apparatus. In the proto-history of cinema this means such entertainments as not only Robertson’s Phantasmagoria but the spinning

optical

toys—the

Phenakistiscope

(cheating,

tricking

view), Stroboscope (a twisting or whirling round view), Zootrope (wheel of life), Praxinoscope (action view) and Zoopraxiscope (life action view)—which set drawings of living and nonliving things into motion, ‘coming to life’. These toys were the ‘meeting ground’ of amusement and science, in a sense like the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, another (impossible)) split between games (bets), cultural artifacts, diversions on the one hand and scientific

studies on the other. (See the essay by Broadfoot and Butler for a discussion and images of optical toys, as well as, along with Lisa Trahair’s essay, ‘For The Noise of a Fly’, and Keith Clancy’s essay, addressal of Muybridge.) And this fascination with an animating apparatus takes us to the advent of cinema and to (the requestioning of) the accounts and theories of it. This is to say that animation both as apparatus and concept binds to the advent /animation of cinema as apparatus and concept. Also it is to suggest that the fascination which the cinema in its ‘childhood’ (otherwise known as its ‘primitive phase’—1895-1905) offered was the fascination with animation, with the reanimation of the world by this new apparatus. A commemorative plaque to the Lumiére brothers outside the Grand 18

ALAN CHOLODENKO

Cafe wherein they staged their first public screenings in Paris reads: ‘Ici le 28 décembre 1895 eurent lieu les premiéres projections publiques de photographie animé a l'aide du cinématographe appareil inventé par les fréres Lumiéres’.'° 1 would suggest that a strong claim can be made that this should read ‘photography animated with the aid of the animatic apparatus’! (except for the redundancy!).'! Here one might adduce Maxim Gorky’s comment, ‘Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life’.!* What so fascinated the spectators was watching the inanimate still photographic image become animate, suddenly turning into living moving image of living moving people and inorganic objects, watching the frozen train ‘take life’, as J. Stuart Blackton said in presenting The Black Diamond Express.'° And the names of the electro-mechanical agencies for this animation

seem

Animatographe—as

loaded

indeed—Bioscope,

Vitascope,

do the earliest characterizations

even

of film—

‘Animated Photographs’, ‘Living Pictures’—which signal, like the

spectators’ comments, the bestowal by the apparatus itself of life. Intriguing here too is the history of J. Stuart Blackton, first a quick sketch artist, then co-owner of Vitagraph, then actor playing in his

own lightning sketch films, which hybrid live action/cartoon animation genre Crafton ostensibly considers the bridge between the live action trickfilm (and vaudeville stage) and what he calls the ‘true animated cartoon’.'4 The name of Blackton’s company—Vitagraph'°—like Maxim Gorky’s characterization of the nature of the new life of cinema as ‘but a train of shadows’!® can, I

suggest, be seen as implying much for a theory of the nature of the life and motion—the reanimation—that this new apparatus can be thought to have brought. And

as

for the advent

of the animation

cartoon,

we

have

recourse to Gilbert Seldes’ 1932 characterization of this fascination: Out of hundreds of animated cartoons, I can recall only two or three

which were wholly bad; even the imitative ones and those lacking in ingenuity gave some sort of pleasure. This suggests that something in the form itself is a satisfaction to us. And that satisfaction, I think, is

the childish one which the movie as a whole had in its beginning and which long custom and the injection of dialogue has taken away from the photographed drama. It is the pleasure in magic, in seeing the impossible happen... In the early days we looked at a movie and marveled that a picture could be set in motion. Now we do not think

19

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

of the picture—only of the actors. The animated cartoon shows us in movement something naturally inert, ave it is essentially the satisfaction of magic that we get out of its

This is a fascination with what might be called the illusion of life, I would

of (the) illusion, of what,

as the life(-likeness)

suggest,

might be thought to be the life of all our illusions. (Not illusion as unreal but as real unreal.) After coining this name for our event, I discovered that another before me had conjured something with/in these terms: ‘The illusion of life’-—the very words Walt Disney had used to characterize animation! But intriguingly, and as

animation

likewise

would

attempted

foreshadow,

to grasp

fascinating, fugitive and

others

before

Walt

Disney

profound—profoundly

something

‘uncanny’ —with these words.

The first

English program of the Lumiere brothers’ films in 1896 reads: The interval during which one picture is substituted for a succeeding one is so infinitesimal that, the retina of the eye preserving one image until the next one takes its place, an effect of absolute continuity and perfect illusion of life is obtained.’®

The fascination with the illusion of life was/is a fascination with the way in which an apparatus animates—gives movement and life to—images of people and things. The nature and perfection of this animation

and

the reanimation

it effected

would,

of course,

be

subjects of speculation—of theory. The noted art historian Erwin Panofsky, in his classic essay on cinema, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, speculated on animation in terms of the animated cartoon, saying:

The very virtue of the animated cartoon is to animate, that is to say endow lifeless things with life, or living things with a different kind of life. It effects a metamorphosis, and such a metamorphosis is

wonderfully present in Disney’s animals, plants, thunderclouds and railroad trains.!” Here

I am

reminded

that

another

famous

film

director,

a

magician of the cinema, also conjured with the idea of animation. Orson Welles said of film: ‘I do try to keep the screen as rich as possible, because I never forget that the film itself is a dead thing, and for me, at least, the illusion of life fades very quickly when the

texture is thin’.29 For Welles film offers us not life but the illusion of life—its

animation

never

escapes

20

the death

which

precedes

it,

ALAN CHOLODENKO

inhabits it and to which it returns. Film as lifedeath. And this is to

suggest that animation cannot be thought without thinking loss, disappearance and death, that one cannot think the endowing with life without thinking the other side of the life cycle—the transformation from the animate into the inanimate—at the same time,

cannot think endowing with motion without thinking the other side of the cycle of movement—of metastasis, deceleration, inertia, suspended animation, etc.—at the same time, and cannot think the

life cycle without thinking the movement cycle at the same time. In a foootnote writes:

in section 49 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant

Perhaps nothing more sublime was ever said, and no sublimer thought ever expressed than the famous inscription on the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘I am all that is and that was and that shall be, and no mortal hath lifted my veil”!

Commenting on this thought in terms of the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Richard Klein invokes Gérard de Nerval as follows: Isis is a lunar goddess and her iridescence is better suited, says Nerval, for aesthetically animating, for bringing life to the ruins of Pompey than the light of the sun. It gives not life but the gift of the illusion of life to the ruins it haunts.”

In my essay I suggest that film is that iridescent veil of Isis. Here I would propose that animation film, film animation and the animatic apparatus offer us this animating gift of the illusion of life. I would suggest that a view of contemporary culture at the least and for many of the essays a philosophical view of the world informs the thinking of animation in this book—a view including the idea of ruins. In light of such a view, I would

suggest that animation

film, film animation and the animatic apparatus may be thought to have reanimated the world in/as simulation and that the thinking of animation necessitates therefore the thinking at the same time of not only representation but simulation, not only production but seduction (Jean Baudrillard), not only the subject and its strategies but the object and its strategies (Baudrillard), not only presence but différance (Derrida), not only ‘beginnings’ but ‘endings’.”’ Indeed, in a certain sense animation may be thought to be that which indetermines and suspends the distinction between representation and simulation, what makes it impossible to say which is which, as 2A

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

it indetermines and suspends all things.* And such a sublime gift—the thought of that which escapes (thought)—would be a gift of animation to the thinking of film and to Film Studies as well, the

gift of the illusion of life. Here I would point to Donald Crafton’s claim that ‘the animated film is a subspecies of film in general’. Even taken straight, this claim would argue that any theorization of animation film would

be valuable

for theorizing film as such, therefore

of

obvious importance to Film Studies. To speculate further: if one adds the twist that this claim might be only one side of the coin, that not only is animation a form of film but film is a form of animation, then not only are the stakes raised but so too are the

double profit and double necessity marked for both animation theory and film theory in each addressing the other in their theoretical undertakings. In this regard, I would direct the reader to the articulation in my essay of some of the dynamics of the peculiar and confusing ‘logics’ of the hybrid, the relation of live action (let us call this film theory) and cartoon animation (animation theory) and their necessary and inescapable implication.*° Here we may return to the lightning sketch, hybrid bridge between live action and cartoon animation. (Its practitioners included Emile Cohl, J. Stuart Blackton

and Winsor McCay.) The lightning sketch shows the animator, often in the tie and tails of the professional magician, giving life in various ways to drawn characters. Often the animator’s hand holds the chalk or other drawing implement he uses to animate the drawn figures, playing a role analogous to God in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, but purveying life at the touch not of his finger but of his drawing instrument. It was standard that the animator

enter

the

world

of what

he

animates

and/or

the

animated creature enter the animator’s world and/or that both at some point be seen together in the image, for example, Winsor McCay with Gertie the Dinosaur. I would suggest that the lightning sketch—‘meeting ground’ of live action and cartoon animation—assumes a (non)place simultaneously in the two ‘modes’ /‘traditions’ of live action and cartoon animation,

simul-

taneously thereby challenging any ‘true’ live action and any ‘true’ cartoon animation. Crafton comments on Winsor McCay entering his animated cartoon: Were not the first experiments by McCay praised for their power to pa

ALAN CHOLODENKO

transport the viewer to Slumberland? And in Gertie, we actually saw the animator (or more accurately his simulacrum) enter into the picture and be carried away by the animal. In the end, it is this transportive function, the implicit ‘sentimental journey’ in all early animation, that made it gratifying and compelling and_ that established the expectations and desires of the audience long before Mickey boarded that first steamboat.””

The lightning sketch, the earliest instance of that hybrid live action/cartoon animation form of which Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the most noted recent example, suggests that what is at stake in these earliest animation films (and which the recent replays) would be (at the least) the very distinction between live action (film theory) and cartoon animation (animation theory) and all that hangs on such a distinction, including the distinction between representation and simulation. It not only suggests a privileged relation of cartoon to simulacrum. It suggests that a much more complicated articulation of the relation of animation film to live action is necessary: first, the initial positing of the animation film as a form or genre of film—where the animation part (this pertinence, form,

genre,

of film)

bears

special

relation

to animation

as a

principle, idea, etc.—versus the positing of film animation—where all film is a form or genre of animation (as principle, idea, etc.)—which has the consequence that animation film, before only one form or genre of film, now becomes the privileged form or genre for all film, a kind of inversion and twisting inside out; and second, the intervallic spacing wrought upon animation by/as dissemination,*® the suspending by ‘animation’ as dissemination of the versus, of any clear distinction between cartoon animation and live

action,

between

animation

film

and

film

animation

and

between film animation and animation—each at the same time twisted inside the other. Such a complicated articulation is enabled by the work of Jacques Derrida. Here, taking a cue from the fact that optical toys were otherwise known as ‘philosophers’ toys’, I would suggest

that they imply thereby that not only they but the animatic apparatus ‘as such’ (including the cinema and the cinematic apparatus within ‘it’) is theorizable as a philosopher's toy, a toy whose fascination, enchantment, seduction and provocation would

be the illusion of life. It issues a challenge to theory which implicitly is taken up by the essays, declaring that what is at stake in 2a

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

animation and in the thinking of it are not only matters putatively ‘intrinsic’ to Film Studies but bearing upon the whole history of ideas, including the history of thinking what life and movement are. In response to such a challenge, the essays in this book mark a

rearticulation of film theory and/as animation film theory and film animation theory with philosophy—classical Greek philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the ‘Presocratics’), the work of Kant and

Hegel and contemporary French ‘philosophy’, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray,

Héléne Kristeva, Julia Baudrillard,” as well as

Cixous, and _ Jean Michel Serres that of the noted American theorist

Samuel Weber. Furthermore, insofar as the thinking of animation as film and animation as idea necessitates a ‘return’ of film/animation theory to philosophy, one is arguably at a point of articulation of a dual neglect by Film Studies, that of both animation

and philosophy,

their marginalization or exclusion casting large shadows of doubt over the ‘proprieties’ and/of the body ‘proper’ of film theory. This is to say at the least that the claim that Film Studies/film theory would

need

to be interested

in, indeed

must

take

account

of,

animation theory in general and the animation theory mobilized in these essays in particular is not vapid nor is it made in ignorance of the film theory of the last twenty-thirty years. In fact, these essays intersect with subjects integral to ‘70s—’80s film theory, for example, the theory of the author and genre theory, but instead of taking the author as a given (or simply evacuating it as dead), they explore the aporias of authorship; instead of taking genre as a given, they explore the aporias of genre in its simultaneous generative and degenerative capacity; and they explore the implication of each—author, genre—for/in the other. And

instead of taking the idea of animation

as a given, they

endeavour to think what it might be, including how the author and genre might be thought in relation to animation and not only in the classic mode of the author as animator miming the Great Animator—God—but through complex models of the animatic, the mobile,

metamorphosis,

metaphor,

metastasis,

etc.,

the

very

thinking of thought itself—its movement, its life—caught up in the animatic process/apparatus. Such a process marks a monstrosity to representation, including any effort at demonstration of it, implicating animation in horror 24

ALAN CHOLODENKO

and horror in animation and making of the horror genre a privileged site for the playing out of the monstrous side always there in animation. This is to suggest that the essays by Peter Hutchings and Lisa Trahair, which claim a privileged relationship between animation and horror/science fiction (and special effects), intersect with the Diprose and Vasseleu essay on science fictioning. For instance, Peter Hutchings’ essay, “The Work-shop of Filthy Animation’, engages with a set of complex relationships of authored— Shelley, Dr Frankenstein—and authors—Mary Frankenstein, the monster—and of technologies—literary, cinematic, scientific—which themselves author the authors as much as

the authors author them, all caught up in a process which Julia Kristeva calls the ‘abject’. And in ‘For The Noise of a Fly’ Lisa Trahair takes up the subject of the remake—a subject integral to genre theory—and involves the

remake

with

animation

as

reanimation,

reanimation

as

metamorphosis. Mobilizing a Derridean approach, Trahair explicates this complex model, this model of (con)fusion, in terms of

Kurt Neumann’s The Fly and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, confusing the received wisdom (and that of Plato and Kant) on original and copy, imitator and imitated, animator and animated, including as this implicates (the theory of) the author, with the incessant, insidious buzzing of a fly always already there in the ointment

(the thought,

for instance,

of Derrida

of the hama

of

Aristotle). En route her essay cuts across classic communications sender-receiver theory and cybernetic theory with the entropic noise of special effects.*? Hutchings’ essay would suggest that live action films whose subject is the making of artificial life inevitably raise profound issues involving animation, and both Hutchings’ and Trahair’s essays would imply that live action films which trope reanimation as their very generic function call for a reconsideration of the cinematic apparatus as animatic apparatus. The concluding essay in the book, Edward Colless’ and David Kelly’s essay, ‘Mosaic Infinity’, while not explicitly addressing animation film, addresses that which would englobe the thinking of anything. In bringing the fantastic thought of Borges of the Aleph and the Zahir to the thinking of thinking, including thinking the relations of narrator to writer and the animate to the inanimate,

this essay both marks the ‘return’ of the animate text to that state from which it came (and from which it never departed) and 45)

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

‘returns’ it to that state with which for the writers the writer is seemingly inevitably associated, a state with which many of the essays implicitly associate the philosopher—a state of death—or rather, lifedeath.*! (The zombie is a creature which is invoked in

the epigraph with which Philip Brophy’s essay begins as well as in Lisa Trahair’s essay). Two essays in this book take up the thinking of animation in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s work in general and/or his two volume text on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, which is itself the text marking the new articulation of

film and philosophy in its engagement with thinking the implications of Bergson’s ideas on cinema and modern science for the formulation of a global model of cinema that moves away from a linguistic semiology privileging narrative as the essence of film towards a pure semiology of movement and image. In this regard Keith Clancy’s ‘TIlpnotnp’ and Keith Broadfoot’s and Rex Butler’s ‘The Illusion of Illusion’ offer richly contrasting takes on Deleuze’s teasing mention of animation at the beginning of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image only (to appear) to exclude it from consideration in the remainder of his work. And both essays argue for a profound connection between animation and Deleuze’s approach to film, especially as mediated by Eisenstein on Disney. Here I would suggest that film theorists should take ‘seriously’ the fact that Eisenstein, film theory’s greatest director-theorist, loved Disney animation, finding in it a quality to which his own work could only aspire, as Broadfoot and Butler argue. Clancy’s essay suggests that the thinking of animation necessitates a return of film theory to the beginnings of philosophy’s thinking of animation in terms of life and motion, to the philosophy of the so-called Presocratics. For animation, as I suggested earlier, is related to animism and therefore bears relation to

classical philosophical approaches to animus and anima, to an animistic vision of a world composed entirely of one animating substance, be it fire, air or water, or

a mix of such substances. For

his part Clancy, via a meditation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit as ‘meeting point’, broaches a connection between Herakleitos’ notion

that all is flux, his vision of a single animating substance of spinning fire (prester), the definition by Eisenstein of the essence of Disney’s animate form as plasmaticness and the philosophy of Deleuze.” 26

ALAN CHOLODENKO

On the other hand, but also taking their cue from Eisenstein‘s

love for the animation of Disney, Broadfoot and Butler argue that Deleuze’s notion of the time-image is the veritable figure of animation that Eisenstein’s movement-image as Deleuze characterizes it aspired to. Unlike Clancy, Broadfoct and Butler approach Deleuze from the perspective of the work of Derrida on time, space and motion, martialing their analysis in terms of McLaren’s definition as well as through a consideration of optical toys, the bet of Leland Stanford and Eadweard Muybridge, the painting of Duchamp,

Monet

and

Benjamin, Clement

Jackson

Pollock,

the

writing

of Walter

Greenberg and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

the

seminar of sacames Lacan and the relation of Road Runner and

Wile E. Coyote.°? It may be thought that the knotty twisting aporetic analyses which animation calls for themselves imply that animation bears a special relationship to ‘violence’. Arguably animation always involves a kind of violence. Certainly, violence is a topic which many of the essays take up explicitly or implicitly, and several foreground it: Philip Brophy’s addressal of Warner Bros. cacophony; Robyn Ferrell’s speculation on violence done women in terms of an identity of relationships she draws between, on the one

hand,

Sand-Man’,

the doll Olympia

and

Freud’s

of the E.T.A.

non-addressal

Hoffmann

tale, ‘The

of the question of the

animation of Olympia in his essay, ‘The ‘Uncanny’, and, on the other hand, the character Melanie and the brutal treatment meted

out to her by Uncle Philip in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop; Diprose’s and Vasseleu’s gesturing towards the violence done the culture in general by the naturalizing by medicine and biomedical science of a model which animation enables them to animate; and

Ben Crawford’s addressal in his ‘Saturday Morning Fever’ of the violent and otherwise pernicious content of cartoons and their influence on children and his defense of the right to violence and to what he calls ‘high impact culture’ in general. The essays would suggest that there is a certain violence not only to animation but to the very thinking of animation, that animation is itself the very thinking of thinking, the very thought of thought and that such thinking and thought are never, any more than is animation, without a certain violence. Animation would be

an irritant, like the noise of a fly buzzing around your head, a fly whose diabolical secret would seem to be the inescapable pape

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

frustration attendant upon theorizing movement, life, animation and animation film, that no more than the fly are movement and

life, animation and animation film graspable. And this is what these would tell us, their theorists.4

Animation would also suggest a special form of ‘violence’, the ‘violence’ of the ‘uncanny’. Like the sand of the Sand-Man thrown in the eyes of naughty children, animation would be for the theorist an ‘uncanny’ provocation. While the ‘uncanny’ is addressed in Ferrell’s essay, it comes up again in the essays of Hutchings and Trahair; and it forms a major but unexamined term in the characterization of the spectatorial response of simultaneous delight and fright at the first film projections. The ‘uncanny’ has to do with the return of what gave us a fright when we were children to give us a fright again when we thought we were over it now that we are adults. It suggests that the adult is never only adult but always child, too. And

Freud

posits two

sides to the

‘uncanny’, not only the psychological but the anthropological, suggesting thereby that what returns from one’s own childhood is allied with what returns from the childhood of the human—our primitive animistic beliefs; and in both aspects—aspects which Freud notes are comingled and therefore ‘not always sharply distinguishable’*°—the nature of animation is at stake. Furthermore, the ‘uncanny’ is bound to Freud’s notion of the death drive, for which all ‘uncanny’ returns are stand-ins, that is, it

is death which returns. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud speculates that the human comes from the inanimate and that there is a death drive which leads the human to his/her own proper death, the restoration to the inanimate state from which one came.

Such a death drive keeps one alive to find one’s proper death; and therefore, the death drive is indistinguishable from a life drive, or better, the death drive is both life and death drive at the same time. It suggests that life is never without its death at the same time,

even that in a sense we have not one but two deaths—the one which

precedes

us,

the one

which

awaits

us—and a third

as

well—the one which lives with us. And what it suggests for animation is profound: that animation always has something of the inanimate

about

it, that it is a certain

inanimateness

that both

allows and disallows animation. Animation therefore could never be only animation. It is both and neither animation and nonanimation at the same time. And this would suggest that in a 28

ALAN CHOLODENKO

sense the ‘uncanny’ is never not with us, for it would mark the always already returned of the ghost, the zombie, the dead in us—lifedeath. Animation—the simultaneous bringing of death to life and life to death—not only a mode of film (and film a mode of it) but the very medium within which all, including film, ‘comes to

be’. The animatic apparatus—apparatus which suspends distinctive oppositions, including that of the animate versus the inanimate—apparatus of the ‘uncanny’. Too, insofar as the essays in this book are caught up in the animatic apparatus, I would propose that they and the book might

be thought to be animating and animate(d) ‘beings’.

Note: All the essays in the book were presented at THE ILLUSION OF LIFE conference, July 14-17, 1988, but for two—Keith

Clancy’s and my

own—while Philip Brophy’s and Ben Crawford’s were written on the basis of their talks at the conference. Apart from the two essays of Robyn Ferrell and Rosalyn Diprose and Cathryn Vasseleu, all have been revised to some degree. The essays of Keith Clancy and myself—written after the event—were introduced in part to compensate for two papers which were presented but not offered for publication as well as for the several others which were originally to be presented at the conference but unfortunately were not.

NOTES

1.

2

3.

At the instigation of Mme. Barbara Gré, I undertook the conceptualization and realization of the event, taking direct responsibility for the conference component while inviting the Australian Film Institute to execute the festival component, which it did under its title Quick Draws. While I have had to construct a model of Film Studies which has neglected animation, insofar as I here indicate that many of the authors of these essays theorizing animation are, like many animation theorists, also film theorists—part of Film Studies—it would suggest that Film Studies is no longer neglecting animation! But would this Film Studies be only Film Studies or also or rather Animation Studies? Therefore I would suggest the reader put Film Studies in quotation marks wherever it seems appropriate in the Introduction, that is, wherever a dynamic metamorphosing process seems being marked, which process language in a sense finds it impossible to present. Tomy knowledge none of these texts has been translated into English. 29

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

To this list |would add Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, trans. David Kunzle (New York: International General, 1975). Also I would wish to

direct the reader to two doctoral theses on animation: Thelma Schenkel’s Exploring the Cinema of Figurative Animation: With Special Consideration of the Work of John and Faith Hubley and Jan Lenica (New York: New York University, 1977) and Georges Sifianos’ Langage et esthétique du cinéma

d’animation

(Paris: Sorbonne,

1988).

Schenkel’s

opening chapter is a useful assessment of those texts which she considers the most significant writing on animation, and the remainder of her thesis is devoted to an examination of the work of the Hubleys and Jan Lenica. Also worth consulting is Kristin Thompson’s essay, ‘Implications of the Cel Animation Technique’, in The Cinematic Apparatus, eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980).

4

5

Donald Crafton has a new book, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), which unfortunately I have not yet seen. Other anthologies worth consulting are: The Art of The Animated Image, ed. Charles Solomon (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1987) and Storytelling in Animation, The Art of The Animated Image, vol. 2, ed. John Canemaker (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1988). These two texts were published in conjunction with the annual Walter Lantz Conference on Animation, presented by the American Film Institute, which conference, I am led to understand, is not an academic

but rather an industry-based conference at which no academic papers are presented. Apparently, with the exception of the transcripts of industry panel discussions, nothing in these two anthologies was presented at the Lantz conferences. I would also direct the reader to: Animating The Fantastic, Afterimage 13, Autumn 1987, with essays focusing on the work of Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay; and Le cinéma d’animation, CinémAction 51, 1989.

6

In this regard Chuck Jones’ autobiography, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist (New York: Avon Books, 1989), is a treasure trove for animation theorists. It means, also, that autobiography should be added to the list of modes of writing on

7

animation. Too, they would problematize any simple distinction between technology and ‘cultural affinity’. See, for example, C.W. Ceram’s

Archaeology of the Cinema (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965). It would seem to me that Ceram’s effort to isolate the science and technology—precisely, the dynamic technology—of the nineteenth century that for him leads to the invention of cinematography, which

is where he claims cinema begins, from everything else in the world

30

ALAN CHOLODENKO

(including static mechanics)—which at best it appears can offer ‘cultural affinities’ with cinema—informs the two major ways of thinking about animation, that is, imparting motion and imparting life; and I would suggest that it is a certain thinking of animation which dooms any effort to keep the two separate. Quoted in Charles Solomon,

‘Animation: Notes on a Definition’, The

Art of the Animated Image, ed. Charles Solomon, p. 11. Here the relevance of Diprose and Vasseleu to any effort to sustain a clear distinction between science and technology on the one hand and art, film, media, the religious, social, economic, etc., institutions of the

10 11

culture on the other. Memorial plaque in Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, p. 11. Insofar as animation implicates both life and motion and animation can be thought to animate cinema, ‘cinema’, which derives from the

Greek kinema Lévi-Strauss posits a transcendent idea that overlooks the intricacy of the ways in which

myths

relate

to

each

other,

overlooks,

that

is, the

importance of the interstices between myths. But in examining

the two

films of The Fly, we

see that it is

elements of mise-en-scene—the form, tone and contingent aspects— that consitute the nuances and subtleties of meaning. To reduce the films to the basic story (Lévi-Strauss’s mythical value) is to overlook the way each film treats the thematic of remaking and, hence, comments on the question of meaning within and beyond its own

textuality. As alluded to earlier, Philip Brophy has noted

that the contemporary horror film works within a ‘genre that mimics itself mercilessly’.** It ‘knows that you've seen it before; it knows that you know what is about to happen; and it knows that

you know it knows you know’.” This is even more extreme in the case of the remake because, as Jameson has inferred, it plays with

the viewer's expectations of the first film. The second film takes the story of the first film and remakes

it, not in a straight sense but

ironically. While this has already been discussed in terms of the thematic

of remaking,

in Cronenberg’s

film it is precisely these

elements of the mise-en-scéne and dialogue that are deployed to comment on the earlier film. Irony is effected in the selfconsciousness of the characters and actors, their awareness of their

T95

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

position in the diegesis. For example, there is the transformation of the

subtext

of the

1950s

family,

fused

into

the

ideal

family.

Veronica, Seth and the baby, the three of them together in one body, will be the perfect nuclear family. Seth’s demonstration of teleportation for Veronica is carried out with all the panache of a party trick. The non-diegetic musical score that often hyperbolizes such significant moments is here incorporated into the diegesis: Seth himself performs the prelude to the display on his piano. His intimation to Veronica that he cannot possibly let her leave there alive simultaneously inflates and deflates the audience’s growing apprehensiveness. While this seems to be parodying the scene in Neumann’s film where André tops off a romantic evening at the opera by taking Hélene down to the laboratory to drink champagne and demonstrate an experiment, it is difficult to be sure of

this and not to consider that Cronenberg’s film is rather a continuation of the irony already evident in the 1958 film. In this sense, the attempt to say that the remake changes the tone by ironizing the meaning of the original could never succeed, because the original can never be known. If the ‘original’ designates a point of departure for the ‘remake’, such a point could not be said to have existed before the ‘remake’. Hence, the ‘remake’ becomes the

original. Another implication of structuralism is that insofar as it codes the meaning

of myths, remakes,

etc., concepts of repetition and

difference can supposedly be utilized to measure variations between the texts. The problem with the concepts of repetition and difference is that you cannot know difference without repetition nor repetition without difference, and this is an aporetic relation.

That is to say, there can only be repetition and difference, not repetition or difference, because repetition is already implicit in difference and difference within or alongside repetition—difference is a third term next to which two aspects of the Same will be recognized. It is the importance of the conjunction between the two concepts that needs to be considered. For within this and lies the possibility and impossibility of determining the difference between repetition and difference. In Andy Warhol's Marilyn series, it is fundamental that there is always the same base, the same blueprint or negative, that can be subjected to different treatment, so that we

can see where difference lies. It is the difference that allows us to see the blueprint. This works as long as the relation between 196

LISA TRAHAIR

signifier and signified is considered to be singular, unitary and fixed. In the absence of this relation there is no certainty of analysis. Repetition and difference become mutual. A difference in one location will dislocate the meaning of repetition found elsewhere. The whole (which is not reducible to the set) will be transformed in such a way that it cannot be understood in terms of the sum of its parts. As an aesthetic that was initially concerned with repetition and difference, Serialism treated them first as separate concepts by composing on the basis of permutations of a cellular

unit.

Later,

however,

the work

of Schoenberg

totally

eradicated the tonal centre and thus attested to the inseparability of repetition and difference, to their mutuality. This is why to talk about Cronenberg’s film of The Fly as an update would be a thoroughly untenable notion. The implication would be that both films are the same; the mise-en-scéne is merely updated to placate our contemporary or postmodern predilection. But to assume that something remains the same, something that could be codified and that would always be maintained, would be to divide the film into

exclusive levels of meaning without acknowledging, for instance, the way in which transformations in mise-en-scéne contaminate the overall meaning of the whole film in much the same way as the fly in the second film fuses with Seth on a molecular-genetic level. (Indeed, we would also have to acknowledge here the difficulty in talking about ‘overall meaning’ as if it were something given, as if it were something in which contamination could be read as though inscribed.) While Lévi-Strauss and structuralism came to base the constitution of sense in the binary code and attempted to determine the limits of meaning once and for all,*’ this binary code is also one of the preconditions for computer technology, information theory and cybernetics. The way the question of the code is taken up in the two films of The Fly is in terms of the mechanism of teleportation, where an object is teleported once it is analyzed and converted into codes. Analysis, as deconstitution, rests, as Gaston

Bachelard indicates, on the assumption of the ‘absolute of localization’, that is, the localizability ‘of matter in a precise space’. When Bachelard suggests that this is an abstraction that Western Science takes for granted, he also notes that this principle is at the foundation of language.*’ There is an analogy here, too, between teleportation and both information theory and _ cybernetics. 197

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Information theory is concerned with encoding, transmitting and decoding messages but has an algorithm for redundancy built into its system to ensure against the corruption of the message or the interference of noise. Either the amount of data given is lengthened or extra channels are maintained in the receiver to ensure against the breakdown of a channel.*° In cybernetic theory, too, redundancy is used to overcome the disorganization

or disinformation—that

is, the entropy—of

ma-

terial as it is repeatedly transmitted. Algorithmically, entropy is the maximum amount of disorganization permitted before what is perceived as a system is transformed into another system. In terms of the remake, to assume

that a certain amount

of information is

redundant is to assume that its presence has no effect on the rest of the information, that would be, to think that parts of the text would

not contribute to the totality of the work. Insofar as the fly gets mixed in with the deconstituted matter (let us say the intended message), insofar as it introduces a cacophonous buzz into the perspicuity of the encoded data, insofar as it obscures the clarity of meaning, this fly might be understood as noise, as that which causes the entropy of information theory and cybernetics. Further, the noise of the fly exceeds the algorithm of entropy that maintains the system’s equilibrium, increases it beyond containment, so that the conditions of the system change. If the two scientists who teleport themselves are to be perceived as closed systems, it could be said that the fly opens the system and thus causes negentropy—that is, new information. Thus, the fly is

both the breakdown of the system and the possibility of a new system. It is this conversion of noise into negentropy that Michel Serres recalls when he says: ‘Noise destroys and horrifies... Noise nourishes a new order. Organisation, life, and intelligent thought live between order and noise, between disorder and perfect

harmony’.*! Noise is not just noise as such but contains the possibility of meaning.

Even

though uncoded,

noise can always be reclaimed,

given definition as something. It is irrelevant that the manner in which it will be defined will not be identical to the noise itself. As soon as there is definition, the identity of the noise, the noise as noise, ceases to exist. (The word ‘noise’ then becomes an

interesting sign in that, like the word ‘silence’, it destroys its referent.) But Serres does not say that noise is simply transformed 198

LISA TRAHAIR

into order. Between this, he says, there exists ‘organisation, life and intelligent thought’; and this existence is not the mere existence of order. It is the act of living, and it is a force that fills in this space ‘in between’. In The Fly (1986) this space ‘in between’ is contested by the computer and the fly. The Fly (1986) becomes a duel between the computer and the fly. They represent two systems of thought, the former based on concrete meaning, the logic of presence, the latter on metaphor and poetics. But it should be noted that these ‘systems’ of concepts and metaphors are not simply opposed. We shall see that the concept is a metaphor just as the metaphor is a concept.”

In Cronenberg’s film we recall Veronica removing a computer chip from Seth’s back. That this occurs before Seth has been able to teleport live matter suggests that the computer might be responsible for his forthcoming success. And that the fly uses the scar on Seth’s back to manifest its insect hairs implies that Seth’s body will be the site for the waging of the battle. Thus, Seth is programed or animated by the computer and reanimated and reprogramed (in a sense, perhaps unprogramed) by the fly. Let us ignore the level of signification for a moment, ignore that rupture between the signifier and the signified that was gestured towards when we considered the impossibility of treating repetition and difference as autonomous analytical tools, and rest for a moment at that point where we can invoke Husserl’s theory of communication, where it is assumed that a message is transmitted

from sender to receiver and understood by both in the full presence of its meaning. If Kant in the Critique of Judgement suggests that the determination of meaning is a question of the relation between apprehension and comprehension (and even if the very possibility of comprehension is itself a question of metaphor’), then we might begin to speculate as to how we could begin to try to conceive or grasp the difference between the two films. Where would one begin and the other end? Now, the computer is the telos of structuralism; and this is indeed

ironic. The

computer is the end of structuralism. It takes the binary code that was the basis for thinking structures and returns the world (or the thinking of it) to chaos. Once the blueprint is abandoned, or the possibility of privileging certain aspects, one could only try to think the veritable similarities and differences between the two films in terms of a certain madness. The computer, as the metaphor

199

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

for the human

the world; but

mind, is our ability to comprehend

importantly, it is by way of a synthesis of apprehension and comprehension. It comprehends through apprehension. The computer in the second film thinks through materialism, and in thinking it meticulously, genetically, molecularly, thinks through its limitations in an infinite admixture. We could say that, from a certain point of view (for example, that of the characters), the fly is the unaccountable element, the

non-intended message, the sign of the force that motivates the movement from one appearance to the next. It is neither entropy nor negentropy but initiates a continual oscillation between the two. We might say that it is the mark of the insufficiency of either designation. It prevents meaning through the proliferation of meaning, interconnecting with everything and preventing groundedness. It is carcinogenic, fusing on a molecular genetic level. In Cronenberg’s film, monstrosity is figured in the incoherence of forms. The fusion of scientist and fly does not simply result in a hybrid form (as in Neumann’s film) but engenders a continual metamorphosis, a heterology, a proliferation of resemblances to other monsters. Not only does Seth Brundle become Brundlefly but Brundlefly metamorphoses into Tarzan, Rambo,

Elephantman,

Mr Hyde, the Hunchback

of Notre

Dame,

King Kong, John Carpenter’s The Thing and E.T., while each in turn metamorphoses into Brundleflymachine. This is truly the game of the seduction of appearances, the play of simulacra. Just as the fly and the computer mark the ‘in between’ of Seth and

Brundlefly,

inaugurating

an

incessant

cycle

of metamor-

phosis, the gap between the two films of The Fly provides the space for the films’ endless comparison.

But this gap, this ‘in between’,

far from delimiting the identity of each film—which would be the proof of the genetic fission of a transcendent Fly—rather necessitates the films’ (con)fusion. Jacques Derrida writes of the ‘in

between’: Between two, there is no longer any difference; rather, an identity. In that fusion, there is no longer any distance...between distance and nondistance... Not only is the distance abolished...but the difference between difference and nondifference equally... [C]onfusion between

present and nonpresent...’has taken place’ in the between...4

In Bachelard’s terms the localization of matter in a precise space

200

LISA TRAHAIR

is not only the basis of language but also the means by which time is thought as concrete and linear. And indeed it is in turn this notion of time that provides the possibility of localizing matter in precise space. In ‘Ousia and Grammeé: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, Derrida elaborates the logical difficulties that arise from philosophical conceptualizations of time and space, difficulties which pertain to the issue of presence already raised in connection with the copy and the remake. We will look at this article briefly because it highlights some of the difficulties of specifying the relationship between the two films of The Fly or between the original and the remake insofar as they would both seem to conform to an everyday spatio-temporal model or in any case depend on this model in order to institute a relationship. Derrida recounts the exoteric conception of time elaborated by Hegel and before him by Aristotle. For Aristotle, this conception of time is based

on the nun; for Hegel, it is based on the Nowe

Through

analogy to space, time becomes linear and continuous because the now is understood as the point and time as the line. Every ‘now’, although referring to the ‘present’, is actually absent, being that which is ‘no longer’ and that which is ‘not yet’.“© The now is not presence itself, just as the first point does not itself exist (is indeterminable). Hegel’s concept of negation ensures that the (virtual) ‘now’, or the point, is, through negation, succeeded by another point and thus is itself maintained or preserved, becomes actual only through being passed over. This sublation or Aufhebung will structure time as linear.” The relation between the linear and the lineage is evident here by analogy to this exoteric or linear time: it is precisely this process of sublation, of the virtual becoming actual through being passed over, that would allow us to think of the relation of the original to the remake as able to make an empirical claim to the specification of repetition or difference. Here Derrida’s consideration of time helps to elaborate further the relation between the original and remake. The original and remake could only be supposed on the basis of a linear structuration of time. And if the now does not exist except by being passed over, if the virtual is made actual only by being succeeded, we could say that the original only actually becomes ‘original’ insofar as it is remade. Earlier it was noted that Cronenberg’s film ironically

reanimated the scene from Neumann’s film of André showing Héléne how teleportation works. But the difficulty in ascertaining 201

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

whether Neumann’s film was not itself making a sort of ironic comment about this scene was noted. The everyday understanding of time as successive negation is not itself logically coherent. The analogy between time and space is insufficient. For the analogy to be instituted, space must pre-exist time. But Derrida shows that because primordial space is initially conceived as indeterminate and indivisible, the very positing of this first point as the demarcation between primordial space and determined space implies time.”* It is in this sense that time and space cannot be thought of separately from each other. There is no time before space nor space before time. Even though time and space cannot be understood except through each other, when we think of time ordinarily, we divide it off from space; and every time we think of space, we divide it off from time. To postulate time, we negate space and vice versa. It is

by separating time from space but nevertheless maintaining the analogy of time to space, space as the co-existence of points along a line, that we falsely conceive of time as the succession of instants. So the problem that analysis would be faced with would be one of trying to think metamorphosis without thinking it through a crude notion of animation, that is to say, without thinking it through the simple activation of the now, of presences. But it is precisely because time is thought of in terms of the ‘now’ (as presence) and by analogy to the line (as absence) at the same time that the simplistic possibility of the animation of presence is suspended. It is the assertion (insertion) of the ‘in between’ as the infinite dismantling of presence on the basis of presence that complicates things. In this sense it is not simply that the virtual is made actual through being passed over, through sublation, but that the actual is

itself put into question, suspended between its own virtuality and a reading that seeks to actualize it. Thus, it is not the nature of the

forms that Brundlefly mutates into but the fact of his continual metamorphosis that is important. The fly is the engendering, the computer would be what attempts to make sense of these metamorphoses (the reading of them and hence their identification with other monsters); and Seth, in spite of these two tensions, is

continually trying to be himself. The quotation of other monsters, Seth’s continual failure to be himself, could not be specified by the

order of presence; and yet, in another sense, these could only be 202

LISA TRAHAIR

understood according to presence. It is not only that each of the monsters is a figure or pose to be sublated by another pose. If Cronenberg’s game is the institution of equivalences, ultimately what Seth is is between each of the figures. He is still the Overman,

because it is the ‘in between’ as absent-presence that simultaneously constitutes Seth and denies his identity. But metamorphosis has always been denied by presence, by logocentrism, by the everyday conceptualization of time. It is only temporality, that is, not the exoteric time that is based on the analogy to the line but time before its separation from space, that could conceive of metamorphosis, that could conceive it as duration, as becoming, in

its virtual as well as actual force. Since this time (of metamorphosis) can only be apprehended by language for the reason that metamorphosis is itself the sign by which language comprehends its misapprehension of duration, metamorphosis itself remains in a certain suspension, uncertainly suspended. It is this uncertainly suspended metamorphosis that constitutes the relation between the two films, a relation that mani-

fests itself in the proliferation of certain virtualities that are simultaneously indeterminable and interconnected. But we could look at this another way. We could shift from a consideration of the ontology of the remake to the possibility of its interpretation.

Jean Baudrillard

attempts

to close

the gap, the

cleavage, wrenched by the logic of presence (as well as by animation) with his principle of fatality. For him, indeterminacy exists only when one stands at the edge of the precipice—one does not die by falling into the abyss, or more correctly, life does not end. Baudrillard says of metamorphosis: It is a question of a logical mutation... A little as in dreams, according to Freud, words, emptied of their significance, begin to function like things, reduced to the same crude material state and thus interconnected in their meaningless (but not random) immaterial immanence beyond all syntax and all principle of coherence—words take themselves for things and are suddenly caught in the game proper to things... The connections which are then created all seem catastrophic, telescoped, like an unexpected turbulence of events, but preserving, like the ‘free’ couplings of words in dreams, the character of an extraordinary necessity.

We might speculate that this is precisely what Plato was afraid of: that representations, emptied of their significance, would begin 203

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

to function like things. And it is this logic of Baudrillard’s that has been repeatedly deployed in the interpretation of the films so far, in the analogies between the relation of Seth to the baboon and Kant’s figuration of mimesis, in the attribution of agency to the computer and the fly, etc. This logic is not one that considers the narratives side by side but interfacing. They lose not only their self-identity but their significative identity. Identity no longer belongs to them but characterizes a world of appearances. That is to say, their interconnection will always be fatal—in Jean Baudrillard’s

sense

of

the

term,

where

fate

seduction.

is

Baudrillard posits a world which breaks out in appearances, in connections,

in seduction,” a world of total correlation, compelled

to endless reinterpretation—to re-animation. Hence ontology disappears, interpretation takes over. Interpretation is the ontology of the remake. Ontology is interpretation. Let’s see this world, Baudrillard’s world, in operation: on one

level, in the first film of The Fly André and the fly are indifferent to each other; and it appears to be chance that the fly gets into the telepod. The fly is initially a metaphorical agent. Its ‘chance’ alighting is the result of divine intervention. André’s accident is retribution for tampering with life, which is God’s privilege. In the Bible God created the world by dividing, naming and structuring the organic substance of the universe (John 1:1, Genesis 1:3-5). We

might say that God’s sovereignty is re-established and the impertinence of André aptly punished by the chance introduction of the fly as an unaccountable element. In a sense, we could say that modern science took Kant seriously insofar as genius was characterized by imitating God; but hand in hand with this was the

popular fear of overstepping the mark, of diminishing the gap between

God

and

humanity,

to

the

extent

that

God

would

conveniently be attributed with an irrational and vengeful aspect and hence maintain an absolute alterity, an irreversible difference. But

on

another

level,

André

works

autonomously

for

the

Department of Aviation. His scientific interest is not in flying but in its supersession, that is, in teleportation. While, diegetically speaking, it is chance that the fly gets into the teleportation mechanism, in terms of the narrative trajectory it is ironic that it is

a fly that initiates such havoc. It is not so much the return of the repressed but the resurgence or revenge of the remainder, or to put it another way, the impossibility of redundancy.

204

LISA TRAHAIR

In Cronenberg’s film it is unequivocally not chance but fate that the fly enter the telepod with Seth, fate in terms of the designation of the remake. And the fly is no longer simply a metaphorical figure, a trope, but more fundamentally, it is analogy itself. From the beginning we see that Seth has the demeanour of a fly; and the fly loiters in his lab throughout the earlier part of the film, waiting for the opportunity to fuse with him but already having figuratively fused with him. The fate of Seth is sealed from the very first shot of the film, a shot in which the camera adopts the position of a fly on the wall. And the fly is analogous to the camera—it reduplicates that omnipotent and impotent gaze that is simultaneously absent and present. The blurred focus suggests the multivision of a fly’s point of view. We might think again here of the noise of the fly as a subtle whirring or buzzing of the camera which, like the fly’s inability to settle, exemplifies its desire for (con)fusion. The fly sees all but identifies with none. The camera, insofar as it seeks to capture its object—the pro-filmic—can only ever ensure its disappearance, its flight. We could say, parenthetically, that this is perhaps also analogous to the control we seek in watching the horror film—to see all and identify with nothing. With the splatter of the remake we feel not so much the linear tension produced by the development of the plot but the centrifugal force of splatter defying the centripetal cohesion of identity. No longer are we swept along at a speed which aims to deny the presence of our bodies but our bodies are themselves fragmented, pulverized and exploded. This also has an implication for the horror genre: it is our knowledge of the other versions that both initiates and collapses the distance between the film and its intelligibility. Horror opens the door (Pandora’s box) to a history of philosophy whose basic method is to differentiate and distinguish, to attribute value to, to set parameters and boundaries so as to make inclusion and exclusion, truth and fiction, subject and object—all

the polarities that make meaning—possible. But if philosophers from Plato to Kant have sought to specify such boundaries on the basis of presence, it is the horror film, and specifically The Fly, that

calls such boundaries, and hence presence, into question. Like Brundlefly, the horror film regurgitates; it vomits the bounded entities that philosophy valorizes. Its matter, far from being cohesive, unitary and singular, is splattered. 205

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

To conclude then, it is no longer a question of the original and the remake, for our interpretation of the original is marked by the remake. At the very moment of its epistemological emergence, the original must always disappear; and with the disappearance of the original comes that of the remake. If structuralists like Lévi-Strauss sought to understand the mechanism of myths precisely by specifying the relationship between such singular, cohesive units, the horror film and The Fly reinterpret mythology as involving the double

and

its inherent

mess,

waste

and

uncanniness.

But

my

conclusion is not that this is a simple matter of degeneracy or entropy, as Plato would have it. It is rather a much more profound consideration of questions about identity and resemblance. In Baudrillard’s terms, the films seduce each other, engage in a duel, each in a sense defying the other, asking the other to imitate it, disappear into it. So if we say that animation is the illusion of life,

this is not in the sense of imitation or representation. The magic of animation is that it shows us that life exists. If animation was forbidden in the Republic, it was not really because it was something less than life but rather that it was life itself. The power of animation is not simply its ability to deconstitute and reconstitute but is that of analogy. In the two films of The Fly, it is the noise of the fly that undoes the identity of the scientists, just as it is the ‘in between’

that

undoes

the

identity

of both

films,

always

inserting endless virtual films between the two.

NOTES 1

For a consideration of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and animation, see

ge

Peter Hutchings’ essay in this volume. Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality—The Textuality of Contemporary Films’, Screen, vol. 27, no.1, January-February 1986, pp. 3, 5. Abidy.p, 5.

4

Fredric

5

Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 3. Jameson, ‘Post-Modernity, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, p. 67. Noél Carroll, ‘The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond)’, October 20, Spring 1982, p. 52, footnote 2.

2

6 7

Horror

Jameson, ‘Post-Modernity, or the Cultural Logic of Capitalism’, New Left Review, no. 146, July-August 1984, p. 67.

206

Late

LISA TRAHAIR

ibid. Jameson, ‘Post-Modernity, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, p. 65. ibid. Bruce Kirkland, ‘The Fly’, Cinefantastique, no. 3, 1986, p. 15. ibid. Indeed, Cronenberg’s contention is slightly ironic in that it is precisely this question of added elements—extras—that the film plays with. In this sense the film anticipates such an accusation. ibid. Emphasis in original. ibid. George Langelaan, ‘The Fly’, first published in Playboy and subsequently in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1966), p. 35. 16 For an interesting elaboration of the question of self-identity with regard to works of art, see Rex Butler, ‘In the Shadow of Lindy Lee’, On the Beach, no. 10, 1986.

The question of the remake, the copy, etc., is not considered again in relation to the short story. The main reason for this is that the question of film as literary adaptation is too large to broach here. 18 See, for example, Ralph Stephenson, Animation in the Cinema (London: The Tantivy Press, 1967), pp. 9-13; and Charles Solomon, ‘Animation: Notes on a Definition’, The Art of The Animated Image, ed. Charles Solomon (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1987), p. 9. ibid. 17

See Friedrich Wilhelm

Nietzsche, The Will To Power (New

Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 279-281. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Books, 1974), pp. 422-424, 596-598. Gilles Deleuze,

‘Plato and

Lee (Harmondsworth:

the Simulacrum’,

trans. Rosalind

York:

Penguin Krauss,

October 27, Winter 1983, pp. 47-49. ibid. Plato, The Republic, p. 157, 397e.

ibid., p. 151, 393c,d and 394a. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For Everyone and No One, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961).

Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 2, Summer 1981, p. 9. ibid. Derrida’s exegesis of Kant, ibid. ibid., pp. 10-11.

ibid., p. 10. Rex Butler’s Ph.D. thesis, ‘Representation and Its Limits in Baudrillard, Derrida, Zelig, and Lyotard’, University of Sydney, 1990, also begins by raising this point and gives a substantial elaboration of the implications. 207

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,

a2 Claude and

1963), p. 210.

oo 34 35 36

ibid., p. 217. Brophy, ‘Horrality’, p. 3.

38

Gaston Bachelard, Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1934), p. 126, translated and quoted by Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University

39 40

ibid.

ibid., p. 5.

For a more substantial elaboration of this, see Butler, ‘In the Shadow of Lindy Lee’. OW On further reading, such a claim could only accurately be made of Lévi-Strauss’ earlier work. The Raw and the Cooked casts a more discerning glance at the difficulties involved in determining the meaning of myths. See particularly ‘Overture’, The Raw and the Cooked (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).

of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. xi.

4]

David

Porush,

The

Soft

Machine:

Cybernetic

Fiction

(New

York:

Methuen, 1985), pp. 58-65. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 127.

See Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982). 43 Butler, ‘In the Shadow of Lindy Lee’. 42

44

Derrida,

“The Question

of Style’, The New

Nietzsche,

ed. David

B.

Allison (New York: Delta, 1977), p- 189, note 9.

Derrida, ‘Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, Margins of Philosophy, p. 37. 46 ibid., p.39. 47 ibid., pp. 36, 42. 48 ibid., p. 41. 49 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Fatality or Reversible Imminence: Beyond the 45

Uncertainty Principle’, trans. Pamela 2, Summer 1982, pp. 282-284.

50

ibid.

208

Park, Social Research, vol. 49, no.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT,

OR THE FRAMING OF ANIMATION ALAN CHOLODENKO

The question of the borderline precedes, as it were, the determination of all the dividing lines... Jacques Derrida

Like ‘Who’s on First’—the Abbott and Costello routine upon which Rain Man turns—Who Framed Roger Rabbit suspends its title between the question whose mark is absent and the assertion whose mark is likewise absent. In consequence, and as in Rain Man, two alternative and mutually exclusive responses tend to be called for and in fact elicited by these two readings of the title. On the one hand, that which, presuming a question is being posed, presumes and pursues an answer, which would be the secret of its meaning (Raymond’s first response to ‘Who’s on First’); on the other hand, that which, presuming it is a pure nonsensical con, a ruse, treats the title as a joke masquerading as a question, so that

anyone who takes it seriously would be, as in the case of the ‘shaggy dog’ story, the very butt of the joke (Charlie’s response to ‘Who’s on First’). In seeing Who Framed Roger Rabbit either as only serious to the point of profundity or as only frivolous and utterly meaningless, arguably something is being lost. Taking my cue from the Raymond at the end of Rain Man, | will argue the necessity of following the disconcerting approach of abandoning the ‘either/or’ 209

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

for the ‘both/and’ in framing Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

I will argue

that the film itself insists upon such a framing, that the very suspension of its title—including its suspension over the text that follows—already sets such a framing in play, and that in this sense Who Framed Roger Rabbit anticipates and criticizes in advance the ‘either/or’ approach, that is, any approach which simply accepts either Charlie’s or the early Raymond's position. In reframing Who Framed Roger Rabbit with the ‘both/and’, I will propose that the critic would no longer be in the position of disregarding or undertheorizing that which to date has in the title been disregarded or undertheorized, that is, the word Framed. Those critics who have

taken the title seriously have in a sense rushed to nominate the Who as it were in infinite profusion without giving due seriousness to the idea of the frame, including what it would say about the nature of the pursuit to nominate all the Whos. I will argue that it is the very idea of the frame which frames the phrase ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ and the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In insisting that this subject of the frame

be addressed,

Who

Framed

Roger

Rabbit frames the very nature of the frame as its subject. It frames the frame as its frame. To say that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a film about framing is to invite a reading of it in terms of the logic of the frame articulated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida—a reading which has always already preceded my announcing of it. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is in many regards a deconstructivist text, one whose extensive quotationality is not simply allied with a ‘modernist’ reflexive project but is as well wedded to a ‘postmodernist’ form of quotationality not in the service of a telos whose goal is the constitution of the text as a self-presence but in the service rather of a decomposition, a dismantling of such a project as well. Hence the text invites a double reading, one that acknowledges its ambivalent, uncertain, aporetic character.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit antici-

pates that it will be taken to be simply ‘modernist’, true and good and that efforts will be made to answer what is (mis)taken as an authentic question, its suspended

sentence not seen for what it is

and is not; and it mounts a criticism against such a project of stopping the play of the movement of meaning. And, in any event, as Derrida notes, it is futile, regardless of the type of text, to seek to contextualize fully a text. The context, another word for frame, is

never fully saturated and always overflows, always too little and 210

ALAN CHOLODENKO

too much

at the same

time. Further, the Who

of the title—this

indefinite pronoun par excellence of authorship, responsibility, what would be the proper in all its senses—falls prey to the Derridean critiques of authorship and self-presence which Who Framed Roger Rabbit likewise mounts. Such a critique would be a component of the larger project of Derrida, to articulate the conditions of possibility of Western philosophy as a metaphysics of presence, which metaphysics has not only determined philosophy but all of culture, even as manifested in popular culture and everyday speech. For Derrida, Western metaphysics has determined Being as presence, a fullness of living meaning, truth, essence, ideality, etc., interiorizing and

centring it against a lack, an absence, a deficiency of itself. Metaphysics does this through a set of binary oppositions which even today stand for what is self-evidently logical and true, including fullness/emptiness, essence/superfice, interior/exterior,

subject/object,

proper/improper,

literal/figurative,

good/bad,

truth/falsity, reality/fiction, adult/child, male/female, serious/ frivolous, health/disease, cure/poison, light/dark, animate/ inanimate, speech/writing, etc. A hierarchization of these an-

tinomies elevates the first term as belonging to presence and subordinates and excludes the second of each pair of opposites as a falling off from presence. It is Derrida’s contention that by this operation Western philosophy has sought to efface the trace, the mark of the radically other within the structure of difference that is the sign—which is nonetheless traced, marked and operative— which allows such oppositions to be installed in the first place. For Derrida there are certain marks which mark the trace and the repression of the trace, which

marks

he calls ‘undecidables’,

that is: ...unities of simulacrum, ‘false’ verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however, inhabit philosophical opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of

speculative dialectics.. a

The frame (under the name the parergon) is one among a long list of such terms

in Derrida’s

work,

nonidentical

terms

which

condense at different places along a chain of substitutions but each

aii

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

of which serves to mark the unaccounted for operations of the repressed but irrepressible trace, mark of the other. In addition to the already mentioned parergon, these various names include writing, différance, dissemination, the supplement, the hymen, the pharmakon, the gram, spacing, the incision, etc. While none of these terms is identical, each nonetheless serves to mark the systematic play of differences in language. These are hybrid or composite figures of the ‘both/and’, of the hama,* which takes the form of ’X and not X at the same time’—a figure whose differential logic of supplementarity not only applies between oppositions but within each of the terms of any opposition. The result is to challenge all forms of totality, unicity, self-identity, adequation, literalness, etc. As Derrida writes: What has happened, if it has happened, is a sort of overrun (débordement) that spoils all these boundaries and divisions [’...that form the running border of what used to be called a text, of what we once thought this word could identify, ie., the supposed end and beginning of a work, the unity of a corpus, the title, the margins, the signatures, the referential realm outside the frame, and so forth’—my insert]... [A] ‘text’...is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces. Thus the text overruns all

the limits assigned to it so far (not submerging or drowning them in an undifferentiated homogeneity, but rather making them more complex, dividing and multiplying strokes and lines)—all the limits, everything that was to be set up in opposition to writing (speech, life, the world, the real, history, and what not, every field of reference—to

body oO mind, conscious or unconscious, politics, economics, and so forth).

To reiterate our Derridean epigraph: ‘The question of the borderline precedes...the determination of all the dividing lines...’° This would be the question Who Framed Roger Rabbit poses; and its answer is that the question can and cannot be answered at the same time. I will argue that this form, of the supplement, of the always already doubled, is a form that, in deconstructing metaphysics, deconstructs live action, animation and their (‘historical’) relationship. I argue a parallel between the repression of différance by metaphysics and the historical marginalization—scapegoating—of animation by the institutions and discourses of film,

212

ALAN CHOLODENKO

including Film Studies, itself caught up in a metaphysics of presence, which took the moral high ground with the ‘photographed live

action

film’

against,

especially,

the

animated

cartoon

but

against animation in general, either excluding it by defining animation as a form of graphic art unrelated to film or marginalizing it as an inferior, frivolous, merely mechanical form or appendage

of film for children. Yet, while animation has been marginalized by the discourses and institutions of film, according to the logic of the parergon, it is only through animation that film can define itself as film. Animation

is what is traced in film, including film’‘s insti-

tutions and discourses, what film has effaced and sought to efface the effacement of, but what allows film to be. And nothing frames

without being framed at the same time. So while film frames (necessarily a frame-up, too) animation, animation frames film; and therefore, in thinking animation, film cannot be, nor would it

allow ‘itself’ to be, ignored. The Platonism of Film Studies simultaneously should and should not but inevitably will be borne in mind in the constitution of the institution of Animation Studies. Thus, I disagree with those who

think of animation as only a

genre of film, an argument it would seem to me in the service of Film

Studies.

I see

animation

as a mode

which,

in a manner

comparable to Gilles Deleuze’s description of the close-up, is both a ‘specific’ mode of film and a component of all forms of film.’ Indeed,

even

in a certain

sense

not unaffiliated

with

‘history’,

animation arguably comprehends all of film, all of cinema, was (and is) the very condition of their possibility: the animatic apparatus. In this sense, animation would no longer be a form of film or cinema. Film and cinema would be forms of animation. Let us not forget

the

notion

that

the

motion

picture

camera/projector

animated still images called ‘photographs’. The plaque commemorating the first screening of the Lumieére’s films at the Grand Café reads: ‘Ici le 28 décembre 1895 eurent lieu les premiéres projections publiques de photographie animé a l'aide du cinématographe appareil inventé par les fréres Lumiéres’.® Maurice Bessy and Giuseppe Lo Duca write, ‘...Et l/image s’anima. Le cinéma fut réalisé’. [‘The image animated itself. The cinema was realized’.]’ Indeed, I believe

it is still arguable that Emile Reynaud’s Théatre Optique is the exemplification of the cinematic apparatus, even though it projected drawings and not photographs, as the flip book before it first used drawings, then photographs. (Roger Rabbit himself 213

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

flips—animates—‘photographs’ of Marvin Acme and_ Jessica Rabbit playing pattycake within the same images.) For me, after Nietzsche, it is useless to engage in arguments of cause and effect here. But apart from these hypotheses, I will argue that animation and film and cinema are forms of writing, as Derrida uses this term. As the graph of cinematography affirms, cinematography is a form of writing, hence the telling, ironic and ‘self’-deconstructive nature

of the move made by the institutions and discourses of film to try to distance themselves, or indeed, even to try to cut themselves off,

from the graph-ic, including their opposing of film (as speech) to animation as (alone) of the order of the graph (as writing). Derrida writes: And thus we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in

space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’. ”

A long list of graphs exists in the (proto)history of cinema, including the kineograph (the flip book) invented in 1868, the animatographe, the cinématographe of the Lumiere Brothers, etc. Animation, film and cinema are forms of the graph. Insofar as graph means not only writing but drawing, animation, film and cinema are likewise forms of drawing. The French term for animation,

dessin animé—animated drawing—attests to this. As forms of the graph, animation, film and cinema are contaminated and contaminating concepts, concepts drawn from, to and of the nature of drawing. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit Jessica Rabbit perversely puts it thus: ‘I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way’, drawing the drawn, hence drawing drawing, hence drawing animation, film and cinema

into the always already doubled of the trope, of the hama, of the aporia. Likewise the ‘live action’/‘cartoon animation’ composite needs consideration in terms of writing as Derrida articulates it. While Who Framed Roger Rabbit is taken to be the ‘hi fi’ (as Jean Baudrillard would likely characterize it!') of ‘cartoon animation’ to date, it paradoxically and ironically speaks to an issue fundamental to ‘cartoon animation’ and ‘live action’ as old as ‘cartoon animation’ (and arguably ‘live action’), that is, their compositing—the genre of this hybrid form (the fact and implications of this hybrid form likewise effaced by Film Studies). The logic of the hybrid is

214

ALAN CHOLODENKO

exemplified by Who Framed Roger Rabbit in terms of its genre—the composite ‘live action’/‘cartoon animation’ genre—the genre of (such a) genre itself ironized in such a belonging. But this hybrid genre would only be a special case—an ‘undecideable’—of what exists everywhere through the differential logic of the supplement, where absence as much as presence is never pure but is always marked by the trace of the radically other, where the composite and the hybrid are forms of this always already doubled. Thus, insofar as these terms—‘live action’ and ‘cartoon animation’—are regarded as polar opposites, after Derrida I would argue that it would be impossible to keep these two terms separate and distinct, although precisely how they interrelate is likewise undecidable. It is like trying to compare two unknown quantities; and Who Framed Roger Rabbit exemplifies this. I would suggest that the two meanings of animation may help us here: first, to impart motion to; and second, to give life to, to bring to life. The latter notion is one which in various ways is embraced by Film Studies as a part of the Platonic logos of living speech, living truth, etc., insofar as logos (the Word, speech, law) is a zoon, a living, animate creature.!* Hence, this very name—'live

action’—given ironically to a mode which both seeks to separate itself from (one meaning of) animation (because of that meaning’s association with the mechanical and the consequences issuing therefrom) yet to reserve to itself the second meaning of animation—itself deconstructs the metaphysical suppositions underpinning the adoption and employment of such a term. Such a strategic move would correspond to Plato’s valorizing of organic living truth against mechanical simulation—the opposition between the original and the copy, or in its displaced form the good copy (the faithful likeness) and the bad copy (the ghostly pernicious

simulacrum):

like soul to body,

living to nonliving,

speech to writing. Here we return to Derrida’s point that writing always already contaminates speech. To reiterate: to the degree ‘live action’ and ‘animation’ are taken to be binary opposites and partake of a metaphysics of presence, they would be comprehended by the logic of supplementarity, of différance as Derrida articulates it—a logic at work in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Here might I suggest calling that which, from among all of Derrida’s terms, would be the condition of possibility (and simultaneously impossibility) of ‘live action’ and ‘animation’ the ANS)

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

frame (the parergon).!? Or, for aesthetic as well as semantic and syntactical reasons, dissemination (dissemination since it contains ‘anime’ and can form ‘animates’ and ‘animation’ by significantly doubling the ‘a’). Dissemination disseminates ‘animation’ (and ‘nonanimation’), ‘live action’ and ‘nonlive action’, the animate and the inanimate jointly and severally. Derrida writes that for Plato,

writing ‘...violently wrests out of its element the animate interiority of speech’.'* Dissemination is the condition of the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of both ‘live action’ and ‘animation’ as the fullness of presence, the living presence of logos, speech as a living, animate discourse. Dissemination introduces dispersal, deferral, delay, suspension and death, making of ani-

mation

not only a productivity—something

composes—but

a seduction—a

that vivifies

seductive, breathless

and

simulacrum,

something that decomposes, deanimates, brings lifedeath—at the same time.'° Death lies in this cut.'® In making the relationship between and within ‘live action’ and ‘cartoon animation’

its object of inquiry, Who Framed Roger Rabbit

deconstructs this so-called opposition, demonstrating the metaphysical underpinnings of such terms and their opposition, showing how these terms are accomplices in a certain way and demonstrating that dissemination is their simultaneous condition of possibility and impossibility jointly and severally. Who Framed Roger Rabbit disseminates ‘live action’ and ‘animation’ (and ‘nonlive action’ and ‘nonanimation’). Thus, Who Framed Roger Rabbit deconstructs the soul—the second meaning of ‘anime’—of ‘animation’ and ‘live action’. This means that Roger Rabbit can be seen as a bad copy of Felix the Cat (who is depicted above the entrance of the tunnel to Toontown as well as shaking hands with R.K. Maroon in a photo in Maroon’s office). Marcel Brion writes that Felix needs only two things to edify the world, material signs of his states of soul: the exclamation point and the question mark.'” Such are the marks which the title ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ and Who Framed Roger Rabbit suspend and the suspending of which turns Felix likewise into an always already bad copy—the simulacrum. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a simulacrum of a ’40s ‘cartoon animation’ /‘live action’ film'® (the ‘40s the decade that Disney, Hanna-Barbera

and

Warner

Bros. sought to perfect this

hybrid form!”) as ‘Somethin’s Cookin’ is a simulacrum of a ‘40s Warner Bros./MGM cartoon,”’ as Roger Rabbit is a simulacrum of 216

ALAN CHOLODENKO

a ‘40s cartoon character,

a mega-quotation

of the attributes of, as

Richard Williams, Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Director of Animation, declares, the ‘Tex Avery cashew nut shaped head, the swatch of red hair...like Droopy’s, Oswald the Rabbit’s overalls, Porky Pig’s bow tie, Freddy Moore’s Mickey Mouse gloves, and he’s the color of an American flag’.*’ Like Frankenstein,” Roger Rabbit is a composite character analogous to the film’s megaquotationality.” Roger Rabbit and Who Framed Roger Rabbit reanimate, revivify,

the ‘cartoon animation’/‘live action’ film but at a price: the pharmakon. Roger Rabbit and Who Framed Roger Rabbit are both poison and cure at the same time for the ‘cartoon animation’ /‘live action’ film. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a love letter and Last Will and Testament—a double love letter and testament—to the disappearance of classic animation and the studio animation units that produced it up to the mid to late ’50s. In this sense, Judge Doom and the Los Angeles Freeway are stand-ins for the Hollywood moguls whose ‘soulless’ studios destroyed animation. They are the objects of a war that the film mounts—a war waged in time and ostensibly won in the film as it stitches together 1947 and 1987, creating a fold in time. By being set in 1947, Who Framed Roger Rabbit's 1987 recall doubles as anticipation of the forthcoming ‘rubbing out’ of cartoons in the ‘50s and saves by safeguarding in advance the realm of toons, cartoons and ‘cartoon animation’ /‘live

action’ for reanimation, reappearance, in 1987 in and as ‘itself’— Who Framed Roger Rabbit (something like Back to the Future, another

film directed by Robert Zemeckis). It does this by ‘rubbing out’ those who

would

‘rub out’ toons and Toontown,

those with the

secret of the Dip—the poison that makes heretofore immortal toons mortal—thereby ostensibly restoring to toons their ‘immortality’, including the immortality of Toontown, they and it at the end both ‘rubbed

out’ and not ‘rubbed

out’, erased without being erased,

put under erasure, sous rature, as Derrida writes it (like the empty outline of Roger Rabbit’s body in the window pane). Therefore, Who Framed Roger Rabbit functions like Marvin Acme’s disappearing/reappearing ink but in not one but an incessant and indefinite series of operations. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is both time machine and time capsule, a magic drug, a hollow, a retreat, ‘sheltering’ a ‘temporarily mortal’ ‘immortal’ resource—unlocatable, limitless yet available. But, as I

DAW

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

indicated, at a price: that of the simulacrum, of writing as a poison (pharmakon) the effects of which are not only to deconstruct ‘character’ in the case of Roger but to mark this effect of the special effect as always already the case wherever ‘character’ stands for ‘soul’ as fullness of presence, including in classic cartoons, which,

despite the nostalgic wish to take them as origins without origin, themselves take place within an intertextual field which they themselves remark, recite, requote. This is a point made by Richard Williams,

that

is, that

Who

Framed

Roger

Rabbit

is ‘good,

old

fashioned 1947 animation with a twist—it’s Hip Rehash. It’s a cartoon of a cartoon, a joke on a joke’,“* where what is being re-quoted

is itself based

on the cliches, the formulas

of the ‘40s

cartoonists.” In this sense, Who Framed Roger Rabbit's war can be reread as waged against the simulacral nature of toons even in the ‘40s! Insofar as Robert Zemeckis describes Who Framed Roger Rabbit as ‘the ultimate crossover movie’,”° this figure of the cross-over can

be rethought as the double cross-over of the sous rature, the X, the chi of the chiasmus, the mark of the contaminative operation of the disseminal text. Who Framed Roger Rabbit disseminates ‘live action’ and ‘animation’ in a multiplicity of modes. It would, of course, be

impossible to specify all of these operations. I will content myself with an elaboration of movements of the narrative and megastructure and some points on spatial and temporal design and characters and props, all the while presuming that the logic of supplementarity will be understood to obtain in operations and elements which I do not specifically address. The narrative of Who Framed Roger Rabbit: a movement that is drawn. As Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit become accomplices, the ‘photographed live action film’ and the ‘cartoon animation’ are drawn to each other. Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit ostensibly start out as distinct, analogous to the distinction between ‘live action’ and ‘animation’. But the movement of the narrative is the progressive indetermining and indistinguishing of their difference. Significantly, the drama of the film (like that of Rain Man) is the typical Hollywood narrative of healing, that is, the re-animating of

Eddie Valiant through his regaining of a brother of sorts as Roger becomes his twin, his ‘double’. Eddie rediscovers the Roger in himself, which means that Roger is also the reanimation of Eddie’s ‘dead’ brother, Theodore J. Valiant—Teddie.

218

Death

plays in the

ALAN CHOLODENKO

names of the brothers—Eddie (die, died, ded) and Teddie (with its

‘T’ sliding into ‘D’ as well as into “T’ for ‘Toon’). Not irrelevant here is the name of Eddie’s girlfriend—Dolores, from dolor, dolorosus, which mean sorrow, grief, mourning in Latin; and

Valiant contains the significantly incomplete ‘liv’ and ‘aliv’ and a complete ‘vital’, etc. When Eddie can double Roger, Roger can become, can stand-in for, Teddie and can redeem toons. Certainly, it has been noted that Eddie has toon qualities, for example, he can be flattened in an elevator and reanimate. Further, he plays a

bunny—Bugs Bunny and/or Roger Rabbit at the least—in one of the chronologically earliest images of the film, the photo of himself with a carrot in his mouth seated next to his brother on the beach (and in another of these photos he holds up two fingers behind the head of his girlfriend—two rabbit ears!). This carrot signifier, as it weaves its way through the text, includes Eddie saying ‘What’s up, Doc?’, as well as ‘killing’ a Judge Doom who, in his toon form and

in the form of his ‘death’ as disappearance, is remarkably like The Thing in Howard Hawks’ and Christian Nyby’s The Thing From Another World. Doom is a carrot top whose ‘death’ is marked by an orange liquid dispersed everywhere. By ‘killing’ the carrot, Eddie has consumed it rather than been consumed by it; and another consumption (consummation) of sorts is forecast when Jessica provocatively invites Roger to return home to a carrot cake she will bake for him! This means that Eddie Valiant is always already Roger Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, always already a toon, too. And this allows this narrative to be a narrative of the return of the repressed, of poison and cure (pharmakon), where Death, in the forms of Judge Doom

and the Dip (both pharmakons), ‘dies’ and Eddie’s ‘death’, his mourning and melancholia, can ‘die’ so he can ‘live’ again (regaining his sexual vitality en route, his rabbitness so aptly figured in Dolores’ query, ‘Is that a rabbit in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?’).2” And what returns is the toon in Eddie, which

would parallel the return of the repressed of ‘animation’ to ‘live action’ film and its institutions, including Film Studies. This return

has the ironical effect of declaring that Eddie Valiant is alive and human only to the degree that he is at the same time a toon, animated by the other, so that he can play, dance and sing, miming

Roger Rabbit's earlier singing and dancing to the same Merry-GoRound Broke Down—‘quite a looney selection for a group of 219

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

drunken

reprobates’, says Judge Doom

where Roger and about themselves. cure at the same toons but ‘kills’

in the earlier sequence—

Eddie sing about each other but also necessarily The pharmakon is in play here, too—poison and time, including laughter, which not only ‘kills’ the dead (non)human within Eddie (not only

‘Eddie’ but also his ‘brother’ and Judge Doom) so that he can be ‘cured’. In this sense, Eddie Valiant also ‘dies’ laughing!

And the end of the text is a wedding of sorts, not simply a coupling but one that is a noncoupling at the same time—a hymen. This is, as with all weddings,

a wedding without consummation, a

hymen without hymen, a wedding of Eddie and Roger in their second kiss (suggesting that they have always already been married) and invoking the mystery of the copulation of Roger and Jessica and

the nonconsummation

of Eddie’s

relationship

with

Dolores. Eddie and Roger have exchanged traits in a way, but in a sense,

they have

both

always

been

divided

within

themselves,

possessing the traits they likewise exchange (and hence do not exchange at the same time): Eddie always both a humanized rabbit and a rabbitized human at the same time and Roger Rabbit always both a humanized rabbit and a rabbitized human at the same time and both Eddie and Roger both at the same time. The toon would be both the interior of the interior and the exterior of the human at the same time and vice versa. And in a sense the closer they come to resemble each other (are drawn to each other), the further they move from each other (are drawn away from each other), as if a fold joined and separated them at the same time—something which ensured that they could never be either completely different or completely the same, which would likewise hold true for ‘live action’ and ‘animation’. Thus, the narrative of Who Framed Roger Rabbit: a movement that is and is not drawn at the same time.”> At the same time, the logic of supplementarity operates at the largest structural levels. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a film doubled,

a film of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’, and the relation of one to the other is complex and indeterminate. No sooner does Who Framed Roger Rabbit begin—with the Touchstone Pictures

logo,

then

the

title, ‘Touchstone

Pictures

and

Amblin

Entertainment in association with Silver Screen Partners III Present’, and then the title, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, itself appearing in two stages—than the sexy jazz music suddenly stops, displaced by cartoon music and the image of a golden aura out of 220

ALAN CHOLODENKO

which first the face of Baby Herman and then that of Roger Rabbit come to appear in an advance towards us from the vanishing point. This image dissolves to a Warner Bros. type logo under the words,

‘R.K.

Maroon

Presents

a

Maroon

Cartoon

In

Color.

Copyright MCMXLVII By the Maroon Corp. All Rights Reserved’. The words ‘Maroon Cartoon’ swell (as if being inflated) towards us in a manner similar to the faces in the preceding image, to be followed by a dissolve to Baby Herman and Roger Rabbit imaged—the former in a circular frame, the latter in a circular cut-out frame, his hands extending outside the border of the frame

towards us—and named ‘Baby Herman and Roger Rabbit’. This image is followed by a dissolve to an image of Baby Herman frying Roger Rabbit in a pan, with the title ‘In “Somethin’s Cookin’ Directed by Raoul J. Raoul’. Then, at the end of ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’,

we track back from Roger lodged in the refrigerator to eventually pull focus from Roger to discover Eddie Valiant and hear his first word

(of contempt),

‘Toons!’.

It will

turn

out,

in a

manner

analogous in part to the traditional programing of film presentations, that “Somethin’s Cookin” is a prelude/prologue to a feature film, yet with the twist that this feature film—Who Framed Roger Rabbit—seats ‘Somethin’s Cookin’ within its interior, as well as ina

way exterior to it. The upshot is that we both can and cannot tell where both Who Framed Roger Rabbit and ‘Somethin’s Cookin” begin and end. Indeed, both at the ‘head’ and ‘tail’ of ‘Somethin’s Cookin’,

Who Framed Roger Rabbit and ‘Somethin’s Cookin” are separate and not separate from each other at the same time. This (con)fusion and separation is secured and enhanced by certain operations. First, at the ‘head’, the tactic of displacing the

very title—’Who Framed Roger Rabbit’—with a second title— ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’—and the cartoon it ostensibly entitles— ‘Somethin’s

Cookin’ —is befuddling,

doubling

and

indetermining

both Who Framed Roger Rabbit and ‘Somethin’s Cookin”. We are a doubled

audience, audience

to both a cartoon

which

has begun

and a film which has apparently begun—after all we have already seen its titke—’Who Framed Roger Rabbit’—yet where and what Who Framed Roger Rabbit is we do and do not yet know. And this displacement has happened across ‘shot’ four, the ‘shot’ of Baby Herman and Roger Rabbit advancing from a golden aura, a shot which divides and joins at the same time the two titles. Like this shot, the viewer is in the ‘in between’, an ‘inbetweener’ (to use an

221

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

animation term) between spaces, two films, etc.

two

titles, two

times, two

places, two

This operation is supplemented by a second one, the extraordinary twist that occurs with ‘Somethin’s Cookin’, that is, the undoing of the presentation at its ‘head’ of ‘Somethin’s Cookin” as an already finished cartoon by the discovery at its ‘end’ that it is not only not finished but in the very process of being shot. And we, marked at ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’s ‘beginning’ as spectators in a theatre to a finished cartoon, are remarked as now observers on a

Hollywood movie set watching toons shooting a cartoon as if they were ‘live actors’ in a ‘cartoon animation’ /‘live action’ film. (And shot unsuccessfully at that because Roger ‘keeps blowin’ his lines!’,

on this take by producing birds instead of stars around his head.) Insofar as ‘Somethin’s Cookin” is presented at its ‘head’ as a finished and existing cartoon and at the ‘end’ as being shot and therefore not yet existing as the finished ‘cartoon animation’ /‘live action’ film we saw, it is both constituted and ‘erased’ as it goes along, as

the narrative, mise-en-scéne and text of Who Framed Roger Rabbit will be ‘erased’ by Tinker Bell’s ‘knell’ at the ‘end’. Even the fact of ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’’s having many cuts and shots is erased in the impression given at the ‘Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut!’ of Raoul that it has all been one long take (shot with only one camera), an impression corroborated by Baby Herman’s complaint, ‘How many times do we gotta do this damn scene?!’. This complexity is maintained and enriched by a third operation involving this ‘ending’, that is, after Raoul shouts ‘Cut!’ (six

times), the camera tracks back from Roger in the refrigerator. One convolution here is that up to now our camera has been (impossibly) the one camera of the illusory long take that ‘Somethin’s Cookin” has been refigured as constituting; yet at this moment our camera still is but at the same time is no longer that camera. Despite Raoul’s direction, we do not ‘Cut!’ but continue to roll and

track back to discover a camera on the right which ostensibly shot what we saw and also shot and now has stopped obedient to Raoul’s command. Thus, we have always been two cameras (at the

least) at the same time and therefore in two places (at the least) at the same time without knowing it—one camera which has now stopped and one which now continues. And as ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’’s continuing camera, as long as we continue to roll, ‘Somethin’s Cookin” continues to be shot; and therefore we remain a

222

ALAN CHOLODENKO

doubled camera. So in this sense (as well as in others) the rest of the film will be both ‘Somethin’s Cookin” and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The titles—’Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ and ‘Somethin’s Cookin” —and the films—Who Framed Roger Rabbit and ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’— are grafted (graphed) together and the effect of the graft is to indetermine their proprieties, their decidability as proper titles and as ‘bodies proper’.”’ ‘Shot’ four and Raoul’s ‘Cut!’ as grafting ‘hinges’ both join and separate, add and deduct, multiply and divide, cut in(to(o)) as well as out of at the same time, determine

and indetermine the ‘bodies proper’ of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’ and suspend their titles, suspend what they entitle, govern, determine and are determined by. ‘It’—Who Framed Roger Rabbit—is both Who Framed Roger Rabbit and ‘Somethin’s Cookin” and neither at the same time. ‘It’ is a film doubled, grafted of films doubled, grafted, woven into each other,

making it impossible to know and say exactly what is grafted because we can no longer know what the ‘proper bodies’ of ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’ and Who Framed Roger Rabbit are. At the same time the titles and the texts they entitle exceed all adequation of each with the other. Further, this indetermining, this suspension of

any adequation between the titles and what they entitle and vice versa, is twisted one turn further in the anticipation by the titles and texts of this lack, excess, nonadequation, the titles thus

regaining their ‘authority’ of entitling and being entitled by the texts and

vice versa.

Thus, the titles and

films operate

like the

bridging grafts according to the economy of the undecideable, their adequacy that of nonadequacy, of adequacy and nonadequacy at the same time.*’ The title as a ‘nothing’, a McGuffin, something that enables a narrative and withdraws itself, never to be ‘known’,

possessed. Of no value and of infinite value. The title ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ frames and unframes Who Framed Roger Rabbit, including ‘itself’. It, too, exemplifies that we are in the ‘in between’,

‘inbetweeners’. These textual operations have vertiginous consequences. If ‘Somethin’s Cookin” is ostensibly only a cartoon until its characters answer Raoul as ‘live actors’ and refigure ‘Somethin’s Cookin’ as both ‘cartoon animation’ and ‘live action’ at the same time, then its

effect is to suspend the decidability that any one looking like a human is only a human. (After all Baby Herman acts a human baby and

a third character,

the mother,

223

is a second

human

in

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

‘Somethin’s

Cookin’’

whose

actor is never

seen.) Therefore,

‘live

action’ is always already contaminated by ‘cartoon animation’ after ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’’s twist. This suspensive, contaminative twist of

‘Somethin’s Cookin’ at its ‘end’ works with the contaminative logic that Eddie Valiant—the human—is always already also a toon and the doubled movement(s) of the narrative (including the continuing contaminative effects of the continuing ‘Somethin’s Cookin’) towards an ‘ending’ where a second twist twists ‘live action’— already through these aforementioned operations also ‘cartoon animation’—into

‘cartoon animation’, already also ‘live action’ as

well... Therefore, ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’ and Who Framed Roger Rabbit as texts double the dizzying, labyrinthine set of relationships between Roger Rabbit and Eddie Valiant. This complex, abyssal imbrication of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’, including the notion that, from ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’ on, the rest of the film will be both ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’ and

Who Framed Roger Rabbit and neither at the same time—the between’

the ‘films’—is buttressed by a number

including the Acme Factory Cookin’. First, Ready when

‘in

of other factors,

different ways in which the final sequence in the in certain ways doubles and ‘completes’ ‘Somethin’s when hit by a ton of bricks, Roger says, ‘Look! Stars! you are, Raoul!’. Second, at the level of narrative

action, in ‘Somethin’s Cookin” Roger tries to save Baby Herman,

in

the Acme Factory sequence Eddie Valiant tries to and does save Roger and Jessica Rabbit, in this scenario playing Roger’s role while Roger and Jessica play Baby Herman’s; and this is enhanced by Eddie’s doubling of Roger’s Merry-Go-Round Broke Down routine

here.

Third,

certain

narrative

incidents

in

Somethin’s

Cookin” are repeated in the Acme Factory sequence, including the way Judge Doom’s rotating blade, threatening to divide Eddie from crotch up, doubles the meat cleaver planted between Roger’s legs; the way Eddie pretends he’s been plugged into an electrical outlet analogous to Roger’s plugging into a wall socket and lighting up; and the way Judge Doom breathes in air in order to reanimate, recalling Roger’s ‘sucking a lux’. Fourth, certain narrative issues are shared, most notably, taking care of someone likened to a brother. Fifth, the mise-en-scéne of ‘Somethin’s Cookin” is

saturated with Acme products, so identified, which products exist ‘outside’ ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’ and by the same name and are produced by the Acme Factory that is the very site of the final 224

ALAN CHOLODENKO

sequence. (And this is analogous to the way both Roger and Baby Herman use their same names both ‘inside’ ‘Somethin’s Cookin” and ‘outside’.) In this way the Acme Factory is the milieu within which all the events of both films are played out; and it thus makes sense

that the Acme Factory should be located just down the road from the Maroon Studio and visible from R.K. Maroon’s office window,

a window which will be marked with the spectral cut-out of the contours of Roger’s ‘absent’ body. The wall of the Acme Factory is like a fourth ‘wall’, horizon and vanishing point to the open rectangular expanse between the buildings on this side of which is the wall of the Maroon

Studio.

Sixth, the thematic

of ‘cookin’

initiated in ‘Somethin’s Cookin” weaves its way through to the final sequence, where Roger and Jesssica look set to be cooked in the Dip but Doom is instead and Jessica promises to do some ‘cookin’ for Roger. Seventh, in the final sequence the Acme Factory resembles a studio space, the Dip cannon mounted ona truck like a camera on a dollie and pointed at Roger and Jessica dangling on a hook against the ‘blank’ background of the rear wall, a fourth wall to the front wall of the Acme Factory facing the Maroon Studio. Eighth, at the end of the Acme Factory sequence, the movement from the vanishing point towards us at the beginning of the film, ‘first’ marked in ‘shot’ four, is doubled by a reverse movement inward towards the vanishing point, first by the Dip Truck moving towards Roger and Jessica and then past them through the rear wall to Toontown—its destination—and then by the toons and Eddie and Dolores likewise marching towards Toontown—the vanishing point. This movement from and towards the vanishing point is the privileged movement, as it is the privileged axis, of the film. And at this point the doubled nature of the audience, marked at the beginning of ‘Somethin’s Cookin”, is remarked, here in Porky Pig’s

addressal to them: ‘O.K. folks’. Then already been

the toons with his back to us while yet we are among Move along. There’s nothing else to see. That's all, Porky turns around to address us, we who have being addressed, and says, ‘Mmmm. I like the sound

of that. That’s all, folks!’. Thus, at the end, Porky addresses the toons as if they were an audience, which of course they are to the

discovery of Marvin

Acme’s

Last Will and Testament

and to

Eddie’s ‘cure’, an audience with which we simultaneously are and

are not identified and from which we will and will not be excluded aba)

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

at the same time. As all (including ourselves) advance upon and gain Toontown, we lose it at the same time. We are and are not left behind, excluded and not excluded by the advancing black membrane which Porky holds at bay from closing long enough to deliver his line. This unlocatable black membrane of the picture plane deconstructs the ‘pure’ interiority and exteriority which it simultaneously constructs, putting us on both sides of ‘itself’ at the same time, an audience doubled, both within the diegesis and outside in the theatre at the same time, enveloped by the

apparatus, the medium itself. If we are with the toons on the other side and on this side, too (but without

them), this side reverses,

exchanges positions to be that other side, too. Each side is always already doubled.

Then,

with

her magic wand,

Tinker

Bell taps

Porky’s nose—Porky having now visually occluded the factory and landscape—and Porky and the black surround disappear into white, then black. Tinker Bell then exits screen right and credits come up white against the black. At the ‘end’, Eddie and Dolores disappear in the crowd of toons, and Porky delivers his line which typically concludes Warner Bros. cartoons—'That’s all, Folks!’—to the accompaniment of Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, the music which also typically concludes Warner Bros. cartoons, all of which makes this a cartoon ‘ending’ doubled, ‘ending’ to both ‘Somethin’s Cookin’’ and Who

Framed Roger Rabbit. Here I would suggest that the advancing black membrane and Porky’s words implicitly figure an image associated with them and emblematic

of their matter, an image which

‘does’ and does not appear, that is, of the traditional Warner Bros. logo which ends Warner Bros. cartoons, which logo is explicitly figured in the ‘opening’ Maroon Cartoon logo. Like the black membrane/curtain/aperture which Porky holds open, the Warner

Bros. logo would be hymeneal, a black hole, if you will, indeed inkwell,

from out of which

cartoons

and

cartoon

characters

are

drawn and to which they are drawn back: the drawn and withdrawn, always with drawing, the drawn and withdrawn at the same time, the drawn as withdrawn and the withdrawn as drawn at the same time, analogous to the movements of (the) narrative.

This is particularly felt at the end, where Porky Pig temporarily holds open the amorphous and pliable aperture of the advancing and encasing field of black ink, then disappears, and the hymeneal

dehiscence is then ‘stitched up’ (penetration without penetration) 226

ALAN CHOLODENKO

with the aid of Tinker Bell’s pharmakon/stylus/needle. This is a ‘stitching’—a knitting and folding of black into white into black—which remarks Marvin Acme’s disappearing /reappearing ink, indeed writing itself, the graphics of supplementarity and textuality (from the Latin textus, meaning textile). The white ‘Disney dusted’ wink, or burst, is a Mallarméan blank page, surface, screen—hymeneal—of cinema upon which the stylus stitches /writes in disappearing /reappearing ink. What the text has unfolded has at the end folded back on itself, the folding (thrice)

marked, as it was marked in the fold-out of the letters of Roger Rabbit’s name in the ‘opening’ titk—’Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (which fold-out imprinted the ‘v’ of the vestige, the veil, along the

sides of the capital Rs). And the ‘closing’ of the aperture marks the open fourth ‘side’ of the theatre of ‘representation’ as opening, hymen, veil, its operation including and excluding us simultaneously. In this sense, as hymen, the Warner Bros. logo suspends the logos(!), as the hymeneal text of Who Framed Roger Rabbit suspends the entitlement of any title to title (own, govern) the text, which loss of authority the title ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ itself authorizes and marks in its hymeneal graphics, including its fold-out bar beneath

the title, as well as in its other modes

of

syntactic and semantic indecision. According with the economy of the undecidable, the title—’Who Framed Roger Rabbit’—and the text—Who Framed Roger Rabbit—remain interminably ‘to be specified’?! This undoing at the ‘end’ of any sense of Toontown (and toons) as completely separate from Los Angeles (and humans) is affirmed by the fact that at the end Tinker Bell exits screen right but/and

stays ‘this’ side of the vanished Toontown and by the white on black end credits’ list entitled

‘Cast’, which on the left side lists

together the names of both human and cartoon characters and on the right lists together the names of people who apparently ‘acted’ these human characters and the names of those who apparently provided the voices for the cartoon characters. But the precise nature and relations of the roles of those listed on the right, as well as their relations to the characters on the left, are never given; and this casts, under the title ‘Cast’, a doubt on the specificity of the

relationships sought to be established. Thus, this list not only determines but indetermines the relationships between and among the names and roles in both columns; and the space between 22,

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

likewise marks this uncertainty. And this returns us to the credits at the head, the double introduction of a film doubled, the prob-

lematizing of the relationship of the producers, the titles et al. of the two films. These operations of supplementarity deconstruct the possibility of a pure interiority and a pure exteriority, as they deconstruct the pure cartoon, pure ‘live action’ and the pure fusion of ‘live action’ and ‘cartoon animation’. The kind of construction suggested here would be a doubled text, one folded into the other, a double invagination as Derrida describes it, one whose operation is to

indetermine any clear sense of inside and outside. Roger Rabbit

‘contains’ its own

Who Framed

cartoon, which in a sense turns it

inside out, in some sense it becoming the cartoon it thought was only its hors d’oeuvre and vice versa. There would be no referent that could ground this artifice, this hymeneal play of textuality. The logic of supplementarity likewise operates crucially in the spatial and temporal configurations of the text. Indeed, the flooding of all of Toontown’s residents into the Acme Factory is doubled by the movement of those associated with ‘live action’— Los Angeles—penetrating

Toontown,

a doubled

mise-en-scéne,

or

mise-en-jeu, doubling the double invagination of the text as a hymeneal theatre of the text. The location of Toontown in relation to Los Angeles (and vice versa) is in a sense both determinable and indeterminable at the same time. Toontown is always situated on the other side of a barrier, be it a wall or the passage of a tunnel. First, it is just behind the wall behind and adjacent to the Acme Factory, yet curiously it seems it can be reached only by car through an unsituated long tunnel containing a curtain which must rise to grant entry.° When the wall is first seen, it is day in Los Angeles and it is day in Toontown; but when approached through the tunnel, it is night in Los Angeles yet inexplicably day in its most intense possible brightness in Toontown, that is, until it

suddenly becomes night with Judge Doom’s presence there. At the end, when the rear wall of the Acme Factory is broken through to Toontown—which wall when first broken through by the weasels seems infinitely deep in its concentric circles doubling the Warner Bros. logo yet shallow when the Dip Truck goes through it—the night of Los Angeles and what was the night of Toontown that we just left encounter the inexplicably suddenly arrived radiant brightness of Toontown, its sun smiling and shining, that is, until

228

ALAN CHOLODENKO

all the characters walk into the just as inexplicably suddenly arrived sunset at the ‘end’. The tunnel and its curtain with folds, as well as the broken

through Acme Factory wall to Toontown, again figure the hymen, the veil which is both penetrated and remains virginal at the same time. In this sense, the tunnel and wall between Los Angeles and Toontown, like the division between ‘live action’ and ‘cartoon ani-

mation’, are always already deconstructed by their own framing logic, the (illogic of differance, of the relation of the between, of the interval, of the frame—of the ‘passage’ between (the between). They are thus of the same stuff as the Warner Bros. type logo which ‘opens’ and implicitly plays a part in ‘closing’ the film— hymeneal. All of these hymeneal forms suspend inside and outside,

suspend

where

inside and

outside

would

be, suspend

therefore the possibility of our saying we are inside rather than outside and vice versa. The operation of the logic of supplementarity shows oppositions to be exchangeable, reversible terms/ positions, always a ‘passage’ between them—neither inside nor outside, both inside and outside at the same time, both on this side

and the other side at the same time—a ‘passage’ which is at the same time a (non)passage insofar as whatever ‘passes’ remains irreducible one to the other, always a fold suspending equivalence and identicality (as well as complete otherness). In this sense (as well as in others) nothing passes, happens. (In French se passer carries this undecidable meaning of to happen, to take place and to cease, to do without, to refrain from.) Such double invagination

also marks the dizzying temporal operations, the doubled time ‘frames’ joining and separating night and day (and Los Angeles and Toontown), as well as the foldings of 1947 and 1987 into each

other. Here, considerations of time shall be suspended for a short (non)detour through ‘character’ to (not) take place. Judge

Doom

and

Jessica

Rabbit

stand

as

characters

who

embody the composite form of the hybrid most tangibly, which composite form would be, as we indicated earlier, only a special

case of what exists everywhere through the differential logic of the supplement. As a humanoid toon, Jessica is a fatal figure of seduc-

tion, of the always already double. She speaks the double entendre which, like the tautology, partakes of the economy of mimesis as différance. When she says, ‘I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way’, she speaks, contradicting herself in at least two ways, the whole set Og)

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

of issues Plato raises against imitation by painting and writing. Jessica’s

improprieties,

her perversity,

are

those

of writing,

of

drawing, of the graph and the gram. Ina sense she is bad as well as not bad at the same time, like the frame, like the pharmakon. Speaking of Roger, R.K. Maroon says, ‘His wife’s poison but he thinks she’s Betty Crocker!’, a comment not only obviously related to the pharmakon as poison and cure at the same time and to the hymen of the nonvirginal and virginal at the same time but thereby to ‘cookin’ and all that can be ‘cooked’ and ‘cooked with’— ‘Somethin’s Cookin” and its cookie, as well as the carrots and cakes

(including the slide into ‘pattycake’ and ‘dinkie’); and the liquids to be consumed or consumed by or cooked with—Eddie’s alcohol and The Dip (as pharmakons); as well as gas for cooking—after all, ‘If it’s Acme, it’s a Gasser!’. And Jessica is bad as well as not bad at the same time, like the veil: for is she not Isis, itself marked

in her

name? Isis, the Egyptian goddess, wife of Osiris, the first to reanimate the dead, teacher of weaving and medicine and institutor of marriage, of whom Kant wrote in a footnote in section 49 of the Critique of Judgment: Perhaps nothing more sublime was ever said, and no sublimer thought ever expressed than the famous inscription on the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘I am all that is and that was and that shall be,

and no mortal hath lifted my veil’

Derrida suggests that writing as mimetic is ‘bad by nature. It is only good insofar as it is bad’.“* When Jessica holds the mirror up to herself, then to Eddie and she is not seen when she should still be seen, she marks the (non)sites of the veiling, the dispersal, the

hymen of framing, of the movement of différance. Insofar as ‘cartoon animation’ and ‘live action’ aspire to a fullness of presence, they are disseminated by différance, the trace,

the hymen, the parergon, etc. Might one not here suggest that this also be called the toon, by which I cleave an ostensible difference between two kinds of toons (and here I am reminded of the comment by Judge Doom that he is ‘not just any toon’): the demotic understanding of the Disney kind of toon, associated with the benign and beneficent, with the sun and with fun; and the

demonic looney toon, obviously associated with the lunatic but also and thereby with the lunar and the game (and obviously also associated with the Looney Tunes of Warner Bros., of Friz Freleng

230

ALAN CHOLODENKO

and Chuck Jones but especially Bob Clampett and Tex Avery). Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a ‘meeting place’ of Disney and Warner Bros. character animation.» But this cleavage could only be apparent, the ‘Disney character’ only the special restricted case, like the Hegelian economy, of the general economy of Bataille. Like Bataille’s sun,* the toon gives only to give and squanders all in an expenditure without return, like the Company which supplies the toon—the Acme Company. (The paradigm here would be the Acme Company and its relation to Wile E. Coyote and vice versa.) To speak thus of the toon allows us to see how the toon is both less and

more

than the human,

which

human,

like the benign

Disney character, becomes only a special case of the toon—the ‘human’. As Susan Ohmer has suggested,” the toons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit are depicted as both inferior to the human, of no value, marginalized (analogized to black Americans vis-a-vis white Americans) and at the same time superior to the human, of

infinite value, by virtue of their power to reanimate the human. Ohmer characterizes this as an unsolvable paradox, and at this point her analysis comes to a halt. She is correct in her characterization; yet I would wish to suggest that the logic of supplementarity as Derrida articulates it—of the X and not X at the same time—is the ‘answer’ to her quandary. The simultaneously less and more,

the simultaneously

outside

and

inside of the inside—this

configuration with which we are now so familar allows us now to claim that, like the logo that disseminates the logos, the toon, in this sense, disseminates the zdon of fullnesses of living presence of both ‘live action’ and ‘cartoon animation’. And, in this sense, Roger

Rabbit—the toon—the one who ‘keeps blowin’ his lines!’—frames Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Thus, the last minutes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit could not be thought of as (only) pure Disney fun but as also the dissemination of all that Disney—Disney films and Disneyland—are popularly understood

to stand for as only of the nature of fun and/or as a

fullness of living presence. The sun that presides over Toontown, that smiles and shines down benignly, is always already doubled; not only the sun that would be thought to preside over Disneyland—a fullness of living presence—but also the second sun of which Georges Bataille writes, one whose blinding light can drive men mad, that is, looney. This sun would be both the sun of

pure presence, of pure gnosis and speech, that resides outside 231

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Plato’s Cave and the sun associated with the antre (cave) of Mallarmé, from which there could be no exit, as Derrida writes.** This sun would be associated with writing, for does not Thoth, the

Egyptian god of writing and drawing, of all the graphs (including therefore cinematography), indeed inventor of all the arts and

sciences (including therefore animation and cinema), double the sun? Derrida writes, ‘In adding to and doubling as the sun, he is other than the sun and the same as it’.°” This sun is associated with

the lunar, with the lunar god Thoth, with the pharmakon and the night. This sun is associated with the lunar goddess Isis (and therefore with Jessica, who occludes, replaces and doubles the set sun—the sunset—at/as the vanishing point), with the hymen—the veil of Isis. Richard Klein writes:

The veil of Isis is...the medium of the play of appearances, the texture of the analogical surface where everything appears and disappears, like the cloak of color that Nature throws over herself, the prism of resemblance and correspondences. Isis is also always Iris, and her veil is the scarf of Iris or the rainbow.”” Klein continues:

Nerval’s description of the veil in ‘Isis’...has the glittering changing color of iridescence like the rainbow’s prism of water and light or like the silver shine of a clair de lune. Isis is a lunar goddess and her iridescence is better suited, says Nerval, for aesthetically animating, for bringing life to the ruins of Pompey than the light of the sun. It gives not life but the gift of the illusion of life to the ruins it haunts.1!

The hymen, this film that is (our) film—a veil—accords with a general economy operating according to the law of the supplement, suspending the rule of the benign sun which ostensibly presides over Toontown: when Judge Doom is in Toontown, night is suddenly come; and at the ‘end’ all walk towards Toontown, towards the vanishing point, towards a horizon below which the sun has now sunk, not without filling the sky with a multicoloured radiance, an aura marking its retreat, before it is displaced,

replaced by the black curtain/hymen. The dazzling colours of the sunset, like the dazzling colours of the aura of ‘shot’ four and the colours flashing through the small hole in the back wall of the Acme Factory, cannot but mark the inscription of the goddess Iris,

who gives her name

to that variously coloured (on its anterior Doe:

ALAN CHOLODENKO

surface) curtain/diaphragm/hymen of the eye which expands and contracts and which surrounds and is perforated by the pupil: the iris. She gives this name also to the masking device placed in front of the camera, called an iris diaphragm. This diaphragm—another hymen—gives us the ‘iris-in’ to open a sequence and the ‘iris-out’ to close one. The black hymen ‘closing’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit remarks an iris-out, with Porky Pig filling the pupil. The effect is to turn the diegesis into an eye—the camera/room/theatre of the eye—whose vanishing point would at the same time be the point of view where images are formed—a place (Toontown) of the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of the image—the ‘point’ of the blind spot. Here is marked a certain blindness necessary to sight, making sight both possible and impossible at the same time: an eclipse. The hymen of the eye/‘I’—crystal, rainbow—iridesces, disseminating the unity of meaning, of presence and self-presence as identity.” As the ostensibly everlasting sunshine of Disneyland/ Toontown is doubled by the lunacy of toon noir, we are left to ask if Toontown is not only the point of view, the vanishing point and the blind spot but also therefore the decentred centre of the logo, which likewise ironizes the logos. For is it not not only too far but too near at the same time, an excess and a lack, a supplement that is both accessible and inaccessible at the same time? Twilight time—the time between life and death—is ‘come’ to/with Toontown. And here it is to be noted that the logo of Touchstone Pictures, which opens the film, forms into an abstract ‘blue moon’

which momentarily flashes into ‘sun’, only then to return to ‘blue moon’, with a golden shard remarking its flash; and this logo also ends the end credits, following immediately after the logo of Amblin Entertainment of a huge and gleaming full moon (with ET and his human boy protector on a bike superimposed). And

these suns, moons,

caves and tunnels are tropic of the

animatic apparatus within which the viewer is placed, displaced, played, as in the scenographic shifts in the concluding Acme Factory sequence, in which the back wall of the factory serves, by

displacement, as a metaphor of the fourth wall of the picture plane—the veil of/as the screen. In this sense the injunction writ large on this Acme Factory wall and elsewhere in Who Framed Roger Rabbit—’KEEP CLEAR’—is always already undone—made ‘unclear’—by this wall as veil/screen. Capable of being broken 233

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

through but never penetrated, this fourth wall, or fourth surface*’—like any wall, frame, hymen, picture plane, veil, screen, surface—is always already doubled, dividing and not dividing and divided from itself. Indeed, the Acme Factory, doubling this fourth wall/surface in its location on the border between Los Angeles and Toontown and in its function as ‘passage’ between them and doubling the Maroon Studio, becomes emblematic of not only the Hollywood studio (of both ‘live action’ and ‘cartoon animation’)— indeed Hollywood itself, Toontown as Tinseltown—but also, by (dis)placement of our look towards the rear wall as screen, of the motion picture theatre within which we are sited/sighted /cited— as a (non)site of the (‘passage’) ‘between’, of the always already doubled, multiplied and divided,

a nowhere

and everywhere

at

the same time. The animatic apparatus, enveloping what is ‘represented’ in and on the screen and its audience in the theatre, operates according to the vibratory, suspensive, oscillating (il)logic of the supplement, of the simulacrum—writing. The animatic apparatus as hymen (in this sense as film): ...hrymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance; here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false

appearance of a present. That is how the Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a medium, a pure medium, of fiction.

The projector/stylus writes with the iridescent light of the doubled sun on an always already inscribed page/screen/hymen with Acme disappearing/reappearing ink in a camera obscura/ nocturnal theatre of Plato’s Cave and Mallarmé’s antre (cave). Too, the animatic apparatus is the pharmacy, whose magical, seductive, dangerous supplements are both curative and poisonous at the same time. The animatic apparatus (of movies, cinema) is a medium

of the entre- (the between) and the trans-, that is, of

transportation, transformation, transmutation, operating according to the trope. The toon in this sense is zdotrope, the troping/ turning / disseminating of the zdon. Thus here too lies a tie between ‘cartoon animation’ and ‘live action film’ and the optical toys which were their precursors, optical toys significantly called ‘philosophers’ toys’. Derrida writes, ‘Metaphoricity is the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic’.“© Metaphor, from the Greek

234

ALAN CHOLODENKO

metapherein, means ‘to transport’. All of which always already merely ‘begins’ to both exemplify and complicate Norman McLaren’s definition of animation as ‘not the art of drawings-that-move, but rather the art of movementsthat-are-drawn’,”” which complicating includes the undoing of the either/orism of drawings as opposed to movements. Thus, this ‘opposition’ is turned, ironized and deconstructed in the (mobility of the) trope that Jessica wields at every turn, including her ‘self’-description—the trope marking, as does McLaren, that ‘what happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame’ (but between must at the same time be thought of as within, in this sense sliding onto on). But even further, the drawn is likewise not drawn, exists in a state of nonmovement, of movement and nonmovement at the same time, what Derrida calls

mouvance,*” the oscillation between active and interval. Like Jessica’s drawn, McLaren’s word from,

is drawn

from,

noun

towards

passive of the drawings slides

gerund—itself

a mobile

pivot—and drawn back again in an indeterminate oscillation of the hama (a slide and oscillation which, like the gerund, the dash between his words also marks). Moreover, the of of ‘of the interval’, ‘of the hama’, this turning double genitive, likewise marks, frames,

is the frame of, turning ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ into “The Framing of Roger Rabbit’, that is, both ‘of’ and ‘by’ at the same time... The frame is always already the frame of the frame. It is not only that which frames but that which unframes at the same time, including unframing itself as obedient to its very principle of framing, as that which (con)fuses and separates. Animation can never be thought outside death. Georges Bataille suggests that it is only when one is dead that one can know what life is, only then that the final revelation of man to himself can occur; but when one is dead, one cannot know any longer, which means that one can never know life nor death, the animate nor the inanimate as a fullness of presence.” Otherwise, the trace of the trace, différance, dissemination, where metaphoricity suspends the proper, where the littoral (the bord) suspends the literal, including, of course, this writing, which is bad (and good) for being drawn—

framed—this way. Living on in the suspended sentence of Who Framed Roger Rabbit

235

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

NOTES

I want to acknowledge Rex Butler and Keith Broadfoot for their pioneering work on Jacques Derrida, which work helps to frame this essay. 1

Border Lines’, in Deconstruction and (New York: Continuum, 1979), pp.

Jacques Derrida, ‘LIVING ON: Criticism, trans. James Hulbert

82-83. Derrida, ‘Positions: Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta’, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), p. 43. Derrida continues:

(the pharmakon is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing; the suppplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.; the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, neither the inside nor the outside, etc.; the gram is neither

a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither a presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.; spacing is neither space nor time; the incision is neither the incised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondarity. Neither/nor, that is, simultaneously either or; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc.). Positions, p. 43. Note Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s modification of the final words to ‘Neither/nor is at once at once or rather or rather’ in her Translator’s Preface to Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. Ixxii. This

term,

meaning

‘at the

same

time’,

is found,

for example,

in

Derrida’s ‘Ousia and Grammé: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 57. Derrida, ‘LIVING ON: Border Lines’, pp: 83-84.

ibid., pp. 82-83. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press,1986), p. 87.

C. W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema (London: Thames and Hudson,

1965), p. 11.

Maurice Bessy and Giuseppe Lo Duca, Georges Méliés, Mage (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1961), p. 9.

10 11

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 9. See

Jean

Baudrillard,

‘The

Year

2000

Will

Not

Take

Place,

in

FUTUR*FALL: Excursions Into Post-Modernity, eds. E.A. Grosz, Terry Threadgold, David Kelly, Alan Cholodenko and Edward Colless

236

ALAN CHOLODENKO

ip

13

(Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1986). Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Dissemination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 79. Derrida notes that Plato calls painting ‘zographia, inscribed representation, a drawing of the living, a portrait of an animate model’. ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, p. 136. Here I would like to suggest that the standard definition of animation as ‘imagery recorded frame by frame’ and whose ‘illusion of motion is created, rather than recorded’ (as Charles Solomon so defines it in his ‘Animation: Notes on a Definition’, in The Art of The Animated Image, ed. Charles Solomon (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1987),

p- 10) is, in a sense, insufficient as presently articulated since the necessary explicit declaration of the arret, the stop after shooting each frame, remains implicit (although a stop after two or more frames would cause problems of how to account for this). And further, the

definition of animation as ‘frame by frame’ recording falters because it ignores the ‘by’, the frame which frames the frame (by frame)—the frame of the frame—blurring the discreteness of each ‘individual’ frame by the interval, the spacing between, making the ‘frame by frame’ both possible and impossible at the same time. And this would likewise problematize the notion of a pure stop after each frame, regardless of the problems with comprehending the significance of the pro-animatic stop for the animatic transformation of the still into the mobile. Thus, the definition of ‘frame by frame’ itself buys into a metaphysics of presence, further figured in the repressing of the recording of the ‘frame by frame’ in the appeal to the illusion ‘created rather

than

recorded’,

an

obvious

and

undeconstructed

binary

opposition of creation versus recording itself the staple of metaphysics. But I would suggest that Solomon’s acknowledgement that such is a working definition is to imply that it does and does not work at the same time, and this would be a salutary declaration. 14 15

Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, p. 137.

This would accord with Derrida’s account of the shift from an Hegelian restricted economy of the dialectic to a Bataillian general economy of expenditure without reserve, of excess, of remainder, of

16

death, an economy which comprehends the restricted economy, turning it into only a special case of itself. Dissemination would do this to ‘live action’ and ‘animation’ jointly and severally. See Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978). Death, which means the necessity at least: to think the relationship of Freud’s Death Drive to the way film has been and might be thought, for instance, the penetration without penetration of the Warner Bros. logo, like the compulsion to repeat manifest in the cascade of deaths which themselves ‘die’ in Warner Bros. cartoons, for example, attest to the complex relationship between cartoons, Freud’s death drive and 237

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

the general economy that Derrida articulates; to think of film, as Paul Virilio has done,

as an art not of the stable and

static but of the

unstable and mobile, an art not of appearance but of disappearance. See Paul Virilio, in Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti (New

York: Semiotext(e),

1983); and to think film as

Jean Baudrillard has done, in relation to the hyperreal, simulation and seduction, as an evil demon. See Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon

of

Images (Sydney: Power Publications, 1987). Further, it suggests the need to think the speech impediment of so many major cartoon characters, which impediment marks their association with the stutter

Wy

18

of the camera and projector, with the on/off/on/off of the ‘frame by frame’ and with writing itself. Marcel Brion, ‘Félix le chat, ou la poésie créatrice’, CinemAction 51: Le cinéma d‘animation, 1989, p. 31. Richard Williams comments: Bob Zemeckis loves Avery and Clampett. He told me he wanted three things: Disney articulation, ie., believability, weight, skill of movement and sincerity when we needed it; Warner Bros.

characters, because they’re zanier, they do more interesting things; and Avery humor, but not so brutal. ‘The Time is Right’: A Talk with Richard Williams’, Animation, vol. 2, no. 1, Summer 1988, p.

al 19

See Jerry Beck, ‘Combination Films:

A Brief History’, Animation, vol.

2, no. 1, Summer 1988, p. 31 on the history of the composite. The ’40s witnessed the following composite films, leaving the year 1947 as a gap for Who Framed Roger Rabbit to fill(!), which, to the degree it inscribes Harvey, shot in 1950(!), in the Terminal

Bar sequence where

Judge Doom almost dips Roger, it again anticipates the future: 1940: You Ought To Be In Pictures (I. Freleng, Warner

20

Bros.); 1944: Anchors

Aweigh (Hanna-Barbera/MGM), 1945: The Three Caballeros (Disney); 1946: Song of the South (Disney); 1948: Melody Time (Disney); 1949: My Dream's Yours (Warner Bros.). Richard Williams says:

It starts off with the heads coming up, like the title of a Warners’ cartoon: ‘Roger Rabbit and Baby Herman in Something's Cooking directed by Raoul J. Raoul’. It’s done like a composite of Looney Tunes and Popeye and Disney. ‘Richard Williams and the Rabbit’,

21 22

23

Animator, no. 24, December 1988, pris. “The Time is Right’: A Talk with Richard Williams’, pp. 27-28. Richard Williams remarks, ‘The rabbit is a Frankenstein job. A bit from this, a bit from that’. ‘Richard Williams and the Rabbit’, p. 14.

Williams also says:

[Baby Herman is] Elmer Fudd and Tweety Pie crashed together in the form of a baby. So it’s a series of cliches pushed into new forms. 238

ALAN CHOLODENKO

28

But those guys in the Forties drew in cliches anyway. Formula drawings. So we just re-Frankensteined the formula, a bit from this, a bit from that, and then just shook it until it came out fully cooked. ibid., p. 15. ibid., p. 20. ibid., p. 15. See note 23. ibid., p. 13. This is not to say that Roger Rabbit does not have his own ‘cure’, for he seems to be cured of lovesickness, evidenced in his ability in the final sequence to produce the stars he was unable to in (the shooting of) ‘Somethin’s Cookin’. Derrida writes: Operating through seduction, the pharmakon makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws. Here, it takes Socrates out of his proper place and off his customary track. The latter had always kept him inside the city. The leaves of writing act as a pharmakon to push or attract out of the city the one who never wanted to get out, even at the end, to escape the hemlock. They take him out of himself and draw him onto a path that is properly an exodus: Phaedrus: Anyone would take you, as you say, for a foreigner being shown the country by a guide, and not a native—you never leave town to cross the frontier nor even, I believe, so much as set

foot outside the walls. Socrates: You must forgive me, dear friend; I’m a lover of learning,

and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do. Yet you seem to have discovered a drug for getting me out (dokeis moi tés emés exocou to pharmakon héurékenai). A hungry animal can be driven by dangling a carrot or a bit of greenstuff in front of it; similarly if you proffer me speeches bound in books (en bibliois)

1 don’t

doubt

you

can

cart

me

all round

Attica,

and

anywhere else you please. Anyhow, now that we’ve got here | propose for the time being to lie down, and you can choose whatever posture you think most convenient for reading, and proceed. ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, pp. 70-71. Would not the carrot that Socrates speaks of be the McGuffin of all narrative? The McGuffin, that (no)thing, that thing of no value that enables narrative and withdraws itself, never to be fully ‘known’,

possessed. Of no value and of infinite value at the same time. R.K. Maroon

says to Eddie, ‘Let’s call the other $50 a carrot to finish the

job’. Here is to be marked the slide of ‘Somethin’s Cookin’ through ‘What's cooking?’ to Eddie’s own question, miming Bugs, of ‘What’s up, Doc?’. ‘What’s up, Doc?’ would be the suspended, up in the air, floating (non)event—the dissemination—of ‘What’s happening?”, that 239

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

very question of the event, of history, documentary and newsreel, the last of which Roger holds in complete contempt. (‘What's up, Doc? even figures, in the appeal to ‘Doc’, the pharmakon!) Like narrative, the carrot is a pharmakon, both poison and cure, both the promise and the nonpromise at the same time. Like the cookie of ‘Somethin’s Cookin”, which cookie spurs the narrative yet at its ‘end’ is held but not eaten, or consumed without consummation, by the baby, the carrot could be held but never consumed or consumed without consummation (and in this sense, Eddie Valiant could not know a pure consuming of Judge Doom without in any way being consumed himself and vice versa). The carrot, the cookie and narrative are promises which are

and are not fulfilled at the same time. All of which is to perturb the thinking of the Hollywood cinema of the ‘30s and ‘40s, indeed of any cinema, as (only) a form of coupling (closure), including the thinking

of any narrative movement as (only) leading to a coupling (closure). Obviously relevant here is Raymond Bellour’s articulation of the problematic of the formation of the couple in the classical American cinema ‘which in the majority of cases takes the form of a marriage’ resolving, for Bellour, the problems posed at the beginning of the film. Janet Bergstrom, ‘Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour’, Camera Obscura, no. 3/4, Summer 1979, p. 88. Subtending the two major Hollywood narratives—Good conquers Evil and John gets Jane (and Good conquers Evil in John Getting Jane

and vice versa)—is the figure of reanimation as healing and coupling (marriage, closure)—all of which must be (re)thought according to the logic of the pharmakon and the hymen, where, for instance, any coupling would be at the same time an uncoupling. Here it might be noted that insofar as Derrida quotes Philippe Sollers’ characterization of writing as ‘the generalized putting-in-quotation-marks of language’ (‘Dissemination’,

29

Dissemination,

p- 335), a student,

Adam

Rish,

Talk with Dale and Jane Baer’, Animation, vol. 2, no. 1, Summer

Paces

30

has

pointed out to me that it is with one’s two fingers formed precisely as rabbit ears that one makes a quotation mark! Dale and Jane Baer indicate that a sequence—called ‘the Pighead sequence’—of the grafting of the head of a cartoon pig onto Eddie Valiant’s body was deleted from the film. ‘The Acme Gag Factory’: A 1988,

Also (to be) considered here: does ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ name the ‘whole’ text (from first to last grapheme, including ‘Somethin’s Cookin’) or only what is outside ‘Somethin’s Cookin’? If the former, then ‘shot’ four as ‘hinge’ enables us to read ‘Somethin’s Cookin” as ina

way bleeding back to the first grapheme, the logo of Touchstone Pictures. If this is so and it also continues to the end of the film, then all the ‘outside’ of ‘Somethin’s Cookin’ is...Somethin’s Cookin’! If this is SO, then would ‘Somethin’s Cookin” not be making a claim that it and

its title entitle the whole and therefore disentitles the title “Who 240

ALAN CHOLODENKO

Framed Roger Rabbit’? Therefore, does ‘Somethin’s Cookin” ‘cook’/ consume Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And/or does Who Framed Roger Rabbit ‘frame’ /consume ‘Somethin’s Cookin” if it envelopes all of it, as

the titlke—’Who Framed Roger Rabbit’/—would suggest by its name, location, etc.? Or is Who Framed Roger Rabbit no film but only a title—’Who Framed Roger Rabbit’/—that suspends itself, entitling and disentitling itself at the same time, as well as all one might be misled to understand it governs and determines—all this in the title’s acknowledgement of its operation according to the logic of the frame? Or is Who Framed Roger Rabbit a film that exceeds all the nominations and titles, disentitling, disappropriating them—a film without a title? Or is it not both at the same time? Do neither the titles nor the films exist or do they both exist and not exist at the same time? Do the titles and the films not only mark their own ‘appearances’ but ‘disappearances’, even ‘disappearing’ (including into the other) before they ever ‘appear’? Do they only ‘appear’ in their ‘disappearances’ and ‘disappear’ in their ‘appearances’ at the same time? 31 32

See Derrida, ‘Title (To Be Specified)’, SubStance, no. 31, 1978. Susan Ohmer, in her essay, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit: The Presence of

the Past’, Storytelling in Animation, The Art of the Animated Image, vol. 2, ed. John Canemaker (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1988),

p- 101, seems to presume the Acme Factory is in Toontown! But this impression is only to be expected from the fact that the Acme Factory is (on) the margin, the border, between

Los Angeles and Toontown.

Her ‘confusion’ is the very proof of the vertiginous nature of the textual operations. 33 34 3/5)

36

As quoted by Richard Klein in ‘Kant’s Sunshine’, Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 2, Summer 1981, p. 38. Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, p. 139.

Exemplified most cogently in the Donald Duck and Daffy Duck piano duel and the sequence of Micky Mouse and Bugs Bunny together. The former sequence is particularly reminiscent of another film that for the first (and last) time put two actors/characters/directors inextricably associated together in film history on the same stage in the same sequence /image—Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in Limelight. See Bataille’s The Accursed Share (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 28;

and

his

‘The

Two

Suns’

in Visions

of Excess:

Selected

Writings,

1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl and trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and

By, 38 39 40 4] 42

Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 57-58. Ohmer, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit: The Presence of the Past’, p. 102. Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, Dissemination. Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, p. 93. Klein, ‘Kant’s Sunshine’, p. 38.

p. 216.

ibid. In this regard, the hymen of the eye/‘I’ of the camera plays across and 241

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

within comments made by William Rothman—author of The ‘I’ Of The Camera—at a postprandial discussion of a paper he presented at Harvard’s Beyond Document Symposium, November 9, 1989. Dr Rothman remarked: has been

The classical cinema

instrumental

questions of what is a man, what is a woman.

us to

in bringing

Classical cinema is

not the reactionary upholder of a patriarchal order as bearer of the male gaze. On the contrary, from D.W. Griffith on, the camera undermines the classical distinction and separation of sexes. The camera perturbs the distinction between active and passive, male and female. The camera penetrates, yes; but the world penetrates the camera. It is completely ambiguous. It was in classical cinema and it is in cinema verite. The feminine and the feminism of cinema have yet to be acknowledged.

Compare this with Jacques Derrida’s articulation of the logic of supplementarity, its suspension of the classical oppositions, including male/female; the camera

obscura

transformed

here in this essay as hymen/screen

into a surface

enveloping

both

thought

image

and

audience as the theatre of cinematic simulation; and his comment in ‘Dissemination’, p. 316: “The world comprehends the mirror which

captures it and vice versa’.

All of which is to suggest that this essay believes itself to be acknowl43 s4 45

edging the feminine of cinema. On the fourth surface, see ‘Dissemination’, especially pp. 312-313 and pp. 324-325 on. Mallarmé’s Mimique, quoted in Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, p. 175.

Here too the zoopraxiscope (life action view) and the title Eadweard Muybridge takes for himself—zoopraxographer, the writer of life action—take on new significance, including the heralding of the term

‘live action’ and its dissemination. One text indicates that ‘Muybridge mounted drawings made from his photographs of the horse on the circumference of a lantern-slide disc, revolving and projecting images onto a screen by what he called his zoopraxiscope’ (Derek Birdsall and Carlo M. Cipolla, The Technology of Man (London: Wildwood House, 1980), p. 217). This would imply the ‘conversion’ of what one might take to be ‘live action’ into animated drawings as ‘life action’! Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, p. 149. oes in Solomon, ‘Animation: Notes on a Definition’, Pola

ibid.

Derrida, ‘Différance’, Margins of Philosophy, p. 9. See Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy’, pp. 257-258.

242

TIPH=THP THE T(R)OPOLOGY OF PYROMANIA KEITH CLANCY

An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby

also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the subject.! Jacques Derrida ‘Form of interiority’ means not only that time is internal to us, but that our interiority constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end. A giddiness, an oscillation which constitutes time.?

Gilles Deleuze

While

preparing

the final version

of this text, I read, for what

seemed to me the first time, a famous short story by Jorge Luis Borges. As I read ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’,

I was overcome

by a feeling of dizziness and elation in almost equal measure. A laughter that I have heard before (from Foucault?, from Blanchot?, from Bataille?, from Nietzsche?, from Herakleitos?, or was it from

Borges himself?) exploded from my throat. I was fascinated that, while reading a story whose very title doubles that of the story whose story it is (the story is its own frame and so on), my vertigo

243

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

itself doubled, more vertiginously still, the vertigo of Dr Yu Tsun. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is suspended by a quotation mark at its third paragraph. The first paragraph recounts an event that occurred on the 24th of July, 1916. The second paragraph frames the rest of the story. What we are about to read is a statement that has been dictated, reread and signed by Dr Yu Tsun,

a former professor of English at Tsingtao. There is some almost unfathomable relation between the postponement of an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by British divisions on the 24th of July (it actually happened on the 29th) and the fragmented (the first two pages are missing) document which is quoted as the remainder of the story. A quotation mark holds the narrative that follows suspended,

for the mark that might have closed the quotation and fitted it neatly into its frame is missing. This opened but unclosed narrative concerns the murder of Stephen Albert, a Sinologist who is visited by Dr Yu Tsun. Dr Tsun is the great grandson of Ts’ui Pén, a governer of Yunnan who retreated from power to write a novel and construct a labyrinth in which all people would become lost. Stephen Albert has both in his library, for they are one and the same. He describes the labyrinthine book as an enormous riddle whose theme (and answer) is time: ... The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pén conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached unaware of one another time. We do not exist in exist, and not I; in others

one another, forked, broke off, or were for centuries, embraces all possibilities of the majority of these times; in some you I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the

present one, which a favourable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but

lama

mistake, a ghost.

Time, according to Ts’ui Pén, is nothing other than time’s infinite division of itself. There was only one instant, if at all, when time was absolute, uniform, homogeneous or singular: the very origin of time.*

244

KEITH CLANCY

Thinking an incomprehensible multiplicity of times, a universe saturated with an infinite totality of all events, produces within and around Dr Tsun a swarming agitation, an almost inaccessible

anxiety. The humid garden seems full, under every leaf and in every corner, of invisible yet real beings. Past, present and future coalesce, converge and diverge (although these chronological lines are immediately deracinated by the sudden, hallucinatory apprehension of time as nothing other than its own baroque or grotesque self-multiplication). Time is thought as the im-plication and explication of an (although there is no longer just one) infinite series of self-multiplying universes, each of which must be said to exist as much as any other: this is the dizzying point of complication to which Borges presses us. What interests me for the moment,

however, is less the exact

circumstances of the text than the line that Borges draws from out of the seeming interiority of an affect. This line connects, in ways to be specified, the concept of a multiplicity of worlds to the question of the (im)possibility of any comparison between worlds (the question, in brief, of an osmotic interference of actual worlds rather

than the Leibnizian concept of many ‘incompossible’ worlds, only one of which is actual) and from there runs to the thought of this real world as nothing other than our most perfect hallucination, or rather, its own hallucination.

In a sense, I have already done nothing other than let Borges describe the universe presented in Robert Zemeckis’ film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Here it cannot simply be a matter of identifying in Borges a precursor of Zemeckis. Rather, it is a matter of running (at least) two lines together, letting one reflect, double or otherwise transform the other. What is most interesting about the connection of Borges and Zemeckis is the way that each is able to make the line that might describe a certain cosmology connect in a certain (can I write ‘ontological’?) way with certain features of the material with which they draw out that line: in Borges, the relation of the hypothesis of multiple universes to a meditation upon the functions of chronological narrative; in Zemeckis,

the relation of

certain implicit ontological claims about the history and technical materials

of animation

to visual figures, extra-textual

and certain aspects of the narrative.

245

references

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

ECSTASY AND

FIRE

In this paper I am particularly interested in the series of figures I would call ecstatic: laughs, twists, spins, leaps, screams, explosions, songs, floods, overflows, turbulences, crowds, dances, spirals, etc.

These moments, which occur throughout the film, are characterized by an excess, the rupture or transgression of a limit. Ecstasy became a central concept in the film theory of Sergei Eisenstein, whose writings on the animated films of Walt Disney remain one of the few worthwhile attempts towards thinking through what is specific to the animated image. This series of ecstatic figures is not simply interruptive entertainments, not simply great jokes (which they are as well); they also sketch a sort of fundamental physics of Toontown. That series of figures that I have already called ecstatic could be gathered around a single term: mpnotnp (prestér). This term is one

of the central but least-discussed

doctrines

of Herakleitos

of

Ephesos, one of the most influential of the so-called ‘pre-Socratics’.

Herakleitos elaborated what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might have called a ‘minor science’ (they use this term to characterize the physics of Lucretius), which science explained the whole

of nature

in terms

of a single

element,

just as

Thales

explained nature as various states of water. In the case of Herakleitos, all things are exchanges for fire: according to Diogenes Laertius, Herakleitos

‘held that Fire was the element, and that all

things were an exchange for Fire, produced by condensation and rarefaction... All things were produced in opposition and all things were in flux like a river’.> Because all things are in flux, it is not

possible to touch the same substance twice. According to Herakleitos, even the seeming permanence of substance is illusory, for substance scatters and _ re-collects itself again, or rather, substance scatters and re-collects itself simultaneously. Nature

implicates itself, loves to hide itself in its folds. Every ‘thing’ is really a particular sort of flowing fire that, at the same time (although time is no longer, in the Herakleitian world, ‘the same time’), gives itself and withdraws.° To express this process Herakleitos said: ‘We do and do not step into the same rivers; we

are and are not’. ’ The famous question of whether it is possible to step into the same river twice is thus two questions intertwined. From the point of view of the flowing water, one never steps into the ‘same’ river even once for the banks themselves are dissolving 246

KEITH CLANCY

in the river. From

the point of view of the banks, however,

one

always steps into the same river. So, according to Herakleitos, the thing that we call ‘a river’ (which Herakleitos is using as a metaphor for all things, even those that seem most permanent) is actually the simultaneity of two opposing processes of exchange, like the relation between air, smoke and fuel ina

fire.

Nature itself is but a particular mode of being of the element of fire. Expressing this, Herakleitos wrote: ‘Turnings of fire; first, sea; of sea, half is earth, half lightning-flash’. 8 What has been translated

here as ‘lightning-flash’ is the Greek word npnotnp. Originally referring to a meteorological effect half-way between a whirlwind and a fire-storm, this term is translated by Seneca as igneus turbo (a fiery whirlwind, a spiral or spinning top of fire). Fire is transformed into sea, sea is transformed into earth, earth is transformed

into lightning-flash—all are mpnomp, spinning fire.’ Deleuze and Guattari, in their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, might

interestingly have characterized the ‘physics’ of Herakleitos as a ‘minor science’.!° Instead, they refer to the atomism of Lucretius as

discussed in the book by Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique

dans le texte de Lucréce.'' In their account they present four characteristics of a minor science (of which we will only be concerned with the first three as the fourth simply concerns the distinction between the problematic and the theorematic, which is less relevant

to our discussion here). Because it rests ultimately upon a substantial substrate (atoms), the Lucretian atomism seems to me paradoxically less of a ‘true’ minor science than the more radical physics of Herakleitos.

As

distinct

from

Lucretian

atomism,

Herakleitian

‘physics’ resolves even the question of substance into the question of the rates and directions of various flows (the turnings of an elemental fire). The following three sections each concern one of the three relevant characteristics of Herakleitian ‘minor science’: the use of a hydraulic model of natural processes; the privilege given to heterogeneities and becomings; and the privilege given to intensive and vortical speeds as against extensive and linear movements. ALES FLUX’

Minor science uses a hydraulic model rather than constituting a mechanics

of solids

that would

treat

the fluid

(the liquid,

the

gaseous and the plasmatic) as mere instances or modifications of

247

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

an underlying solidity. Using a hydraulic model of natural processes means, on the contrary, the treatment (one might say the circumscription) of the solid as a modification of a broader, chaotic liquidity. In such a model, well instantiated by the claim of Herakleitos that ‘all is flux’, only from one side is there any permanence to things. If all things are essentially fluid, then all things interpenetrate, even at a distance; and all things are thus subject to an unbounded osmotic drifting. Throughout Who Framed Roger Rabbit the animated figure is connected in various ways to the gaseous, the liquid and the plasmatic. When given alcohol, Roger flies into the air, changes colour, screams while smoke gushes from his ears and spins around the room propelled by jets of steam that gush from the circles on the soles of his feet (which are thus transformed into exhaust jets). Examples of this explosive figure could be multiplied. Like a superheated gas, Roger becomes a crowd of particles moving and colliding at high speed. In this context I would suggest that Eisenstein was absolutely correct in connecting the animated figures of Walt Disney (and Roger Rabbit could scarcely be more ‘animated’) to Herakleitos, fire and plasma. Eisenstein writes of Disney’s figures as possessing an ability that I’d call ‘plasmaticness’, for here we have a being represented in drawing, a being of a definite form, a being which has attained a definite appearance, and which behaves like the primal

protoplasm, not yet possessing a ‘stable’ form, but capable of assuming any form and which, skipping along the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, attaches itself to any and all forms of animal existence.!” According

to Eisenstein,

in the

very

name

‘animation’

the

indissoluble unity of spiritual presence and formal mobility is expressed. The basic doctrine of both animation and animism would

be, in Eisenstein’s words:

‘if it moves,

then it’s alive’.!° In

most animated films that employ the standard distinction of painted, unchanging background and mobile figures, this gives rise to whole ecstatic tribes of shoes, brooms and other ‘inanimate’

objects that sing and dance. In his writings on Disney, Eisenstein frequently cites anthropological and ethnographical evidence of the connections made by many mythological systems between the soul

(the anima)

animals

and

(especially,

breath,

it seems,

smoke,

birds 248

steam,

wind,

and

insects)

fog, clouds,

and,

most

KEITH CLANCY

interestingly, fire.’ That Eisenstein should write of the animated figure in connection with ‘plasma’ is also of interest for plasmas are the direct result of another sort of animation. Plasmas (in the scientific sense) are produced by superheating a gas and so exciting the gas molecules that they lose their outer shells of electrons. The gas thus becomes ionized and often emits light and energy in great quantities,

so

that

some

of the most

beautiful

of all natural

phenomena are in fact plasmatic: lightning, the corona of the sun and the auroras borealis and australis are just four examples. Perhaps the most stunning moment of Who Framed Roger Rabbit occurs when Eddie Valiant follows the murderer of R.K. Maroon from the murky nightscape of Los Angeles into the permanent daytime of Toontown. Suddenly, he is propelled into a landscape where the sun always shines with a smile on its face (suggesting that there are at least two suns lighting any one shot of the film). This moment is echoed later in the film when the wall of the Acme warehouse is pierced to reveal shafts of glowing and iridescent light shining into the banal interior. In both instances, the animated image celebrates its freedom from natural light and its connections to the plasmatic light of the flash of lightning or the aurora borealis. The line that connects the concepts of the gaseous, the fluid and the plasmatic to the animated figure has a very long film history. The Pincushion Man, produced and directed by Ub Iwerks in the early ‘30s, presents a land called ‘Balloonyland’, whose inhabitants

are inflated like balloons (something that is repeated 50 years later when Judge Doom reinflates himself after having been flattened by the rollers at the front of his Dipmachine). These ‘balloony’ folk are the products of a large machine (somewhat similar in appearance to the Dipmachine) which processes a gluey substance exuded by a large

tree.

This

machine

produces,

from

between

rollers,

flat

children who are inflated from a gas bottle as if they were showground balloons. They are so light that they have to be weighted down in case they float away. Outside the city walls, however, dwells the Pincushion Man. His legs are formed from fish-hooks,

and his body is a large pincushion studded with pins to throw at the balloony folk. The anima of the animated figure would thus appear to be some sort of gas lighter than air and able to defy gravity, without which the figures would no longer give the appearance of life. The slogan painted on the walls of Marvin Acme’s joke warehouse aptly reads: ‘TfIt’s Acme, It’s A Gasser!’ 249

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

BECOMING AND HETEROGENEITY

It follows from the hydraulic model that the privileged figures of minor sciences are becoming and heterogeneity, in opposition to the privileges ‘major’ or ‘Royal’ science bestows upon the stable, the homogeneous and the identical. Minor sciences follow differences,

heterogeneities and unforeseen becomings rather than, as does major science, extract constants and relate variables in fixed ways according to fixed laws. According to Deleuze and Guattari, such a model of ‘becoming in the heterogeneous’ is found in Lucretian atomism, specifically in the idea of the clinamen, the declination or swerve of atoms in a

‘rain’ of laminar flows.'° This produces turbulences and unforeseen combinations of atoms, thus yielding all the various forms of substance.

But

in this Lucretian

model,

becomings

are

always

related firstly to a laminar division of space and secondly to an irreducible

material

substrate

(the

atoms

themselves).

In fact,

Deleuze and Guattari later admit that Lucretian atomism is only one of the poles between which space can escape its segmentation (from laminar, discrete and parallel flows to turbulences).

At the

other pole lies the spiral or the vortical deployment of space: mpnotnp, which names for Herakleitos the originary turbulence that precedes any imposition of laminar form over unlimited chaos. Vortices and spirals are also the privileged forms of all the becomings of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Indeed, it could be said that toons are nothing other than becomings of various kinds, becomings which flow into each other in various ways, becomings that also flow into a series of human figures (Eddie Valiant, Marvin

Acme). These flows can link up, producing assemblages of varying

character and complexity.’

One such assemblage occurs towards the climax of the film when Eddie Valiant does his song and dance spiel accompanied by the song, Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, blared out on a calliope. The

idea is to make the weasels laugh so hard that they die laughing. If

we say that here Eddie is caught up ina rabbit-becoming, we do

not say that he somehow more than Roger himself becoming has neither subject neither the becoming of something: they take place

is imitating or resembling a rabbit, any resembles a rabbit. Rather, the rabbitnor object. That is to say, becomings are someone nor the coming into being of between things. Here, at the point where 250

KEITH CLANCY

Eddie is caught up in a rabbit-becoming (which is more precisely a toon-rabbit-becoming for toons are themselves animal-becomings, assemblages of animal and human lines), his lines get tangled up with Roger’s, as he emits and extracts particles from other lines (mostly the lines of toon-becomings—their gags, props, pratfalls and double-takes). As Eddie dances, recalling in its insane exuber-

ance Roger’s earlier dance at the bar, his lines are combined with Roger's toon-becomings, filling space with intertwining a-parallel lines of speed and intensity. According to Deleuze and Guattari,

becomings are characterized by taking place in the middle—the interstice—of things. That milieu where becomings take place is not, however, merely the average of those things caught up in the becomings. The milieu, on the contrary, is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.!” As Eddie sings and dances around the Acme warehouse, killing

off the weasels one by one, Eddie becomes Eddie-Roger and Roger becomes Roger-Eddie. This union is sealed with a kiss close to the end of the film. In becoming (something or someone else), that which Eddie is becoming alters in kind, as if by a sort of mutual

osmosis. The (impossible) end of this becoming is to become imperceptible or intangible. This Eddie-Roger-becoming is not merely an exercise in cataloguing all the slapstick routines of cartoon comedy. This active self-dissolution in which Eddie is caught up is what saves both his own life and the lives of all toons. As Roger Rabbit comments, ‘A laugh can be a very powerful thing’. Toons themselves possess very specific powers, those of the false, the superficial and the fleeting, coupled with an almost infinite capacity for surprising and comic transformations. Eisenstein linked the comedy of animated figures to their capacity for instantaneous and literal metamorphosis and found in them the same sort of attractiveness as that to be found in fire: an ‘infinite changeability, modulation, transitivity and the continuous coming into being of images’.'® This ecstatic property of the animated figure inheres, for Eisenstein, in the fact that the animated image presents a way to experience ‘the potentiality of the primal plasma, from which everything can arise’.”” 251

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

This metamorphic power of animated Eisenstein, a metaphorical power. He writes:

figures is also, for

In Shakespeare’s comedies, the characters are transformed constantly...by disguising themselves, or undergoing physical transformation through magical means. In Disney—they turn into each other. One of the devices of comedy is the literalization of a metaphor. *

Who Framed Roger Rabbit overflows with many such literalizations of metaphor. When the penguin waiter at the Ink and Paint Club cannot understand that ‘on the rocks’ is a metaphor and so presents Eddie with his glass full of real rocks, it is because in Toontown there is no immutable separation of subject and object. If metaphor is the projection of subject onto object or vice versa, in Toontown the metaphor is taken to mean a literal transformation of one subject-object complex into another. CROWDS AND WHIRLPOOLS

In both minor science and the ‘physics’ of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, everything moves in vortical or helical forms produced by the interference of various sorts of becomings. Both Toontown and the surrounding city are peopled not only with discrete individuals but with tribes, packs, bands and other non-individual organizations. I am thinking here of the groups of singing birds, pygmies, cows, little mice, trees, singing flowers, little packets of flames, clouds, suns, cats, dogs and rabbits (of course) that populate

almost every animated film and which burst onto the scene at the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In short, everything goes from crowds (of particles or figures) to huge swirls of colour and line. In the hydraulic

model

of nature

(including,

it seems,

animated

‘nature’), one goes froma curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest slope for the smallest angle. From turba to turbo: in other words, from bands or packs of atoms to the great vortical organizations. The model is a vortical one; it operates in an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things.”!

That is to say, the hydraulic model is deployed in a smooth space. Space is smooth when it is occupied or filled without

252

KEITH CLANCY

measure, while space is striated when it is measured or counted in order to be occupied. Smooth space cannot be divided or measured without changing in kind, while striated space can be subdivided and measured without any substantial alteration occurring. In striated space, trajectories are coordinated with or subordinated to points with measurable and permanent spatial positions. In smooth space, on the other hand, the point is subordinated to the

line of a trajectory that cannot be reduced to the shortest distance between two points: the ‘point’ is between two lines rather than the line being between two points. In smooth space, the boundary of a

volume is no longer simply a surface, the boundary of a surface is no longer simply a line, the end boundary of a line is no longer simply a point. In smooth space, the line is a vector, with a direction and an intensity; and surfaces and volumes present themselves in continuous torsion. The line is intensive rather than extensive, a speed rather than a movement. According to Deleuze and Guattari, movement

designates the relative character of a body considered as ‘one’, and which goes from point to point; speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point.”

Toons possess speed rather than movement. When Roger Rabbit flies spinning into the air, there is no possibility of determining his position at any point, as his momentum exceeds his position. (Is this what inscribes those lines of speed behind most animated figures?) The lines that he inscribes are not reducible to sets of discrete points in a homogeneous space; rather, his lines are

the traces of a vortical distortion of the ‘real’ space within which the human characters move. It is a common sight gag in cartoons for a speeding figure to race past a static figure that is set spinning by the intense force of the speeding figure. In such a case, the spinning figure is produced by the interference of two different planes of speed (very fast and very slow) which twist one around the other in a vortical form. One has moved from solid, stable bodies to a more diaphanous, subtle ‘form’ of matter in dissolution.

Possessing an intensive speed rather than an extensive movement, toons often transform themselves topologically from one form to its topological equivalent. Topology is that branch of

253

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

geometry that deals not with forms in terms of extension or distance but purely in terms of their continuity or discontinuity. For instance, the surfaces of a sphere and a cube are topologically

equivalent because each can be transformed or distorted into the other by a continuous process of torsion without tearing or gluing. Roger Rabbit distorts himself in this manner many times. Perhaps the simplest of these is the moment at which he calmly releases his hand from the handcuffs that Eddie seems to think have securely locked Roger’s and his hands together. Another instance is when Roger and Eddie are hiding out in the secret room of the bar, which has two peepholes. Roger looks out the holes, but his eyes themselves become conical and project from the holes to the extent that they knock over a bottle on the table. Royal or major science deploys itself in a striated, segmented space, attempting to reduce the intensities of speeds to extensive movements between points. It seeks to avoid the vortical turbulences that occur in fluids by running them, as much as possible,

along conduits. In brief, if minor sciences are the sciences created by the lovers of the river that is singular and unique at every infinitesimal

instant, then major science is that which

treats the

river as if it were dry. When a nomad science (what Deleuze and Guattari might call the ‘epistemic war-machine’,

the force at the

edges of State, or Royal, science) has been appropriated by Royal science, the hydraulic model merely assumes the form of a prevention of vortical turbulences and the regulation of all flows: aqueducts, dams, pipes, embankments, canals and shipping are the results of this canalization of the fluid. Royal science wants to make sure that you only ever step into the same river by imposing the logos of being over the nomos of multiple and irreducible becomings.”? Create flows, as deterritorialized, chaotic and unstable as possible, then reterritorialize them: this is the basic form of the capitalist axiomatic, Oedipal psychoanalysis and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.* At the very centre of the narrative lies the character of Judge Doom, who is himself a toon (but ‘not just any toon’) yet desires the destruction of Toontown and its replacement by freeways, fast food outlets and billboards reaching into the sky. When Marvin Acme is killed in the Acme warehouse (a safe is dropped onto his head, something toons can bear repeatedly, owing to their supreme

elasticity), Judge Doom

manages

254

to frame

Roger Rabbit.

His

KEITH CLANCY

imminent punishment is the Dip (a mixture of turpentine, acetone

and benzene and the only possible manner of disposing of Toons). Judge Doom makes a comment that in many ways summarizes the actions of the film: ‘Since I have had Toontown under my jurisdiction, my goal has been to rein in the insanity; and the only way to do that is to make toons respect the Law’. He then presents a demonstration of the formidable powers of Dip, whose chemical

constitution is such that it dissolves the actual materials of the process of animation (paint and celluloid). When one of the Acme Squeaking Shoes is placed into the Dip, we see that the Dip is absolute deterritorialization, but one that serves only to reterritorialize the anarchic insanity of Toontown in that most uncartoonlike of emotions: fear. Respect for the Law, of which Judge Doom is a representative, comes at the risk of the almost fascistic threat of

the lines of deterritorialization being turned away from the creative and the inventive and into lines of pure and simple destruction. The deterritorialization that is experienced as joy in Eddie’s song and dance to Merry-Go-Round Broke Down reveals its other aspect. Toontown is thus held between two dangers, the resolution and

redemption of which give the narrative its basic impetus: on the one hand, there is the segmentation and striation of the smooth spaces of the toons by exploitative studios, while, on the other hand, there is the absolute dissolution of Toontown at the hands of

Judge Doom. (R.K. Maroon’s suggestion that the best thing about Toons is the fact that they will work for peanuts is indicative of their treatment

by the studios, and it would

also be possible to

draw interesting comparisons between the Ink and Paint Club and the Cotton Club.) Roger Rabbit is himself held between two planes: exclusion and dissolution. The very beginning of the film is concerned with the production of the now seriously over-budget Baby Herman film ‘Somethin’s Cookin’, in which Roger has only a supporting role and towards the end of the filming of which Roger ‘blows his lines’. (Instead of producing stars around his head, he produces tweetybirds.) Yet throughout the film, there will have been nothing other than the invention of new ways to block, control, redirect and channel his lines, his flows and becomings. The film never ceases

to find new ways to subjectify, humanize and personalize Roger. It never ceases withdrawing and redrawing his lines of flight back

ZOO

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

onto a model of the normalized human subject. He becomes an object of empathy for the (human) viewer, but in the process he loses the dazzling surfaciality that is his greatest potentiality. One could

mark

this

potentiality

(which

is, after

all, that

of the

simulacrum or phantasm) three times—the potential for the false to detach itself from the true, the potential for appearance to detach itself from essence and the potential for the image to detach itself from resemblance. DELEUZE ON ANIMATION

The double movement of exclusion and dissolution discussed above also marks the Deleuzian ‘theory’ of animation as presented in his two books on cinema. In the course of two lengthy and very rich books on cinema Deleuze says almost nothing of animation. One of his statements does seem interesting, more for the glimpse it proffers of a path not taken than for what it signifies in the context of an exclusion of animation from the province of cinema. Henceforth, when animation appears in the two books on cinema, it is as a benign alien presence rather than as an unsettling and destabilizing material critique of his views on the cinematic apparatus. Of animation Deleuze says: ...the drawing no longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the description of a figure which is always in the process of being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant-whatevers of their course. The cartoon film is related not to a Euclidean, but to a Cartesian geometry. It does not give us a figure described in a unique moment, but the continuity of the movement which describes the figure. Animation,

according

to Deleuze,

does not proceed

from the

synthesis of formal transcendental elements (poses photographed one by one) but gives an immediate image of the continuity of the movement. Such a conception of the animated figure reduces the intensivity of its speeds by relating the figure to any-instantwhatevers (the instant equidistant to any others and indifferent to the real movement cinematographed by the camera and shutter). Although, with the Fleischer’s inventions of the Rotoscope and the

Rotograph, the animated figure really was reduced to the plotting of points and lines derived from real movements, it seems to me that the animated figure cannot so easily be reduced to Cartesian

256

KEITH CLANCY

geometry and that animation does not necessarily entail the anyinstant-whatever.”° According to Deleuze, the cinematic movement-

image is produced in relating real movements to the any-instantwhatever in shooting (a process repeated backwards—moving from the succession of any-instant-whatevers to a movementimage—in projection). The shutter of the camera segments and striates speeds and recomposes them from immanent material elements rather than from formal transcendental elements. For instance, when Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge photographed the gallop of a horse at regular and rapid intervals, the images produced were sections of a real and continuous movement in space and time. In Muybridge, photography becomes the segmentation of a space-time continuum; and in principle any other regular segmentation (say, if the horse started its gallop a fraction of a second earlier) would produce the ‘same’ results. The particular images were immanent to the continuity of the movement analyzed into elements (whereas if they had posed a horse that was able to keep perfectly still in the poses that were expected of it, the results, both phenomenological and scientific, would have

been quite different). In this way, cinematic movement is produced by indifferent elements. The gallop of a horse analyzed (and later reconstituted) by Marey and Muybridge is a means of relating the continuity of an intensive speed to a segmentation of time and space. The segmentation itself is indifferent to the movement,

for

any equidistant instants could have been photographed by Marey and Muybridge to produce an analysis of the movement of a horse: a sensible analysis takes place rather than an intelligible synthesis. Deleuze

seems

to suggest that animation is also, like cinema,

the reproduction of movement through the segmentation of space and time according to an indifferent measure. It is perhaps only through this that Deleuze is able to say whether animation ‘belongs fully to the cinema’.”” Animation, for him, is cinematic only by virtue of the any-instant-whatever. I would say, however,

that the animated image is made from privileged instants: the single, crystalline cel painted and drawn upon by the animator and seen only for one 24th of a second is the privileged instant par excellence. It was this aspect of animation that incurred the jealousy of so fastidious a craftsman as Eisenstein, who perhaps envied the

extraordinary degree of creative power wielded by the animator over every frame of a particular film.

257

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

In this respect, it seems to me that the montage theories of Eisenstein (the ‘pathetic’, the ‘leap’ and the ‘ecstatic’) could constitute one of the most valuable points of reference for a theorization of animation. The stone lions that ‘leap’ to attention in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) would thus become, for me, the paradigmatic case of animation: the production of a non-Euclidean universe through the juxtaposition of different spaces, times and

worlds. In animation each frame is a world: animation (in Russian so beautifully named ‘multiplikatsiya’) is the multiplication of worlds at 24 worlds per second. The technology of cinema takes a continuous movement with a particular direction in time and position in space (both of which are assumed to be homogeneous) and segments it according to the movements of the shutter. The techniques of animation need rest upon no such homogeneous or continuous

substrate

of real

movement,

for

the

‘movements’

created by animation depend only upon the radical discontinuity and heterogeneity of the images (what Deleuze would call, perhaps disparagingly, ‘formal transcendental elements’).** This is why, for me, the other paradigmatic case of specifically animated ‘movement’ is to be found in the classic film by Chuck Jones, Duck Amuck (1953). What we might call the complicity between the animated and the multiple is shown to perfection in a short sequence in this film. While Daffy stands on an empty white background, the screen is suddenly divided in two by a black horizontal bar, as if the projector were jammed between two frames; and now the two Daffys call to each other as if each were the real Daffy and the other simply a mirage. Animated ‘movements’ are predicated, then, upon the multiplication and assemblage of transcendentally discontinuous figures in a heterogeneous space-time rather than upon the segmentation and reconstitution of continuous and homogeneous movements (and where the movement

is, as it were,

simultaneous

with its segmentation).

A

further instance of this discontinuity occurs later when Daffy finally explodes in a paroxysm of anger, moving from point to point within the frame, sometimes almost leaving it, each time with a different direction, position and gesture. Here there is no

attempt to make Rather,

there

line describe

is a kind

the continuity of a movement.

of chaotic

and

random

assemblage

of

different directions, characters and vectors producing an internally differentiated and discontinuous tangling of lines.

258

KEITH CLANCY

ONE MILLION PRESENTS

In the book from which the film was later derived, Gary Wolf's Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, toons are the sources not of animated

films but of comic-strips.”” In the book toons are photographed in various poses, replete with white bubbles emanating from their mouths and filled with words. When the shot is a little too risky, they are able to produce a double. These doubles last for only a short amount of time, depending on the degree of energy invested in their production. In the book Roger Rabbit is actually killed (‘censored’), and his double contacts Eddie Valiant in order to find the killer of the double’s double. At the end, with the murderer

discovered, Roger’s double dissolves away into dust. The world presented in the book is at once very close to and very far from that presented in the film. To produce multiple copies of oneself is an extraordinary and singular event in the book; in the film, in animation, it is the norm. There are, literally,

millions of Roger Rabbits. It is impossible, as well, to establish any ontological priority of original over copy (which one was perhaps able to do in the book), imitated over imitation, when both are so

tightly imbricated as they are in the film. In the toon universe there is no way of ultimately distinguishing resemblance from simulation, an ungrounding that threatens all the values mimed by the figures that populate that universe. Where it might be possible to think of the photographic studies of Muybridge and Marey as producing finite series of resemblances, it is perhaps no longer possible to think of the multiple copies of the animated ‘universe’ in quite the same way. Perhaps, then, one might say of Deleuze’s early writings on Lucretius that they had already described there everything that is most essential to the animated image. In the article, ‘Lucretius and the Simulacrum’, he

writes: Simulacra are not perceived in themselves; what is perceived is their aggregate in a minimum of sensible time (image).... In virtue of their speed,

which

causes

them

to be and

to act below

the sensible

minimum, simulacra produce the mirage of a false infinite in the images

which they form. °°

In a universe that multiplies copies of itself every 24th of a second, there is no longer any way of extracting being from becomings. Flows end up by subjecting both themselves and the vase]

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

banks that were meant to contain them to the same abysmal drift. Where there is no possibility of separating things from flows and substances from appearances, perhaps all that remains is a certain vertiginous laughter. The contemplation of a labryrinthine book, in which all possible

events would be narrated together with their consequences, once produced in Dr Tsun an almost incomprehensible anxiety, a sudden and hallucinatory apprehension of the dreamlike character of the world.

Past, future

and

present,

the guiding

threads

of

centuries of thought and seemingly the indices of the course of the universe, were revealed to him as simply a surface concealing folds in time. Like the transcendentally discontinuous frames of all animated films, his past, future and present coexist in the same shattering instant. He sensed, out in the humid garden, the weight

of all possible events and all possible combinations of events. Yet this sensation also removed all possibility of comparing the various compossible worlds. While, for Leibniz, all possible worlds

could be judged from the standpoint of the only real world—what would be the point of view of the bank—for Ts’ui Pén and The Garden of Forking Paths all possible worlds (including that in which we seem to live) were ontologically equivalent—what would be the point of view of the river. It would not be for anyone to say that this or that world were any more real than any other. Who Framed Roger Rabbit and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (and The Garden of Forking Paths) could be described perhaps by these words of Maurice Blanchot: A universe where the image ceases to be second in relation to a model, where imposture pretends to the truth, or, finally, where there is no more original, but an eternal sparkle where, in the glitter

of detour and return, the absence of the origin is dispersed. *! Animation produces a universe from an eternal, crystalline and

glistening instant in which all planes of time, all worlds and all chances coalesce. At the close of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, an angel lighter and brighter than any soul other than the sun’s arrives from outside. A translucent, fleeting image causes

the entire dizzying,

pyromaniacal spectacle to vanish at the lightest of touches. In a handful of glitter there could be a whole universe where the sun is, as Herakleitos has it, ‘new every day’.”

260

KEITH CLANCY

NOTES

Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 13. Gilles

Deleuze,

Tomlinson

and

‘Preface’,

Barbara

Kant’s

Minnesota Press, 1984), p. ix. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden

Donald

Critical

Habberjam

Philosophy,

(Minneapolis:

trans.

Hugh

University

of

of Forking Paths’, Labyrinths, eds.

A. Yates and James E. Irby and trans. Donald A. Yates

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 53.

Ironically, this thesis is now seriously posited as the so-called ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this view, ‘potential’

or ‘possible’ worlds, such as the alternative paths which one may take through a garden, actually exist alongside one another. In this interpretation, every choice made or event that occurs generates an almost infinite number of new universes. The (ideal) universe of universes thus has the form of a point (the hypothetical origin of time) that has millions of branches, each of which has millions of

branches, and so on. In this picture of cosmogenesis, the universe becomes more and more complex with time. See Bryce S. De Witt and N. Graham, The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). Diogenes Laertius, cited in John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), p. 147.

Herakleitos wrote of this in the following terms: ‘It scatters and it gathers; it advances and retires’. It is a matter of some controversy as to what the ‘it’ refers. My opinion is that ‘it’ refers to the universe as a whole, as well as to all natural processes. See ibid., pp. 136-158. ibid., p. 139. ibid., p. 135. See ibid., pp. 148-167.

See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Treatise on Nomadology’, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 361-374. Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucréce (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977).

Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda and trans. Alan Upchurch

(London: Methuen, 1988), p. 21.

ibid., p. 54. ibid., p. 44. Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, p. 361. Here a whole series of human-toon-animal becomings could be traced. The two most prominent examples in my mind are the dances of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins (1964) and Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh (1945), where a line of becoming extends between the animated figures and the human dancers; and the animated figures 261

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

and backgrounds have the effect of transforming and intensifying the space within which the dancer dances. In Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke’s chimney-sweep jumps (along with Mary and the children) into the coloured chalk drawings he does on the pavement. These drawings then become the simulacral (rather than representational) space within which his movements are distributed. In this magically extensive and colourful space, the slightest ‘real’ movement becomes a leap, spiral or twist. In Gene Kelly’s dance with Jerry (the mouse

from Tom and Jerry), the animated figure has the effect of giving Gene Kelly a circular or vortical space that Gene Kelly covers with exuberant and ever-increasing arcs of motion. Interestingly, in both films the animated is presented as an expansive and empowering modification of human space to which humans gladly submit (inscribing a direct parallel to Eddie Valiant’s Merry-Go-Round Broke Down dance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Rhizome’, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 25. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, p. 45.

ibid. ibid., p. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, p. 361.

24

ibid., p. 381. Here I am thinking of the way that Roger Rabbit is propelled along the plumbing of the Acme warehouse after being sucked down the toilet, finally to burst onto the scene out of a drain in the floor (down which the diluted Dip later flows). For the connections between the capitalist axiomatic and Oedipal psychoanalysis, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis:

DS

Barbara 26 2, 28 29

University of

Minnesota Press, 1983). Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Habberjam

(Minneapolis:

University

of Minnesota

Press,

1986), p. 5. Both devices are described in John Fell, A History of Films (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979), p. 386. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 5.

ibid., p. 4. Gary Wolf, Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (New York: Ballantine Books,

1981). 30

Deleuze,

‘Lucretius

and

the Simulacrum’,

The

Logic of Sense,

ed.

Constantin V. Boundas and trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pei.

31

Maurice Blanchot, ‘Le Rire des dieux’, La Nouvelle revue francaise, July 1965, p. 103, cited by Deleuze in ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’, trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 27, Winter 1983, Pp. Do.

32

Cited in John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 135.

262

THE ILLUSION OF ILLUSION KEITH BROADFOOT REX BUTLER

I In the first of his two volumes

on cinema,

The Movement-Image,

Gilles Deleuze speaks of four necessary preconditions for cinema:

(1) not the photograph but the snap-shot or photogramme, the individual cel of a reel of film;

(2) the equidistance of these photogrammes, the fact that they can be taken at quantitatively regular intervals; (3) the transfer of this equidistance onto a framework constituting the film-strip; and (4) the ability to replay this equivalence by means of a filmprojector or its equivalent.' We might consider what Deleuze is saying here in terms of these images by Eadweard Muybridge of a horse trotting (Fig. 1). As we know, Muybridge’s experiments in the analysis of animal locomotion came about as a result of a bet with railway magnate Governor Leland Stanford over whether one of Stanford’s trotters, Occident, ever had all four of its feet off the ground at once during its trot. Stanford bet that it did, while Muybridge (or the other

party to the wager) bet that it did not. According to legend, Stanford won the bet, although, intriguingly, the conclusive photo was never published. What is crucial about these images for Deleuze is that they are taken at quantitatively regular intervals (whether of time or of space we shall leave open for the moment), at what Deleuze calls ‘any-instant-whatevers’.* These photogrammes are not selected for 263

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

1. Eadweard

Muybridge, ‘Lizzie M.’ trotting, harnessed to sulky (detail). From

Eadweard Muybridge, Complete Human and Animal Locomotion (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), p. 1230.

any particular reason; Muybridge is not trying to take the photo of the horse with all its hooves off the ground. Rather, he is sampling a series of movements, during one of which this position might be

seen. What is at stake here, Deleuze argues, is an entirely new conception of movement, of what movement is. What we see in

these Muybridge images is that movement is not made up of a series of held poses in the manner of painting or sculpture. Movement

is not a series of forms 264

or Ideas put into motion—a

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

series of poses or privileged instants as in classical dance or photography. Instead, it is movement itself which produces these forms or Ideas. The pose or instant in these photogrammes, unlike those other art forms, is not only an analysis of movement but also a synthesis of it. It not only results in motion but also from it. Cinema does not simply do away with the pose, then. It is just that we can no longer assert its priority over motion. We can no longer say whether it is these poses or privileged instants which produce motion or motion which gives rise to these poses or privileged instants. Remarkable moments still arise in cinema— that moment perhaps when Stanford’s trotter has no feet on the ground—but we can no longer decide whether movement begins or ends with such moments; whether it springs from them or concludes with them. As Deleuze says, marking out a distinction between the old gallop and this new cinematic form of the trot: These [remarkable occasions] may be called privileged instants, but not in the sense of the poses or generalised postures which marked the gallop in the old forms. These instants have nothing in common with long-exposures (poses), and would even be formally impossible as long-exposures. If these are privileged instants, it is as remarkable or singular points which belong to movement, and not as the moments of actualisation of a transcendent form.?

Where then does the movement occur in these Muybridge images? Is it within each of these photogrammes or between them—or only in the whole series? It is perhaps this question that the rest of this paper will be concerned with, although in a sense our conclusion will be that we can never answer it. But before either answering or not answering this question, we must be more precise about what we mean by movement. We should really begin by asking: what kind of movement could we be referring to here, and in what ways is it specifically cinematic? And, within cinema itself, what kind of movement? And how does each of these kinds

of movement speak of the relationship between the pose and movement? We would say that cinema begins by thinking the interrelationship between poses and movement. As opposed to those pre-cinematic art forms in which it was thought that movement could be achieved simply by stringing together a series ofposes, cinema begins with the realization that these poses themselves

265

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

would

we

not be possible outside of movement.

can distinguish two different ways

But, within cinema,

of thinking this inter-

relationship: the first, quantitative motion, in which there is a kind of cause-and-effect relationship between poses and movement, where

poses reproduce a prior and external movement and movement a prior and external series of poses; the second, qualitative motion, in

which poses and movement arise at the same time, where poses and movement no longer reproduce each other or even relate to each other. (It was perhaps wrong of us, then, to so simply state that there were two ways of thinking the inter-relationship between poses

movement:

and

motion, would

only

first

in the

they be inter-related.

of these,

quantitative

In the second, qualitative

motion, they would arise at the same time, would be related only

in their very lack of relationship.) Unlike quantitative motion, in which poses and motion are the reproduction of something which precedes them—either movement

or poses—in qualitative motion

there is the production of something new itself, which did not exist before. If in quantitative motion we see a horse in motion, a horse which pre-exists our seeing it, in qualitative motion we become a

horse ourselves; the act of seeing is indistinguishable from the movement.

If quantitative motion is a movement

in the world, we

might say that qualitative motion is a movement in the soul. And Deleuze makes one further distinction between this quantitative and this qualitative motion, which he calls the movement-

image and the time-image, respectively. In the first, space is the measure of time, while in the second time is the measure of space.

But, again, these are not to be understood as different ways of thinking the relationship between space and time. If the first can only be thought of in terms of their relationship—an analogy we shall

come

to in a moment—the

second

would

be, more

than

anything else, their very non-relationship or non-analogousness. If in quantitative motion or the movement-image it is still a question

of movement—a movement either given by or giving this series of poses

or instants—in

irregular

or

‘false’

non-movement.

the second movement,

there

neither

is liberated simply

a kind

movement

of nor

Instead of a regular series of fixed poses and

movement, which leaves us unable to see how one is transformed

into another, there is the irregular and aleatory occurrence of singularities, at once a pose and the movement connecting one pose to another. 266

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

But to understand this distinction properly, it will be necessary to turn for a moment to the analysis of the relationship between space and time we find in Aristotle’s Physics—an analysis which underpins Deleuze’s distinction between quantitative and qualitative motion,

the movement-image

and the time-image.

Firstly,

space as the measure of time. What does this mean? If we go back to Aristotle’s

Physics, we

can read

there that time must

imitate

space because the succession of moments in time can only be thought of in terms of a succession of points in space. There is an equivalence or analogy drawn between an instant in time—a ‘now’—and

a point in space.

And,

on

this basis, movement

is

reconstituted as either a series of points in space or ‘nows’ in time. But precisely these points or instants could never give movement because any movement as such—as the paradoxes of Zeno make clear—would always occur in between any two points or instants. It is just this, Deleuze argues, that cinema shows us about movement: that it is never a matter of simply giving movement through its poses or instants because these would themselves always presuppose a prior movement. Movement would always occur in between its poses or instants. If these Muybridge photogrammes were merely a series of poses strung together to suggest motion,

real movement would always be missing. By the time we made the transposition from these figures to the movement they were meant to bring about,

any

real movement

would

already

have

taken

place; movement would be not only gained but lost. We would have an illusion of movement

or the movement

of an illusion, but

what makes this illusion or movement possible—that space or time during which this transposition takes place—could never be seen. It would always be in between. But if movement cannot be given as the point or instant—the pose—this is not to say it can be given as the non-point or the non-instant: the line or time. If the point and instant cannot give movement, this is not to say they can be given by movement. For, in the same way as before, the very time and space of this giving would always be missing, in between. Even though here it is perhaps time which is the measure of space, the line which gives

the point, we would remain just as firmly within the terms of that analogy or comparison between them. If that first alternative we canvassed is always too late—only able to see a motion which no longer moves because it is given by a series of unmoving poses— 267

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

this second (time as the measure of space) would be too soon—unable to see anything because motion only exists in or through these poses. It is not a matter of saying that motion only occurs in these Muybridge photogrammes in the frames between the individual cels, in the image before or the image after the image which seems to move. We cannot just say that movement is always in between. If this were so, and every image depended on every other image for its movement, we would merely get Zeno’s paradox again in another form. We still could not say how motion either begins or ends. This is the aporia of quantitative motion or the movementimage. On the one hand, we can say poses give movement only to get a movement that is always in between, that can never be given, only to discover that it is movement which in fact gives these poses. And, on the other hand, we can say that movement is this in

between, gives these poses, only to discover that it in turn presupposes the pose, outside of which it could not be given. Here Deleuze cites the example of Sergei Eisenstein to make his case— that Eisenstein who for Deleuze is the pre-eminent example of this cinema of the movement-image. Defining the meaning of a film as always in between, in motion, in the process of coming about as the result of the collision between two pieces of film to produce an unexpected, third meaning, Eisenstein was unable to decide which came first: whether it was that third meaning (our movement) which allowed those two pieces (our poses) to be chosen, or those two pieces which produced that third meaning; whether it was the analysis or synthesis of that third meaning which was logically prior. As with Muybridge, we would always be either too soon or too late: too soon because we could have those two pieces of film but not yet that hidden, third meaning which allowed us to select them; too late because we could have that third meaning but no

longer the two pieces of film which produced it. As Deleuze says—but precisely the point here is that this ‘organic’ would always presuppose the ‘pathetic’, these quantitative banalities their qualitative singularity (a qualitative singularity which, at this stage, is not to be mistaken as encompassing all that we mean by qualitative motion): Now this production of singularities (the qualitative leap) is achieved by the accumulation of banalities (quantitative process), so that the

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KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

singular is taken from the any-whatever, and is itself an anywhatever which is simply non-ordinary and non-regular. Eisenstein himself made it clear that ‘the pathetic’ presupposed ‘the organic’ as the organised set of Ao aimee au hatevers through which the cuts (coupures) have to pass. In other

words,

movement-image

this

aporia

of quantitative

is that aporia of measuring

motion

or

the

time by space or

space by time. It is the aporia of space and time themselves, the fact

that in a way it is their comparison which precedes either of them as such. Space (the simultaneity of poses) presupposes time (the successiveness of movement), just as time presupposes space. What cannot be seen is what allows this comparison or analogy between space and time which makes them possible, that ‘space’ and ‘time’—‘movement’—in which this comparison could take place. How can space and time begin if, to begin, each must come before the other; and yet have not space and time already begun, is not this precisely the problem, the fact that each seems to have begun without the other? And this is why, indeed, it would not be

simply a matter of solving this aporia because it is the solution itself—the existence of space and time—which constitutes the problem. It is the solution to the aporia which opens up the time and space within which it is expressed; it is the solution to the aporia which is the aporia itself. All this is to say that what makes space and time possible in their analogy or comparison with each other also makes them impossible, is the end of space and time as such; that what makes

the pose and movement possible insofar as they can be exchanged for each other also makes them impossible insofar as they cannot be exchanged. And this can be seen in the following: if time is defined as a kind of succession or succession as a kind of time, for

a moment to appear the moment prior to it must disappear; there can never be two moments at once. But that first moment must wait for the second to appear before it can disappear. It can disappear, in other words, only in time. But precisely time itself, the succession of time, is only possible because of this disappearance. We cannot say, therefore, which comes first: whether it is the

disappearance of that first moment which makes the appearance of the second possible, or the appearance of that second moment which makes the disappearance of the first possible. For time to pass at all—and this despite what we said above—two moments 269

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

must be present at the same time, at once appearing and disappearing. Any single ‘now’ must be in a way two ‘nows’, one before and one after—or, better, both two ‘nows’ and the space between two ‘nows’, that time during which one ‘now’ can be

exchanged for another.’ This is why we

must

read Deleuze’s

of the

characterization

cartoon in The Movement-Image very carefully and realize that he is describing only one kind of cartoon there and that we must equally be able to posit another kind of cartoon, that of the time-image, in

which we could no longer distinguish between movement. This is what Deleuze says:

the pose and

If [the cartoon film] belongs fully to the cinema, this is because the drawing no longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the description of a figure which is always in the process of being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant-whatevers of their course. The cartoon film is related not to a Euclidean,

but to a Cartesian

geometry.

figure described in a unique moment, movement which describes the figure.°

It does not give us a

but the continuity

of the

But perhaps we can already open this passage up to that second reading, for it is notable that Deleuze does not simply equate the figure and movement here but the figure and a continuity of movement. Movement is no longer graspable as a thing—a figure or pose—but as only already in movement, as a kind of breaking or

dissolution of the figure. It is no longer simply the figure giving rise to movement or movement giving rise to the figure, but a continuity of movement—at

once moving and unmoving,

a figure

and the breaking of the figure—giving rise to both. And would not this be the ultimate ambition of all great cartoons: the presentation—impossible—of this simultaneity of the figure and the breaking

of the figure, of time

(space)

and

movement?

This

is

perhaps why the characters in cartoons are always fighting against themselves: they are trying to destroy themselves, erase themselves; but they would exist only in this erasure. The same line which forms them, delimits them from their background, also

deforms them, makes it impossible to separate them from their surroundings. And vice versa: that line which takes the characters outside of themselves is just that line which gives them character, makes them individuals. The characters in cartoons are only this endless series of metamorphoses, the unchanging form of change, 270

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

perhaps what might be called time. Aristotle himself in his Physics speaks of this impossible but necessary simultaneity of movement and time, that movement which is given in space and time and that movement which gives space and time. He speaks of an impossible simultaneity which is always in the dark and which might be the darkness of the cinematographic illusion itself. He says: When we are in the dark, and are not affected by any body (méden dia

tou sOmatos paskhémen) if a movement is produced in the soul (en téi psukhei), then it seems that a certain time has passed, and, by the same token, together (hama), a certain movement seems to have occurred.”

Aristotle thus unites time (space) and movement in aisthesis. And does so such that no exterior sensory content or objective movement is necessary. But it is precisely because we cannot see this togetherness or simultaneity that movement is possible. If we cannot see that there are in fact two images up there on the screen before us, neither can we see that very blindness: what we see in fact is always one image in motion. What we see, but what cannot be seen, is two images and no image—the space between images— at once. It is this which allows the succession of one ‘now’ after another, that unbroken series of images which for us is movement,

but it is precisely this which cannot be seen. It is a secret that can never be revealed because it is this very revelation itself which is that blindness. I

It is in retrospect not surprising then that Eisenstein, given that he embodies for Deleuze the cinema of the movement-image, should have found in animation, and in Walt Disney in particular, the

realization of his cinematic aims.® Eisenstein perhaps saw in the animation of Disney the transition to the cinema of the time-image that he desired, for it was finally only in animation that he could conceive of possible solutions to the dilemmas he faced in his

work, particularly those involving the relations between montage, metaphor and movement. The simultaneous dissolution and construction of the figure in animation that we have outlined Eisenstein termed _ the

‘plasmaticness’ of the image. There is a being in animation, he ZITA

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

suggested, which behaves like the primal protoplasm, ‘not yet possessing a ‘stable’ form, but capable of assuming any form and which, skipping along the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, attaches itself to any and all forms of animal existence’.’ This freedom of form is initially interpreted by Eisenstein as an antidote to the constraints of the increasingly restrictive organization of daily life in the modern

world, a response to the ‘formal

logic of standardization’ that American capital imposes.” But the attempt at an ideological reading and an understanding of animation as a reified reflection of consumer society ultimately collapses for Eisenstein. This is because with animation it is impossible for the spectator to achieve the necessary distance required for critique, or inversely, for ideology, to operate. There can be no critique of the representation of capital in animation for the simple reason that animation itself is the presentation of capital. The primal protoplasm, this form which lacks definite boundaries and can appear as any form whatsoever, is, it hardly need be said, the form of capital itself. The ‘omnipotence’ of the

variable form in animation that Eisenstein continually stresses is the very omnipotence of capital. With regard to cinema, Deleuze proposes that money is the obverse side of the time-image, but in animation money is the image itself. This perhaps explains why cartoon characters are the true Icons (in all senses of the word) of the twentieth century. A cartoon character’s image can literally appear anywhere—on a TV screen, a billboard or a T-shirt—as it is able to dissolve

into the ether of the media

environment

and,

indeed, is strictly equivalent to this ether. Hence its iconic status: for in a certain sense any cartoon character is the incarnation of the ethereal spirit of the media. Many correspondences could be drawn between Eisenstein’s analysis of the stage of the image reached with animation and Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreal form of the image that he develops as the stage beyond art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Indeed, the three historical analogies to Disney that Eisenstein outlines could be related in detail to Baudrillard’s own orders of simulation. These

are

for Eisenstein

La

Fontaine’s

Fables,

Hans

Christian

Andersen’s Tales and Lewis Carroll’s Alice. In each of these examples there is what Eisenstein calls a prelogical response to the reigning rational logic of the period; and this pre-logical response, as an antithesis to this rational logic, takes in each case the form of

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KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

the resurrection of the animal. But, in following this progression, Disney cannot be similarly positioned in any dialectical or antithetical relationship to societal norms. Disney, Eisenstein says quite simply, is beyond good and evil.'’ So we could say with Disney, as Baudrillard

says of America,

that there is a realized

utopia. However, if animation truly exists beyond the art of the age of mechanical

reproduction, it is because animation

corresponds, as

Eisenstein implies, to a condition of organic production. Animation is not the result of the lifelessness of a mechanical reproduction but is itself life-giving. What, however, is the form of life it creates? Is it

a life that we know? In his article, ‘A Short History of Photography’, Walter Benjamin writes that in the early photographic portraits there could be seen the final emission of aura before its decline in the subsequent era of mechanical reproduction. He related the presence of an aura in these early photographs to the necessity for the model to remain immobile over an extended period of time, that is, for the model to maintain a pose. As a result, it was this procedure itself which ‘taught the models to live inside rather than outside the moment. During the long duration of these shots they grew as it were into the picture’.!” But after these photographs there was a disjunction between the pose and the aura. Benjamin is thus describing in this instance what could be termed the pre-cinematic condition of the photograph and the pre-cinematic condition of the pose. It is that moment prior to Deleuze’s prerequisites for cinema: the equidistant snapshots and the any-instant-whatever. When the technology of reproduction does reach this stage, the pose that it is able to capture no longer contains within it the breath of aura. It is evident that Benjamin’s terminology becomes very ambiguous and paradoxical here, for it is just at that instant when movement is given to the image, when it could be said that the image becomes animated, that life, presence, aura—the breath of ani-

mation—also leaves it. It is perhaps necessary, then, to pause to consider Benjamin’s definition of aura or rather, what is more significant, how he speaks of its experience. ‘Experience of the aura’, Benjamin writes,

rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural 273

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

object and man. The person we looked at, looks at us in turn. To look at means to invest it with the experience corresponds to the data Thus, with the investment

look at, or who feels he is being perceive the aura of an object we ability to look at us in return. This of the mémoire involontaire.'°

of a returning look, the inanimate

nature of the early photographic portraits is overcome; and they are endowed with an auratic atmosphere. In contrast, the resulting

mechanical development of the image, although adding a potential animation to it, is perceived as inanimate due to the lack of any return look. But perhaps even this does not sufficiently explain the paradox in Benjamin's terminology, for the decline of the aura can also be read as the loss of the distinction between the inanimate and the animate, that is to say, the confusion of the ‘transposition’ from the human to the inhuman. Understood this way, the decline

of aura would then only signify the impossibility of categorizing the human

and the inhuman

and, moreover,

of establishing the

direction in which any transposition or metaphorical displacement from one to the other could be said to take place. It is exactly this which Eisenstein in his book on Disney examines in relating the question of animation to animism and totemism. He begins by exploring the phenomenon of the projection of the human onto the natural and inanimate and, vice versa,

the projection of the natural and inanimate onto the human. But with Disney the stage has been reached where it is impossible to determine in which direction this projection proceeds; it cannot be

established who (or what) is imitating whom. This he relates to the belief of a certain Indian tribe—the Bororo—of Northern Brazil who understand themselves to be not only human beings but at the same time a special kind of red parrot common in the region. Eisenstein emphasizes that this does not so much mean that they believe that they will become these birds after their death or that their ancestors were these birds but rather ‘...they are in reality these actual birds. It is not here a matter of identity of names or relationship; they mean a complete simultaneous identity of both’.* In transferring this anthropological data to Disney, Eisenstein notes: ‘Mickey plastically truly embodies the ‘ideals of the Bororo’—he

is both human,

and a mouse!’.'° Eisenstein is as-

tounded that with Disney a character can be ‘simultaneously and identically’ both an animal (or object) and a human. The implication to be drawn from this is that in no way can it 274

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

be determined whether Mickey is a mouse imitating a man or a man

imitating a mouse.

Equally, it cannot be said, for example,

that Disney is a God who creates Mickey in His own image, for it is also man who, after animation, after Disney, is made in the image

of the animal or object. Animation in this regard marks the end of any evolution of the species because it establishes as equivalent the evolution of man from the animal and the devolution of man to the animal. To return to Eisenstein’s primal protoplasm, if it has the ability as he says to assume any form in the evolutionary ladder, is it not because it has destroyed the very notion of evolution? But can we go even further, for is there not perhaps with animation, as Benjamin intuited, truly an end to the human species

as such? A human form and presence returns to the image with animation, but it is a humanity which can no longer be known in itself; it is a humanity without any essence. In this regard, Walt

Disney’s interest in cryogenics should not be, as it has been, cruelly interpreted as a gesture of self-aggrandizement; it is rather a form of respect and an attempt to commemorate a species that will disappear, or has disappeared, through its inability to be represented. There would also seem to be initially, just to take up Eisenstein’s references to the primal protoplasm and the ‘ecstatic’ insertion of the self into nature with animation and the resulting indistinguishability

between

the subjective

and

objective,

some-

thing akin to the plenitude of an individual’s pre-‘mirror stage’ existence in animation. The indestructibility of the cartoon figure would be then the primitive belief in the immortality of the ego; and, additionally, the lack of a ‘stable’ image or form would signify that the ‘arrest’ and immobility of the human form reflected in the mirror had not yet taken place. But this would be to distort Eisenstein’s remarkable insights into animation. What is perhaps necessary, finally, is not to interpret animation as the symptom of a desire to return to the erased memory of a pre-Symbolic but rather as an effect of the disappearance of the mirror stage—that with the arrival of animation it is no longer a stage that needs to be passed through. Asa result of his conception of the mirror-stage, Lacan was able to propose what he believed to be the defining characteristic, and defining condition, of the human species. He said:

Nothing allows us to assert that the animal has a consciousness

27D:

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

separated from its body as such, that its corporeality is an objectifiable entity for it... Whereas it is certain that, if there is for us a fundamental given even before the register of the unhappy consciousness has emerged at all, if- precisely the distinction between our consciousness and our body.!°

It is the assumption of the form of the body reflected in the mirror, the assumption of the form of the other, that produces this distinction. But what if even this distinction between the animal and the human has collapsed? In such a situation, the look that returns from the mirror, the aura with which the inanimate body in

the mirror is invested, would be of a completely different nature. The appearance of the human form in the mirror and the infant's anticipatory assumption of the mastery of this form in relation to his own present condition of motor incapacity and dependence signified for Lacan the appearance of the image of death. Following

Hegel’s

master-slave

dialectic,

where

it is by

an

imagined death that self-consciousness is achieved, Lacan places the imagined death in the reflection in the mirror: This image of the master, which is what he sees in the form of the

specular image, becomes confused in him with the image of death. Man can be in the presence > the absolute master. He is in his presence from the beginning... With the decline of the aura, however, is it not, in a certain sense, life which looks back, the animate which is invested with the return of the look? This look of animation would indeed be as

strange and uncanny as the previous look of death because this life to be imagined, like the previous death to be imagined, would not be one’s own. In short, life would be unlivable. In his first version of ‘The Work of Art In The Age Of

Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin entitled the thirteenth section ‘Mickey Mouse’. As in the second version, Benjamin deals in this section with the emergence of what he calls the ‘optical unconscious’. A different nature opens itself, Benjamin argues,

to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge people walk, one knows ROLE of a person’s posture fractional second of a stride.!®

276

because an consciously of the way during the

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

It is perhaps not surprising that Benjamin locates Mickey Mouse in this unconsciously penetrated space so that it is Mickey who inhabits the interstices of a person's stride. As the camera enters man’s very being a metamorphosis occurs; and man becomes Mickey or Mickey becomes man. Benjamin writes that ‘Film has launched

an

attack

against

waking we share a world worlds’. This is evidenced of the collective dream Mouse’.!? Benjamin hints here at

the

old

Heraclitean

truth,

that

in

while sleeping we are each in separate for Benjamin by ‘the creation of figures such as the earth-encircling Mickey

a movement towards the literalization of

the unconscious, an exchange in which, like the earlier confusion

between the inanimate and animate, it would be impossible to distinguish between the conscious and unconscious, in which either

could be the other. This embraces a broader issue which we have suggested animation gives rise to: the impossibility of establishing a definitive direction to the metaphoric transferral involved in animation. But even this is not strictly what is at stake, for it is perhaps true that the direction of the metaphoric transferral cannot be established in animation for the simple reason that animation is the very presentation of the metaphoric—the transferral—itself. This is ultimately the indescribable beauty and purity of Disney for Eisenstein. Whereas Eisenstein in his practice of montage—his attempt to constitute his theorization of montage as trope or metaphor—could only ever represent montage and metaphor successively, Disney is able to present the very ‘at the same timeness’ and simultaneity of metaphoric comparison itself. As a result, however, if animation is not the representation of

metaphor—as it is with Eisenstein—but its presentation, then the paradox arises, which Eisenstein notes, of the literalization of metaphor. So if, for example, we speak metaphorically of a ‘cocky

fighter’, Disney or animation in general, Eisenstein argues, reverses the metaphoric comparison to literally present a gamecock. Thus, Eisenstein states: ‘In this sense, Disney is on the ‘Homeric’

stage:

his beasts are metaphoric to people, i.e. reversed to the comparison of man with animal. They are plastic metaphors in essence’ .”° But, as has already been suggested, the more profound aspect of animation would be the impossibility of even establishing the direction of metaphor—to be able to say whether it is reversed or Diy,

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

not. Although, even more profoundly, it is in a sense the ‘at the same timeness’ of the metaphoric comparison of space and time within the transfer and transport of any metaphor that Disney presents. It is within this enigma that we will find the secrets of the animator. ul Many writers on art have tried to speak of the ‘filmic’ in painting,

of the way certain developments in painting predicted or paralleled those in film. Most speak of Futurism or Cubism as representing a kind of motion

in painting, of being the true equivalent of

film in painting. For us, however, it was Claude Monet who first and best thought through the problems of presenting motion; it is Monet who first develops a qualitative motion in painting. We might say, indeed, that if Futurism and Cubism represented a kind of quantitative motion, a motion still centred—for we know that in

Cubism it is the object which stays still and the spectator or painter who moves around it—a synthetic or analytic motion, Monet presents a qualitative motion, a motion without a centre or in which

every

centre

already

turns

around

another,

a movement

which tries to think the simultaneity of its analysis and synthesis. To take up a distinction we made before, we might say that if Cubism represents an intelligible motion, a motion which can be

reproduced or predicted in advance by an act of the will, Monet presents a sensible motion, a motion which always comes about either too soon or too late, which surprises you or is produced as an effect of chance. It is in these terms that we might understand Marcel Duchamp’s break with Cubism over Nude Descending A Staircase: for Duchamp, Cubism was precisely this system of intelligible narration, where the spectator or witness remained outside the work, whereas what he wanted was a non-intelligible, even absurd, movement impossible to narrate, in which the

spectator or witness became part of the work. We the figure in Cubism, which only becomes actual ment or narration, a situation in which we can actual from the virtual, with that in the Large

might compare with its movedistinguish the Glass or Nude

Descending A Staircase, where we are confronted with a figure that

is at once present and absent, actual and virtual, fugitive and immobile. Movement is thus given neither in the part nor the whole but in both, which is to say that we can never actually 278

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

equate the part and the whole, add up all of the parts to produce a whole. (In Cubism there is always a whole, the parts always refer to a whole, even if lost, irredeemably shattered, always virtual.)

The nude in Nude Descending A Staircase moves, but this movement neither constitutes a whole nor unwinds through a series of poses. Unlike Cubism, there is no regular movement such that the next position or pose could be predicted, or even painted. Movement is constituted not so much by poses, between which movement would occur, as by what we might call, after Duchamp, ‘stoppages’, whose only connection to each other would be chance—that

same

chance, after all, which prompted

undertake his bet with Muybridge.

Stanford to

Motion, for Duchamp, was

motion only insofar as it was unexpected, in a way both too soon and too late. It is this which accounts for the humour in his work,

its tongue in cheek quality. For does not the joke itself participate in this same temporal economy? On the one hand, it is always too soon, in that you laugh before you truly understand it; and on the

other, it is always too late, in that by the time you understand it, it is no longer funny. It is the enigma Duchamp played on in his last great work, the Etant Donnés, where, as in the joke, it is impossible

to decide who is the butt of the joke: is it that figure behind the door, unaware of being seen, or is it we, the apparent tellers of the

joke, caught peeking through a keyhole at a nude woman? Do we see or are we seen?—always the final question in Duchamp’s work and the impossibility of ever completely distinguishing the work from its spectator, to say who is moving around whom. And is there not the same humour in Monet’s work, the same

fundamental absurdity or paradox? As we know, Monet too was trying to capture a sort of movement, the equivalence between what he saw and what he painted. But in a sense this equivalence, this moment

of change or movement, would always be either too

soon or too late. That elusive moment would always be in between two other canvases: either after the one he had just painted and before the one he will paint or before the one he had just painted and after the one he will paint. As he wrote in a letter (and he relates

this with

a kind

of wistful

resignation,

a shrug

of the

shoulders that brings a smile to the lips): I had up to a hundred canvases under way, of a single subject. By searching feverishly among these beginnings (ébauches), | found one which did not differ too much

from what I saw in front of me; but

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THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

despite everything I modified it completely. My work done, I saw, while moving my canvases around, that I had overlooked pie one which would have suited me best, and which I had near at hand.”

That is to say, that equivalence Monet sought to depict could be seen either before he began to paint or after he had finished painting, but the actual moment of this equivalence—the moment of painting, movement itself—could never be seen. It would necessarily remain invisible, like that time he sought to capture— or perhaps more profoundly, it would remain a moment during which Monet himself would have to be absent. We can see Monet wrestling here with those paradoxes of the movement-image with which Eisenstein also struggled. Understood as a series of poses or canvases, movement would always be missing, in between; we could neither say how any one canvas was completed nor how one canvas becomes another. Monet’s method hints at a certain infinite divisibility, that is to say, not only would that moment Monet wanted to capture always be in between two other canvases but even within any canvas itself, that instant it depicts could always be further divided, shown to contain two moments; but he could not have painted at all, this division could not begin, unless there was also a certain persistence of vision, some minimum unit of

time during which things would stay similar enough for him to begin to paint, unless two moments could be seen as one. How is it

then that one moment can be at once infinitely divisible and undivided, two nows and only one now? How can that moment Monet paints be both the beginning and the end of the series and only one of the infinitely many moments or canvases in between, both that incomparable moment which makes the series possible and just another moment within it? It is the thinking through of the answers to these questions—or rather, the impossibility of answering these questions, the answers as the impossibility of answering these questions—that will open Monet up to the possibility of qualitative motion. It is precisely this paradox—that each moment is at once the pose and the movement connecting poses, the pose and the impossibility of the pose—that we have tried to explain as qualitative motion. This dual necessity for each nioment to be both two moments and the passage between two moments, at once the beginning and end of movement, is of course the aporia of time as first expressed by Aristotle in his Physics. The solution to this aporia that Hegel 280

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

gives, the only possible way that any moment can be both the beginning and end of the series and all the moments in between (although, as we said, it is just this solution that also makes the

aporia possible), is that the linear conception of time must be folded up into a circle. It is in a circle that every point is at once the beginning and end of the circle and one of the infinitely many points between the beginning and end. And thus it is that we can understand Monet's last great series (but the word no longer strictly applies here) as a solution to the problems of the earlier serial canvases: the Nympheas, a huge circle depicting the waterlily pond at every moment of the day from sunrise to sunset. It is a circle on which

there are no in betweens,

no moments

missing,

because it would no longer be composed of separate canvases. But in another way, of course, this completion is bought only at the price of making the whole canvas in between: if every moment of the day is depicted somewhere on the circle, it is also impossible to

say exactly where any particular moment is. We could not point to a single moment without falling into the same trap as the serial

2. Zoetrope. Photograph by Edwin Smith. 281

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

canvases: it would always be in between, or you would. All time is

there, but only because we cannot see it or say where it is. Qualitative motion is the solution to the enigmas posed by quantitive motion, but only because it does not exist, cannot be proved. And we would say that in the same fashion true motion only arose in those early cinematic devices with the incorporation of the wheel (Fig. 2), thus exploiting the phenomenon of the persistence of vision (the persistence of vision being precisely the confusion of two moments as the same moment, a kind of blindness, but also, while this blindness is going on, the reception of the next moment,

the splitting up of one moment into two; it would be, as in Benjamin, the very simultaneity of the unconscious and the conscious, memory and perception). When we look at the Phenakistoscope or the Praxinoscope, we see that movement

only

occurs there when, by the time the wheel has made its revolution, we can still retain its first appearance in our mind. It is only when the eye mistakes two different occurrences of the same event— separated by the entire span of the circle—that movement actually In a sense then, quite truly, every movement

is both the

beginning and end of the circle, but this only because by the entirety of the circle, because of all those figures in between which are excluded. And this possible to say that in cinema, as in Duchamp, it is

occurs.

it is divided other virtual is why it is the spectator

himself who enters into the work, becomes

the surface on which

the work is inscribed. If in cinema we can never see the surface of inscription, if the surface onto which the film is projected is always invisible, this is only because the eye that would see this is itself the screen. This is the fascinating aspect of Monet’s Nympheas, too, for precisely there the real vanishing point of the work, the point upon which all the canvases converge, is the spectator himself in its centre.

(But, of course,

if the spectator

completes

the work,

closes the circle, he is also the impossibility of completing the work, closing its circle, for this equivalence could never be seen, the spectator could never see himself seeing except from outside of the circle—or, to put it another way, the spectator could never see the whole work at once except by a kind of persistence of vision, because wherever he turned his head there would always be something behind him, he would be looked at before he himself sees.) Monet's work is filmic, finally, not because it is about time,

expresses time, but because it is in time, can only be perceived 282

KEITH BROADFOOT AND

within

time.

The

entry of the spectator

REX BUTLER

into the work,

as with

Duchamp, is the entry of the work into time. This would be the Copernican revolution inaugurated by Monet: to put man, not the work, at the centre; but this would also be the unlocatability of the centre, the fact that any centre must always contain another,

previous centre, and so on, until infinity. Of course, to speak of the spectator being the surface onto which the work is inscribed would only be possible because the work is somehow projected; or (it comes to the same thing), to say that the spectator forms part of the work of art, that the work of art is not complete without its spectator, is to say that the spectator projects onto the work of art. This again marks the progress from the serial canvases to the Nympheas. If in the serial canvases we have an idea of a real haystack behind all of its impressions—a kind of perspectivism—in the Nympheas we can no longer distinguish between the light and what it illuminates, the support and

its subject, what projects and what is projected (the whole impossibility for the critics of deciding whether the water of the Nympheas reflects the sun or illuminates from within, whether the waterlilies

are shadows cast by the sun, only virtual, or can be seen directly, project themselves,

are actual).

This would

be the difficulty of

locating the sun in the Nympheas, of saying whether the sun is behind the objects in the water or in front of them. This light would be the simultaneity of projection and introjection in cinema—or, as before, that impossibility of establishing the direction of meta-

3. Praxinoscope Theatre. Photograph by Edwin Smith. 283

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

4. Praxinoscope Theatre. Image seen through the proscenium. Photograph by Edwin Smith.

phoric transferral in the art of mechanical reproduction and afterwards: whether it goes from the literal to the metaphoric, the sun to the waterlilies, or from the metaphoric waterlilies to the sun.

to the literal, the

This is why it is with the inclusion of the wheel and light that the cinematic machine is definitively invented. In both, the spectator enters the work. This is why we would say that cinema, animation, begins with Emile Reynaud and his Praxinoscope,

which was the first device able to project animated drawings (Figs. 3, 4). That is to say, he constructed the first machine Christian Metz would recognize as essentially cinematic, for precisely here it would be a question of the spectator’s identification with a beam of light, when he would become himself the vanishing point, as

opposed to the earlier vanishing point of monocular perspective where the spectator maintains a distinct point of view. We might say that, as opposed to earlier perspectival vision, where the spectator is either the point of view or vanishing point, cinema,

the

filmic in painting, arises when the spectator is at the same time the point of view and vanishing point, when the painting is put into time. Film, qualitative motion in general, is always this thinking of the circular form of time, the circular in time, where at once two

points—the point of view and the vanishing point—are the same

and infinitely distant, where there is an unbridgeable depth between any two points. It is the thinking that for time to pass, for motion to be possible, all moments must be one moment, the circle

284

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

must be completed; and yet that there must always be another moment

remaining

for this equivalence to be made, there must

always be two moments, the circle must forever remain open. We must grasp all time, all movement, as one; and time, movement, is

always further divisible, will squeeze through any possible calibration we can make of it. It is this that Duchamp and Monet grapple with in their art, this form of time; it is this motion or time that they try to present in their work. But is this not as well the form of time and movement that animators also try to deal with? Or better, we think, is it not animators who show us essentially what is at stake in modern art, the animation of the picture, the presentation of time, movement, in art? This for us would define modernity in art—and it is animation, the question of animation,

that is the best example of it. But ‘animation’ here is not to be confused with Futurism or Cubism, for example, or any other art historical movements; we do not mean modernism in any chronological or epochal sense. Rather, as we hoped to suggest by yoking together such disparate artists as Duchamp and Monet, modernism in this sense would be a perpetual problem in art, always new, always novel; the problem of art itself, all art.

IV

In their book, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston make a distinction between the two different

ways of picturing animation. The first is known as ‘straight ahead action’ because the animator literally works straight ahead from his first drawing of the scene. He simply takes off, doing one drawing after another, getting new ideas as he goes along, until he reaches the end of the sequence. The second is called ‘pose to pose’. Here, Thomas and Johnston say: ...the animator plans his action, figures out just which drawings will be needed

to animate

the business,

makes

the drawings,

relating

them to each other in size and action, and gives the scene to his assistant to draw the inbetweens.~” In the attempted But stated possibility

first method, we could say it is motion itself which is to be imitated and in the second, the character’s pose. in these terms, as we have said throughout, it is the very of movement that is lost. If motion exists at all, it is in

the impossibility of ever being able to distinguish it from its poses, 285

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

of being able to say whether it is movement comes first. The distinction Thomas

or its poses which

and Johnston make does not

hold, or it is precisely this distinction animators work to overcome. When an animator sketches out the scene in his flicker book,

what is being expressed in the constant alternation between the drawing and how it is seen as the book is flicked through is just this simultaneity of the pose and motion. Though the animator is

only able to work from one to the other, what must nevertheless be

captured in the flicker book, separated only by the thickness of the page or support itself, is the simultaneity of the pose and motion, the simultaneity—at once the same and different—of two poses. The animator must thus work in a realm between the visible and the invisible, between the page of his flicker book as opaque and transparent, as two pages and always between two pages (this like Monet who in the Nympheas wanted to present the instantaneity of every moment in the day but was prevented from doing so by the necessity for a support—this being itself what we mean by simultaneity, the ‘at the same timeness’ of time: the fact that all moments coexist but would be separated by the very time that superimposes them). It is within this passage that the mystery of animation lies, the fact that it has produced what it could never produce, should never have been able to produce. In other words,

the animator can never know in advance what it is he will see— and yet in a way, like the teller of a joke, he must. He must somehow cross the abyss without looking down or falling into Zeno’s paradox: a certain suspension of disbelief, a certain cred-

ulity or taking of chances.

Animation

must

take the risk of

translating motion, which ‘exists’ all at once or outside of time, into

the discrete and successive moments which would both constitute it and destroy it. The animator must position himself somewhere between a motion grasped all at once, foreseen, predicted, and a motion that can only be seen in retrospect, that is, cannot be seen at

all. We are approaching here the enigma of all gesture, all movement in art—an enigma which we can see in a beautiful passage by Merleau-Ponty from his book, Signs. He speaks of Matisse looking back at a film of himself painting in slow motion, something that leaves him unable to explain how he actually began to paint, how he chose the correct line to be drawn (though it is not simply here a question of Matisse choosing some particular line because this line, Merleau-Ponty is suggesting, also chooses or draws Matisse). Merleau-Ponty says: 286

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

The impression was prodigious, so much so that Matisse himself was moved, they say. That same brush which, seen with the naked eye, leaped from one act to another, was seen to meditate in a solemn and expanding time—in the imminence of a world’s creation... And Matisse would be wrong if, putting his faith in the film, he believed that he really chose between all possible lines that day and, like the God of Leibniz, solved an immense problem of maximum and minimum. He was not a demiurge; he was a man... By a simple gesture he resolved the problem which in retrospect seemed to imply an infinite number of data...”°

Merleau-Ponty is speaking here of two infinities, an infinity of the maximum (which we might say is the idea of the work as a whole, or movement grasped at once) and an infinity of the minimum (which we might say is the work or motion as infinitely divisible, infinitely analyzable). And the problem for the painter, as Merleau-Ponty sees it, is how to connect these two infinities, which would be, of course, infinitely distant from each other. But there is

another side to this question, for these two infinities could be infinities, could be infinitely far apart from each other, only because they have already been compared, because a gesture already connects them. This is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the two sides of painting, the oscillation between retrospection and haste.

In terms of animation, however, this produces the effect that

it becomes impossible to decide whether the hand leads the character or the hand simply follows where the character leads it. It is significant that in the early animated films by Winsor McCay, Emile Cohl, or even in Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck, the actual draw-

ing of the cartoon figure on the screen is shown before us, for this seems to allude to something crucial to the experience of animation. It is to suggest that the two characters—the animator and the animated—and the two gestures—the gesture of the animator’s hand and the gesture of the character’s figure—are both infinities (whether of the minimum or maximum we could not decide), two infinities which, as infinite, as incomparable, resemble each other

perfectly. But this resemblance itself can never be actually given: it would be only the moment of animation which connects them. The animator is trying to depict the equivalence between the movement

of his hand

and

the movement

of the character,

but the

enigma of his art is that this equivalence can never be seen. This moment of equivalence, although the animator must always anticipate it to begin to draw at all, must also be unexpected, a product

of chance. 287

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It would be interesting to consider Jackson Pollock’s work in relation to animation here. It was Pollock, we must not forget, who

was painting his major canvases at the same time as the great American animators—Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery— began their careers. There is in Pollock the same violence, destruction, humour and obsession with motion. Significantly as well, it is

Pollock who, for Clement Greenberg and others, broke with Cubism and its solutions for depicting motion in precisely attempting to liberate the line from the figure. But it must be specified that he broke with Cubism not simply because his line can be said to pass between points, as Michael Fried and Deleuze after him suggest, but rather because it becomes impossible to decide whether the line passes through or between points. Pollock does not simply do away with figuration only for the figure to return in another way; rather, exactly like a cartoon, it becomes impossible to say whether Pollock follows a figure or the figure follows Pollock. In his famous painting, Cut-Out, for example, it cannot be

determined whether the figure is released into or out of the canvas. Analogously, it would also be impossible to decide whether Pollock proceeded by ‘straight-ahead action’, simply proceeding

from the first veil of paint to the last, creating the final effect of the ‘all-over’, or by in betweens—starting as it were with the ‘all-over’ and proceeding to layer the veils between it. We could not say whether there is a single line without a break in Pollock or a series of superimposed images laid on top of each other, whether the image floats on the surface or recedes in depth.* The more intriguing animation aspect of Pollock’s work, however, would be the way the figure is produced through the effect of gravity,

the fall of the paint.

Here

there

would

be

the

same

relationship between gravity and movement that we see, for example, in Jones’ Road Runner and Coyote cartoons: the way in which the figure is given there, and in animation in general, as an effect of gravity, the characters only truly revealed by the different rates at which they fall. Pollock comes not simply at the end of figuration but also at the beginning of a new figuration in which the figure is no longer opposed to its dissolution but only given, as Deleuze says of the figure in cartoons, in or as its very dissolution. The figure is literally formed here by the different rates at which the paint falls upon the canvas, or even by its very suspension above

the canvas.

With

the figure as the effect of this falling,

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KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

produced either within or from motion, it cannot be determined if the figure belongs to the support or not. This is reminiscent of Muybridge’s original experiment, in which the trotter, Occident, only moved insofar as it was impossible to decide whether its hoof, like Pollock’s brush, ever came in contact with the ground. The figure, then, would be not so much a product of a single, successive time but of a kind of rhythm, a concatenation of several different times, some slower and some faster, some too fast to be

seen and others virtually immobile. Pollock’s canvas is an effect of these different temporalities; and this is perhaps why Greenberg is able to compare it to a musical polyphony, and more specifically, to twelve-tone music. He establishes, in other words, an analogy between two art forms which correspond in their breaking with linear, representational

movement,

their distance

from

intuitive

forms of space and time. He disagrees, however, with DanielHenry Kahnweiler, who had already used the analogy between art and music—Cubism and twelve-tone music—to restore a kind of ‘architecture’ to art’s formlessness. Greenberg writes in his essay, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’: The parallel I see is more specific. Mondrian’s term, ‘equivalent’, is to the point here. Just as Schonberg makes every element, every sound in the composition of equal importance—different but equivalent—so the ‘all-over’ painter renders every element and every area of the picture equivalent in accent and emphasis. Like the twelve-tone composer, the ‘all-over’ painter weaves his work of art into a tight mesh ace scheme of unity is recapitulated at every meshing point.

What is Greenberg’s exact objection here to Kahnweiler’s use of the analogy between art and music to reduce their formlessness to a kind of ‘architecture’? Greenberg recognizes that art and music— the spatial and the temporal—would only exist in their analogy to each other. Thus, in paradoxical fashion, it is the very comparison

between art and music which precedes each of them and makes them possible as such. In order to say what is unique about music, to speak of the way in which it is incomparable, we must resort to an analogy taken from another art form, to a comparison. The genius of criticism has been to find a language that has nothing to do with art to speak of the fact that art no longer has anything to do with anything else. Greenberg’s use of the comparison between art and music in terms of the accent can be understood as charac289

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

terizing for him that which is unique or essential to art. Yet it is evident that this incomparability is bought at a cost: art could never really be incomparable, for it would only be possible because of its comparison with another art. That is to say, it is only because both of these arts imitate the accent (or, we might say, because both

imitate motion) that they can be compared. Greenberg's alternative to Kahnweiler is thus to utilize the comparison not to establish imitation or form but to maintain a difference between two art ‘forms’ which imitate nothing or are formless. But, of course, aS we

have suggested, there is no real alternative here; and we can perhaps read into Greenberg’s words not the attempt to establish this alternative but for the two alternatives—the comparable and the incomparable—to exist at the same time. This can be justified if we acknowledge the significance of the analogy being formed in relation to twelve-tone music—a music, of course, which desired no longer to be music as such. Traditionally, the analogy between art and music was dependent upon the distinction between melody and harmony already within music. Through this distinction, that which allows imitation in painting—

the line—can be compared with that which allows imitation in music—melody. Already we must note here that the comparison between painting and music relies upon a prior comparison within music itself. But it is perhaps the status of comparison itself which is here at stake—the collapse of the possibility of distinguishing between the comparable and incomparable. Twelve-tone music, in its polyphony, would be melody and harmony at the same time. It would be, as Greenberg says of Pollock’s painting, ‘the same and different all-over’. With the advent of this condition, it would be

impossible to decide whether accent or dissonance (Greenberg's terms of comparison) produces this equivalence between melody and harmony or is produced by it; whether it is the accent which imitates or the accent which is imitated. The incomparable and comparable would exist at the same time. But to return to animation, is it any coincidence that around the same time as Pollock was creating his innovations in painting, Walt

Disney was making an identical breakthrough in his masterpiece, Fantasia, by means of the same rethinking of the relationship between movement and music? Like Pollock and twelve-tone music, Disney can be understood

as creating something which is

neither simply art nor music but rather art and music. As Wilfred 290

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

Jackson, one

of the early members

of the Disney team, later to

introduce the metronome for relating sound and image, said: I do not believe there was much thought given to the music as one thing and the animation as another. I believe we conceived of them as elements which we were trying to fuse into a whole new thing that would be more than simply movement plus sound.”°

There is more at issue, then, than simply tracing the intersection or analogy between the soundtrack and the animated image in Disney. Initially, the problem would be raised by trying to determine if it was a musical theme or vocal inflection which led to the development of a character or vice versa. But perhaps the character and animation are formed by the very destruction of this analogy, in the movement beyond this analogy. If Disney cartoons exist within a comparison to music, in another way what is most characteristic of them would be lost in this comparison. Thomas and Johnston speak in Disney Animation of the fact that it was music that allowed animators to cut to the essence of the action: ‘When ordinarily they would have taken an extra eight or ten frames to complete an action, stage a pose, or register a look, the

music made them search for the absolute essence of the idea—that and nothing more’.”” But here the essence of animation would be precisely what is non-essential to the action, what cannot be given by poses, movement or music. Or better, what is essential to

animation is just what gives itself—like that laughter we give when we watch a cartoon. With this, so to speak, lack of essence to the action in animation,

it could be proposed that it was with the popularity and promotion of Disney animation that there could be read one of the first signs of what Deleuze refers to as the crisis of the action-image. Here it is again Eisenstein, with his astute observations on the innovations of

Disney, who offers the possibility for understanding the importance of animation in constituting this crisis. Eisenstein gives examples of the elastic play of the contours in Disney’s images: With With With runs

surprise—necks elongate. panicked running—legs stretch. fright—not only the character trembles, but a wavering line along the contour of its drawn image.”°

Ultimately, with this elasticity of the contour there is achieved, Eisenstein argues, an independence of the contour in relation to the 291

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

character or the figure that the contour delineates and contains. The contour takes on an independent life and movement which is not restricted by the figure itself. In such a situation ‘the unity of an is dissected’; and as a

object and the form of its representation

consequence there is a differentiation between the character and its representation in a state of action—the character is not defined by or limited to the movement

could be termed

of its figure. There is, in fact, what

an irrational relation between

after Deleuze

character and action, a relation which is a non-relation, since what

prevails, Eisenstein suggests, the outlined character and an This discordance between Eisenstein to that unity of Shakespeare, where ’...a trait

is ‘a self-contained independence of independence of his actions’.”” character and action is compared by personality and action we find in of personality determines the course

of action and...an action, in turn, moulds

the personality of the

character’.*’ Eisenstein defines the former state (of non-relation between character and action) as a lack in comparison with the latter, speaks of the childlike vision of Disney leading to the maturity of Shakespeare, but can we not also see it as coming in a way after it? This would be the possibility opened up by Deleuze’s speculations on the collapse of the action-image, which might be explained by him as a result of the introduction of music into the space of the Shakespearean stage—or even as the thinking through of that aporia involved in saying that it is personality that determines the course of action and action which moulds the personality of the character. For Deleuze, that cinema of the body, of ‘embracing, striking, intertwining and bumping bodies’, which

succeeds the cinema of the action-image, would be characterized by the simultaneity of the body and thought, no longer the body as an obstacle to thought or thought as involving the necessary immobilization of the body but the body as thought itself, ‘that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life’*'—the thought ultimately of, or rather a thought equivalent to, an animate body. It would no longer be

therefore a matter of trying to stage an action, of cutting to the ‘absolute

essence

of the idea’;

rather,

it would

be—and

it is

animation which first shows us this—a question of action as the impossibility of the idea or the impossibility of the idea of action. Action and the idea are no longer given by each other but simply give themselves, beyond any analogy or comparison.

Zo2

KEITH BROADFOOT AND

REX BUTLER

Vv In conclusion, then, we could not say whether it is movement

as

the essence of animation that allows its analogy with music or movement which arises as a result of its analogy with music. And

this is what we mean by saying that it is movement as non-essence which is itself the essence of animation: not simply that it can or

cannot be given but that it would be excluded at the very moment it is given. It cannot be seen when it is most visible, most active, most at play; but, of course, in another sense, it is precisely what gives itself to be seen in animation. This is how Deleuze understands the relationship between music and image in the cinema of

the time-image, which is what we would say the cartoon—at least in its post-Fantasia form—is: There is certainly a relation, but it is not an external correspondence nor even an internal one which would lead us back to an imitation; it is

a reaction between the musical foreign body and the completely different visual images, or rather an interaction independent of any common structure... [T]here is no movement common to the visual and to sound, and music does not act as movement, but as ‘stimulant

to movement without being its double...’**

In addition, Deleuze speaks of this mixture of the cinemas of image and sound and the new forms of time which are to be found there in terms of the implication—the falling-together, we might say—of two different movements, two different times: the first, the ritournelle, the circular dance, the fox-trot; the second, the gallop,

which is also a kind of dance, but an asymmetrical one in which partners are not exchanged according to any predetermined formula;

the first circular, the second

successive.

Now,

if their

relationship can simply be thought of dialectically or on the basis of their analogy, such as we find in musicals, in a more interesting

way, in what Deleuze calls the ‘image-crystal’, we can also find them coexisting as both the horizontal orientation of presents which pass and the vertical orientation of pasts which conserve themselves.

It is a simultaneity, as it were, of the timelessness of

the ritournelle complication,

and Deleuze

the successiveness says, that we

of the gallop.

It is a

find in the road-movie

or

western. But could we not say that we also get this mixture of times in the road-movies

or westerns of cartoons, those cartoons

which take movement itself as their guiding principle? 293

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

With this gallop we

return, of course, to Muybridge

and his

experiment—the whole question there of whether or not Occident remains in contact with the ground throughout the duration of his trot. Stanford bets that it does not. He bets, in other words, that he

can identify the position of the horse in space at a certain time: that precise moment when all four of its feet are off the ground. He bets that the horse will strike a pose—a position that could only exist outside of motion and which could be captured in a photo or photogramme—at some time in its movement. And it does not matter for Stanford whether it is this pose which allows movement (whether it is only because the horse leaves the ground that movement is possible) or movement which allows the pose (whether the horse could get off the ground, strike a pose, only because it is in movement). All he is betting on is the possibility of distinguishing the pose from movement: that movement is either made up of poses or makes poses and that these poses can be photographed. In a sense, Muybridge bets against this: he argues that movement cannot be distinguished from the pose. But there is a paradox here because he cannot simply win the bet by showing that the horse does not get off the ground; he cannot show a pose or even a series of poses of the horse not getting off the ground. To prove it like this—to win the bet outright—would also be to lose the bet. He could only demonstrate that Occident does not strike Stanford’s pose by showing another pose, thus winning Stanford’s bet for him. Rather, he must argue negatively: he might not be able to win the bet, but he can always show that Stanford cannot win it. (And thus, of course, the old dispute over whether there really was a bet between Stanford and Muybridge, with some historians arguing that there was and some that there was not. And we ourselves would have to say—or bet—both. Or say that what is at stake here is the whole possibility of betting itself, that what Stanford and Muybridge are betting on is the very possibility of betting itself.) In other words, Muybridge is not betting on the appearance of a certain occurrence but only on the fact that it will not occur. He is betting not that you can see the pose or movement (for, if Stanford’s bet concerns our ability to see or distinguish the pose, it would also be a bet that we could see or distinguish movement) but rather that you cannot see the pose or movement. There is entailed an endless vigil of movement, which perhaps accounts for the extraordinary number of experiments he carried out. And with 294

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

each one—each one in which he did not see a pose—there is a certain lengthening of the odds that Stanford could win his bet. But the bet itself, the actual odds of seeing this pose, can never be

given, never be finally calculated—just as Muybridge can never finally win his bet. For it is only the chance that this event will occur that makes the bet possible at all. It is only because it is possible that Stanford is right—that taken accurately enough, using finer and finer slices of time, the pose can be seen—that the bet is possible, that Muybridge can win his bet. And is this not, strangely, all we have been saying about movement? Although it can never be given—and the bet only continues, only remains open insofar as it cannot be given—what makes the bet possible, what sustains the credibility of this movement which can never be seen, is the possibility that one day it will be. It is perhaps this profound ambivalence which affects us most strongly in these Muybridge images: the fact that they exist only within the shadow of an event which would literally be their end, an event which could never be known or seen in advance. Finally, just like the motion it was meant to calculate, we would say that we

could never see this bet. As in horse-races, we

can

divide this bet up into its odds or possibilities, as Muybridge can divide motion up into its poses or photogrammes; but—and this is paradoxically what Muybridge was trying to prove by just such a division—what makes this bet possible, just as what makes this division into parts or poses possible, can never be itself calculated or divided.

And,

most

profoundly,

would

it not be this unde-

cidability—this bet—that we have been calling qualitative motion throughout? It is not simply that the pose or movement cannot be given because we could only demonstrate this by means of another pose or movement but rather the impossibility—precisely that suspension or suspense at stake in the bet—of deciding whether the pose exists or not. It is just this undecidability that makes us look for movement, that constitutes the fascination of movement: the fact that it can neither be demonstrated nor refuted, can neither

be said to exist nor not to exist. And in the cartoon as well we see this same fragile credibility, kept aloft only by the fact that we cannot—but one day might—see it moving. As long as we cannot see it move we remain afloat, in

motion. But to look—to look down or to look too closely, to hope to know or to prove movement as Stanford tried to—is to fall. As 295

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

with Occident, as long as we cannot tell whether we are touching the ground or not we remain in motion. As with the Road Runner: his blindness, his stupidity, his lack of self-consciousness

allow

him to cross the abyss. But his look back at the Coyote—the Coyote’s science, empiricism—ensures that the Coyote will always fall. It is only the Coyote, eager to plumb the mysteries of movement, who

is finally rendered

motionless,

who

falls at the very

moment he discovers its secret. He is no longer that Road Runner he yearns to be but only his imitation: Icarus, man. But perhaps the final irony is that the Road Runner himself could never know he had won the bet or race. All this as that conclusive photo—that photo in which Stanford proved to Muybridge that the horse was off the ground—was lost. Is it not precisely in this loss that Muybridge wins the bet? Is not every one of these photogrammes the loss of this photo? Is it only because the Road Runner does not know whether he can fly or not that he can cross the abyss?

5. Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner in Chuck Jones’ Zoom & Bored. © 1957 Warner Bros. Inc.

296

KEITH BROADFOOT AND REX BUTLER

NOTES Gilles

Deleuze,

Habberjam

and

Cinema

Hugh

1:

The

Movement-Image,

Tomlinson

(Minneapolis:

trans.

Barbara

University

of

Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 5. N

ibid. ibid., pp. 5-6. It would be interesting to think how Degas tried to break with the pose in his work. We are thinking here not only of his paintings of ballet and horse-racing—which we know to be influenced by Muybridge—but also of his sculpture. ibid., p. 6. We would refer the reader here to the analysis of Jacques Derrida in his essay ‘Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982), esp. pp. 54-62. It seems to us very important to bring Derrida’s essay to bear on these two volumes on cinema by Deleuze, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image. Our analysis is very indebted to Derrida’s. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 5. Aristotle, Physics IV, trans. R.P. Hardie and

G.K.

Gaye

(Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1930), 219a, as trans. by Jacques Derrida in ‘Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, p. 49.

Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda and trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988). ibid., p. 21. ibid., p. 42. ibid., p. 9.

Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, Screen, vol. 13, no. 1, Spring 1972, p. 17. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p.

190. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, p. 50.

ibid., p. 96. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: ‘Freud’s Papers on Technique’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 147. ibid., p. 149. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,

Illuminations, pp. 238-239. As quoted by Miriam Hansen in ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology’, New German Critique, no. 40, Winter 1987, p. 221.

20 21

Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, p. 49. Cited in Duc de Trévise, ‘Le Pelerinage de Giverny, II’, Revue de l'art

PT

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

ancien et moderne, January-February 1927, p. 126, and quoted in John House, ‘Monet and the Genesis of his Series’, Claude Monet: Painter of Light (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1985), p. 25. Also to be read in this connection between Monet and cinema are Steven Z. Levine’s ‘The ‘Instant’ of Criticism and Monet’s Critical Instant’, Arts Magazine, vol. 55, no 7, March 1981, and ‘Monet's Series: Repetition,

22

Obsession’, October 37, Summer 1986. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), p. 24.

23

24

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 45-46. Matisse is in a sense ‘moved’ and overcome by the art of animation as Merleau-Ponty could be understood to be dealing here with that which is known in the history of animation as the ‘lightning sketch’. We should note in passing that this question of superimposition arises in Pollock as a result of the separation he instituted between colour and line. Colour is no longer supplementary to and defined by the line. The line, it could be said, now defines movement rather than colour,

25

26

or

rather,

movement

defines

the

line—but,

of

course,

movement also defines nothing or movement cannot be defined so line and colour can no longer be related at all. The figure is thus now produced in the destruction of the relationship between the line and colour. And it is with a more recent American painter, David Salle, that we can see this absence of relation figured precisely in terms of animation—in his painting, The Happy Writers (1981), shown at the 1987 London ICA exhibition, Comic Iconoclasm. Also shown at the same exhibition was Peter Saul’s Donald Duck Descending A Staircase, which says everything we would want to say about the relationship between Disney and animation. Clement Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picure’, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 156-157. Cited in Thomas and Johnston, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, p. 148. In general, on the relationship between music and animation, see Chapter 4, ‘The Disney Sounds’.

DY 28 29 30 Bil

32

ibid. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, p. 57. ibid., p. 61. ibid. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 189. ibid., p. 239.

298

MOSAIC INFINITY EDWARD COLLESS DAVID KELLY

One must begin now unfashionably. Imagine, still enlivened by the pretext of Borges, who fancied he lost himself in contemplation, an

all consuming image. Imagine, then, the Aleph and Zahir, two images of the universe: the first, the coincidence of all points in a singular, garrulous luminosity; the last, the disappearance of the Many in the One in the precipitous divinity of its reiteration. (Do not be mistaken: the Zahir is not a mantra. We know that the mantra is an induced idiocy, trying animation of the soul in chattering

ecstasy.

Then

again,

neither

does

the Zahir

have

a

liturgy: no ceremony, no ritual, no invocation to attend its compelling epigraphic assignment. We do not reiterate the Zahir: the Zahir is simply reiterative. Only in a peculiar way the Zahir has a compelling iconography whose parenthetic history details the coincidence of excerption and absorption.) Now Borges opens a parenthesis to tell us that. (In Guzerat, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java, a blind man from the mosque of Surakarta whom the faithful pelted with stones; in Persia, an astrolabe which Nadir Shah caused to be sunk to the bottom of the sea; in the Mahdi’s prisons,

along about 1892, it was a little compass Slatin touched, tucked

which Rudolf Carl von

into the fold of a turban; in the mosque

of

Cordova, according to Zotenberg, it was a vein in the marble of one of the twelve-hundred pillars; in the Tetuan ghetto, it was the bottom of a well.) (In 1939 it was the 42,571st frame of John Ford’s film

Stagecoach—the face of actor Thomas Mitchell.)

To begin with, then, some images, excerpted from obsession; 299

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

and a single image, perhaps the same. For Borges’ first person narrator in Buenos Aires, the Zahir is this parenthetic catalogue of

irremedial distraction, and equally is a single 1929 twenty centavo coin which he quickly rids himself of for a drink. As memory of this consumes

his thoughts, as, more

and more,

his idea of the

world is supplanted by the idea of this apparently inconsequential thing, this ‘incomplete’ narrator, ‘Borges’ (‘I am no longer the ‘I’ of

that episode’), recollects his disappearance into the Zahir’s singular repetition in his mind only as the exercise of an inscrutable destiny. He thinks, he ‘tries to think’, that perhaps his monomania

is the

itinerary of the soul, that behind the coin is God. What distinguishes the Aleph from this indistinct absorption is its demonstrable

clarity, its cumulative

extroversion,

its demand-

ing and animated utterance. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them amazed me more than the fact that all of

them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive... The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished.

Each thing (a

mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America;... I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the

Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon—the unimaginable universe. If the

miserable

Zahir

but

is exclusive,

faithful

occasioning

introversion,

an

the Aleph

extraordinary,

a

is appallingly

inclusive, for anything can be the Aleph; worse, the Aleph becomes

all things, for the Aleph contains everything and therefore must contain itself and its starstruck witness. So far from being unique,

the Aleph is wondrously, alarmingly common,

and, in its banal

plenitude of differences, is seen as undiscriminating. Bland idiotic, the world is comprehended in it as an infinite 300

and text

EDWARD COLLESS AND DAVID KELLY

enfolding its reader as an array of appearances amid a prospect of delirious views. (The Borges which narrates his wonder at the sight of the Aleph is fashioned after the dandy; the Borges which writes of the Aleph is like a monk feeling only pity for the Alephic creature—needless to say, the writer’s Aleph is in fact a Zahir.) The one who sees this miracle, the jealous owner, possessed of the Aleph, master of ceremonies in the secretive, fractal dimensions

of textuality, is himself devalued by his vision: he sees himself simultaneously, clearly from every angle, yet without distinction. Accomplice to the dull eventuality of an indiscriminate world... that is the Alephic effect of the viewer in this instant of omniscience. It empties him of consequence and yet demands a chronicle of his endless observation: it commands his animation before the world, before the world pausing for an instant in its timeless mosaic as a meaningless emblem—an enfolded, tesselated simultaneity of imagery frozen in a scenario of rapturous idiocy. The Aleph demonstrates, in the animation and depletion of its mesmeric beholder, that the world is a computable infinity of details of itself, contained anamorphically within each and every infinitesimal detail. (It is this logical impossibility that, without question, impels the utterances of the respondent relentlessly explicating the intertextuality of details: animated polylogue of Alephic animation, he is the true convener of this infinite conversation. Here, in an instant, is the orderless array of the world’s

infinite details: another momentary pandemonium.) Operator

of animation,

labyrinthine

imagination

of instan-

taneity, the Aleph too is this effusive engagement with the first person in the present tense, according it a dynamic asymmetry: for, animated before the world, the convener of this babble must lose

the world of the Aleph—his multifarious yet singular view of the world and his professed place, both in it and around it—as he successively reconstructs the infinitesimal moment of his instantaneous action. Aside from this Borges: ‘Time, which usually attenuates memories, only aggravates that of the Zahir... From thousands of images I shall pass to one’. That one is the absorbing excerpt—darkly illuminating—is ‘not beyond all conjecture’ (Sir Thomas Browne): it is pictured as the compulsion to repeat, compelled by the compelling (though what one may be is incomprehensible, incommunicado, responseless).

301

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

The Zahir then absorbs all action in contemplative disenchantment with, meditative disengagement from the world. Not really an image the Zahir is the forsaken...mute,

illumi-

nating manuscript of an incomplete and solitary life upon which the soul (possessed by the Zahir) has signed itself to eternity. So that one is inanimate,

remote, lost in resemblance

to a desolate

God. Possession of the Aleph induces the interminable profession of the animator, a demonic but inconsequential figure. (Is it needful to conclude with the Zahir’s habit, focusing the mind wonderfully?)

REFERENCE

‘The Aleph’ appears in Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, and “The Zahir’ appears in Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths.

302

APPENDIX

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE The First International Animation Conference in Australia

Sydney July 14-17 1988 Conference Director Dr Alan Cholodenko Assistant Ben Crawford

Assisted financially by The Mari Kuttna Bequest and the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney The Australian Film Commission

Film Graphics

Warner Bros. and their Australian representative In Character Licencing Yoram Gross Filmstudio

PROGRAM

Thursday Evening July 14 Chauvel Cinema Formal welcome and introduction of overseas guests by Dr Cholodenko. Host of the Evening: Irene Kotlarz, Director, The Animation Festival, Bristol.

Screening of the winners of The British Film Institute Mari Kuttna Award for Young Animators at the 1987 London Film Festival.

303

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Screening of the program, Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, from The Animation Festival, Bristol.

The Freezer Seducktion, The Opening Night Party. Friday July 15 Chauvel Cinema Introduction by Conference Director Alan Cholodenko.

Screening of the film Heaven and Earth Magic Feature (1961) by the American alchemist surrealist animator Harry Smith. Reading by Ingrid Periz of a paper on Heaven and Earth Magic Feature entitled ‘The Mummy’s Return: A Kleinian Film Scenario’. This paper was written for THE ILLUSION OF LIFE by Professor Annette Michelson, Department of Cinema Studies, New York

University. Australian Animators Session One:

Bruce Petty ‘Animation and Information’

Yoram Gross ‘Why Animation?’ Anne Jolliffe

‘Value for Money’ Margaret Parkes ‘The Role of the Large Studio in Animation’ Julie Cunningham ‘Curious Connections? Peculiar Parallels’

John Bird ‘Swinburne Animation Course’

Stephen Jones ‘Illusion, The Brain, Animation and Video’

Evening Program Host of the Evening: Sandor Reisenbiichler. The Touch of Aquarius, a program of his films.

304

APPENDIX

Saturday July 16 Bosch Lecture Theatres 1 and 2, University of Sydney Australian Scholars Session One:

George Alexander ‘SUSPENDED ANIMATION: From the Silent Scream to The Crashing Hieroglyphic’ Rosalyn Diprose and Cathryn Vasseleu ‘Animation: AIDS in Science/Fiction’ Robyn Ferrell ‘Life-threatening Life: Angela Carter and The Uncanny’ Edward Colless and David Kelly ‘Mosaic Infinity’ Chauvel Cinema Australian Animators Session 2:

John Wilkinson ‘AXOLOTL’

Evan Yabsley ‘Beyond the Dazzle’ Jill Scott

‘Visions of Utopia and Automata’ Andrew Quinn

‘Computer Animation and Computer Generated Sound’ Sally Pryor ‘What kind of tools do computers and video offer the animator /artist?’

Jon McCormack ‘Computer Animation at the Video Paint Brush’

Evening Program

Host of the Evening: Terry Thoren, Director, The Los Angeles International Animation Celebration. ‘Animation is Not Just Cartoons for Kids!’, including a screening of

The 20th International Tournee of Animation. 305

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Sunday July 17 Bosch Lecture Theatres 1 and 2, University of Sydney

Australian Scholars Session Two: Peter Hutchings ‘The Work-shop of Filthy Animation’ Rex Butler ‘The Illusion of Illusion’ (Part One) Lisa Trahair ‘For The Noise of a Fly’ Keith Broadfoot ‘The Illusion of Illusion’ (Part Two)

Ben Crawford ‘Mickey Mouse Theory’ Philip Brophy

‘Symphony /Cacophony /Antiphony’ Chauvel Cinema

Chuck Jones A Lecture on Animation

Discussion of THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Evening Program: Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace

An Evening with Chuck Jones.

306

APPENDIX

QUICK DRAWS 1988 Australian/International Animation Festival

Sydney, July 18-24 Melbourne, July 28-August 4 Adelaide, August 5-9 Brisbane, August 13-14, 20-21

Perth, August 25-28 International Programs Gayle Lake, Irene Kotlarz and Terry Thoren Australian Programs OZ 1 & 2— Amanda Falconer and Gayle Lake OZ 3 —John Bird, Amanda Falconer, Gayle Lake and Richard

Payten (OZ 3 concept — John Bird) Program Edit and Dubs Paul Scott, Metro Television Ltd Festival Consultant Alan Cholodenko

THE BEST OF BRITISH ANIMATION Curated by Irene Kotlarz, Director of The Animation Festival, Bristol. Life Drawing, d. Ian McCall, 1987.

Strangers In Paradise, d. Andy Stavely, 1987. I'm Not A Feminist, But..., d.Marjut Rimminen, 1985. Dreamless Sleep, d. David Anderson, 1986. Rocky, Sten et Pierre, d.Metyn Huseyin, 1985. The Jump, d. Neville Astley, 1987.

My Baby Just Cares For Me, d. Peter Lord, David Sproxton, 1987. Hearts and Stars, d. Sharon Cawdery, 1987. The Web, d. Joan Ashworth, 1987. Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, d. Ron MacCrae, 1986.

The Victor, d. Phil Austin/Derek Hayes, 1985. WAYWARD GIRLS & WICKED WOMEN Curated Bristol.

by Irene

Kotlarz,

Director

307

of The

Animation

Festival,

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Is My Palm Red?, d. Max Fleischer, USA, 1933. Someone Must Be Trusted, d. Christine Roche, Gillian Lacey, UK, 1987. Second Class Mail, d. Alison Snowdon, UK, 1984. Olive For President, d. Max Fleischer, USA, 1948. Mid-Air, d. Vera Neubauer, UK, 1986. Red Hot Riding Hood, d. Tex Avery, USA, 1943. Black Dog, d. Alison de Vere, UK, 1987. Girls Night Out, d. Joanna Quinn, UK, 1986. Some Protection, d. Marjut Rimminen, UK, 1987.

THE BROTHERS QUAY Program One Igor—The Paris Years Chez Pleyel, d. Brothers Quay, Keith Griffiths, UK, 1983. Leos Janacek: Intimate Excursions, d. Brothers Quay, Keith Griffiths, UK, 1983.

Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse, or This Unnameable Little Broom, d. Brothers Quay, Keith Griffiths, UK, 1985. Street of Crocodiles, d. Brothers Quay, UK, 1986. The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, d. Brothers Quay, Keith Griffiths, UK, 1984. Program Two Nocturna Artificialia—Those Who Desire Without End, d. Brothers Quay, UK, 1979.

JAN SVANKMAJER RETROSPECTIVE

Program One The Last Trick of Mr Schwarzwald and Mr Edgar, Czech, 1964. Punch and Judy, Czech, 1966. The Flat, Czech, 1969. A Quiet Week in a House, Czech, 1969. The Ossuary, Czech, 1970.

Program Two Leonardo's Diary, Czech, 1973. Dimensions of Dialogue, Czech, 1982. Down to the Cellar, Czech, 1983. The Pit, Pendulum, and Hope, Czech, 1983.

308

APPENDIX

THE TOUCH OF AQUARIUS The Sandor Reisenbiichler Retrospective.

Kidnapping of the Sun and the Moon, Hungary, 1968. The Year 1812, Hungary, 1972. Moon Flight, Hungary, 1975. Panic, Hungary, 1979. Farewell, Little Island, Hungary, 1987.

THE 19TH INTERNATIONAL TOURNEE

Curated by Terry Thoren, Director of the Los Angeles International Animation Celebration. Anna and Bella, p. Borge Ring, The Netherlands. Bottom’s Dream, p. John Canemaker, USA.

Skywhales, p. Phil Austin/Derek Hayes, UK. Olympiad of Animation Opening Title Sequence, p. Bill Littlejohn, USA. Olympia, p. Csaba Szorady, Hungary. Victoria, p. Zoltan Lehotay, Hungary. 1...2...3, p. Graeme Ross, Canada.

Sigmund, p. Bruno Bozzetto, Italy. Anijam, p. Marv Newland, Canada.

Luncheon, p. Csaba Varga, Hungary. Tony de Peltrie, p. Philippe Bergeron/Pierre Lachapelle/Pierre Robidoux/Daniel Langlois, Canada. Bitzbutz, p. Gil Alkabetz, Israel. Romeo and Juliet, p. Dusan Petricic, Yugoslavia.

Conversation Pieces; Early Bird, p. David Sproxton/Peter Lord, UK. Incubus, p. Guido Manull, Italy. Jumping, p. Osamu Tezuka, Japan.

Moa Moa, p. Bruno Bozzetto, Italy. Vincent, p. Tim Burton/Rick Heinrichs, USA. The Big Snit, p. Richard Condie, Canada. Charade, p. John Minnis, Canada.

THE COMPUTER ANIMATION SHOW

Curated by Terry Thoren, Director of the Los Angeles International Animation Celebration. Abel Showreel, p. Robert Abel and Associates, US.

309

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Speeder, p. Art Centre College of Design, US.

Digital Effects Showreel, p. Judson Rosebush, US. The Shape of Things To Come, p. Robert Abel and Associates, US. Deja Vu, p. Elyse Vaintraub, US. Desenex: The Classic Cure, p. Digital Productions, US. LBS: Fantasy, p. Digital Productions, US. Metafable, p. Tom Hutchinson/Bill Sadler, US.

Nickelodeon Brew, p. Edward Bakst, US. The Great Mouse Detective, p. Walt Disney Productions, US. Brilliance, p. unknown, US. Kiss Me You Fool, p. Tanya Weinberger, US.

Pacific Data Images Showreel, p. Pacific Data Images, US. Opera Industriel, p. Pacific Data Images/ Adam C. Chin/Richard Cohen, US. Omnibus Showreel, p. Omnibus, US. Vision Obious, p. Ruedy W. Leeman, US.

Dance of the Stumblers, p. Steve Segal, US. Tony de Peltrie, p. Philippe Bergeron/Pierre Lachapelle/Pierre Robidoux/Daniel Langlois, Canada. Tuber’s Two Step, p. Chris Wedge, US.

Fairplay, p. Michael Sevilli, US. Abel Commercials, p. Robert Abel and Associates, US. Red’s Dream, p. Pixar/John Lasseter/William Reeves, US.

TV-CF for Kirin Mets, p. Taiyo Kikaku Co., Ltd., US. Oilspet and Lipstick, p. The Late Night Group/Walt Disney Productions, US.

Peppey, p. Toyo Links, US.

High Fidelity, p. Robert Abel and Associates/Randy Roberts, US. Stanley and Stella; Breaking the Ice, p. Symbolics Graphic Division-Whitney, US. Hard Woman, p. John Whitney, Jr., US. Luxo, Jr., p. Pixar/John Lasseter /William Reeves, US.

OZ 2&3 OZ1 Student works from Swinburne. A Craven, d. Anne Algar, 1987. La Lune, d. Ann Shenfield, 1987. The Aardvark Song, d. Claire Bamford, 1986.

Pleasure Domes, d. Maggie Fooke, 1988.

310

APPENDIX

Symbiosis Samba, d. Stuart Ramsden, 1987. Kitchen Sync, d. Maree Woolley, 1984. Home Sweet Home, d. Simone Lindhout, 1987. UF-Oh!, d. Glenn Melenhorst, 1987. Trevor's Island, d. John Taylor, 1988. The Puzzle, d. Paul Gehrig, 1987. Waltz Mambo, d. Andrew Quinn, 1983. X Times 2, d. Noel Richards, 1983. Elephant Theatre, d. Sabrina Schmid, 1985.

Dreamhouse, d. Sally Pryor, 1984.

OZ2 Independent works of the 1980s. Dance of Death, d. Dennis Tupacoff, 1983. Earthlight, d. John Barker, 1988. Where The Forest Meets The Sea, d. Jeannie Baker, 1987. One Potato Moor, d. Bruce Currie, 1986. Poo, d. Stephen French, 1983. Migrants in Aust,, d. Debbie Glasser, 1984. Cathedral Forms, d. Ann Pollack, 1984.

Eclipse of the Delusions, d. Penne West, 1986. Decoding the Link, d. Benay Ellison, 1988. L’ Amour, d. Andrew Pearson, n.d.

The Thief of Sydney, d. Toby Zoates, 1984. Etrusco Me, d., Marcus Bergnar/Marie Hoy, 1984. Air Pirates of The Outback, d. David Johnson, n.d. The Other World, d. Dave Tyrer, 1988. Media Message, d. Jill Scott, 1988.

OAS:

A look at a decade of major change in computer graphics and animation through the work of our most prestigious studios. And a glimpse of the early days of Yoram Gross, Anne Jolliffe, Bruce

Petty and Max Bannah.

Spirit Got Lost by Mental as Anything, p. AXOLOTL. Montage of TCN 9 Station IDs. Montage of Early Television Adverts. Video Paint Brush Showreel. Bird Brain, d. Max Bannah. Montage of ATV 10 Station IDs. Computer Pictures Showreel (no. 1). oid

THE ILLUSION OF LIFE

Chansons Sans Paroles, d. Yoram Gross, 1959. Plus Band Stand

segment. Film Graphics Showreel. Computers are Fun, d. Sally Pryor. Trailer for Cinderella's Story, d. Yoram Gross. Images of Australia Showreel. XYZap Showreel. Computer Picture Showreel (no. 2). Australian History, d. Bruce Petty, 1971.

AI Et Al Pty Ltd Showreel. Excerpt from Dot and The Kangaroo, d. Yoram Gross.

Montage of ATN 7 Station IDs. Big M Ad, p. AXOLOTL. Animagrafx Showreel. ABC Excerpt. Neptune's Revenge, d. Anne Jolliffe.

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FILM, PHILOSOPHY, CRITICAL THEORY

The Illusion of Life is the first book of scholarly essays theorizing the most neglected area of film theory and practice — animation. These essays were presented at the world’s first international conference on animation theory which was held in Sydney, Australia in July of 1988. This book demonstrates the inescapable necessity for Film Studies to take account of animation in order to theorize film. It is essential reading for film theorists and filmmakers, as well as animation theorists and animators. These essays also bring the latest post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches to the theorizing of animation. In so doing, they not only illuminate the nature of the animated film but also

contribute to the theorizing of the idea of animation

as such.

Insofar as these essays broach the relation of animation to representation and simulation, they engage with the most significant and most contemporary issues of the arts and media of our culture.

POWER

PUBLICATIONS

in association with

AUSTRALIAN

FILM COMMISSION

SYDNEY ISBN 0909952 18 3