Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema

This book explores the question of realism in motion pictures. Specifically, it explores how understanding the role of realism in the history of title sequences in film and television can illuminate discussions raised by the advent of digital cinema. Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema fills a critical and theoretical void in the existing literature on motion graphics. Developed from careful analysis of André Bazin, Stanley Cavell, and Giles Deleuze’s approaches to cinematic realism, this analysis uses title sequences to engage the interface between narrative and non-narrative media to consider cinematic realism in depth through highly detailed close readings of the title sequences for Bullitt (1968), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), The Number 23 (2007), The Kingdom (2008), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and the James Bond films. From this critique, author Michael Betancourt develops a modal approach to cinematic realism where ontology is irrelevant to indexicality. His analysis shows the continuity between historical analogue film and contemporary digital motion pictures by developing a framework for rethinking how realism shapes interpretation.

Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist and research artist concerned with digital technology and capitalist ideology. His writing has been translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and published in journals such as The Atlantic, Make Magazine, CTheory , and Leonardo. He is the author of The ______Manifesto , and many books, including The History of Motion Graphics and The Critique of Digital Capitalism, as well as four books on the semiotics of motion graphics: Semiotics and Title Sequences, Synchronization and Title Sequences, Title Sequences as Paratexts , and Typography and Motion Graphics . These publications complement his movies, which have screened internationally at the Black Maria Film Festival, Art Basel Miami Beach, Contemporary Art Ruhr, Athens Video Art Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, the San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads, and Experiments in Cinema, among many others. Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice

Semiotics and Title Sequences Text-Image Composites in Motion Graphics Authored by Michael Betancourt Synchronization and Title Sequences Audio-Visual Semiosis in Motion Graphics Authored by Michael Betancourt Title Sequences as Paratexts Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation Authored by Michael Betancourt The Screenwriters Taxonomy A Collaborative Approach to Creative Storytelling Authored by Eric R. Williams Open Space New Media Documentary A Toolkit for Theory and Practice Patricia R. Zimmermann and Helen De Michiel Film & TV Tax Incentives in the U.S. Courting Hollywood Authored by Glenda Cantrell and Daniel Wheatcroft Typography and Motion Graphics: The ‘Reading-Image’ Authored by Michael Betancourt Ideologies of the Real in Motion Graphics and Title Sequences Authored by Michael Betancourt Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema

Michael Betancourt First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Michael Betancourt The right of Michael Betancourt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Title: Ideologies of the real in motion graphics and title sequences / Michael Betancourt. Description: 1. | New York : Routledge 2020. | Series: Routledge studies in media theory & practice ; 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020408 | ISBN 9780367199197 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429244094 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Titling. | Credit titles (Motion pictures, television, etc.) | Graphic design (Typography) | Realism in motion pictures | Motion pictures— Production and direction—Technological innovations. Classification: LCC TR886.9 .B475 2020 | DDC 777/.55—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020408 ISBN: 978-0-367-19919-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-24409-4 (ebk) Typeset in Perpetua by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Some parts of this book were adapted from previous publications produced in earlier stages of this analysis: “‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures,” AM Journal of Art and Media Studies , no. 16 (September, 2018). “Paranarrative, Postcinema, and the Unheimlich Glitch,” Utsangia.it , no. 15 (March 2018), ed. Francesco Aprile. “The Calligram and the Title Card,” Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies , no. 204, 2015, pp. 239–252. “That Uncanny Moment: Jack Cole’s Design of the Kolchak: The Night Stalker Title Sequence,” Bright Lights Film Journal , January 16, 2014. “Pablo Ferro’s Title Montage for Bullitt (1968): The Criminality Beneath the Surface of Civil Society,” Bright Lights Film Journal , April 29, 2014. for Leah

Contents

List of Figures ix Acknowledgments xiii Preface xv

Introduction 1

PART 1 Subjectivity 21 1 Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) 23 The Long Take 29 The Analytic Montage 36 The Kinestasis 41 Articulating Realisms 45 2 Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23 (2007) 53 Animation as Revelation 65 Performing Interpretation 73 3 Subjective Desire in Goldﬁ nger (1964) 81 ‘Unreal Fantasy,’ Representation, Ontology 89 Composite Realities 92 Seduction 106

PART 2 Objectivity 117 4 Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt (1968) 119 The Discovery Process 124 The ‘Reading-Image’ 131 The ‘Perception-Image’ 139 viii Contents

5 Persuasion in The Kingdom (2007) 149 Articulation and Enunciation in Collage 158 Intertextuality and Archive 171 6 Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) 177 ‘Narrative Function’ and Indexicality 191 Editing Glitches 199

PART 3 Ideologies 207 7 The Medium 209 What was Cinema? 209 Modal Media 211 8 The Message 219 Active Engagement 222 9 Realist Articulation 229 Four Realist Modes 230

Afterword: Digital Movies 241

Index 243 Figures

Frontis Cinématographe Lumière designed and illustrated by Henri Brispot. The earliest poster advertising motion pictures, for a screening on August 28, 1896.

0.1 All the title cards in Touch of Evil (1958), designed by Wayne Fitzgerald. 9 0.2 All the title cards in The Player (1992), designed by Dan Perri. 10 0.3 “James Bond Parody” main title opening from Deadpool 2 (2018), designed by John Likens. 12 0.4 All the title cards in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder. 16 0.5 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a product of its (ontological) direct connection to the real, while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not require this same link to reality for its significance. 17 1.1 Stills from the long take in La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, Lumière Vue no. 91.3 [“Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon ,” also known as “Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory” or “Exiting the Factory,”] (third version, August 1896), directed by Louis Lumière. 26 1.2 Still frames showing the opening long take from Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), designed by Jack Cole. 29 1.3 Still frames showing the background long takes in title sequences for [Top] White Zombie (1931); [Bottom, Left] logo graphic in Dracula (1931); [Bottom, Right] a statue in The Maltese Falcon (1941). 32 1.4 All the title cards in Touch of Evil (1958), designed by Wayne Fitzgerald. 33 1.5 Still frames showing the montage from Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), designed by Jack Cole. 37 1.6 Stills showing the kinestasis in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), designed by Jack Cole. 41 x Figures

2.1 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a claim about ‘the real,’ while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not address reality. 54 2.2 Stills from the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt. 59 2.3 [Left] Stills from the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt; [Right] Stills from the title sequence for Seven (1995), designed by Kyle Cooper. 63 2.4 Stills showing the letters in the main title card melting into a red stain in the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt. 71 2.5 Stills showing facts such as “William Jefferson Clinton has 23 letters” in the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt. 73 2.6 A selection of metamorphic postcards (1890–1910). 76 3.1 Selected stills from the James Bond title sequences: [1] From Russia With Love (1963), designed by Robert Brownjohn; [2] The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder; [3] A View to a Kill (1985), designed by Maurice Binder; [4] Goldeneye (1995), designed by Daniel Kleinman; [5] Skyfall (2011), designed by Daniel Kleinman; [6] Quantum of Solace (2008), designed by Ben Radatz. 85 3.2 Selected stills from Dr. No (1962), designed by Maurice Binder. 93 3.3 All the title cards from Goldﬁ nger (1964), designed by Robert Brownjohn. 94 3.4 All the title cards from From Russia With Love (1963), designed by Robert Brownjohn. 97 3.5 All the title cards from Night of the Generals (1966), designed by Robert Brownjohn. 99 3.6 Selected stills from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), designed by Tim Miller. 100 3.7 Selected stills showing the distortions of Honor Blackman’s face in title card number 7 from the title sequence for Gold ﬁ nger (1964), designed by Robert Brownjohn. 102 3.8 All the title cards from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder. 103 3.9 Selected stills from The Incredible Hulk (2008), designed by Kyle Cooper. 108 4.1 Selected stills showing the relationship and kinesis of the text-mask for “Steve McQueen” in section [1] in the Bullitt (1968) title sequence designed by Pablo Ferro. 121 4.2 Selected stills from the “newsreel” in Citizen Kane (1941) showing the compositing of actor Orson Welles as the fictional “Charles Foster Figures xi

Kane” appearing with actual historical leaders: [Top] Teddy Roosevelt; [Middle] Francisco Franco; [Bottom] Adolf Hitler. 128 4.3 Selected stills showing [Left] the integration of the typography into the realist space itself that transforms typography into an apparently physical presence that is a part of the diegesis in the Easy A (2010) title sequence produced by Christina Hwang; [Right] the articulation of typography as a material discourse that renders non-narrative concerns as a matryoshka-like penetration “deeper” into the découpage via the ‘reading-image’ in the Blow Up (1966) title sequence. 132 4.4 [Left] Selected stills from the Hearst Metrotone News newsreel, “The News Parade of 1934,” vol. 6, no. 226 (December 19, 1934); [Right] Comparable stills from the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane (1941). 143 4.5 Selected stills from the point-of-view pan searching the office at the start of section [2] in Bullitt (1968), designed by Pablo Ferro. 144 5.1 Selected stills showing the sequence addressing the “Oil Crisis” in the 1970s in The Kingdom (2007), designed by Stephan Burle. 154 5.2 Selected stills showing calligram mode title cards that connect footage of the actors with their names in the title sequence for The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936). 156 5.3 Selected stills showing archival footage of Americans living in Saudi Arabia in The Kingdom (2007), designed by Stephan Burle. 159 5.4 Selected stills from [Top] The Next Door Neighbors (1909), and [Bottom] The Mysterious Fine Arts (1910), both directed by Émile Cohl. 160 5.5 Selected stills showing [Top] the shift from animation to still image to motion at the start of the sequence, and [Bottom] the combination of photographic imagery and graphics to create photo illustrations in the title sequence for The Kingdom (2007), designed by Stephan Burle. 170 5.6 Selected stills from the film, La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, Lumière Vue no. 91.3 [“Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon ,” also known as “Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory” or “Exiting the Factory,”] (third version, August 1896), directed by Louis Lumière. 174 6.1 [Top] Encoding errors produce aberrations in the appearance of the image; [Bottom] Example of MPEG frame compression glitch, also known as “datamoshing,” © 2000 Michael Betancourt/Artists Rights Society (ARS). 182 6.2 Stills of “archival footage” from the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane (1941); note the scratches and other dirt that suggests a ‘historical testimony’ to fictional past screenings. 184 6.3 Selected stills showing the fade to white at the end of The Holy Mountain (1973). 190 6.4 Selected stills from the titles for Blade Runner 2049 (2017), designed by Danny Yount: [Left] Showing the glitched opening studio logos; [Right] Showing the digital glitches in the main-on-end title sequence. 192 xii Figures

6.5 Selected stills showing digital glitches from the title sequence to the cable television program Tosh.O (season 1, 2011), designed by Jonathan Gershon. 194 6.6 Selected stills showing glitches that represent a computer malfunction destroying records of financial data due to a “computer virus” in Inspector Morse (series 4, episode 4, “Masonic Mysteries,” 1990). 195 6.7 [Top] Selected stills from Danse Serpentine, Lumière Vue no. 765 (1896) directed by Louis Lumière; [Middle] Selected stills from L’oeuf du Sorcier, Star Film no. 392 (1902), directed by Georges Méliès; [Bottom] Selected stills from Le Cerceau Magique (1908), directed by Émile Cohl. 200 7.1 Venn diagram showing three formal dimensions of cinema and their potential combinatory relationships: the spatial arrangement of projected imagery in space, whether on one screen or several; the temporal ordering of those images; and the continuity of motion within them. 213 7.2 Still frames showing multiple image juxtaposition in Suspense directed by Lois Weber (1913). 214 8.1 The four realist modes are defined by the relationships between naturalism::stylization and indexicality::artificiality. 220 9.1 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a product of its (ontological) direct connection to the real, while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not require this same link to reality for its significance. The examples discussed in Parts 1 and 2 are arranged according to the mode they employ. 231 9.2 Examples of text–image composites from title sequences for Paramount Pictures productions in the 1930s: [Top] Figure–ground mode crediting from Rumba (1935) that does not assert an indexical connection between text and image; both [Middle] selected calligram mode credits from The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936), and [Bottom] selected calligram mode credits from She Done Him Wrong (1933) involve an indexical claim about the identity of the actors. 235 Acknowledgments

Although motion graphics is generally held apart from cinema study, and the title sequence is rarely viewed as a central text or relevant for a theoretical consideration, in this study it is: only the title sequence provides a nexus that allows the consideration of the full range of cinema: fictional, documentary, and avant-garde. My analysis of cinematic realism began more than twenty years ago as a result of putting André Bazin and Stanley Cavell’s ontological proposals for cinema into a specifically Modernist con- text with the avant-garde film and art using Clement Greenberg’s formalist concept of “purity.” Without this initial choice to historicize these ontological claims about an essential “cinematic” nature, defying this connection would not have been possible. Cin- ematic realism is an implicit component of my earlier considerations of title sequences that articulated my discursive approach to motion graphics, and which made the need for this study apparent. This analysis reflects a personal concern with the impacts of digital technology that took shape in August 1990 when I read the article “Ask It No Questions; The Camera Can Lie” in the International Herald Tribune about the possibilities of digital photo collage. It was at that moment, looking at a fabricated photograph of the 1945 Malta conference where Groucho Marx replaced Joseph Stalin and Rambo was seamlessly added to the scene, that the importance of digital imaging for the future of cinema took shape for me: it would not just be an issue of CGI, but of photo-realism. In a project that germinated over such a long period of time, there are many people who contributed to its evolution, far more than I can recognize here: William Rothman, Ruth Perlmutter, Charles Recher, Anthony T. Allegro, and Timothy Inners; my colleagues John Colette, Dominique Elliott, James Gladman, Austin Shaw, Minho Shin, and Woon (“Duff”) Yong had a helpful role in the final selection of ‘model works’ to consider. I also wish to thank my graduate students Noël Anderson, Dominica Jordan, and Matt Van Rys. Special thanks go to my brother, John Betancourt, for his assistance with locating the many title sequences that inform this study. Frontis Cinématographe Lumière designed and illustrated by Henri Brispot. The earliest poster advertising motion pictures, for a screening on August 28, 1896. P r e f a c e

Motion graphics is a hybrid media practice drawing from theory and concerns in multiple disciplines—some cinematic, others from graphic design, and still more derived from art history. This study proceeds from an interest in what realism, a powerful ideology in cinema, means for motion graphics, and how understanding its role in the history of title sequences can illuminate the emerging problems of “digital motion pictures.” Realism has been an omnipresent constraint on all commercial media, so although this analysis borrows concepts and theory from cinema studies, it is not about commercial film, nor is it a work of cinema studies. This issue is a central part of entertainment and informational media, equally a feature of fictive drama and documentary history: what appears can be analyzed, critiqued, challenged. Its philosophical concerns begin first as the basic question about [1] the nature of reality apart from our understanding, then as [2] the status of our understanding of ‘the real’ (reality) that is the subject of this discourse (realism). The initial question [1] determines the content of the claims being made (their ontology); the following [2] describes their form and presentation (their semiology). This analysis can be challenging because [1] and [2] are fundamentally incompatible, and their dissonance creates paradoxes, bedeviling attempts to resolve their conflicts: [a] as the ambivalence between a depiction and the depicted, in imitation of what might be seen if encountering the unmediated thing in the world rather than on-screen (as naturalism); [b] as a depiction which identifies the thing depicted in ways that are not immanent, but are revealed over time or upon examination, documenting causality (as illusionism); [c] as a depiction of a fictive world that corresponds to the rules and expectations known from our everyday experiences (as mimesis ); [d] as a depiction that accounts for things in ways known only by their mental understanding (as metaphysics); [e] as a depiction of the unseen or impossible, a rendering-visible of what does not otherwise exist (as fantasy). 1 Attempting to separate realist form into these specific depictive modes or types rapidly becomes a recursive and ever-finer series of divisions because these five ordinal dimensions intersect and converge, providing multiple layers for simultaneous interpretation, separate only in the degree of their immanence to everyday perceptions (aspirations to being ‘objective’). The range of naturalism::stylization 2 these dimensions create is a constant in commercial narrative cinema, but it becomes ambivalent and contingent with motion graphics, an effect of how this field commercialized the avant- garde. This Modernist heritage 3 shapes the role of realism in motion designs, and is the reason that the title sequence is of critical and theoretical interest, but their analysis is xvi Preface more commonly considered in relation to either narrative functions or graphic design than in regard to cinematic discourse. Considering the realism inherent in the live action photographic component of title sequences changes the center of attention from text and motion typography to the articulation and progression in time of imagery, arenas more thoroughly examined in cinema study. 4 Each chapter in this book develops a theoretical investigation of realism in motion graphics using a prime example chosen for its utility as a case study: the analysis proceeds via an extended close reading that connects these expressions of a subjective or objective order to the historical questions of cinematic ontology and photographic indexicality. They are not chronologically arranged; this analysis does not argue for a directed, teleological progression, nor propose a final answer to the problematics of realism in motion graphics, offering instead an analysis of the shifting semantics of indexicality, its claimed relationship to ‘the real,’ and the distinct interpretive modes this claim creates. The issue of cinematic ontology, raised by André Bazin’s arguments about cinema, haunts this analysis, continually returning in the relationship of artifice to index; however, questions about which claims are valid descriptions of ‘the real,’ and what is the “true” ontology of either analogue or digital images is not of concern to this discussion of how motion graphics deploys indexical claims to expressing/presenting a link with reality. What mat- ters is the claim itself, not whether that claimed link to ‘the real’ is correct, appropriate, or defensible: it is an issue of encultured meaning, the articulation of the relationship to ‘the real,’ and the consequences of its enunciation on the modal presentation. Aban- doning Bazin’s proposal of photographic ontology as articulating realism enables the continuity between analogue and digital motion pictures to become obvious. This modal approach to ‘cinematic realism’ is an en passant alternative to historical, ontological claims for indexicality, offering in their place an engagement where the Modernist concern with “purity”—the essential nature of the image—is tangential (if not entirely irrelevant) to cinematic indexicality and realism. The designs chosen for discussion play a discursive role. Their selection responds to the particular need for a clear example of the theoretical issues under consideration: the role of indexicality in developing “subjective” and “objective” modes that identify ‘the real.’ The resulting discussion is divided into three sections: Part 1 concerns the elaboration of subjectivity; Part 2 addresses the claims of objectivity; and Part 3 is sum- mative, addressing their ideological significance. Jack Cole’s title sequence for the television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) begins the analysis in Part 1 because of its self-conscious invocation of the devices used in realist fiction while simultaneously challenging them, giving their role in this design the capacity to serve as an introduction to the issues of indexicality and realism that return throughout the analysis. This title sequence shifts from “objective realism” to “subjective illustration” by undermining the photographic indexicality common to commercial and avant-garde cinemas in the 1960s—thus producing its famous uncanny affect. The difference between the understanding of “uncanny” in the ‘realist fiction’ of Cole’s design and the ‘metaphysical reality’ that appears in the titles for The Number 23 by Peter Frankfurt (2007) distinguishes the subjective articulations of stylization from the more familiar objective articulations of naturalism. This role for indexicality separates Frankfurt’s subjective design from the dynamics of audience identification that constrain the ‘unreal fantasy’ portrayed Preface xvii on-screen in the subjective allegory of sex shown in Robert Brownjohn’s title design for Goldﬁ nger (1964). His design separates the indexical claim of being-factual in The Number 23 from the artificial claim of being-ﬁ ctional through an ambivalent articulation of desire as subject and meaning. Part 2 explores how the separation of “subjective” and “objective” presentations allows for a clear distinction between documentary and fictional claims, a separation the audience makes easily, but which confounds ontological approaches to photographic indexicality. Digital media develop the separation of “subjective” and “objective” that emerge in motion graphics as an extension of how “objective” presentations converge on historical cinematic realism: Pablo Ferro’s fusion of title credits with montage in the ‘realist fiction’ of Bullitt (1968) distinguishes the narrative emphasis of Giles Deleuze’s analysis by marking the difference between the ‘reading-image’ and the implication of causality imposed by traditional continuity editing. This same objectivity follows a more familiar development in documentary realism in which the historical testimony presented by the collage of animation, typography, and archival photo illustrations in Stephan Burle’s opening design for The Kingdom (2007) separates objective realism from its correlation in photography. This self-contained documentary on United States–Saudi Arabia relations demonstrates the dependence of the ‘documentary effect’ on the audience’s past experiences. In direct contrast to the ‘objective realism’ in Bul- litt and The Kingdom is the paradoxical ‘material function’ clearly on display in Danny Yount’s title sequence for Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The technical failures (glitches) in this design create a confusion between their indexical role as symptoms of a digital breakdown of the image, and their symbolic role as representations. While some of these objective title sequences are narrative, integrated with the storytelling’s elaboration of cause–effect, others are more concerned with how audiences relate the depiction they see on-screen to their own lived experiences, a response that highlights the ‘event’ nature of cinema: the mediation presented on-screen energizes the direct connection of depiction and depicted in ways that appear to turn the mediated denotation of a thing into that thing in itself, making it present for the audience, but mimesis is not a given. 5 Part 3 articulates conclusions about these four realist modes. The two indexical modes, ‘documentary reality’ and ‘metaphysical reality,’ entail a distinction that is more clearly marked in the two artificial modes, ‘realist fiction’ and ‘unreal fantasy.’ All four realist modes deny any ontological assumptions about the imagery on-screen, countering the pervasive historical belief that photographic images are necessarily linked to reality. This limited group of designs allows a deeper consideration of how these dynamics inform the cinematic realism of motion graphics, and a recognition that the “idealized” spectrum of naturalism::stylization is modulated between indexicality::artificiality. The historical breadth of the six motion graphic designs considered in detail enables an exploration of realist problematics separate from the Modernist aesthetics of “purity,” thus bringing the ideological dimensions of the indexical claim into focus. The theories of cinematic realism and ‘filmic reality’ 6 considered in this analysis have two distinct, mutually exclusive approaches to understanding imagery on-screen: as a document related to ‘the real,’ or to conceive cinema as a contra-document (inherently unrelated to ‘the real’)—a division between theories of indexical realism, and theories of internal realism whose consistency the depends on adherence to established semiotic codes rather than an immanent link to ‘the real.’ The role of artificiality is to insist on xviii Preface cinema’s constructed, fabricated nature—which those theories emphasizing cinema as an escapist illusion do only to criticize it for misrepresenting reality. Yet the issue is not the differences or incompatibility of theoretical proposals about cinematic realism made by André Bazin, Stanley Cavell, Siegfried Kracauer, Christian Metz, and Giles Deleuze, nor to deny or elevate the ideological critiques proposed by Peter Gidal, Peter Wollen, and Laura Mulvey, nor even focus on the synthetic analyses of historians such as Christopher Williams and Richard Rushton, but to consider their implicit similarity that appears in the proposition of what appears on-screen as resembling some aspect of lived experience, apparent in their consistent concern for and with narrative dramas, understanding them as either the epitome of realism or its antithesis. 7 Their differences are ultimately about what qualifies as ‘the real’ being presented, not the semantic nature of the claims articulated on-screen. What is of interest in considering realism in title sequences is not the nature of any ontological connection to ‘the real,’ or its ideological basis in unquestioned encultured beliefs, but the ways that claims of indexicality informs and modulates the presentation on-screen. The goal of this study is not to present or critique a theory of realism, even if such a proposal might result, but to understand its ambivalent function in cinema and motion graphics. Negative associations with identifying cinema as illusion—mere fakery—inhabits all the theories of an ontological, indexical connection of photographic imagery to reality; they are evidence of a desire to make cinema into an agent in the world, capable of revealing hidden truths whose ramifications impact ‘the real.’ But what is most interesting critically about any motion picture is precisely the ways that it is not-real. Differences between actual experience and the mediated presentation on-screen are what gives these works their capacity to become commentary, challenges, or critiques; if cinema were indistinguishable from actual life, there would be nothing to gain from it. This “illusory nature,” artificial and constructed, opens the presentation into the realms of enunciation and articulation (whatever the contents might be). Acknowledging such an understanding challenges the established discourse of cinematic realism as only a narrow range of expressions. The reality effect of photographic indexicality itself becomes a point of contention: what all these historical theories of cinema take as a given, assumptions about the apparent ontology of the photographic image, is the product of an elaborate set of technical, aesthetic, and semiotic conventions which render its contents coherent. The difficulties of media production, its heuristic dimensions, remain tangential to the philosophical analysis of cinema, but its impacts are definitive in the actual works. There is no guarantee that the découpage which appears on-screen will reveal any profilmic reality at all, a fact that makes assertions of any innate ontological indexicality problematic. When representation is not an autonomous, guaranteed result, it cannot be an ontological demonstration of reality. Only when everything is arranged precisely the correct way that allows the mediating technology to entirely disappear from consideration does the familiar realism and photographic indexicality result. 8 These complexities are not new: the act of watching a film entails a process that replaces a description or implication of something happening, familiar from theater and literature, with literally showing the action itself. This ‘event’ nature of cinema attracted audiences to early film shows and secured their commercial success as “magical illusions” offering pantomime and anarrative transformations. The plasticity of motion graphics Preface xix derives from ‘trik films’’ use of composite and VFX photography produced before World War I, but their “magic” becomes increasingly rare as the taste and concerns of cinema shifted toward longer, more dramatically coherent stories told in “feature films.” The varied theories of realism in cinema came later, after these early productions had gone out of style, resulting in their initial irreal play being marginalized in cinema history. Title designs, ignored in theorizations of narrative cinema and the realism it creates, offer alternative approaches to realism than what is familiar from the indexicality of photography. The same technologies that make the material transformations and fluid manipulation of photographic images cost effective in digital cinema are a product of technical development and elaboration of those older, analogue mechanisms whose history starts with ‘trik films’ and continues through the invention of motion graphics and on, into digital cinema, making the historically rare composites of motion graphics that fuse graphics, typography, and photography become a mundane part of even the cheapest television commercials; in becoming a digital artifact, what was an intransigent analogue photograph has achieved a protean, metamorphic fluidity that forces an acknowledgment of the narratively supported artifice that is “realism” on-screen. The commercial nature of motion graphics ties them to the same realist demands of other popular media. Title sequences provide a unique resource for considering this heritage without the distrac- tions of fabula (plot, story, and the elaborations of causality) that simultaneously develops and limits the opportunities to consider the role and significance of cinematic realism in dramatic forms. Historically expensive, technically difficult, labor-intensive manipulations of what appears on-screen (based in celluloid photography and the materiality of the film strip, intermittent projection and the whole technical, cultural, and aesthetic apparatus) are now common. Digital imaging easily simulates rarified and unusual photographic techniques to render all images it exhibits as part of the same imaginative range of naturalism::stylization, familiar from the fully synthetic imagery of historical arts such as painting, allowing their everyday incorporation into contemporary cinema. This reconception of motion pictures raises once-settled issues of denotation, morphology, and structure with increasing urgency as computer technology achieves freedom from the limits of analogue photography and offers to facilitate its plastic deformation, 9 giving cinema a new autonomy from the traditional constraints of photographic sampling. This banal observation seems unfamiliar only when compared to the expectations informed by commercial narrative cinema—motion graphics and “vernacular video” 10 descend from politico-aesthetic innovations of avant-garde film and video art. The changes wrought by the “digital convergence” of the 1990s11 have taken nearly two decades to become sufficiently inexpensive that they can shift from being marginal dimensions of production to familiar effects, completely mundane, thus banal. A theory derived from the historical role of realism in motion graphics has the potential to offer insights into the challenges confronting digital motion pictures. 12 The uncanny, realism-challenging aesthetics of digital imaging are familiar from commercial title sequences, motion graphic logos, and other animations that accompany the narrative as various types of paratext. However, the changes wrought by digital cinema are most apparent in the democratization of access to what historically was the almost exclusive domain of major studios13 —the everyday production of motion images, for example, in the omnipresence of “webvideo”—a shift that a variety of media critics xx Preface and theorists including Lev Manovich, Richard Grusin, and Steven Shaviro have called “post-cinema.” Their proposal literally means a “cinema after cinema,” transformed and disrupted by digital technology. This historiographic use of post in post- cinema is still an apt designation for an ambivalent, metastable transition between two otherwise distinct and incompatible historical states. It comes into use precisely at moments of change and uncertainty prompted by an accelerating impact of processes already in use, an apparent freedom from the physical constrains of imaging pioneered in motion graphics due to their marginality and pseudo-independence from the main production. Disruption does not emerge suddenly with a bell tolling and everything abruptly assuming a new con- figuration, as art historian Matei Ca˘linescu explained in his book Five Faces of Modernity:

The prefix post is a common terminological instrument in the language of history, and it is quite often a neutral and convenient means of indicating the position in time of events by referring them to an outstanding previous moment. . . . What the prefix post implies, however, is an absence of positive periodizing criteria, an absence which in general is characteristic of transitional periods. 14

As digital technology expands the varieties and means of motion picture production, and the barriers to entry drop, these shifts reveal challenges to established paradigms of cinema and the unambivalent conception of motion pictures that “cinema” historically has signified: an industrial, expensive, and technically esoteric cinematography. This broadening of cinema’s historical assumptions and heuristics is linked specifically to the emergence of issues familiar from in the avant-garde cinema 15 that provides the basis for motion graphics, 16 a further intersection that makes the title sequence of interest theoretically. All machineries are crystallizations of the ideologies that enable their use, form given to thought, making-instrumental the socio-political paradigms of their construction—a reflection of the interface between commercial production and technological innovation. Shaviro is an early advocate of the term post-cinema to describe these changed conditions and potentials of digital tools emergent from the intransience of analogue video and historical optical printing. His analysis connects the cultural-technological shift from film/television to networked digital media and algorithmic processing as revelatory of the emergent political and social system of digital capitalism. 17 The issues that concern his analysis are not new; the challenges that have become commonplace in digital cinema are evident throughout the twentieth century in marginalized and ignored types of cinematic production, such as the title sequence and motion graphics in general. How digital technology meets commercial demands for lower cost, increased control, and greater efficiency in production and post-production makes what was historically rare and marginal into a commonplace part of production:

Everything can be sampled, captured, and transcribed into a string of ones and zeroes. This string can then be manipulated and transformed, in various measures and controllable ways. Under such conditions, multiple differences ramify end- lessly; but none of these differences actually makes a difference, since they are all completely interchangeable.18 Preface xxi

The sampling protocol Shaviro describes is central to digital technology. It develops from motion pictures’ foundational use of high speed projection of discrete, independent frames—each of which is a sample of the motion that emerges on screen—increasing the discreteness of the controlled sample to offer greater flexibility in the presentation. Unlike the photographs of film, the digital imagery shown on-screen is composed from discrete samples that can be individually addressed, engaged, and altered. But this essential technological rendering is invisible, masked by its organization into shots; higher-level interpretations, such as narrative, are products of low-level, perceptual recognitions of denotation and motion. 19 Abandoning the ‘shot’ for the (digital) composite as the foundational concept in the construction of cinema belongs to what Shaviro has termed “post-continuity,”20 where the independent containment of the ‘shot’ becomes a seamless progression: digital collage replaces cinematic montage. Digital compositing is typical of what has been called the “image-animation problem,” 21 offering an alternative to montage and the unitary conception of the ‘shot’ that has its origins in early film, a ‘degree zero’ for cinema that predates digital technology and is obvious in all the complex mechanisms of optical printing and composite photography that developed before being supplanted by computers. The contemporary crisis for cinema arises because the ontological conceptions of cinematic realism continues to dominate in spite of being confronted with their own, internalized failings, as Shaviro explained in his conclusion to his book Post Cinematic Affect:

It is easy enough to deplore this situation on moralistic or political ground, as high- minded cultural theorists from Adorno to Baudrillard have long tended to do. And it is tempting to wax nostalgic, and mourn the passing of a more vital, and more temporally authentic, media regime, as film theorists as diverse as David Rodowick (2007) and Vivian Sobchack (2004) have recently done. They are too wrapped up in their own melancholic sense of loss to grasp the emergence of new relations of production, and of new media forms. 22

Digital technology challenges earlier cinema because digital technologies enable lower costs, increased control, and greater efficiencies in precisely the types of post-production manipulations that were historically rare and whose challenges to beliefs in photographic ontology were thus ignored. The contemporary need to reassess the assumptions of cinematic realism emerges from the embrace of this digital facility to con/fuse live action, animation, graphics and text as a singular ‘material’ on-screen. Shaviro’s analysis did not develop this reconceptualization of realism; it is instead focused on a cultural critique which notes the changes without exploring their ramifications for the conception of realism. The continuous return of indexicality in arguments about cinematic realism is not, as he suggests, a nostalgic attempt to recapture a “more vital, and more temporally authentic, media regime” that has passed, but is instead a symptom of a dominant encultured order under existential threat. Shaviro’s emphasis on digital transformations—the animation of the samples—makes the viewer’s initial recognitions of realism central to the conception of digital cinema. At its most basic, this is the question of perceptional interpretation that film historians Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks develop in their article “Movies in the Mind’s Eye” xxii Preface concerned with understanding the apparent movement of motion pictures as a mental process: the movement we see when watching a movie—whether in the form of a film, video, or digital file—is more than simply the illusion of motion, it is perceptually as real as any other visual motion because there can be no separation of ‘object seen’ from its interpretation. The difference between the motion picture and other perceptions of immanent motion-in-the-world resides in its empirical status independent of human observation, not in our subjective perception.23 The apparent motion of movies depends on these earlier encounters with real, empirically immanent motion. It gives the realism of cinema an experiential basis in audience perceptions, arguing for a cognitive basis independent of presentation technology—celluloid, analogue video or digital imaging. Their identification of virtual-but-perceptually-real motion suggests a shift implying not only the effacement of distinctions between animation and live action, but the importance of marginal cinemas that explored these dynamics. Shaviro’s analysis develops this continuity between the break up of frames in film that creates the potential for motion with the encoding of imagery as digital data that facilitates a proximate and exacting control over individual pixels to amplify historical potentials for realist manipulations already familiar from the history of motion graphics. Realism and its critical-theoretical organization in cinema are the subject of a film ontology realized in assumptions of the “photographic index and the dispositive of cinema”; film historians André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion have discussed the impacts of digital imaging on these historical conceptions of cinema as the “image-animation problem.” They recognized that digital imaging has revitalized what appeared to be settled issues about motion imagery and animation common to the beginnings of cinema at the start of the twentieth century. These developments entail a return to the problematic fusions that inform the praxis of early ‘trik films,’ motion graphics, and contemporary VFX sequences—all of which are united by their manipulation of realist form in dynamic and uncanny ways:

The phase of cinema we are living through today, which we might call ‘post’institutional, is thus the site of a return of the repressed: animation is returning to take its place as the primary structuring principle, as it was at the time of optical toys, Plateau’s phenakistiscope and Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique. 24

The “return” is the emergence of non-narrative motion imagery—the dynamic play of potential transformations and movements as being sui generis expressions unto themselves. These concerns are common features of avant-garde cinema and motion graphics throughout their history: the conception of motion pictures as a kinetic, visual art. Digital production enables this (re)emergence of animation as the central technical/ theoretical concern for motion pictures neither limited to any particular technology, distribution system, nor primarily focused on the elaboration of fictive narratives. The historical models of oft-neglected non-narrative avant-garde and contemporary motion graphics, (including music videos, infographics and VFX works) address this approach. Motion pictures that are different in design and construction from commercial narrative films are instructive of the innovations offered by digital animation in altering the sampled imagery of cinema. Analogue media has always manipulated its component Preface xxiii animations, an indicator of the “return” Gaudreault and Marion describe, but the fact that photo compositing and manipulation are a historical feature of motion graphics (even before digital technology) does not diminish the importance of the digital convergence. The contemporary collapse of cinema into television and computer imaging in the “image-animation problem” is a product of Modernist theorization in the twentieth century that kept animation and live action apart—separate and unequal—but organized and structured them through a shared cultural construct, realism. The marginalized title sequence provides an opportunity to consider these historical contiguities between the emergence of Shaviro’s “post-cinema” and the developments of digital animation and motion graphics: neologisms such as “post-cinema” are a counterpart to the emergence of institutional crises of authority accompanying how digital convergence undermines received ontological traditions for cinema, 25 as historians Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hedi- ger, and Alena Strohmaier suggest in their anthology, The State of Post-Cinema:

The concept of post-cinema evolves around issues of medium specificity and ontology. If focuses on the two classical markers of cinema’s specificity, namely the photographic index and the dispositive of cinema, and designates a condition in which both the index and dispositive are in crisis. 26

The “digital convergence” so celebrated in the 1980s and 1990s has become the problem— it undermines the conception of cinema’s “medium specificity and ontology” in ways that break down traditional media’s superficially secure historical parameters. The resulting hybridity was specifically anticipated in the title sequence. All conceptions of “purity” ultimately depend on the definitions employed: the results are homologous expansions of a priori conceptions ratified as axiomatic in ontological theories that put their problematics outside normative consideration. What “purity” ultimately demands is remaining faithful to an ontological essence—a specific claim about ‘the real’—reified as the medium-specificity of Modernism. As a result, this essentialism justifies its definition on the basis of what that definition claims about its subject. This circularity is why digital media causes established ontological paradigms to crumble by challenging their self-imposed demarcations between media—undermining their “purity.” Approaching its theoretical challenges unmasks the connections between historical motion graphics27 and Gaudreault and Marion’s “image-animation problem,” and reflects the continuity between digital motion pictures and historical cinema. The Modernist cinematic ontology supports a heterogeneous constellation of dis- courses, institutions, legal propositions, and philosophical arguments reified on-screen as realism. These same frameworks are unstable in motion graphics, distinguishing them from the rest of cinema, and giving particular forms such as title sequences a theoretical value for considering digital motion pictures: the crisis of established authority for cinema happens precisely because the concept of realism becomes questionable as theorizations of the “photographic index and the dispositive of cinema” adapt to a new, changed ontology that accompanies the “new media” of digital technology. The importance of these questions for motion graphics lies with their capacity to reveal connections between established cinema theory and its relevance for kinetic design. A specific set of relationships between audience, image, camera, and presentation are in the background to this historical “cinematic” that is being transformed by the xxiv Preface convergence of immaterial and material processes that are increasingly obvious in everyday experience.28 Postdigital Aesthetics , an anthology edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, explains this shift:

The historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly blurred, to the extent that to talk about the digital presupposed a disjuncture in our experience that makes less and less sense in the experience of the everyday. Computation becomes experiential, spatial and materialized in its implementation, embedded within the environment and embodied, part of the texture of life itself. 29

Their term “postdigital” is concerned neither with cinema, nor with realism; however, this exclusion is superficial—the indistinction of on-line and off-line they describe is precisely the digital convergence that enables an on-demand, continuous availability of digital motion pictures (along with any other digital content) as a product of how these technologies re-construct the lived, social world according to the demands of immaterial capital and the autonomous instrumentalities that render it into a commod- ity via the database. 30 The digital distribution and encounter with motion pictures that concerns The State of Post-Cinema depends on what Berry and Dieter term “postdigital,” even as the proposal of the term “post-cinema” demonstrates the interface between the cinema, its transformation, and the Modernist ideology of “purity.” This concern with an essential identity or value that is corrupted by coming into contact with alternatives leads to a fetishistic demand for the appearance of celluloid and analogue processes as a “proof ” of an essential nature—even if these ‘material markers’ are now rendered by digital filters—the evidence of film grain serves to assert a photographic nature for what is not photographic, subverting historical artifice by attempting to maintain it, an especially important development given the centrality of digital production tools to their continuation. Emphasizing “purity” converges the ideological construct, realism with its subject, ‘the real’: belief in an ontological link between the depiction and the subject of that depiction in photography assures a gravitational tendency toward their conflation. Considering computer technology as part of a technical, evolutional lineage offers a different conception of the digital capacity to alter and manipulate the realism that appears on-screen in motion graphics: this development becomes readily apparent via the oversimplification of “cinematic realism” as an instrumentality (ideology) for the representation of reality itself, but doing so also ignores the subtlety and complexity of the realist ontologies developed around the indexicality of photographs that complicates a direct connection to ‘the real’ by qualifying the types of relations possible and the role of the audience in making them. The contemporary fluidity of digital technology is not a rupture with this past, but a continuation of how that past was never as ‘fixed’ nor as ‘stable’ as might appear on-screen. These challenges are products of the function of digital technology as much as symptoms of its systemic operation; for historical cinema undergoing this technological shift, the uniformity of digitality and its ease of manipulation creates an identity crisis that leads to the proposal of correctives such as Shaviro’s “post-cinema,” 31 but which obfuscate the dynamics of naturalism::stylization already in play in the design and production of motion graphics, as well as the irreal impacts of historical tools, such as optical printing. The shift to digital tools in contemporary works Preface xxv is an automation that changes costly time- and labor-intensive processes into easily created and more precisely controlled operations. But the activities now performed with digital systems are an outgrowth of processes already apparent in motion graphic works such as the title sequence. That these problematics are familiar from how the development and role of optical printing in motion pictures makes these neglected parts of cinematic history sites of theoretical and analytic interest. Considering the role of realism in title sequences reveals the legacy of Modernist approaches in contemporary media is sustained by realism and its ideological claims to demonstrate ‘the real.’ These dynamics are visualized in the realist modulations of crediting versus narrative functions, and the self-consciously artificial combination of text—photography—music that makes the title sequence a pseudo-independent unit within the motion picture as a whole.

Notes 1 Nochlin, L. Realism (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 13–23. 2 The double colon /::/ designates positions of mutual exclusion that define the scope of a dynamic range that includes hybrid intermediaries and which exhibits a contingent, metastable flux within that range. 3 Golden, W. The Visual Craft of William Golden (New York: George Braziller, 1962), p. 21. 4 Drucker, J. “Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation” Narrative vol. 16, no. 2 (May, 2008), pp. 121–125. 5 Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 198. 6 Rushton, R. The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2011), pp. 191–196. 7 Williams, C. Realism and the Cinema (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 17–86. 8 Fielding, R. The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography (Oxford: Focal Press, 1984), pp. 1–3. 9 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 40. 10 Sherman, T. “Vernacular Video” Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube ed. G. Lovink and S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), p. 162. 11 Negroponte, N. “Products and Services for Computer Networks” Scientiﬁ c American Special Issue: The Computer in the 21st Century (September, 1991), pp. 102–109. 12 Hagener, M., Hediger, V. and Strohmaier, A. The State of Post-Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmil- lan, 2016), p. 4. 13 Denson, S. and Leyda, J. eds. Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film (Sussex: Reframe Books, 2016). 14 Ca˘linescu, M. Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 133. 15 Balsom, E. “Brakhage’s Sour Grapes, or Notes on Experimental Cinema in the Art World” Moving Image Review & Art Journal vol. 1, no. 1 (2012), pp. 13–25. 16 Betancourt, M. The History of Motion Graphics: From Avant-Garde to Industry in the United States (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2013). 17 Shaviro, S. Post Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), p. 2. 18 Shaviro, S. Post Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), pp. 132–133. 19 Arnheim, R. To The Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 36. 20 Shaviro, S. Post Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), pp. 126–127. 21 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 40. 22 Shaviro, S. Post Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), pp. 132–133. 23 Hochberg, J. and Brooks, V. “Movies in the Mind’s Eye” Post Theory ed. D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 368–369. xxvi Preface

24 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 40. 25 Buden, B. “Criticism without Crisis: Crisis without Criticism” Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique ed. G. Raunig and G. Ray (London: May Fly, 2009), pp. 33–42. 26 Hagener, M., Hediger, V. and Strohmaier, A. The State of Post-Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmil- lan, 2016), p. 3. 27 Betancourt, M. The History of Motion Graphics: From Avant-Garde to Industry in the United States (Rockport: Wildside Press, 2013). 28 Pangrazio, L. and Bishop, C. “Art as Digital Counterpractice” CTheory May 24, 2017 http:// ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/art-as-digital-counterpractice/. 29 Berry, D. and Dieter, M. “Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design” Post- digital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design ed. D.M. Berry and M. Dieter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 2–3. 30 Betancourt, M. The Critique of Digital Capitalism (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2016), pp. 75–100. 31 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 39. Introduction

“ You know one when you see one ,” a dictum that invokes realism, is a terrible way to define anything. For title sequences, the difficulty is specifically the inability to create a coherent definition that would work in all cases, even though the audience always knows how the titles remain apart from the main text, especially when they interpenetrate and coincide with its narrative exposition. 1 This apparent paradox has not gone unnoticed by film historian Georg Stanitzek, who observes that it happens because the “real” film (the story) begins both in and after the titles have finished:

As the beginning, the title sequence sets itself apart in a particular way; namely, insofar as it is endowed with its own beginning and end, it establishes itself as distinct and develops its own coherence. In turn, its own beginning might possibly be seen as set apart; as a rule, the title sequence starts with the studio’s or the distribu- tor’s trademark logo, which itself acts as a kind of title to the title sequence proper as the title sequence does to the movie proper.2

The series logo–titles–movie sets up an automatic progression that narrows the scope from a general product (studio logo) to the increasingly particular identification of the movie itself, first in terms of names and production roles, than directly as the story. The audience’s knowledge of these separate but linked sequences renders them as thresholds whose critical and interpretive significance always lies with anticipating what follows, the “real” event that is of interest—the story in the “movie proper.” This approach to title sequences denies their complexity by focusing on how they match and meet clear demands for fictional stories. Stanitzek’s proposal assumes the titles are at the start of a motion picture, both the literal beginning of the “film” and separate from the actual story, serving as an opening whose rhetorical function establishes the start of what comes after. Stanitzek oversimplifies. This “classic” understanding of title sequences normalizes what follows as naturalistic revelations of ‘events’ on-screen, defined by their narrative functions. The simple title cards in use at the start of the twentieth century marked the start of a production by acting as a literal separation between one film and the next, 3 but for sequences in later commercial feature films, this restriction to only being labels is rare, and rarer still in television. No matter how complex they are, the audience fluently separates the credits and narrative, without any acknowledgment of the modal shift in engagement that transition requires. 2 Introduction

Title sequences (and motion graphics) are formed from a complex mixture of multiple cues: speech, music/noises, written language (texts), and visual imagery of various types. These hybrids occupy a unique position in commercial cinema—fusing the graphic conventions of typography and design with the kinetic and chronic modes of animation and live action photography, modulating otherwise assumptively incompatible concerns with experience and duration drawn from commercial design, avant-garde animation, and narrative cinema—thus providing a critical nexus immediately applicable to the challenges posed by digital technology. The use of live action and animation to form singular units called “title cards” cannot be understood as texts and images and narrative simultaneously, 4 yet all these materials form the ‘image object,’ the denoted contents shown on-screen.5 The titles’ conception as a pseudo-independent unit, separate and separated from the “movie proper” provides a cliché threshold mediating between artifice and actuality that cultural critic Jonathan Gray noted in his study of cinematic paratexts, Show Sold Separately:

Opening credit sequences, in short, serve an important ritual function. . . . In a sports game, it is the playing of the national anthem. And in television, it is the opening credit sequence. Opening credits help to transport us from the previous textual universe to a new one, or out of “real life” and into the life of the program (even if a growing number of shows are opting for cold starts to throw the viewer right into the action). 6

Gray offers the classic conception of the title sequence as the definitional, but ambivalent, moment demarcating between “opening” and “narrative” that serves to move the audience into the world created by the story. It is a convention-laden process of demarcation. He evokes the “magic circle,” a proximate, traditional distinction between the fictional realm and the rest of life, mystifying what is a structural interpretation and functional invention of difference. The refusal is authorized by its tacit assertion of cinema=narrative. Pre- cisely this “invisible” and overlooked nature, hidden from consideration by being obvious, justifies their analytic interest: the title sequence is an ideological construction whose dimensions are evident in their ambivalence and invisibility. Understood in these terms, the critical analysis and apprehension of the title sequence is an afterthought, interesting but not important, their marginalization an appropriate response to a minor form. The normative role of credits as a material separation between the narrative causality and whatever came first, before them—the logos, advertisements and other ephemera that is not part of the story—becomes the entirely of the sequence, justifying its marginal consideration as peripheral and insignificant. 7 Such a view is a self-fulfilling prophecy where the title sequence can be ignored without consideration precisely because, a priori, it does not deserve consideration. This circularity has prevented and delayed theoretical analysis of titles as cinematic works. Although motion picture technology was invented during the nineteenth century, and narrative, dramatic films are a twentieth-century evolution of melodramatic theater from that same century, 8 cinema is the Modern art form. 9 Its development during the twentieth century aligns with Modernist aesthetics triumphantly becoming the dominant cultural mode at mid-century. 10 Unlike the older arts, its novelty enabled it to avoid the challenges of engaging with the weight of received history that other arts seeking to Introduction 3 become “modern” confronted, as composer Harry Partch explained in the opening to his book on composition in 1949:

Perhaps the most hallowed of traditions among artists of creative vigor is this: traditions in the creative arts are per se suspect. For they exist on the patrimony of standardization, which means degeneration. They dominate because they are to the interest of some group that has the power to perpetuate them, and they cease to dominate when some equally powerful group undertakes to bend them to a new pattern. 11

Partch’s understanding of tradition and aesthetic innovation is that of an avant-garde artist, opposed to entrenched standards and suspicious of received knowledge; while he does not discuss cinema, the received history he describes was notably absent from early film, leaving its theorization to invent it. 12 His comments about the “weight of tradition” make the attraction of cinema for Modernism immediately apparent—what its traditions were had to be experimentally created in much the same way the technology itself was. Lacking a clear and indisputable foundation, the early decades of film theory were concerned with inventing “cinema art”:13 the proposition of “cinema” as a capturing and preserving of ‘the real’ that allowed it to become the idealized percept-proof of reality14 is closely ingrained in the understanding of “cinema” as a world-historical practice of significant art. The historical emergence of “cinema” is part of twentieth-century Modernism—a fact quickly recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (established in 1929) which began collecting films in 1935.15 Literally an invention of the ﬁ n-de-siècle, the role of Modernist thought in cinema is structurally systemic, superficially invisible, and commonly ignored. This heritage should not be difficult to recognize or acknowledge because motion pictures arises sui generis as an art during the arrival of Modernism; by the 1920s, histories of cinema explicitly connected it to narrative storytelling, establishing the formula of cinema=narrative at the moment recording its birth as a serious art. This “traditional history” of cinematic development informs the discussion of Thomas Edison’s work with motion pictures in A Million and One Nights (1924) by Terry Ramsaye, who develops the transition to narrative as the teleological destiny of cinema. 16 French historians Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach developed this same thesis in The History of Motion Pictures (1938) within a broader, international framework, 17 and Lewis Jacobs’s two editions of The Rise of the American Film (1939/1948) make the connections between this narrative understanding and Modernism explicit, both in terms of works selected and the scope of his analysis. 18 These histories contribute to the critical and analytic neglect of motion graphics (and title sequences) because its hybrid nature challenges the clarity of formalist Modern aesthetics, 19 which have a subtle influence, hidden and expansive without becoming more inclusive. The persistence of this ideation remains apparent through the choices of works and artists for consideration and the marginalization of hybrids such as motion graphics: the definitional boundaries that separate commercial film, avant-garde film, and video art as autonomous, independent art forms, but which all paradoxically employ motion pictures, argues against their contextual influences, and denies any hybrid crossings between them aesthetic validity, thus critical apprehension.20 This division of motion pictures into separate, parallel, and independent categories establishes the commercial (typically narrative) film, the avant-garde film, television, 4 Introduction video art, and still later, the web video as independent arts, each with its own distribution, presentation, audience. This process of division reifies a Modernist demand for “purity” common in the 1950s and 1960s that makes the contemporary collapse of their boundaries in digital convergence into an ontological challenge, a violation of the aesthetic criteria that define these art forms. Each category has a different degree of critical appraisal and consideration as part of “art history,” thus demonstrating how persistent this Modernist heritage, value system, and influence remains. 21 In being conceived as autonomous arts, each domain of moving image was assured significance as art through their separation from each other. 22 Hybrids such as motion graphics that bridge the differences between design, animation, avant-garde film/video art, and commercial narratives were neglected and ignored, regarded as insignificant to the historical development of cinema for exactly the same reason that they become important in addressing the challenges posed by the digital: title sequences in particular reveal the common, shared features of articulation and enunciation in motion pictures. They allow a consideration of semantic, lexical ordering without the constraints of narrative—precisely a rejection of the central concern in historical cinema study.23 Occasionally, singular designers (most famously Saul Bass, 24 but including Maurice Binder25 and Pablo Ferro 26), would be acknowledged as serious or important—but the field of motion graphics would not be. Their contemporary critical and historical attention illustrates the challenges posed by emergence of digital technology and its convergence of media.27 Modernist distinctions, prescriptions, and definitions of cinema and other media come into question in digital production, not because of its dominance and ubiquity or as the result of an avant-garde assault on an entrenched, traditional paradigm, but because contemporary challenges to the limited, “pure” conception of cinema have emerged in media created by digital technologies; their role in the critical and theoretical evolution of cinema cannot be underestimated. The hybridity that was an issue in the past returns as an asset in the Contemporary as the ambivalences of animation::live action become an increasingly obvious dimension of the digital revolution. Film historian André Gaud- reault describes this emergent acknowledgment as a self-consciousness of ideological constraints that argues against any teleological conception of historical inevitability:

“Traditional” film history, which the new generation of film scholars began to dis- pute following the Brighton congress, was known for an idealist conception of cinema and a teleological vision of its history. In this vision, events are only stages at various degrees of distance from the ideal to be attained: so-called “classical” cinema. Because of this ideal standard of cinema yet to come, early cinema, for traditional film historians, could only be a “primitive” cinema whose sole goal was to strive towards cinematic potential. 28

The emphasis on a canon of “great films” is teleologically justified by their role in defining a “pure” media. This recognition of its enframing reveals it as an idealization of the reductive aesthetics ascendant for the first half of the twentieth century. Historical fusions of live action into animation, a potential introduced by Émile Cohl before World War I, exploited by the Fleischer animation’s use of rotoscoping in the 1920s, and developed in the composites of graphics and live action common to motion graphics in the 1950s Introduction 5 and 1960s, becomes in digital cinema the transformative technique of “motion capture” where a human actor becomes the live action puppeteer for CGI animation, used in productions such as The Polar Express (2004), Avatar (2009), and The Adventures of Tin-Tin (2011) with increasingly naturalistic affect. 29 These digital motion pictures rupture the assumed link of photographic indexicality between what appears on-screen and a physical source in reality, a challenge to this assumed “truth claim”30 that violates cinema’s medium-specificity and photography’s ontology. 31 Unlike the discrete series of unique photographs in celluloid motion pictures or the continuous electronic waveform of analogue video, digital motion pictures are samples that lack the same type of material relationship to their source. What defines historically analogue media as analogue, whether in film or in the electric charge produced by a charge-coupled device, is the resulting media recording “depends on a physical relation between the object photographed and the image,” 32 with only constrained capacity to change form once it has been “set.” Although the direct mediation of optics, exposure, film stock, processing, and printing are ignored in ontological arguments for cinema as a demonstration of ‘the real,’ these elements do distinguish the photograph from the pho- nograph recording—as well as older media such as the book. However, all these entirely different analogue media become identical digital media—stored as data they are differen- tiated by their encoding, not by a material link to their “source” as is commonly assumed for photography, a factor that makes “photographic indexicality” an amorphous, slippery concept whose everyday use consistently escapes from attempts to delimit it precisely. Computational media are different than analogue technologies: one type of material, motion pictures, does not remain entirely different and separate from other types of material, books and sound recordings. The digital encoding of all these as binary information processed and electronically rendered into superficially different human-readable forms facilitates manipulations, transfers, and shifts between media in ways that were literally impossible historically: their immanence as “recording” is more directly truncated by technology than in analogue film. Digital cinema is fluid and transformable using com- putations in ways that do not directly link the result to a photographic source by replac- ing the photochemical trace with the database and its catalogue of pixels collected and stored as information. The expanded field of digital convergence is an ungrounding of accepted aesthetic foundations, not the repudiation or rupture with the technical lineage of earlier technologies, such as photography, that historically allowed smaller degrees of visual transformation anticipating the digital. 33 Understanding motion graphics’ relationship to digital imaging first requires recognizing how they have been marginalized in historical conceptions of the “cinematic” linked to an aesthetics relying on the indexicality of photographic realism and articulated in/through the formulation of cinema=narrative and its specific canon of “great films.” Cinema’s “material manifestation of history” originates with specific and limited options—formal, interpretative, aesthetic, political—for the works accepted as significant enough for critical and theoretical consideration, constituting its dispositive (discourse). 34 Philosopher Giles Deleuze’s twin studies on motion pictures are typical of this approach, revealing how these assumptions are common factors in the foundational theorizations of cinema, invisible and unquestionable. He develops an understanding of the internal (diegetic) structure of motion pictures as a realist presentation justified by 6 Introduction an assumption about the nature of that image’s production—origins, i.e., an ontological belief implied by the apparent reality shown on-screen. The cinematic subjects of his consideration are deliberately limited to the canonized “art cinema”:

The great directors of cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts. One cannot object by pointing to the vast proportion of rubbish in cinematographic production—it is no worse than anywhere else, although it does have unparalleled economic and industrial consequences. The great cinema directors are hence merely more vulnerable—it is infinitely easier to prevent them from doing their work. 35

These “movement-images” and “time-images” Deleuze identifies are irreducibly narrative: they function as presentations of “perception” connected to a character (dream, hallucina- tion, subjective view), “affection” (the visible space as an arena for/awaiting action), or “action” (the continuity of cause–effect within/across a series of shots)—all interpreted ways to subjectivize ‘image objects’ as belonging to a particular narrative effect; within this framework, these constructs remain stoically realist, especially when they assume distorted and irregular appearances linked to the fantastic and hallucinatory. They propose a world-on-film corresponding to the familiar experiential reality of the audience, accounting for the differences from that everyday experience through the mediation of “subjective” dramatization. These understandings of cinematic imagery are narrative, but they are also derived from a concern with the formal expressiveness of the medium—an engagement with the “purity” of cinema=narrative where the capacity to dramatize narrative action visually becomes the sine qua non of “cinematic art” and its cinematography:

The image of the cinema being, therefore, ‘automatic’ and presented primarily as movement-image , we have considered under what conditions it is specifically defined into different types. These types are, principally, the perception-image , the affection-image and the action-image . Their distribution certainly does determine a representation of time, but it must be noted that time remains the object of an indirect representation in so far as it depends on montage and derives from movement-images. 36

Deleuze naturalizes this framework through his appeal to the automatic nature of live action production: that the photographic process seemingly proceeds without the need for human intermediation or direction. This belief in photographic automation is a fal- lacy. Every dimension of the cinematographic process is subject to highly specialized and precise controls for historical chemical photography (not to mention the more precise control over digital images) that determine not only what (if anything) appears on-screen, but what enables its recomposition and transformation in postproduction in dramatic ways through composite photography and optical printing, as well as in subtle ways through the developing and printing processes. The links between cinema and narrative forms makes them appear to be an inherent feature of motion pictures, rather than a historically specific outcome of the costs of production and distribution. Even something as basic as what appears on screen is subject to controls through such basic functions as the Introduction 7 framing, lighting, and mise-en-scène deployed prior to exposing even one frame. When the animated motion picture is included within this cinematic framework, the Modernist preconceptions—the “purity” of photographic indexicality-ontology—reveal themselves. The aesthetics of cinema=narrative are an example of what art critic Clement Green- berg called “purity.” His theory depends on ascribing a specific definition to a particular medium in advance. Whether for painting or film, this a priori constraint then determines the logical progression of its self-critical revelation by excluding any work that develops in the marginal, hybrid overlaps between what are assumed to be “distinct” media:

What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, though its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain. . . . The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific tasks of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.37

Reduction to “purity” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Realist ideology typically assumes that photographic representation is ontologically linked to real-world sources. This belief justifies the refusal of motion graphic hybrids that demonstrate the artificial and plastic capabilities of motion pictures. These developments were explicitly confined to the avant-garde film as a specific, independent variety of cinema; 38 their presence in commercial work undermines that distinction in an implicit opposition to purist cinema: reductivism is the watchword for Greenberg’s Modernism.39 Digital media challenge the established order of cinema in a natural consequence of their leveling established hier- archies that separate media: any awareness of alternatives subverts Greenberg’s “purity” that isolated each field. It is logical to expect a multitude of Post-Cinemas as symptoms of the “corrective” pluralism and hybrid processes denied by Greenberg’s “guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence” that relies on the elimination of hybrids in the name of “purity.” American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s book on cinema, The World Viewed: Reﬂ ections on the Ontology of Film (published 1971), establishes “cinema” as necessarily a reflection of the art theory Greenberg developed.40 The aspiration to becoming philosophical that he discerns in Greenberg’s account renders serious art as a reflection of this reduction. His analysis is also reductive, proceeding from a priori limits that justify his logic of selection: only those works typically shown in the black box theater are considered, but this limit does not include or overlap with the “avant-garde film,” or with the media of the “art world” shown in galleries or museums. 41 This ratification of cinema in these terms denies hybrid forms validity, thus inherently rejecting the title sequence as insignificant:

The requirement for a certain indiscriminateness in the accepting of movies (I don’t say you have to appreciate Singing Cowboy or Comedy Horror movies) has its 8 Introduction

analogues in the past of the established arts: anyone who is too selective about the classical composers whose music he likes doesn’t really like music; whereas a distaste for various moments or figures in literature may be productive. But this requirement not merely is unlike the case of the other arts now [in 1971], it is the negation of their very condition: for it can be said that anyone who cultivates broadly the current instances of music or painting or theater does not appreciate, and does not know, the serious instances of those arts as they occur. This condition of modernist art has been described by [Clement Greenberg’s follower] Michael Fried as one in which an art leaves no room, or holds no promise, for the minor artist: it is a situation in which the work of the major artist condemns the work of others to artistic nonexistence, and in which his own work is condemned to seriousness, to further radical success or complete failure. . . . Art now exists in the condition of philosophy. 42

Cavell makes the aesthetic theory proposed by Greenberg (via Michael Fried) an explicit part of his discussion, connecting formalist “purity” to “cinema.” 43 The mediation of cinema is a transformative action that renders the ‘world on screen’ as an experiential reality for the audience—this encounter with reality (“photography’s objectivity”) is the essential nature of motion pictures whose adherence assures its validity as art: this Modernist narrowing of scope is the precondition for “important art.” The realist, narrative forms common to commercial cinema become the only possible “serious” cinema, since the works excluded are determined a priori to be irrelevant to analysis; a teleology apparent in the central role of narrative, dramatic fiction for Cavell’s analysis. “Historical progression” is necessarily a prescriptive reduction and exclusion. This approach is cru- cial to delineating cinema as a serious art, making the role of ‘purity’ and the exclusive, narrowed conception of cinema-as-narrative foundational to “cinema.” Cavell’s rejection of the animated film as cinema 44 arises from how it is entirely constructed, an artificial creation that modulates the audience’s understanding of what hap- pened in-between the frames shown on-screen belied by their embrace and acceptance by their audiences. The motion that arises cannot be a material trace of the apparent reality shown on-screen, thus also demonstrating the contingency of Deleuze’s framework and its reliance on a set of preconceptions about the nature of “great films” and their production: that they are products of a photographic process whose ontological link to reality is not open to question or consideration. It is precisely the lack of such a link that causes Cavell to reject animation; his ontological considerations of cinema necessarily conflict and reject motion graphics and title sequences a priori to their consideration. This understanding of the relationship between the moving image in live action films and its “source” in reality is central to the post-World War II aesthetic conception of cinematic form: the photographic foundations of film are the guiding principle in these realist aesthetics. Because celluloid films are composed from photographs, for both Cavell and André Bazin, their photography is evidence of a direct link between what appears on- screen and profilmic events.45 Especially for Bazin, realism depends on an “objective” presentation created by the “long take,” which enables the emergence of the ‘reality’ of the events shown—their narrative progression as ‘events’ (actualities) happening on- screen with a minimum of intrusion. Events correspond to what could happen for the audience if they were witnessing the events themselves without the cinematic mediation. Introduction 9

Bazin’s realism discursively functions as a revelation of a socially defined reality. 46 His claim about the long take, that “nature finally does more than imitate art: it imitates the artist,” 47 identifies this narrative presentation with the framing of shots. The presentation on-screen thus serves as an articulation of this ontological reality for the audience, a revelation of a world that considers the “conditions of reality”—cinema as a reflection on ‘the real.’ 48 There is no place in either Bazin’s or Cavell’s realism for the hybridity that is motion graphics and the ambivalent complexity of title sequences, an expression of the Modernist bias against hybridity. Ironically, the long take, which is so important to Bazin’s aesthetics, is most commonly employed in Hollywood features as a background for the credits. This aesthetic constraint is internalized by the realist strictures of cinema to argue against the separation of credits from story to promote the integration of titles directly into the narrative itself; however, there is no confusion between what the titles state and how the story develops. Even when the crediting and narrative functions are mixed together, running simultaneously as in both Wayne Fitzgerald’s fusion of credits with Orson Welles’s iconic four-minute long take in Touch of Evil (1958) [Figure 0.1], or

Figure 0.1 All the title cards in Touch of Evil (1958), designed by Wayne Fitzgerald. 10 Introduction

Figure 0.2 All the title cards in The Player (1992), designed by Dan Perri. the virtuoso orchestration of Robert Altman’s nine-minute long opening to The Player (1992) [Figure 0.2] where Dan Perri’s inserted credits neither confuse nor conflict with the self-referential discussion of Welles’s earlier long take and the need for a constant “cut, cut, cut.” What seems like an “obvious” separation between the title sequence and the main text breaks down in these designs as the actual identification of where the titles start and stop is ambivalent, an indication of their uncertain role that reinforces the title sequence’s traditional, marginal status at the initiation of the narrative. In the book Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design, film historian Jan-Christopher Horak noted the problematics of defining title sequences reveals their marginality. 49 Their hybrid fusion of concerns from avant-garde film and graphic design complicates their critical and historical analysis, but audiences understand these same shifts in enunciation easily and often without recognizing them as happening at all. This fluidity and fusion of aesthetic sources anticipates the same instabilities in digital imaging; recognizing the pseudo-independence of a title sequence is a product of interpretation and expectation dictating the horizons of possibility. While the titles are not the story, their critical identification is fundamentally a grammatical view of interpretive functions. Their separation is traditionally marked by the role of theme music (which appears along with the credits in most designs): when the music stops, the titles are over. In his analysis of title sequences, Stanitzek noted that audiences understand the lexical-semiotic engagements of crediting and the experiential-dramatic interpretations of narrative as separate aspects of the same experience:

Title sequences create a divided focus of attention, the separation of the inside from the outside, of what is the play of the narrative from what is documenting the Introduction 11

production, cinematic narrative from film commentary, intradiegetic from extradi- egetic information. The title sequence achieves this as a film within a film, in that it introduces, in that it—semi-autonomously—establishes itself as distinct from the main film. 50

Audiences understand the separation of title sequences from the scenes that come both before and after without conscious effort, making the need for a definition of “title sequence” seem quite futile, redundant with what is plainly obvious about these sections in motion pictures. Their pre-conception as a separate part, definitionally distinct from the story that follows is critically problematic in cases such as Touch of Evil or The Player where the credits are superimposed onto an extended, virtuosic long take that begins the story—except there really is no problem in separating credits from actions. The role of both theme music and on-screen titling together provide a clear separation of the credit sequence from the rest of the story,51 and even in instances such as the opening to the television cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where AreYou? (1969) where there is only a title card identifying the show’s name, the sixty seconds of montage synchronized with the theme song still stands apart from the rest of the program. 52 Making the distinction between titles and narrative requires a transition from one interpretive mode to another; the complexity arises when these modes happen simultaneously. 53 Although paratexts are marginal productions, paradoxically autonomous and integrated-while-independent of narrative, 54 film historian Garrett Stewart explains the separation of titles from story as a function of “causal logic,” the realist basis of narrative in familiar relationships the audience already knows from their everyday lives:

We all know that, even though few films end effectively, most begin that way. This is because there is nothing to test the beginning against, nothing for it to fall short of. In David Bordwell’s formalist distinction, it is all syuzhet [actions or events] with no fabula [narrative or story] yet constructed—or not quite yet. At least for a second or two: pure structure without narrative. And structure without content is another name for a paradigm—after which the syntagmatic takes over, subordinated to the cause and effect chain of narrative linearity. 55

Stewart’s recognition about separating the credits from narrative action necessarily links them to realism. For the titles to be labels that always identify externalities to the narrative requires that the narrative function reflect a familiar and established logic derived from past experience—i.e., create a naturalistic affect no matter how stylized its presentation. The exceptions to this rule are rare and atypical, immediately recognizable as exceptions to the standard progression of title sequences as labels rather than narrative: the “James Bond parody” opening to Deadpool 2 (2018) designed by John Likens employs what are normally composited, non-narrative texts to comment on the narrative action—the titu- lar character’s apparent suicide at the beginning of the film [Figure 0.3]. Rather than providing the standard identifications of the actors and production, these titles criticize them, for example, by crediting the writers as “‘the real’ Villains Here” instead of providing their names. It makes the interruptive effects of the opening titles apparent, serving as an ellipsis between the opening events and the rest of the fabula. Nevertheless, this 12 Introduction

Figure 0.3 “James Bond Parody” main title opening from Deadpool 2 (2018), designed by John Likens. title sequence is entirely self-contained. It does not resemble anything else in the rest of the film, including the actual credit sequence, a standard and unexceptional main-on-end presentation that comes after the conclusion of the story. The conversion of these parodic visuals into a narrative enunciation makes them into a specific part within the story, comparable to the dream sequence (Scottie’s Nightmare) designed by John Ferren for Vertigo (1958). In both sequences, their contents defy the organization of the story, yet are immediately understood as a subjective expression tied to the main character. Ferren’s dream sequence functions in precisely the same way as the parody credits in Deadpool 2: as an ellipsis between the first section and second section of the story. This montage describes the psychosis that “Scottie” (played by Jimmy Stewart) has—it is readily assimilated to the narrative. However, in Deadpool 2 , this sequence is exactly disruptive of the progression, yet in shifting comprehension from crediting to narration, the parody sequence draws attention to its stylization as a rupture—a fugue—that avoids returning to the narrative consequences of the opening scene. The complex play between narrative and credits in this parodic design ultimately remain within the scope of the story—“Deadpool” (played by Ryan Reynolds) attempts suicide in an attempt to avoid the same consequences this eruption of credits also attempts to avoid by superficially “stopping” the narrative. Using the crediting function to define the title sequence is an instance of the tendency for essentialism. The “purity” of a title design lies with this most easily recognized ele- ment of their construction that understands the title sequence simply as “labels” identifying the production, but it is a minor concern compared with how their relationship to the narrative directs their comprehension. 56 This differential counters the purist reduction of titles to a crediting, but also justifies their elimination entirely from the start of a movie. 57 Interpreting the credits as an intratextual illustration of the story is the traditional view espoused by Stanitzek and Gray; the titles differentiate between the narrative and the not- narrative. Because the audience can always separate the titles from the story they describe, although being both a part of the narratives in commercial cinema and Introduction 13 apart from it, they are always able to navigate complex mixtures of credits and narrative without difficulty. This commonplace view of credits has been repeated often enough to become their standard, uncritically considered “definition”; it is a view that Modernist title designer Saul Bass invokes in discussing his work with film historian Pamela Haskin shortly before his death in 1996:

My initial thoughts about what a title could do was to set mood and to prime the underlying core of the film’s story; to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it. 58

Bass proposes “emotional resonance” as a way to link the pseudo-independence of his designs, such as the minimal graphic animation of The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), to the narrative as an abstracted allegory. When considered in this way, the title sequence is an anticipation of the events-yet-to-come in a way that only becomes a coherent account of them in retrospect. The myopic belief in the “purity” of a clear demarcation between crediting and narrative functions is the traditional of understanding titles; it also margin- alizes their critical appraisal. The general neglect of title sequences and motion graphics throughout the 1950s and 1960s demonstrates this omission. The allegorical model that Bass’s title sequences offer is one where the design suggests expectations about the story, but withholds their details, a suggestion or teasing of what will come but does not engage with the narrative directly, thus assuring its distinction; in contrast, the narrative integration of Fitzgerald’s and Perri’s designs assumes the immediacy of difference between the credits and the story without explaining or considering what produces that distinction. The implicit separation of titles from narrative in Bass are demonstrations of its Modernism: the titles are titles, while the narrative stands apart as an entirely distinct articulation. Although some designers such as Bass became prominent for their title sequences, Modernism’s narrowed scope of consideration for cinema means that the majority of notable designs failed to achieve the prerequisite independence needed for their critical consideration as “important art,” and hybrids such as Touch of Evil would be denigrated for imposing titles over the narrative progression. This elimination of externalities leaves no allowance for hybridity or changes in media; the convergence specific to the digital is disallowed in advance of its proposition, making the contemporary crisis posed by digital technology inevitable: “post-cinema” recalls the “crisis of cultural authority” which defined the Post-Modern in the 1980s,59 and which is extended into the present in the book Modernity Without A Project by cultural critic C. B. Johnson. 60 The abandonment of futurity in favor of an ongoing, interminable nowness transforms historical Modernism into “the Contemporary.” It accommodates the Modern to the particular recombinant strength of digital technology as an autonomous productive system: the convergence of motion picture technologies underway with the advent of digital technologies for production, distribution, and exhibition makes these restrictions appear antiquated and irrelevant while they are still actively shaping the present. This re/construction of history ossifies around the established paradigms of Modernity in ways that appear natural, masking their ideological basis and lineage. The eclipse of futurity, apparent in the 14 Introduction

Contemporary, creates the illusion of severed links to the Modernist past, when in fact they are being transformed into axiomatic assumptions:

This was modernity: a time that oversaw vastly different ideological movements all trying to bring their own visions for the future into being, however opposed, ghastly, or desirable. It was the last time that society really believed in a future that was grasped as better than the present. . . . Upon examination, “the contemporary” can be seen as elitist and rigid in its own way, often concealing order within “open- ness” and surface change. At its most mainstream or democratic, “the contemporary” appears more like the brutal past that Post-Modernists thought was outmoded than the future free from oppression that Modernists so dearly desired. It might be viewed in this sense as a weird or incoherent restoration of the experience of the high modern. 61

The restrictions that define cinema remain evident in the collection of “great works” chosen for discussion—thus the assumption of cinema=narrative continues to constrain and direct the present.62 This transformation of Modernism into the Contemporary that Johnson identifies was part of the avant-garde from its inception: successful avant-gardes become the status quo—rebellion becomes the new dogma.63 Johnson’s proposal takes this analysis further, suggesting that the contemporary is the arrival of what the historical avant-gardes anticipated: it is easy to recognize the transformation of the early avant- gardes into academic procedure, as dominance was the end-goal for all these movements; the Post-Modern comes as an attempt at a final shattering of all restrictive dogmas, the end-game beyond which the freedom promised by the Modernist project leaves no room for new dogmas to arise. Johnson’s analysis recognizes that the success of this project is aligned with the success of the avant-garde; the Contemporary arises when they have achieved their ideological goal of dominance. The problems posed by digital technology are implicit in this transformation: instead of challenging it, they serve to conclude these developments by erasing the final sets of traditional barriers the avant-garde opposed, the distinctions between media and the opposition of high and low culture. The role of realism in the title sequence occupies a useful, critical position in considering this transformation of indexicality in identifying the relationship to ‘the real.’ The position of the title sequence as a pseudo-independent unit gives it more than merely rhetorical value in considering the transformation of imagery effected by the emergence of digital technology. The historically marginal position of titles makes them uniquely suited to theorizing these changes because digital technologies are destabilizing in precisely the same boundary-breaking ways that motion graphics have been for their entire history. The continuity of new and old in motion graphics—those differences that don’t “make a difference”—render the heritage of cinema apparent in title sequences familiar enough to be recognizable, but allows those things that are different to become obvious and conclusive. These transformations are technological, they impact all media in related and interconnected ways. However, to ignore or deny the convergent nature of its point of address would be to deny the concerns raised by digital technology. Unlike the photographs of film, the digital imagery shown on-screen is composed from discrete samples that can be individually addressed, engaged, and altered. While the fact of compositing Introduction 15 and manipulation has always been true of cinema even before digital technology, with the digital convergence of animation and live action, it achieves a new currency that film historians André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion identified as the “image-animation problem” in their book The Kinematic Turn. The fluidity between live action photography and generative animation depends on a technological fact about motion pictures that has been ignored and de-emphasized in twentieth-century theorizations of cinema—that it is not what it appears to be, but is instead masked by a cultural construct, realism, that denies the technological foundation of motion pictures in animation. 64 The theoretical issues posed by digital technology are familiar from the history of animation in general, the avant-garde film in particular, and are obvious throughout the history of motion graphics. Contemporary digital production tools bring what appeared to be settled issues back into consciousness: the (re)emergence of animation as the central technical/theoretical concern for motion pictures (cinema), which was systematically developed and explored in motion graphics, and has become a commonplace part of the historical organization of title sequences. Maurice Binder’s fluid compositions using scale-independent design in openings such as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) [Figure 0.4] directly anticipate the dynamic, plastic construction of contemporary digital works that elide the separation of graphics, animation, and live action. These ambiguities and instabilities are commonplace in title designs, making them historically relevant models for considering the challenges offered by digital production making these processes commonplace. Digital technology merges animation with live action to achieve a new prominence and theoretical urgency that challenges the assumed “medium specificity and ontology” apparent as an indexical claim about between the ‘image object’ and its productive source. The banality of digital convergence reveals the critical concerns with the historical maintenance of “cinema” as field-specific insecurities created by these disruptions of categorical “purity” achieved in Modernist theory. Motion graphics and the title sequence connect digital cinema to the basis of motion pictures in photographic technology. The use of historical title sequences as paradigmatic exemplars of these connective relations reflects a conscious choice to challenge the ahis- torical conception of digital technology as a rupture that exceeds the aesthetic developments it incorporates and instrumentalizes. The desire to demarcate digital animation as essentially different makes this proposition of continuity a polemical defiance of the historical instability of “pure” media inherited from Modernism. The digital only poses definitional and conceptual problems for those works primarily considered within a paradigm that insists on them as disruptive technologies supplanting earlier approaches—a claim that refuses to acknowledge that this replacement necessarily entails the simulation of that earlier technology; marginalized and neglected hybrid forms—readily apparent in the convergent role of animation, optical printing, avant-garde film and graphic design in the commercial title design—offer a tangential conception of cinema, one that is tied neither to the purist conception of cinema=narrative nor to a restrictive conception of technical determinism and ontological belief. In being sidelined in the historical conception of “cinema,” these works have a simultaneous historical presence and consequent contextuality with Modernist works, while at the same time exceeding and violating those demands, a position reflective of their marginal position within the discourse of cinema. 16 Introduction

Figure 0.4 All the title cards in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder.

Understanding “realism” in motion graphics as a series of indexical modes [Figure 0.5] enables the recognition of how title sequences modulate their relationships to reality by treating indexicality as distinct from the ontology of photography, thus separating their enunciation from the aesthetics of a “purity” that denies them validity. These dynamics Introduction 17

Figure 0.5 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a product of its (ontological) direct connection to the real, while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not require this same link to reality for its significance. will become more apparent in Part 1. The entanglement of ontology with indexicality makes the discussion of these realist modes problematic without first addressing the ontological theories of realism as applied to title sequences. Historically, both factors appear together, simultaneously, as interdependent approaches to realism focused on naturalism that gives the indexical claim of being-connected to ‘the real’ a central role, in contrast to the artiﬁ cial identification of fictionality as the illegitimate ‘unreal’ when it does not correspond to this photographic ontology. Considering these relations using the distinction between subjective and objective instead of ontology enables the acknowledgment of a broader scope of realist applications than only those that act as an ontological demonstration for ‘the real.’ That motion graphics, in exactly the same ways as fictional narrative drama, proposes its own reality is a banal observation: in offering statements about being-realistic, the fictional establishes itself as independent of any ontological concern. This distinction between subjective and objective enables the acknowledgment of a broader scope of realist applications in cinema and motion graphics, avoiding the logically necessary rejection of these hybrids as non- or anti-cinema. Contemporary digital challenges to the historical index of cinema are phantasmal, produced by theoretical demands and propositions whose “truth claims” are the source of the problems. The distinctions of “objective” and “subjective” modes emerges clearly from articulation by rejecting the link of indexicality-ontology. Unhindered by an ontological aesthetic of photography-as-indexical common to traditional conceptions of cinematic realism, motion graphics has been free to develop and explore a wider range of potentials, developing an alternative conception of cinematic realism as a set of modalities where the ontology of photography is irrelevant to the articulation of links to reality or the elaboration of fictional narratives. The dynamic range of naturalism::stylization that defines the variety of realist appearances in motion graphics distinguishes documentary, with its attendant claim of being-factual (indexical) from fantasy, with an equally important attendant claim of being-ﬁ ctional (artificial): both 18 Introduction sets of claims being-factual/being-fictional are presented using the same modal realism shown in Figure 0.5. Stylization is no more a distinction of being-fictional than naturalism necessarily defines the being-factual of documentary. The complexity of this modal approach appears through the opposition of objective and subjective presentations that articulate the difference between “mere appearances” (‘documentary reality’) and the “reality of the mind” (‘metaphysical reality’); both presentations make an identical claim to describe ‘the real,’ split over the nature of the reality they describe. Separating the naturalism of everyday appearances, where cinema offers a demonstration of things that the audience might encounter if they looked for themselves (the superficial appearance of the world), from the stylized revelations of imaginary conceptions of the world, whether in the immanence of fantasy or as a normally hidden, metaphysical “truth” that does not correlate to the mere appearances of everyday reality, gives cinematic realism the capacity to express the same range of representation potentials familiar from other visual and performing arts that are not beholden to only demonstrate an “ontological truth” about the world. This approach to realism is not new; it has simply been denied to cinema and motion pictures generally.

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