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Towards a History and Aesthetics of

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of

the College of Fine of University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of

Andrew M. Tohline

August 2015

© 2015 Andrew M. Tohline. All Rights Reversed.

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This dissertation titled

Towards a History and Aesthetics of Reverse Motion

by

ANDREW M. TOHLINE

has been approved for

Interdisciplinary Arts

and the College of Fine Arts

Michael Gillespie

Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts

Margaret Kennedy-Dygas

Dean, College of Fine Arts

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ABSTRACT

TOHLINE, ANDREW M., Ph.D., August 2015, Interdisciplinary Arts

Towards a History and Aesthetics of Reverse Motion

Director of Dissertation: Michael Gillespie

In 1896, early cinema technology made possible for the first to view a of entropy’s reversal – that is, to watch time run . This technique of temporal inversion, now known as reverse motion, straddles both the aesthetic and the scientific aspects of cinema’s identity. Aesthetic, because early filmmakers instantly recognized reverse motion’s potential to transform cinema into a space of the fantastic and the spectacular – the cinematic redefinition of reality. Scientific, because reverse motion allowed a greater understanding of thermodynamics and time’s arrow through its indexical registration of physical processes within sections of duration – the cinematic revelation of reality. Reverse motion’s upending of causality resolutely resists classical narrativity and opens a plethora of possibilities for the cinematic exploration of time and motion. In this project, I explore the use of reverse motion throughout history, examining the aesthetic and philosophical consequences of introducing time as a plastic material into the arts. By analyzing a range of motion picture media from the full history of cinema, I unlock new insights into the origins of the time-image, the hegemony and limits of narrativity, the nature of , and even reverse motion’s capacity to deepen our understanding of history by laying bare the forces of its production and uncovering absences produced by forward time.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Michael Gillespie for his patience with this protracted project and for his incisive comments and revisions along the way. One day I hope that I will be as good at separating the muscle from the fat of my writing as he was. I would also like to thank my committee – Drs. Buchanan, Eliaz, and Marchenkov – for their flexibility and helpfulness, both in the they offered years ago on the papers which formed the seeds of this project and during the mad rush preceding my defense.

Finally, I want to thank my mentor Jim Bogan and my friend Mazy Hayes for gently encouraging me to get back to work.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3

Acknowledgments...... 4

List of Figures ...... 7

Introduction ...... 8

Definitions ...... 12

Theoretical Foundations: Key Propositions on Reverse Motion ...... 15

The Structure of this Project ...... 30

Chapter 1: The Birth of Reverse Motion ...... 36

Forward and Back: From Demolition of a Wall to Édouard Hospitalier ...... 37

The of Reverse Motion as a Technological Idea ...... 49

The Time-Image Before the Time-Image ...... 71

Chapter 2: Reverse Motion as Spectacle and ...... 87

The Changing Technologies and Exhibition Practices in Early Cinema ...... 91

The Variety of Reverse Motion Spectacle in Early Cinema ...... 96

Narrativity, Diegesis, and the Marginalization of Reverse Motion ...... 102

Hiding Behind a : Reverse Motion as Special Effect in Classical Cinema ...... 112

Power over Time and Transcolonial Identity in ...... 118

The Negotiated Reappearance of Reverse Motion in Post-Classical Cinematic

Spectacle...... 122

Spectacle in Other Spaces: Reverse Motion in Music ...... 127

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The Limit of Spectacle: Reverse Motion as Analysis of Movement in Deren and the

Avant-Garde ...... 138

The Limit of Special Effect: Cocteau’s Cinematic Identity and the Queering of Time 147

Chapter 3: Reverse Motion as Comedy ...... 161

Superiority ...... 164

Incongruity, Resolution, and Norms ...... 170

Laughter and Evolutionary Biology ...... 174

Comedy as : The Semantic/Syntactic Mismatch and the Improbability Pact ... 177

Reverse Motion’s Affinity with Comedy in Happy End...... 183

Bergson and the Mechanical: a Temporal Theory of Comedy ...... 195

Chapter 4: Reverse Motion and History ...... 202

Wish and Disavowal...... 204

Reverse Motion as a Narrative Device ...... 212

Reverse Motion and the Recognition of History in ...... 226

Conclusion ...... 250

References ...... 270

Appendix I: Descriptions of Listed in Ch. 2 ...... 292

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LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1: Cinématographe program from March 1897 ...... 267

Figure 2: program for Proctor’s Pleasure Palace, NYC, from March 1897

...... 268

Figure 3: First known newspaper advertisement in Paris promoting reverse motion ..... 269

Figure 4: Édouard Hospitalier’s article “Curiosités Cinématographiques” ...... 269

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INTRODUCTION

Until nearly of the nineteenth century, no one had ever seen time run backwards. But in the 1890’s, early cinema technology made that radical sight possible, and audiences around the world first glimpsed the reversal of indexical records time and motion in that decade. Though the novelty of the early reverse-motion trick films soon faded with the public, reverse motion never disappeared from moving picture media, instead taking shelter in a number of film history’s margins. Yet despite its disinclusion in dominant film aesthetics and the lack of paid to it by film scholarship, reverse motion stands at the confluence of a great number of concerns for cinema studies and cultural studies more broadly.

The history and aesthetics of reverse motion deserve an extended exploration because it represents one of the most scientifically-, philosophically-, and epistemologically-fascinating technological consequences of cinema. Along with phonography, cinema introduced temporal plasticity to the arts. Unlike theater and music, which for thousands of years used time as a support, substrate, or background in which or upon which to perform durational works, cinema introduced time, or records of it, as the moldable substance of an form. In the era of cinema, time transcends its former status as mere canvas; cinema transforms time into the paint. Cinematic technology allows time to be , pasted, fragmented, collaged, juxtaposed, superimposed, sped up, slowed down, reversed, looped, scrubbed, and more. Like the ink that sticks to Silly Putty pressed onto newsprint, cinematic imprints of duration attain an analytic malleability not present in the referent.

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It should give us pause that cinema made it possible to register the trace of a section of time onto a physical material, deform that record, and back the altered event. What are the consequences of temporal plasticity on human thought and ? What new kinds of thinking or new creative possibilities does it make available to us? What reconfigurations of our understanding of narrative, of history, of causality and entropy, of normativity and deformation, or of the very nature of duration?

What epistemes rise at the dawn of plastic time? The present study proposes an in-depth analysis of the historical, aesthetic, expressive, ideological, and even political valences of the temporal plasticity of cinema by closely examining one of its most provocative instances: reverse motion.

When I embarked upon this project, I never anticipated that one of my greatest challenges would consist in explaining to my colleagues and what, exactly, I was studying. “When time runs backwards in the cinema,” I usually say. On this point I am often misunderstood. Though I mean to indicate that in a of reverse motion time smoothly flows frame-by-frame – that is, that the order of the individual frames has been reversed, putting the last first and the first last – people often mistake my object of study for a narrative technique which leaps backwards in time from one scene to the . A pardonable error, not only due to the entangling of narrative within the very definition of popular cinema, but also since a number of notable films do this – François

Ozon’s 5x2 (2004), Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002), and the grandfather of them both,

Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (directed in its film adaptation by David Hugh Jones, 1983).

Helpfully, the popular film Memento (, 2000) features both reverse motion and a fragmented narrative structure with reverse chronology, and thus furnishes

10 useful ground on which to distinguish the two. In Memento, the protagonist suffers from anterograde and cannot remember the events of the past for more than a few minutes. Writer/director Nolan cleverly simulates this frame of mind in the audience by beginning the (in formalist terms, the syuzhet) of the film within the final moment of the chronological story (or the fabula) and then, at the end of each scene, leaping back to the beginning of the scene before it. This “reverse narration” structure sufficiently fragments the story’s line of causality to render it nearly impossible for the audience to reconstruct the full arc of the narrative in their minds. But this is not reverse motion.

The only reverse motion in Memento appears at the very beginning of the film, in the form of a Polaroid photograph slowly un-developing, trickles of blood running back up a wall, and a gun un-firing a bullet – all of which serves to emblematize the reverse narration which will follow. A little-known predecessor of Memento, Lee Chang-dong’s

1999 Korean Peppermint Candy, combines reverse narration and reverse motion even more thoughtfully. Peppermint Candy tells the story of twenty years of a man’s life, beginning with the day of his suicide, followed by a series of elliptical episodes, each successively earlier in his life. Lee stitches these episodes together with elegiac shots in reverse motion. These interstitials each present a view from the rear of a moving train, looking back down the tracks. But since they play in reverse, they appear to indicate forward movement through space which somehow simultaneously runs backward through time, as though the viewer were taking a phantom ride through to get from one scene to the next. As such, these extradiegetic reverse-motion inserts poetically symbolize the story’s melancholy recessions into the past, in which forward movement through the syuzhet (emplotted time), and toward a deep understanding of what drove the

11 man to suicide, requires leaps backwards through the fabula (the chronological order of the narrative’s events).

Drawing on the work of Brian Richardson, Seymour Chatman helpfully distinguishes between these two orders of narrative reversal. He calls the larger form, in which scenes play forward but the order of the scenes is reversed, episodic reversal. He characterizes narratives which rely on framewise reverse motion as temporally

“antonymized” (33). While a useful distinction during this moment of introduction, I will neither elaborate upon it nor return to it, since Chatman’s principally literary purview ignores most of the uses of reverse motion in cinema, which tend toward non-narrative in nature. After all, reverse motion emerged in 1896 as a puzzling consequence of a breakthrough scientific device. It was wholly new – an extralinguistic sign without literary precedent. Though a child born directly of cinema’s material specificity, reverse motion found itself cast out by the principally theatrical and literary codes of narrative cinema. Over the years it has wandered rootlessly, finding work in the service of spectacle, of comedy, of experimental cinema, and even as a special effect. Though incorporated in narrative from time to time, reverse motion’s upending of causality, the very basis of classical cinema, doomed it to perpetually signify its own otherness from the margins of film history. Thus, here I accord little attention to its occasional incorporation within a narrative mode, opting instead to recognize it as a radical technique of time. Recentering film history and aesthetics upon reverse motion deterritorializes the primacy of narrative and affords a new from which we may understand the new revelations of reality made possible by temporal plasticity.

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Therefore, I base the heart of the project on a battery of core precepts from literature in cinematic temporality. Chapter-by-chapter, however, this project will draw on a wider variety of scholarship to account for the many applications which cinema has found for reverse motion over the years. I cast a wide net because few scholars have produced work that even mentions reverse motion, and those that have (Deleuze, Doane,

Epstein, Christie, and a handful of others) either mention it in passing or restrict their study to only one aspect of what is a very diverse phenomenon. This project seeks to produce a more complete account of reverse motion’s use in film history in order to discover new insights into the consequences of temporal plasticity. As such, it must draw on many sources. But I hope that in all this readers will not lose sight of a few basic precepts. So, I will spend much of the balance of the introduction briefly elaborating the findings of the scholarship which forms the backbone of this project, before offering one or two core principles of my own and outlining the contents of the chapters to follow.

Definitions

To begin, I must first establish a precise definition of reverse motion and situate that definition within the broader scope of cinematic time in general. For this purpose, I turn first to the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze begins Cinema 1: The Movement-Image with a series of commentaries on Henri Bergson’s early writings on cinema, time, and motion in Creative Evolution. In Creative Evolution, Bergson distinguishes between two orders of time: homogeneous clock time (time understood in terms of movement through space, such as the regulated tick of a second hand) and durée, time in its pure

13 heterogeneous state, for which language has few adequate descriptors. Deleuze frames his two-volume study of cinema according to this dichotomous relationship between time regulated spatially and subjugated under movement (Cinema 1: the movement-image) and time expressing itself directly, apart from movement (Cinema 2: the time-image). But before historically demarcating the divide between these two image classes, Deleuze explains the seminal leap which the invention of cinema made in the representation of movement. Film is the first art form that reconstructs motion not from “ideal poses,” but from unprivileged instantaneous indexical records of profilmic space, registered at equidistant temporal intervals by the automatic action of a machine. We may call this sequence of pictures spaced evenly in time photograms or, as Deleuze calls them, “any- instants-whatever” (Cinema 1, 3).

Expanding upon this leads to a useful definition of reverse motion. I define reverse motion as the playing back of any section of any-instants-whatever in the opposite order of their registration. Reverse motion cannot be constructed from sections of forward motion, but rather from forward motion’s units of stillness: from reversing the playback order of a film’s photograms. A brief elaboration of this notion of stillness is necessary. According to François Albera, even the earliest of thinkers and popular commentators on the cinema recognized that the act of viewing a film entails an unconscious mental operation – the active construction of motion by the eye and the brain. The spectator does not observe already existing motion; instead, the essence of the cinematic apparatus consists of “the production of movement through the combination of two mechanisms, that of the device and that of the spectator’s and brain”

(127). After all, cinema stops time and motion. 24 per second (or another

14 standardized number for , silent cinema, or video) the samples profilmic space and registers a still photogram. The reanimation of these still photograms relies on a precise calibration; the projector must display these images to the spectators at a rate equal to the rate of their capture. If this is done, the intermediate stillness between profilmic event and the of reception seems to disappear. But, of course, that stillness is the cell of cinema. Once the photographic mechanism stops time in this way, it permits all manner of manipulation of that section of time in playback or in post- production. Put another way, by storing time as a pair of registration and playback algorithms (in traditional cinema an “algorithm” as simple as defining how quickly a crank or a motor must be turned), the cinematic mechanism permits the plastic alteration of records of time through the alteration of the algorithm. Reverse motion is one such manipulation of time.

When the constant pace of the registration of the individual photograms (for instance, 24 frames per second) is identical during both shooting and playback, cinema reproduces a reasonably lifelike picture of the world, matching both its optical contours and the rate of its movements. Note here that it does not suffice for cinema that the image of profilmic space be indexical; the temporal interval between each pair of photograms must also be uniform with all other intervals as well as identical in the camera and in the projector. Put another way, cinema’s reality-effect depends on both the precise of space and time.1 Of course, this frame-tempo may be varied during filming, during projection, or during the editing phase (by reprinting frames, skipping frames, or any other technique which effectively adjusts the apparent framerate) to

1 This means that reverse motion cannot be generated from reversing the order of frames in .

15 produce a temporal distortion of film’s views of the world. If the rate of registration of photograms effectively exceeds the rate of playback, this produces . The opposite relationship, wherein fewer frames are recorded per second than are presented in playback, produces fast motion. Reverse motion, on the other hand, results from a different method of temporal distortion. In reverse motion, registration and playback proceed at equal and constant rates, but the order of frames is exactly inverted. Thus, in reverse motion the tempo of duration remains familiar; only its direction changes. As such, it holds a unique and quasi-uncanny place among the techniques of temporal plasticity.

Theoretical Foundations: Key Propositions on Reverse Motion

With these precise definitions of reverse motion and several other relevant concepts now in place, I turn now to a series of propositions drawn from literature on cinematic temporality which will guide my approach to reverse motion throughout this project. In essence, the following overview of literature relates and results in three propositions: that cinema revolutionized art and thought by introducing temporal plasticity (of which reverse motion is a supremely salient exponent); that reverse motion conceptualizes and makes visible several surprising claims of 19th-Century thermodynamics, thus linking scientific, philosophical, and artistic inquiries into the nature of time; and that these shocks and challenges to normative linear deterministic thought (represented and in part made possible by reverse motion) introduced a host of routes by which counter-hegemonic artists and philosophers might resist or overturn

16 reigning notions of time and the patterns of thought enmeshed in them. Since I have adopted the term “plastic” to describe the malleability of cinematic time, I will begin with a commentary on the most significant theorist to have positioned cinema in a historical relationship with other “plastic arts”: Andre Bazin.

Despite what Bazin claimed, cinema does not mummify change, it plasticizes change. Since the 1940’s, film studies has been haunted by all manner of readings and misreadings of the “realist” film theory of Andre Bazin. As Philip Rosen explains in

Change Mummified, many surface appraisals of Bazin’s arguments misunderstand and sometimes even conflate what he means by “likeness” and what he means by “realism,” thus mistaking his phenomenological investigation of cinema for a set of essentializing and teleological pronouncements on its nature. Cinematic technology only provides for

“likeness,” not for realism (however defined). The photochemically-registered trace of light furnishes no objective truth about any real-world referent; it merely declares the

“there-ness” of it captured. Put another way, the photographic index attests only that a light source and a camera once shared a line of sight. As Rosen argues, Bazin understood very well that no regimen of formal techniques guarantees objectivity or permits access to it (13). Indeed, Rosen claims that Bazin’s primary philosophical project in his writing on the cinema concerned “the processes by which human subjectivity approaches the objective” (11). Understood through Rosen, Bazin’s 1945 essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” does not claim that likeness is the ontology of the photographic image, but rather that the human desire for likeness brought about the ontogenesis of the photographic image. As Bazin claimed, European artists since the Renaissance sought to approach optical verisimilitude in their paintings through

17 a number of standardized techniques, chief among them linear perspective. But such techniques did not guarantee realism either; they merely systematized a method for collapsing three-dimensional space onto a picture plane, creating what Rosen calls a

“credible code,” a “reliable illusion” (17). When came along, it mechanized that perspectival algorithm, drawing the credibility of its likeness from the established credibility of linear perspective. This automation of picture-making, Bazin explains, arose from a desire to remove the “shadow of doubt” cast by the human hand in traditional drawing or painting (vol. 1, 12). But, Rosen adds, something else peculiar happened: the technology of photography established “a new kind of credibility” which culturally came to surpass that of linear perspective alone (17).

Bazin channels this new credibility when he claims that “Photography and the cinema... are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism” (vol. 1, 12). Here, a slippage occurs in his discussion of likeness and realism, as Bazin's historical claims regarding the human desire for likeness and investment of faith in techniques of likeness begin to intermingle with his aesthetic claims regarding realism as cinema's specificity. Rosen argues repeatedly that Bazin understood that likeness, however compelling, is neither automatically real nor realism, no matter how much faith the consumer of a photograph or a film might invest in believing that it bears a one-to-one correspondence with reality. And Bazin's writing confirms this stance, as when he states in “An Aesthetic of Reality” that “realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice” (vol. 2, 26). Yet, despite his acknowledgment that photographic and cinematic technology neither guarantee nor perforce imply on their own any kind of realist aesthetic, he nevertheless treats realism as

18 though it were an inherent desire of the cinema. To Rosen, this amounts to the “irrational leap of faith” entailed in investing belief in an image of likeness spilling over into an account of cinema's stylistic development (26). Thus, while Bazin often extols the and lenses, he recognizes that realism also depends upon the artificial arrangement of shots in . Put another way, certain manipulations of the image transform likeness into realism. But what of other kinds of manipulations? Near the end of “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin tips his hat to the illusionism of surrealist photography, calling it “an which is also a fact” (vol. 1, 16) precisely because its indexically-registered likeness commands something of our faith in the index despite optical deformations which make the content of the image empirically unreal.

So what, then, is cinema? Does it consist of traces of the world which somehow aspire to realism? Or does it consist of the arrangement and deformation of those traces into narratives which never happened and images which never before existed? Surely, the faith in likeness inspired by the cinematographic process of spatiotemporal imprint- taking confers a patina of “trueness” to even the most fanciful films and eye- bending avant-garde experiments. Far from implying an aesthetic of realism for itself, cinema's indexical image-making process confers its special kind of credibility to even the most bizarre unrealities. This fact imbues cinema with a kind of split personality which Bazin either did not recognize or which he disavowed as “heresy” (vol. 2, 26). Put succinctly, in the hands of certain artists, cinema (or, in point of fact, Bazin's mythic

“total cinema”) became the ultimate or “last” of the visual arts, achieving the heights of realism which Bazin praised. But in the hands of other artists, the very same properties

19 allowed cinema to become, in a sense, the first of the virtual arts, capable of creating entirely unreal but credible and enveloping worlds of sight and unfolding in space and time. All this became possible because, contrary to Bazin's characterization of it, cinema does not “mummify” change; instead, it plasticizes change. Cinema, by repeatedly taking the direct imprint of light in the world at regular temporal intervals, registers time in matter, thus making records of time available for deformation, fragmentation, and recombination in space.2 Cinema did not surmount the history of the plastic arts (as Bazin claimed) by perfecting a certain method of image-making, but instead by introducing a new material for plastic manipulation: in effect, time itself.

At least one other author who explicitly confronts Bazin’s engagement with temporality and phenomenology is Malin Wahlberg. Her Documentary Time: Film and

Phenomenology takes “time-space malleability” (xiii) as an intrinsic fact of the cinema with deep implications for our sensory and affective experience of filmic time. Invoking

Ovid's notion of metamorphosis and Bill Viola’s videotape The Reflecting Pool (1977), which features several moments of reverse motion in a poetic, meditative context,

Wahlberg points out that in cinema and video time becomes “sculptural,” taking on a malleability or “plastic quality” (5). She writes that this metamorphic potential steps to

2 This “” of time makes reverse motion possible (along many other techniques of deformation and manipulation). Had the 19th-Century invented a televisual device instead of a cinematic device, its temporal ontology would have been entirely different. As Mary Ann Doane writes in “Real Time: Instantaneity and the Photographic Imaginary” that broadcasting technologies are built around the premise of transmitting events to the viewer in “real time,” which is to say, “asymptotic to the instantaneous – with no delay, no distance, no deferral” (24). It is hardly an extrapolation to conclude that “real time” and reverse motion are antithetical. By physical necessity, reverse motion can never communicate “now-ness.” While the technological delay of a shot in real-time broadcasting might practically approach zero, any shot to be presented in reverse motion must have been recorded in its entirety before it can be projected or broadcast. Ontologically, reverse motion cannot participate in discourses of instantaneity. And since ever instance of reverse motion consists of a consciously manipulated section of time, it naturally seems to demand not passive consumption, but thought.

20 the fore in both trick films and art films, where filmmakers abandon or abjure the mere temporal mimesis of classical narrative in favor of the creative manipulation of cinematic spacetime. For instance, she writes of the experimental/scientific films of J. C. Mol,

“The possibility of extending, reversing, and compressing a preordained movement in time and space on the screen becomes a pedagogical device in order to analyze and explain natural processes” (71). Not only, then, do deformations of time such as reverse motion have a significant role to play in documentary; the spectator's encounter with reverse motion in any context may potentially spark a new awareness of time. Instead of insisting upon a naive correspondence between documentary and realism, she emphasizes films which experiment with “the ambivalent border between photographic representation and plastic abstraction” (84), acknowledging a commingling of the two in a way Bazin did not. Though Wahlberg writes very little specifically on reverse motion, she emphasizes that temporal deformation and fragmentation are not merely formal or aesthetic properties of cinema; rather, they represent phenomenological and philosophical possibilities capable of reorienting the spectator’s understanding of time.

Despite Deleuze’s rejection of phenomenology, Wahlberg writes that his Cinema project “accommodates a strong recognition of cinema as experienced… [and] presuppose[s] the viewer’s involvement to complete the cinematic sign at hand” (26). It is in this spirit that Deleuze classifies reverse motion with other techniques of temporal plasticity, such as slow and fast motion and false continuity shots, emphasizing both the spectator and the mainstream aesthetics by collectively calling them “aberrant movements.” He writes, “aberrant movement calls into question the status of time as indirect representation or number of movement … But, far from time itself being shaken,

21 it rather finds this the moment to surface directly, to shake off its subordination in relation to movement and to reverse this subordination. Conversely, then, a direct presentation of time does not imply the halting of movement, but rather the promotion of aberrant movement” (36). Deleuze means that all instances of reverse motion in which the viewer is aware that the image is reverse motion (for there are cases in which it is impossible to tell) are instances of the time-image in cinema. Aberrant movement,

Deleuze writes, “sets time free from any linkage; it carries out a direct presentation of time by reversing the relationship of subordination that time maintains with normal movement” (37). However, not all aberrant movements or techniques of temporal plasticity decouple time from movement in equivalent ways, and thus not all the same insights about the nature of time. By altering the direction of time, reverse motion stands uniquely poised to investigate and demystify causality, both in thermodynamic terms and narrative terms.

This leads to immediately to two important points: in the first place, reverse motion debunks teleological misconceptions of time. Deleuze (summarizing Jean-Louis

Schefer) observes that aberrant movements have the power to reveal “what does not let itself be thought in thought, and equally to what does not let itself be seen in vision”

(168). Here, Deleuze connects reverse motion to cinema confronting the cinemagoer with “something unthinkable in thought.” Used by a radical filmmaker, reverse motion can reveal the misrecognitions and the absences which forward time and its accompanying teleological constructs tend to produce in our understanding of history and the universe. Reverse motion lays bare the contingent and the chaotic, rendering even sections of the past unpredictable by denying us the security of recalling causes as we

22 witness effects. Inverting the order of causes and effects, reverse motion refuses us the comfortable fiction that the present flows with perfect predictability from the past, forcing us to face instead the truth that the past could have led to any number of presents, and the present could have resulted from any number of pasts.3 In the absence of memory furnishing us a smooth logic by which the past became the present, the past destabilizes and any teleological formations which we might have otherwise attached to history collapse in its presence. If we accept the Bergsonian proposition that the cinematographic mechanism’s way of “thinking” time and change mimics that of the human mind, then cinema desperately needs the intervention of reverse motion and other time-images to correct default human teleological misapprehensions. After all, the cinematic apparatus, with its single lens, its discrete photograms, and its unbroken ribbon of , presents a vision of “history” technologically predisposed to mislead.

Reverse motion, on the other hand, by offering the viewer simulated transit backwards through recorded sections of time, grants access to sections of the past unburdened by our routinized modes of forward-time thinking.

The notion that time is a field of contingency rather than a deterministic line results from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which introduces a principle called entropy. This leads toward a second point which reverse motion renders inescapable: paradoxically, that time is irreversible. Though reverse motion might simulate the look of a universe in which entropy decreases, beguiling us with such a fantasy, Mary Ann

Doane argues in The Emergence of Cinematic Time that reverse motion only truly points

3 Richard Feynman arrived at this result in 1948. Stephen Hawking summarizes: “[B]ecause the universe keeps on rolling the dice to see what happens next, it doesn’t have just a single history, as one might have thought. Instead, the universe must have every possible history, each with its own probability.” (The Universe in a Nutshell 80)

23 to the utter impossibility of real-world reversal of time and entropy (109). Entropy governs the becoming of our universe, and it declares that time can only ever flow in one direction.4 Thus, simulating time’s reversal on film reinforces this irreversibility and provides a view of time which would have been unthinkable apart from the cinema. But how and why does entropy prescribe an “arrow” to time? Stephen Hawking clarifies that ordered states tend to descend into disorder simply because of probability: since the number of possible disordered states greatly outnumbers the number of possible ordered states, as long as a system is in motion (which is to say, as long as it has any heat in it at all), it will, in all probability, find one of those more-likely disordered states in due time.

He adds that we perceive this as a fall into disorder only because our “psychological arrow of time” corresponds to the thermodynamic arrow of time. He explains that this is so because the process of remembering something – that is, the process by which we experience the present turning into the past – consumes energy, and thus increases the absolute value of entropy in the universe. This is true regardless of how the memory is recorded, whether in our brains, by toggling a bit in a computer, or by recording the trace of light by a photosensitive chemical reaction (that is, the process by which a “remembers”). “The direction of time in which a computer remembers the past is the same as that in which disorder increases,” he writes. “This means that our subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time, is determined by the thermodynamic arrow of time. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which

4 Neatly, Henri Bergson arrives at the same result by a different route. He argues that the continuous change of universal becoming prevents both our consciousness and the cosmos from ever repeating the same state of being twice. “Our duration,” he writes, “is irreversible” (Creative Evolution 6).

24 disorder increases. You can’t have a safer bet than that” (The Theory of Everything 110).

Therefore, in addition to being able to film every photographable event, all of which increase the absolute value of entropy in the universe, cinema also increases net entropy through the very act of filming. Were time to ever, by some strange miracle, reverse its direction, no films could ever be shot of it. They could only be un-shot. Reverse motion, then, opens a window onto something impossible.

But the impossibility of reverse motion only achieves its rhetorical force (both aesthetically and philosophically) through its manipulation of indexical records of time.

Understood in the context of thermodynamics, cinematic indexicality endows film with the ability to capture the unfolding contingency of time, to preserve chance events, and to record entropy. “Indexicality,” Doane writes, “must be dissociated from its sole connection to the concept of realism, the reflection of a coherent, familiar, and recognizable world. Indexicality is a function that is essentially without content—” (25).

It offers for the first time a view of the world which is free of teleological overdetermination in representation and instead replete with contingency and chance.

Though early cinema reveled in cinema’s ability in general and reverse motion’s ability in particular to uncover the contingency of the everyday, Doane writes that “Classical form in the cinema has functioned to restabilize a time subject to multiple disruptions in the nineteenth century’s confrontation with the epistemological implications of the loss of determinism and law” (139). Put another way, classical cinema sought to tame nonteleological chance by overwriting it with narrative. But reverse motion, by confirming time’s irreversibility, itself inextricably linked to chance and entropy in

25 thermodynamics, repudiates classical cinema’s particular brand of teleological narrativization of time.

By overturning normative narrativity, reverse motion seems also to offer an escape or a mode of resistance to dominant modes of thought. At its least politically- charged level, reverse motion caters to our hunger for the improbable and the impossible.

Ian Christie writes in “Time Regained: The Complex Magic of Reverse Motion” that if indexical forward motion confirms a world disintegrating into disorder, then reverse motion offers a complementary counter-narrative: the possibility of escape into fantasy or magic. Calling reverse motion “probably the most magical of all filmic devices,”

Christie first positions it within an early-cinema discourse of trick films in which it

“produced the specific effect of chaos seeming to revert to order” (168). But as time went on, realist conventions forced cinema to shed these “infantile” effects.5 In response, avant-garde filmmakers recast early cinema techniques like reverse motion as a way to challenge the assumptions of bourgeois realism. But the thermodynamic notions of

“chaos” and “order” (Christie does not use the term “entropy”) are complex. Christie writes, “At a simple perceptual level, filmic reverse motion produces a paradoxical sense of inevitability: the wall [from “Demolition of a Wall”] and the diver [from Vertov’s

Kino-Eye, and elsewhere] both rise, defying gravity, because they have fallen” (174).

Whereas Doane calls upon the probabilistic mathematics which thermodynamics used to formulate the theory of entropy in order to prove time irreversible, Christie seems to locate our desire for or our delight at its reversal in a broader social interest in the

5 Deleuze likewise observes that “if it is true that aberrations of movement were recognized at an early stage, they were in some sense corrected…” (Cinema 2, 39).

26 improbable. Appropriately, we find cinema history littered with instances of reverse motion fulfilling a character’s wish fantasy. We also find plenty of examples of artists using reverse motion to create an otherwise “impossible” shot.

Thankfully, the political ramifications of reverse motion surpass the escapism that

Christie proposes. Though Doane makes the case that many of the developments of mid-

19th-Century science and philosophy shaped the kind of time-experience that came to characterize the cinema, Bliss Cua Lim suggests that this Western technological apparatus is not necessarily bound to reproduce Western thought. Instead, reverse motion carries the potential to radically challenge Western bourgeois homogenous time. She points out in Translating Time that cinema arose from a context of Enlightenment-era philosophy which constructed Western historical time as “spatialized, abstract, chronological, measurable, and premised on a logic of temporal exclusion” (18). By this,

Lim summarizes dual concerns and ideas. First, Western modern consciousness understands time not in itself, but in terms of events that take place in space, such as the sweep of a clock hand or the spooling of a foot and a half of 35mm film through a projector every second. Secondly, Western linear construction of history ethnocentrically regards any differing non-Western notions of temporality as primitive and mistaken.

Under the regime of the clock, Western time became homogeneous. The cinema extends the homogeneity of time to its reproduction of sections of time: twenty-four evenly- spaced frames per second, rendering the whole world equally seeable by an unthinking machine. In the words of Roland Barthes, the cinema is a “clock for seeing” (qtd. in Lim

8). In short, cinema’s clockwork mechanism carries a knowledge-effect, implanted by the cultural context which produced cinema, and extended to later generations and

27 cultures which made use of cinema. Jean-Louis Comolli writes that the second half of the nineteenth century was characterized by an explosion of printed images which reached their apotheosis in cinema. He declares, “The whole world becomes visible at the same time that it becomes appropriatable” (123). The cinema transforms a heterogeneous world into a homogeneous one: under its regime, all events become equally filmable. As a machine of and Enlightenment, the cinema functions according to the ideological assumptions of modernity, temporally, racially, teleologically, and otherwise. But right on the heels of this account of Western bourgeois time-consciousness, Lim raises the possibility that temporalities born of the cinematic apparatus need not necessarily be determined by the Western ideological context which originally built the apparatus. Specifically, Lim’s project in Translating Time concerns the fantastic in non-Western cinema. To ground her work, she returns to the imbrication of the basic properties of cinema with the basic assumptions of modernity as considered by Bergson and Deleuze. She charges that even though modernity and its ideological prosthesis cinema attempted to reduce the world to a regime of “empty, homogeneous” time, in cinema of the fantastic, other temporalities erupt which cannot be fully tamed by the cinematic apparatus. These contending temporalities she calls “immiscible times,” and they present a challenge to the notion of homogeneous time and modernity in general by horrifyingly refusing to fit within a modern/cinematic temporal paradigm. Though (as

Doane argues) the apparatus of cinema does not ultimately affirm anything besides irreversible, causal, entropic, modern temporality; non-Western cinemas of miracles, of the marvelous, of the spectacular, and of the fantastic nevertheless challenge stable, causal temporality. Armed with techniques like reverse motion, resistant filmmakers,

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Lim argues, can create cinematic images which do not necessarily comport with ideology reified into the apparatus. Within the context of cinema of the fantastic especially, she contends that time-images (like reverse motion) could be used to shock thought and present a challenge to uniform, empty, teleological modern notions of time.

To reinforce Lim’s thinking on this point, it is worth observing that reverse motion, by its very nature, already presents an “immiscible” heterogeneous form of time to the cinema screen. After all, the spectator’s time of watching and the projector’s time of unspooling necessarily flow in the opposite direction of the apparently reversed time on screen. In her recent work Cinematic Chronotopes, Pepita Hesselberth, dubs this multiplicity of interlocking times as a “thickening” of time. She observes that when it comes to cinema “we are always in multiple temporalities at once” (3). Reverse motion manifests this fact as clearly as any technique of temporal plasticity can. Here, it will prove useful to supplement our understanding of the complexity of the polytemporality of reverse motion with a theories of polyrhythmicity drawn from writing on music. In

“‘Musical Time’ and Music as an ‘Art of Time,’” Philip Alperson assembles a list of ways in which music relates to time: a work of music was produced during a section of history and has a history, music requires time to perform, music might narratively represent a period or moment of time, music might be about time, and music includes a time of imagination during which it was conceived by the . All these temporalities and more intermingle in a section of reverse motion. But above all these,

Alperson recognizes time itself as a formal element of music, its pure (one might say heterogeneous) duration at odds with the strictures of mensural notation and standardized tempo markings (408). A similar tension exists between framerates in cinema and

29 represented sections of time, especially when considered in terms of Lim’s work.

Helpfully, Alperson makes a distinction between music’s “durational” and “dynamic” features, calling attention to the “features of objective and irreversible unfolding of tones in time,” which requires from the listener “intellection characterized by attention, memory, expectation, and assimilation” (409). He explains the “dynamic” nature of music in terms of rhythm – notes existing “‘in’ and ‘through’ time” but also ordered against each other. This impression of rhythm comes not from regularity, but from irregularity. Here Alperson attempts to distance music from homogeneous time, arguing that “musical rhythm is not simply a matter of a mere dividing of the time flux into equal parts,” but rather an impression of “push and pull, of pulse and decay, of rhythmic tension and resolution” (410). To support this claim, he draws on Susanne Langer’s argument that clock time is unidimensional, whereas music’s engagement with time is multidimensional, with “form and organization, volume and distinguishable parts” (qtd. in Alperson 412). Likewise, though the ribbon of celluloid might represent a unidimensional mechanism in cinema’s “clock for seeing,” reverse motion and other techniques of temporal plasticity introduce multiple simultaneous temporal orders to film.

Alperson suggests that mentally dealing with the multidimensionality of music requires what Kant termed “apperception,” by which the mind collects and orders multiple impressions within time (411). Similarly, reverse motion often demands the mental engagement of the spectator by picturizing multiple simultaneous temporalities for the viewer to mentally process and consider, leading potentially to new patterns of thought.

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The Structure of this Project

The potential of the temporal plasticity of reverse motion to birth new modes and patterns of thought began arguably even before its first appearance on a cinema screen.

In the first chapter of this project, I will endeavor to show where reverse motion came from and how its technological and ideological genealogy might enrich an understanding of film history. This will entail a tripartite revision of the history of reverse motion as the basis for the chapters to follow. I will begin by returning to the archive and examining primary documents to debunk and then refabulate the received, but incorrect, notion that reverse motion began when a projectionist accidentally cranked the Lumière film

“Demolition of a Wall” (1896) in reverse at an early screening. I attest instead that the earliest elaboration of the possibility of reverse motion in cinema dates to a January 1896 article by popular-science writer Édouard Hospitalier. From there, the second section considers the technological terms on which reverse motion did arise, examining the material factors which in combination constituted cinema as they did, rather than some other way. This section hypothesizes how or whether reverse motion might have arisen under different circumstances, and what that implies about our understanding of cinematic temporality. Finally, armed with this expanded and corrected narrative of reverse motion’s appearance, I turn my attention to Deleuze’s similarly dubious historical claim that the time-image arose only after the Second World War. I argue that the time- image, or at least proto-time-images, emerged in the consciousness of audiences of early cinema confronted by temporally-transgressive images of reverse motion.

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The second chapter picks up in early cinema again, discussing how reverse motion entered cinema as spectacle within that context. I will discuss the manner in which the rise of bourgeois narrativity at the dawn of classical cinema thereafter left reverse motion with a choice: integrate into mainstream cinema wearing the mask of the special effect, or persist as a kind of experimental or niche spectacle by fleeing to the margins. I spend the balance of the chapter discussing the consequences which befell the history of reverse motion in the wake of the commodification of narrative. This will first entail an examination the industrial aesthetics and occasional poetics of reverse motion as a special effect, in which its temporal plasticity creates an image of movement unavailable by other means. Then, I will discuss the later market for exotic movements created by reverse motion, which will include the terms under which certain forms of aberrant motion returned to post-classical cinema and the aesthetics of reverse motion in the . Finally, I will address the work of two avant-garde filmmakers in depth, sketching the limits to which took reverse motion as an examination of movement and the limits to which Jean Cocteau took it as a special effect infused with cinematic and personal allegory.

In the third chapter, I open with the observation that from the very beginning, cinema audiences found reverse motion profoundly funny. But why should this have been so? What makes reverse motion amenable to comic inscription? Departing from the premise that if typically relies upon some aberration from or deformation of a normative standard, then reverse motion introduces to cinema the power to humorously manipulate time itself. To corroborate and contextualize this claim, I set out a composite theory of film comedy, drawing perspectives from evolutionary biology, superiority

32 theory, incongruity theory, and studies of comedy as a genre. I will propose that reverse motion’s transgression of time quickly mobilizes an oppositional élan which makes it ideal for anarchic . Moreover, its incongruous and improbable contravention of the order of forward time sanctions bizarreness and difference, unmasking what classical cinema kept hidden. Equipped with these perspectives, I will analyze one of cinema’s most daunting reverse-motion projects, the 1966 Czech comedy Happy End, which is presented almost entirely in reverse motion, telling the story of a man living his life in reverse, from death to birth. In my discussion of the film, I will frame its comic appeal in terms of its playful and nonserious rejection of normative time, the incongruities wrought by swapping causes and effects, the mirthful superiority we feel in comparison to the main character Bedrich’s utter misrecognitions of the world around him, and, drawing from Bergson, the ludicrousness of the mechanical encrustation of cinematic reversal upon the indices of bodies in motion.

The fourth chapter begins with the notion that historiography and narrativity intertwine within broader concepts of temporality, meaning that narrative experiments which incorporate reverse motion to elucidate causality might enrich filmic approaches to history, and vice versa. The chapter begins by discussing a series of examples of reverse- narration in literature and cinema, classifying some as naïve wishes or attempts to disavow history and others as efforts to make sense of history through narrative. After this, I turn to a close analysis of Soviet silent filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s deployment of reverse motion as a radical technique not simply of retelling history, but of shaping it.

Positioning reverse motion centrally in his revolutionary and avant-garde practice, I argue that he incorporated “trick effects” into documentary in order to continually transform

33 reality according to Soviet principles. In Vertov’s hands, reverse motion neither denies history nor hoodwinks the viewer into false belief; rather, it demystifies both the material nature of the cinematic illusion and the flow of history itself.

To close my introduction, I would like to sketch a few additional guiding principles for this project. First, reverse motion is, to say the least, multivalent. It relates to modern temporality, contingency, entropy, indexicality, irreversibility, “magic,” stillness, the fantastic, immiscible temporalities, palindromes, circuits of recollection, spectacle, shock, avant-garde possibilities of cinema, musical temporality, and more. As such, during any discussion of reverse motion, ontological, epistemological, and discursive tensions often arise. For instance, while reverse motion “is” a time-image which at bottom signifies temporal irreversibility, when used as a special effects shot, it may nevertheless signify a magical event in forward time. How should one go about describing such a shot – according to the parameters of its contextual function and appearance, or according to an obdurate insistence upon the fact that it was generated from a section of forward time? Is it permissible to refer to reverse motion as “time running backwards,” or must one only call it “a record of time played backwards”? Is it acceptable to poetically say that something “ascended” or “leapt up” in a reverse-motion shot of an object falling? As much as I endeavor to avoid such slippages, I nevertheless find it tyrannical to insist, for instance, that reverse motion “always” signifies irreversibility when a film or video clearly uses it to explore other topics, like dreams, resurrection, altered subjectivity, or spectacle. So in many cases I will tactically let my guard down, especially in this work’s early chapters.

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Secondly, reverse motion naturally tends to produce confusion and misrecognition. Though skillful artists have in limited instances used it to help correct the misunderstandings of forward time, in general, left to itself, reverse motion muddles both and expectations. Despite the fact that a sheet of past is, in Deleuzian terms, certain, we would be wrong to surmise that recession into the past (via reverse motion) is predictable. A shot of reverse motion moves from effects to causes, but it does not necessarily move from the unknown to the known. That which has already happened un-happening is often stranger than that which has not happened happening. Consider the perceptual process of watching a shot of reverse motion. As we move through each instant, each frame, we observe that that which has not happened (from the forward-time causal perspective of that referent instant) is behind us and known. Conversely, that which has already happened (again, from the perspective of that instant as it passed in forward time) is before us and unknown. Reverse motion puts the chronological past in our perceptual future and the chronological future in our perceptual past. In certain films or which overlay two regimes of time, everything becomes simultaneously past and future. Bergson declared that the seat of our knowledge is based in duration rather than in space. No concept merely is; all concepts emerge and change in and through time. Thus, when film reverses an image of duration, the ordinary mechanisms of our thought collapse, or at least undergo serious strain.

Therefore, thirdly, we cope with reverse motion by generating mental images. As stated before, reverse motion is produced by mirroring the temporal flow of indexical photograms recorded at equal durational intervals. Recognizing that a shot before us is playing in reverse entails first recognizing the indexical similarity of its objects and

35 object familiar to us from lived reality. From our intuitive understanding of entropy and time’s arrow, we then recognize that the objects before us move differently than our experience would predict – in particular, that time flows backwards in the shot. Since we can only notice this by virtual reference to our mental schemas of forward time, the mere act of watching a reverse motion shot and recognizing it as reverse implicitly involves an automatic mental forwarding procedure. This is to say that we can only recognize reverse motion as reverse motion by imagining it forwards. I call this imagined forward- time shot “obverse motion.” Beyond mere recognition, such “obverse motion” shots may also be pondered intentionally so as to make sense of the reverse motion. In this act of purposive pondering, we mentally place side-by-side the reverse motion before us and the obverse motion which we have visualized. This act of mental comparison brings into existence another mental-image, which I choose to call the “comparison-image.” With the comparison-image, we slowly piece together an understanding of the nature of entropy and, indeed, of forward time.

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CHAPTER 1: THE BIRTH OF REVERSE MOTION

A student seeking the genesis of reverse motion in popular accounts of cinema history will likely encounter a tale of accidental discovery. During the course of this investigation, I have read many of them. Consider a representative origin story—Bernard

Tavernier’s voice-over narration for the Lumière film Demolition of a Wall, popularly considered the first reverse motion film, on the Kino release The Lumière Brothers’ First

Films:

This is Auguste giving orders. They are demolishing a wall. The film is called The Demolition of a Wall. And it was planned to be a documentary... but then, an accident happened. Look. By rewinding the film, one day the film was projected backwards and that created an enormous shock with the audience. Louis Lumière decided to use that accident and exploited the film like that in his later programs. He was a filmmaker, [but] he was using all the accidents which was [sic] happening during the making of the films and incorporating them in the next programs.

This narration leads the listener to believe that reverse motion was discovered by accident

(that is, neither purposively invented nor abstractly formulated), that Demolition of a

Wall was the first reverse motion film, and, implicitly, that cinematic reverse motion began with the Lumière Cinématographe. In such accounts, a number of dubious romanticizations intersect and coalesce: our love of the contingent or fortuitous event, our overestimation of the Lumière Brothers’ single-handed contributions to cinema history, and our insistence that the first instance of anything be a tangible object rather than a thought.

In the following pages, I will demonstrate that all of the claims of this birth narrative are false by producing an expanded account of the birth of reverse motion which dispels a number of myths and highlights the key contributions of a science writer

37 named Édouard Hospitalier. Then, in the next section, I will apply several models of the development of cinematic ideas to the emergence of reverse motion, making sense of reverse motion’s birth by paying particular attention to the technologies of temporality surrounding the beginnings of cinema. Having thus deployed both an exhibition history of reverse motion’s birth and then a technological or material account of its ontogenesis, I will bring these insights to bear on Gilles Deleuze’s historiography of the time-image in cinema. I will argue that though Deleuze’s taxonomy of cinematic signs certainly references temporal plasticity in various forms, its ignorance of reverse motion in early cinema undermines his of the emergence of modern subjectivity. I regard the depth of the re-examinations and revisions of this chapter as necessary because the complex genealogy of reverse motion requires more than a simple negation to set the story straight. In fact, I marvel at the archive’s almost ruthless zeal for shredding nearly every aspect of the “official story.” Thus, before we can disembark at the most probable genesis of reverse motion and base later historical claims upon it, we must work our way backwards through a series of claimants to the title, untangling what can be untangled as we go. We will begin with the film which has worn the crown the longest: Demolition of a Wall.

Forward and Back: From Demolition of a Wall to Édouard Hospitalier

Demolition of a Wall, Lumière catalog no. 40, was shot sometime in the early months of 1896 and premiered in Lyon on March 9, 1896 (“Lumière catalog”). At about the same time in Paris, Le Figaro reported that the Lumières, overwhelmed by the crowds

38 attempting to see the Cinématographe at its venue in the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des

Capucines, decided to branch out to additional locations (Huret 4). On March 26, 1896, they added the Cinématographe to the second act of the revue Royaume des femmes at Paris’s Eldorado . Though more than one Paris paper remarked that the eight-film screening “literally brought the room to its feet,”6 only the reviewer for Le

Gaulois mentioned the names of any of the films that played. He refers to one of them by the name Le Mur qui s’écroule [“The Wall that Collapses”], and writes that this film

“elicited thunderous applause.”7 Given that no Lumière film was cataloged under that name, he must certainly have meant what we now call Demolition of a Wall. The exuberance of the public spread quickly for this new Lumière program, and two days later the Eldorado had to turn away 300 people from one of their shows.8

As spectacle, Demolition of a Wall was evidently a sensation. But at first, the reason had nothing to do with projecting it in reverse. Just as in the case of the fluttering leaves in the background of the Lumières’ Le Répas de Bébé (Baby’s Breakfast, which was one of the first 10 films screened at the public premiere of the Cinématographe on 28

December, 1895) and the images of surf crashing ashore in various views of oceans and beaches (Birt Acres’s 1895 Rough Sea at Dover and several Lumière films among them), the public’s love of Demolition of a Wall sprung at first from their interest in spectacle, contingency, and fine detail. An item in the Boston Daily Journal summarizes the appeal: “The marvelous reproduction of everyday scenes in such a lifelike manner is

6 “Courrier des Spectacles.” Le Gaulois 27 March 1896: 3, “Courrier des Théâtres.” Le Petit Parisien 27 March 1896: 3. My translation from the French, “…ont littéralement soulevé la salle,” a phrase used in both articles. 7 Ibid. My translation from the French: “Le Mur qui s’écroule et la Plage de la Ciotat, notamment, ont provoqué des tonnerres d’applaudissements.” 8 “Courrier des Théâtres.” Le Petit Parisien 29 March 1896: 3, La Lanterne, 30 March 1896: 3.

39 most astonishing. The tearing down of an old building [here the reviewer likely refers to

Demolition of a Wall] is really one of the best, the dust effect being so real that lots of theatre-goers are under the impression that it is in some way produced on the stage, which, of course, is not really the case” (“ – Keith’s Theatre” 4). Demolition of a Wall was a hit without reverse motion and, perhaps more importantly, no one mentions it as having screened in reverse until almost a year after its premiere.

The first newspaper coverage of a reverse motion screening of Demolition of a

Wall appeared in several Paris papers on March 6, 1897, as an aspect of what appears to have been a coordinated new marketing strategy. For the first time, the Lumières advertised the titles of the films they were showing, as well as which ones would screen in reverse.9 On the same day, Le Figaro also published an article which, especially given its timing, smacks of a puff piece, but nevertheless gives us insight into the manner in which the spectacle of reverse motion was received and marketed. The author notes that films projected à l’envers (in reverse) give rise to absolutely new visual effects which disrupt the laws of weight and balance. From a wall which has been demolished, he writes, “we see all its debris engage in a comical race to seal themselves back together, whereupon the edifice suddenly straightens itself back up without any spiritual intervention.”10 Unmistakably, the author describes Demolition of a Wall.

9 “Cinématographe Lumière.” Le Figaro 6 March 1897: 5, “Spectacles Divers – Cinématographe Lumière.” Le Gaulois, 6 March 1897: 4. 10 “Courrier des Théatres.” Le Figaro 6 March 1897. My paraphrase and translation of the single- paragraph notice: “La Vie à l'envers. -- Aucune expression ne saurait mieux qualifier les merveilleuses scènes animées, dites « à l'envers », qui sont actuellement visibles au Cinématographe Lumière du Grand Café, boulevard des Capucines. Il s'agit de vues animées dans lesquelles les lois de la pesanteur et de l'equilibre sont entièrement perturbées et donnent lieu à des effets absolument nouveaux. Ainsi, un mur ayant été démoli, on voit tous les débris de ce mur se livrer à une course comique, se ressouder entre eux, puis l'édifice se redresser subitement sans aucune intervention spirite. C'est une merveille de plus à l'actif du Cinématographe Lumière!”

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Here a remark necessitates a brief pause in this narrative. Though titles of films were always listed in the programs distributed to the spectators at any Cinématographe screening, they were not before March 1897 advertised in newspapers, and rarely did a reviewer mention one of them by name. At its unveiling, the Cinématographe was culturally positioned, like its contemporary the X-ray, as a scientific marvel (cf. Gunning,

“‘We are Here and Not Here,’” 52).11 No specific film had yet emerged as spectacle or in its own right (and the appellation “art” was still much further off); rather, they all served to demonstrate the capabilities of the device. But by late 1896, hints began to surface in the marketing of and reporting on the Cinématographe that the scientific novelty was beginning to fade. Consider the Cinématographe’s first appearance in Boston. On August 10, 1896, the Boston Morning Journal reported on the New

England premiere of the Cinématographe in Keith’s Theatre, writing that the

Cinématographe “is as much better than the Vitascope12 as an electric light is superior to a gas get [sic]. The views are steadier, clearer, and more interesting, and it should prove an endless attraction” (“Mr. Keith’s Climax” 3). By October, the Journal’s opinion of the Cinématographe had altered slightly but importantly. Their reviewer wrote, “The novelty cannot wear off this great French invention so long as the programs are changed as regularly as they are at Keith’s” (“Keith’s New Theatre” 7). Contradictorily, he claimed that the novelty of the device was contingent upon the newness of the films which it played; this indicates that the novelty of the device had worn off, and the novelty of the films made up for it. By December, the Cinématographe’s appeal seems to have

11 Ads for demonstrations of the X-ray often appear near Cinématographe ads in the papers I researched. 12 A motion picture projection technology built by and C. Francis Jenkins which premiered as the “Phantoscope” in September 1895. later bought, improved, and rechristened it under the name “Edison’s Vitascope.”

41 transferred almost entirely from its technological properties to the profilmic content of the films it played. An ad for Keith’s in the Boston Globe , “Boston Views in the Cinématographe… Come and See if You Got Caught in One of Them” (10). And with that, the Cinématographe’s cultural capital slipped from that of a revolutionary new way of seeing to that of a pipeline of fascinating new things to see.13

Thus it should come as no surprise that with their new March 1897 Paris marketing strategy, the Lumières (and along with them the nascent motion picture industry in general) continued the trend demonstrated in Boston by beginning to transition from a device-centered business to a film-centered business. Reverse motion emerged in exhibition at this moment in early 1897 as a means of producing more bizarre effects for an increasingly fastidious audience. The sheer quantity of references to reverse motion in the marketing suggests that reverse motion was no marginalized sideshow, but rather a cornerstone of this new spectacle-based strategy. In fact, advertisements and programs for the Cinématographe from 1897 and 1898 rarely mention any specific details about the films playing besides their titles and which ones will screen in reverse.14 As such, these advertisements do not merely whet the viewer’s eidetic appetite with the promise of time and physics transformed, they also secondarily reinforce the wonder of the device itself, which not only reproduces dust clouds, fluttering leaves, and crashing waves with such fidelity, but which also has the capacity to invert the trajectory of time’s arrow. Thus, while the marketing of reverse motion as

13 See also Robinson’s The History of World Cinema, in which he estimates that by mid-1897 cinema had ceased to be a scientific attraction and had become a show (25). The dates of reverse-motion’s emergence as an element of saleable spectacle re-confirm this timetable. 14 The advertisements do not mention editing, slow motion, time-lapse, camera movement, lighting, or any other formal element besides reverse motion. See figs. 1, 2, and 3.

42 spectacle participated in a pattern of displacing the wonder of the Cinématographe onto the content of the films, it did so in a way which also momentarily renewed awe in the surprising technological power of the device itself.

Now to return to the main question: was Demolition of a Wall, as Tavernier and many others have claimed, the first film shown in reverse motion? As it turns out, others vie for this distinction. In his authoritative volume on the Lumière operators15, Jacques

Rittaud-Hutinet credits Felix Mesguich with the accidental discovery of reverse motion in late 1896 or early 1897. He explains that Mesguich, in his role as projectionist at the

Grand House in Boston16, decided one night to project in reverse “Les bains de

Diane à Milan” (Lumière catalog no. 277, variously translated in English at the time as

“The Divers at the Bath in Milan” or “The Baths of Minerva, at Milan, Italy”), and the sheer “irréalisme” of the spectacle touched off unanticipated laughter in early audiences

(Rittaud-Hutinet, Le Cinéma des Origines 166-167).17 Notices from the time confirm the last part of this claim, with a New York reviewer supportively calling the effect

“startlingly unlifelike and highly ludicrous” (New York Herald-Tribune, 23 March 1897:

7). But the rest of this tale stands upon the slightest of foundations. Rittaud-Hutinet bases this origin story on Mesguich’s 1933 memoirs, in which he recalls, “For the first time, I dared indulge the fantasy of making divers ascend out of the water by turning the

15 That is, the filmmakers and projectionists which the Lumières sent around the world with their Cinématographe. 16 To avoid confusion, I should explain that the Cinématographe’s run at Keith’s Theatre ended in early January 1897 when it was replaced with the Biograph (“Keith’s Theatre” Boston Evening Journal, 5 January 1897: 5) After a brief absence, it subsequently returned to Boston at the Grand Opera House. 17 Rittaud-Hutinet also tells an abbreviated version of the same Mesguich story in Les Frères Lumière 377.

43 crank backwards,”18 without any further supporting documentation. To his credit,

Rittaud-Hutinet acknowledges in a footnote that Mesguich’s claim of discovery may be dubious, writing that it is difficult to date the first projections of reverse motion in either

Paris or Boston with sufficient precision. He refers the reader to Georges Sadoul’s 1964 of Louis Lumière for evidence of another scholar’s difficulty at precisely fixing the moment of reverse motion’s birth.

Sadoul’s text does indeed corroborate Rittaud-Hutinet’s professed difficulties, and he even repeats the standard accidental-discovery narrative, writing, “It just took one error by an operator to discover the elementary trick effect of reverse motion,” adding that were it discovered by accident in Paris, “maybe” the happy accident can be ascribed to projectionist Charles Moisson. But insightfully Sadoul goes a step further, pointing out that the requisite mechanical process for reverse motion had existed at least 60 years before the cinématographe in the form of phenakistoscopes and other motion toys, which were certainly from time to time spun retrograde. He adds, however, that before 1897, reverse motion had not yet emerged in its “truly cinematographic” form (71).19 Here,

Sadoul recognizes the ontological difference between reversing the order of ideal poses

(drawings made to be assembled into on motion toys) and reversing the order of any-instants-whatever (the temporally-equidistant photograms or individual frames of

18 Rittaud-Hutinet, Le Cinéma des Origines 166-167. My translation from the French, “Pour la première fois, je risque la fantaisie de fair remonter les plongeurs de l’eau, en tournant la manivelle en arrière.” 19 My translations and paraphrases from the French, “Il avait suffit d’une erreur d’un opérateur pour découvrir le truc, élémentaire, du « film à l'envers ». Le procédé avait déjà été utilisé, de façon différent, par Emile Reynaud durant les projections de son théâtre optique, quand il montrait Arlequin hésitant au sommet d’un mur pour se décider enfin à le franchir. Dès les années 1830, il avait suffi de tourner à l’envers des Phenakistoscopes et des pour que, par exemple, la fumée rentre dans la bouche d’un fumeur au lieu d’en sortir. Il n’empêche que le premier truquage vraiment cinématographique fut dû à un opérateur du Grand Café, peut-être Charles Moisson (encore que Mesguich revendique son invention aux Etats-Unis, pendant l’été 1896).”

44 cinema). Since only photographic cinema actually records time (unlike animation, which builds approximations of time from scratch), only cinema can truly play back, accelerate, or reverse time. And since motion emerges as a byproduct of physical forces interacting upon a tableau of time, reverse motion cannot truly appear without the registration and reversal of time.

Rittaud-Hutinet was wise to regard Mesguich’s claim with suspicion, because the timetable simply does not support it. The Cinématographe re-opened at Boston’s Grand

Opera House on March 29, 1897 (“Grand Opera House” 8), after an absence of over two months from Boston. Just as none of the coverage of the Cinématographe’s previous run at Keith’s mentioned reverse motion, none of the coverage of its re-opening at the Grand

Opera House mentioned reverse motion either. However, beginning in the second week of April 1897, the Grand Opera House began to advertise “motion pictures reversed!” on their showings of the Cinématographe (Boston Evening Journal, 8 April, 1897: 7).

Nearly a week later, the local press briefly commented on this new spectacle, writing just that “the Divers at the Bath in Milan [was] shown in reversal” (Boston Evening Journal,

“Theaters,” 13 April, 1897: 7). If reverse motion did not appear on the Cinématographe in Boston until early April 1897, then it trailed the Paris premiere by a full month, and even the New York premiere by several weeks.20

Dates aside, any attempt to identify which Cinématographe screening premiered reverse motion might be entirely moot, since such a formulation of the inquiry begs the broader question by assuming that reverse motion began with the Cinématographe, when,

20 The New York Herald-Tribune reported on March 23 that “The Cinématographe is giving a comic exhibition this week by presenting some of its moving pictures backward” (7).

45 in fact, it might not have. Indeed, the archive boasts a number of items which suggest that reverse motion did not originate on the Cinématographe, nor, quite possibly, on any device at all. Consider a few of them, in reverse order of their appearance:

On 13 February, 1897, the Boston Daily Advertiser wrote nonchalantly in their theater column, “In the Biograph exhibitions at Keith’s next week several pictures will be shown with the films reversed, and there will be new views also” (“Plays Next Week” 7).

This was three weeks in advance of the advertised Paris premiere of reverse motion on the Cinématographe.

On 29 December, 1896, the New York Herald-Tribune reprinted an item from the

Troy Times, a Boston area paper, which describes a reverse motion experiment with the

Kinetoscope, said to have taken place “not long ago in Boston”:

The subject was a man eating dinner, and the film, prepared especially for the occasion, was of unusual length, so that the whole performance could be recorded. The man entered the room and, seating himself at a table, proceeded to cut up the food. The motion of the fork from the plate to his lips was carefully recorded until the last morsel of food had vanished. Then he arose and walked out of the room, leaving nothing on the table but bare dishes. The series of pictures was then reversed. It showed the man entering the room, walking backward. He sat down at the table, upon which there was nothing but bare dishes, and proceeded to extract food from his lips until he had filled the potato dish with potatoes and gradually put together a steak on the platter before him. Then he calmly backed out of the room, and the waiter did likewise with the meal that the man had apparently created. (7)21

Nearly half a year before that, in early July 1896, an item appeared in the St. Louis

Globe-Democrat22 describing a lecture given before the Paris Academy of Sciences by a

21 Though this film appears not to survive, I estimate that it would look similar to the single-take reverse eating in the music video for God Lives Underwater’s song “From Your Mouth,” 1998 (directed by Roman Coppola). 22 And many other papers, including the Times-Democrat [Lima, Ohio] (July 10 1896), the Daily Nevada State Journal [Reno] (July 18 1896), the Sioux County Herald [Iowa] (July 22 1896), the Rolfe Reveille [Iowa] (July 23 1896), the Eau Claire Free Press Weekly [Wisconsin] (August 6 1896), the Newark Daily

46 certain Professor G. Queroult under the title “Impossibilities Made Possible by Means of the Modern Inventions In the Electrical Field.” The article, titled “Working It

Backward,” abbreviates his findings as follows: “During some of his experiments he hit upon the idea to turn around photographic records and also the series of pictures seen through the .” The article then tantalizes readers with descriptions of his results:

A drinker takes up an empty glass and replaces it full upon the table, a smoker sees the stump of cigar flying at him from the floor, takes it to his mouth and sees the smoke originate in the room, draws it into his mouth and into his cigar, which is gradually lengthened and finally replaced in the pocket. A wrestler, who has probably thrown away his garments, is recovered with them by their, so to speak, walking up on him into their places, while he himself performs motions of which we can understand nothing because we never saw these most ordinary motions performed backward…

And on it goes. The anonymous writer suggests placing two side by side, one running such scenes forward and the other in reverse; he also advises the proprietors of any interested Kinetoscope parlor to warn patrons of the reversal, “for otherwise they might think themselves the victim of a dream, a hallucination, or something worse” (3).

But we cannot attribute the conceptualization of reverse motion to this Prof.

Queroult, since the description corresponds to no actual person. A look at the proceedings of the Paris Academy of Sciences reveals that a man named Georges

Guéroult did make a brief presentation on February 17, 1896, but he discussed time-lapse photography, not reverse motion (404-6). As it turns out, the time-reversal experiments credited to the fictitious Queroult were actually a series of thought experiments proposed

Advocate (September 14, 1896), the Austin Daily Herald [Minnesota] (September 17 1896], the Kalamazoo Gazette (September 29 1896), and even appearing as far as way as , in “Book Bits” on December 19, 1896. This range of reprinting suggests that it likely appeared in many more papers as well. The New York Journal also printed a similar, but somewhat longer, overview of Queroult’s findings, adding that there were plans in the works to premiere such films in New York by the winter (“To Reverse Nature” 3).

47 in a short speculative article called “Curiosités Cinématographiques,” written by Édouard

Hospitalier in La Nature, a French popular science publication. Hospitalier was a prominent mechanical engineer, professor, and contributor to La Nature (Laffargue 256), and on January 25, 1896, not even a month after the Cinématographe’s public premiere in

Paris, he published an article outlining the effects which could be achieved by reversing the direction of the crank on the Cinématographe and, moreover, their potential value to science (Hospitalier 114-5).23 Hospitalier’s groundbreaking piece forms the backbone of the widely-distributed Queroult articles, with the section in the block quote above nearly a word-for-word translation of parts of the third and final paragraphs of Hospitalier’s article.24

Hospitalier writes in the first paragraph of “Curiosités Cinématographiques” that while physicists have already observed a number of strange phenomena due to the

“principle of reversibility,” none of these could possibly be as strange as those which would be observed were it possible to reverse the direction of time. He continues that though the mind balks when it comes to visualizing time in any sequence besides its natural order, simple physical instruments have made possible what humans were otherwise powerless to accomplish. Sometimes, he points out, a scientific device’s greatest service to intellectual activity is to shock the senses – “sight and sound in

23 See fig. 4. 24 Which, in part, reads: “Le buveur prend son verre vide et le repose plein; le fumeur voit la fumée naître dans l’espace et entrer dans son cigare qui s’allonge avec le temps; le lutteur qui a jeté ses vêtements les voit revenir sur lui-même et le recouvrir tandis qu’il se livre à des contorsions auxquelles nous ne comprenons rien, puisque nous n’avons jamais vu les phenomenes ou les événements les plus ordinaires de la vue se dérouler en remontant dans le temps. // Nous pensons qu’une séance du cinématographe devrait être complétée par le curieux spectacle d’une ou deux vues déroulées à l’envers, mais en ayant soin de prévenir les spectateurs, pour qu’ils ne se croient pas sujets d’un rêve ou d’une hallucination.” Ibid. Carelessness in the translation probably accounts for the odd syntax and verb choice in the Queroult piece. I cannot identify who invented the amalgamated Queroult, or why.

48 particular” – as would certainly result if events could be viewed in reverse chronological order. In the second paragraph, he remarks, “we already know that by turning the backwards, one can play back in the reverse of the order in which they were emitted,” resulting in “a veritable cacophony.” Thus, he concludes in the next paragraph that the Cinématographe ought to be able to reverse visible phenomena the same way that the phonograph can reverse acoustic phenomena, adding, “it would be as simple as unrolling the photograms in the opposite of their natural order.”25

Not only does Hospitalier’s confidence in the feasibility of his method indicate his mechanical erudition, but his mental route to the idea of reverse motion proves that he was an insightful topological thinker as well. By analogy to the phonograph, Hospitalier supposed that the reversal of time could be visualized by the Cinématographe, and he turned out to be right. In the next section, I will consider the origins and consequences of this analogy in greater depth, evaluating a number of theoretical approaches to the historical development of ideas in cinema. Subsequently, I will use reverse motion as a test case to reconsider the identity of cinema in terms of how it developed and how it might have otherwise developed.

25 Ibid. My translations and paraphrases. Note: Hospitalier makes extensive use of the verb “remonter” to describe reversal in time. English lacks a verb to correspond to remonter’s range of meanings. In its most literal sense, it means to re-climb (as in to walk back up a staircase), but it also encompasses the verbs recover (as in lost time), reassemble (as in a demolished wall), reach back, reset, and rewind. The Princess in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) uses the same phrase, “Remontez le temps,” when commanding Heurtebise to “rewind” Orpheus out of the underworld and return him to resurrected Eurydice’s side, a sequence which features ample reverse motion.

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The Emergence of Reverse Motion as a Technological Idea

Were it necessary to identify the moment when the idea of reversing the playback direction of photographically-registered sections of time first entered consciousness, we would likely find it difficult to mark it any point earlier than the publication of Édouard

Hospitalier’s article of January 25, 1896. But on this point, a number of remarks are necessary. First among them, a reminder that the genealogical method permits no historical question, no matter how straightforward or unambiguous, to be answered in a straightforward or unambiguous way. If the search for points of origin springs from a desire to make history linear, expeditiously readable, and dotted with stable benchmarks, then any search for a beginning also consciously or unconsciously interprets the events of the past in terms of their perceived value from the point of view of the present. André

Gaudreault and Tom Gunning remind us that film historians answer even the most basic historical questions about cinema on an ideological level, writing that by canonizing “the fetish date of 28 December, 1895,” film historians have chosen to emphasize,

“consciously or not, that what should be considered the turning point, the historical moment, is not the invention of the device but the coming together of the entire

‘apparatus’ (projection plus public plus paying) that presides over the act of ‘going to the movies’” (“Introduction” 4). If cinema was not “invented” until the entire apparatus of device, audience, and industry coalesced, then why not, in a similar fashion, grant the birthright of reverse motion to the moment when it was first advertised as a key selling point of cinematic spectacle, sometime in early 1897? Before that, as we have seen, reverse motion only appears in scientific settings, as an experiment in temporality. If

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“cinema” (however imagined) did not begin on 13 February, 1895 (when the Lumières patented their cinématographe), then why should we suggest that reverse motion was born the moment it was first conceptualized by Édouard Hospitalier in La Nature?

Following the logic of the December “fetish date,” should we not pinpoint reverse motion’s birth around the time exhibitors began to advertise it as spectacle rather than science? The same conundrums plague attempts to date the inception of both cinema in general and reverse motion in particular, since each began as a scientific exploration before entering the public consciousness as saleable spectacle.

The historiographical methods necessary to understand cinema’s gradual emergence must necessarily be brought to bear on any of its constituent parts or resultant effects, including reverse motion. A number of different writers on cinema’s diverse prehistory and endlessly-mutable history have proposed useful ways of thinking about the gradual coalescence of “cinema.” Charles Musser situates cinema as a milestone on the centuries-long development of various modes of “screen practice.” André Gaudreault accounts for the tumultuous convergence of various devices and in cinema by trying to disentangle each into its own “cultural series.” François Albera addresses the influence of the popular consciousness of the late Nineteenth Century by outlining what broad ideological factors fed the “cinematic episteme.” And D. N. Rodowick rehabilitates an idea first developed by Stanley Cavell when he proposes that we think of any creative medium in terms of the forces which govern how it develops, forces which

Cavell dubbed “automatisms.” Taken together, these four ideas will make it possible to locate Hospitalier’s bold thought experiment along a continuum of thought, or, to be more precise, along one of the many strands of ideas, technological devices, and cultural

51 practices which intertwined and converged to form cinema. Moreover, they will remind us that cinema was never a single device, nor a single definition, nor a single goal.

Consequently, the cinema does not possess the power of reverse motion thanks to the will of any single inventor or thinker, Hospitalier’s article notwithstanding; rather, its potential emerged as the material consequence of the amalgamation of a set of technologies each themselves generated by a of intersecting culture forces.

Charles Musser’s account of screen practices assembles quite a few inventors and devices along the way, among them Athansius Kircher and his of 1646,

Etienne Gaspar Robertson’s phantasmagorie of 1799, the incorporation of photographs into projection in the 1840s, the mass-production of lantern slides thereafter by the

Langenheim brothers, the gradual transformation of the magic lantern into a multi-slide sequential storytelling medium, Heyl’s phasmatrope of 1870, Muybridge’s of 1880, and the contributions of Marey in that decade and Friese-Greene at the end of it, opening the way for Edison and his assistant W. K. L. Dickson to invent the kinetograph and kinetoscope (17-72). Musser prefaces this lengthy prehistory with multiple examples of writers at the very end of the Nineteenth Century who perceived the invention of cinema as merely an extension of such existing screen practice, with C. Francis Jenkins calling it a “modified stereopticon” in 1898 and Henry V. Hopwood classifying it as a

“multiple lantern slide” in 1899 (15). By using the term “screen practice,” Musser emphasizes continuity and commonality, dispelling the common misperception that cinema’s appearance was a watershed moment, a sharply-etched dividing line which initiated a distinctly new era as it put to death an old one.

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André Gaudreault’s account in A Companion to Early Cinema adds more evidence to Musser’s argument by slightly modifying his method. Rather than considering cinema the culmination of some quasi-teleological series of innovations in a unified history of “screen practice,” Gaudreault clarifies that cinema’s identity throughout its protracted birth was a matter of significant discursive contention between a number of groups each claiming cinema as an extension of their own “cultural series.”

Because, as Gaudreault argues, cinema is not equivalent to the cinématographe (or to any device), what we think of as cinema was never “invented,” because “the cinema is not a procedure; it is a social, cultural, economic, etc. system. Cinema, then, is something that was constituted, established, and finally institutionalized” (“Culture Broth” 16, original emphasis). As such, all of its technological and cultural forerunners made varyingly compelling claims to progenitorship. Gaudreault explains, “every cultural series contributing to this race to invent ‘cinema’ has its own hero: Reynaud for the cultural series optical toy; Marey and Edison for ; Lumière for photography; and, for the magic lantern… Birt Acres” (17). Of course, cinema was ontogenetically indebted to all of these cultural series26, but Gaudreault wishes to indicate that at the time of cinema’s emergence, people ascribed identities to it based not on its combination of devices and practices, but rather by arguing that one device or practice dominated the others, according to whichever lineage they preferred to see in it. Put another way, each early author, inventor, or promoter with a stake in screen practice or technological

26 And to still many others as well, including phonography (as I will elaborate in the following pages) and, most surprisingly to me, the sewing machine. In what Auguste Lumière would later call the “decisive revelation” on the cinématographe, Lumière head factory mechanic Charles Moisson oversaw the incorporation of the “Hornblower’s eccentric” ratchet into the device, which was “a triangular ratchet which maintains the ribbon (or film) in place for two thirds of the total time.” The ratchet was first used on sewing machines in 1877 (Lumière 23).

53 reproducibility in the 1890’s situated the polysemous sign “moving images” (or “living pictures” or “movement photography,” since “cinema” did not yet exist as a name) on their own syntagmatic chain. Magicians, for instance, would have placed cinema on a continuum with other image illusions (such as Pepper’s Ghost (cf. Gunning, “‘We are

Here and Not Here’”)), perhaps ignoring aspects of its cultural in motion toys or in photography. Different aspects or potentials of cinema would have come to the fore in the minds of people committed to different cultural series. I will demonstrate in a moment that these cultural/lexical blind spots probably restricted the variety of perspectives from which one would have been able to perceive cinema’s capacity for reverse motion.

François Albera, however, disagrees with the “blind spot” premise of the cultural series argument, explaining that beginning in 1896, “no commentator failed to speak” of the cinématographe and kinetoscope as “the descendants of Joseph Plateau’s experiments, Émile Reynaud’s optical theater, snapshot photography, and chronophotography” (127). According to Albera, these commentators positioned cinema’s appearance as the culmination of a diverse set of technological and conceptual developments. Put another way, cinema emerged charged with epistemic potential. As such, astute commentators were able to immediately perceive the extent to which the cultural, technological, and discursive epistemes of the time had staked off a place for cinema in advance while also creating it. In general, the term “episteme” refers to a historically-specific mode of knowledge which defines what is and is not thinkable within a certain historical moment. Each moment’s categories and frameworks of knowledge arise from the discourses, technologies, and other cultural practices of the previous

54 moment. As each new moment explores and fills in the categories and frameworks bequeathed to it with new discourses, technologies, and practices, it establishes the categories and frameworks which the next cultural moment will itself have to explore and fill. Albera explains that such categories and frameworks as “reproduction, circulation, standardization, fragmentation, [and] ‘montage’” (125), which had arisen by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, furnished a field in which cinema would emerge. In turn, cinema’s condensation of these categories and frameworks (and its answer to their implicit questions) gave rise to many new ways of thinking across a variety of fields, from philosophy to pathology. As such, Albera defines his notion of the “cinematic episteme” very broadly: it involves not only the conditions of production, social life, and thought within industrial society which produced the cinematographic mechanism, but also the concurrent development of other devices which extended the range of the senses

(such as phonography and x-rays) and the resulting re-fashioning of consciousness which all these developments brought about. Albera also positions the cinema both as emblematic of the accelerations and heterogeneity of industrial society and as a model of modern humanity’s fragmented consciousness, since it “gave form to the most upsetting reformulations of space and time,” including “going back in time,” or reverse motion

(124).

Stanley Cavell underpins his thoughts on cinematic creativity with the notion of the “automatism,” which for him includes two aspects: on a broad level, the “ or forms into which an art organizes itself,” and on a narrower level, the characteristic events or devices “around which a genre precipitates itself” (104), which for film include, for instance, freeze-frames, slow motion, and flash insets (cf. 133-146). Cavell’s

55 approach centers on the artist’s creative meaning-making through the exploration of genres and formal devices. On the one hand, automatisms function discursively, defining an art form as the scope of its established techniques: a safe playing field populated by reigning conventions, giving copyists plenty to copy and ways to be recognized for doing it well. But on the other hand, automatisms also implicitly sketch the boundaries of a medium, which beckon the bold to cross them and invent new techniques or new meanings for old ones, and thus permanently altering the “shape” of the artform’s automatisms. Because automatisms continually beget new automatisms as artists interact with them, no artform ever settles into a stable identity. So in one sense, automatisms set out the limits of the possible, but in another sense, they define a medium according to the parameters of its transformation.

In The Virtual Life of Film, D.N. Rodowick returns to Cavell’s automatisms as a way to conceptualize cinema’s changing identity amid the technological transformations wrought by the transition to digital. After an overview of various attempts to solidify an ontology of cinema, Rodowick settles on the idea that cinema has a “variable specificity” defined by its basic technological translation of time and space (23). Just as the cinema image continually absents itself before the spectator’s eyes, so also cinema as a medium persistently wriggles free of any attempt to nail it down to a static definition. All at once, the , the audience, market forces, genres, individual creativity, and the mechanical limits of existing and post-production equipment lay out a locus of possibilities into which and through which cinema becomes. Accordingly, Rodowick points out that a medium is never merely a set of materials used to create artworks or a technological device through which works are created, but rather a system of iterative

56 interactions between materials, devices, and creators. Distancing the notion of a medium both from Platonic ontology as well as from material fixity, Rodowick calls a medium

“nothing more nor less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may unfold,” which is to say, “a horizon or territory populated by automatisms” (85). Each time an inventor or artist creates a new material, device, or process, artists and other inventors explore the possibilities of that innovation, creating new uses and devices to extend or reproduce or clarify the functions of forerunning processes; these new devices yield new possibilities, which are further clarified, reproduced, and extended over the course of time by other creative individuals.27 For the moment, we may observe that like any formal device, reverse motion only counts as an automatism in Cavell’s eyes to the extent that a filmmaker can give it significance – that is, to make it signify something – in a way which will prompt other filmmakers to imitate or elaborate on it. But reverse motion also participates in Rodowick’s revised conception of the automatism, in the sense that it entered cinema history as an unintentionally inbuilt property of the cinématographe (and a number of other devices), was ideated and proposed by someone merely familiar with the design of the device (Hospitalier), and then entered film grammar as a purposefully designed functionality in future camera and post-production mechanisms.

27 To be clear, this use of “automatisms” exceeds Cavell’s. Although Cavell uses the word “automatic” to emphasize “the mechanical fact of photography” which forms the material basis of cinema (73), he clarifies later on that word automatisms does not apply to the mechanics of the camera or the projector, but rather to the “artistic discoveries of form and genre and type and technique” (104) which give meaning and significance to those mechanical capabilities. Rodowick’s use of automatisms places much less emphasis on the making of significant meaning by the artist, though he does agree that automatisms “ the meaning of the medium in each artistic act” (Rodowick 42). I sense that Rodowick’s approach to automatisms considers film primarily as a technology whereas Cavell considers film primary an artform; as such, Rodowick’s use of Cavell is more materialist and less concerned with the “genius” of the artist. It is in this materialist sense, with additional weight thrown onto the mechanism itself, that I deploy the term “automatisms.”

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Taken together, these four perspectives remind us that no single machine, no single purpose, and no single ontology ever defined cinema. Cinema was and still is a protean meme of technological representation, and it speaks its name through a plenitude of devices made by many different people over the course of centuries. But just as cinema survives as a continuous idea across a multiplicity of devices, each device reshapes and accelerates cinema toward the next innovation in its history. Its material and its conceptual strands are always fully realized, always interacting with each other, and always transforming cinema’s identity. Thomas Elsaesser summarized this understanding when he wrote, “the cinema has always been in transition and transformation, as well as achieved and fully aware of itself. In other words, if there is no

‘infancy’ then there is no ‘maturity,’ and there can be no ‘death’ because there was no

‘birth’” (605). In the following pages I will apply these four perspectives to reverse motion, attempting to account for its emergence in both conceptual and material terms.

How does an unthinkable idea become thinkable? How do machines carry concepts and potentials within their designs? How might a different technological substrate have completely redefined cinema’s fundamental relationship with time? In seeking to know reverse motion, we must contend with a number of film studies’ most daunting and enduring problems.

Considering cinema history in terms of Musser’s notion of “screen practice” and

Albera’s “cinematic episteme” establishes both a long lineage of diachronic developments as well as a synchronic set of cultural forms which together begin to account for where cinema came from and why it emerged when it did. Aspects of cinema had existed in other practices and devices for ages, and all the parts of what we now think

58 of as “cinema” were slowly and simultaneously coming to a boil across many aspects of technology, science, and culture in the 1880’s and early 1890’s. Both Musser’s and

Albera’s methods dispel the idea that cinema, or any aspect of cinema, merely appeared sui generis. This does not mean that reverse motion could not have occurred by accident, as earlier accounts suggested, just that the technological capacity for the accident (a crank which could be turned backwards) had to have first been built into the machine.28

In fact, I find it highly likely that something like reverse motion did arise by accident both before and after Hospitalier published his article. As noted some pages earlier, Georges Sadoul rightly inferred in his biography of Louis Lumière that the concept of reverse motion is at least as old the first time that a phenakistoscope was spun in reverse, probably in the 1830’s (71). In China, motion toys may date back as far as

180 C.E., when inventor Ting Huan created the “pipe which makes fantasies appear,” a proto- driven by rising hot air pushing angled fan blades (Needham). Were the blades angled the opposite way, or were the device spun by hand in the opposite direction, this would have produced the same visual effect as spinning a Nineteenth

Century zoetrope or phenakistoscope retrograde. We can even find accidental reverse

28 Here my own very limited capacity to understand mechanical schematics leaves a gaping lacuna in this project; that is, I cannot say for certain that the cinématographe could be cranked in reverse, at least at first. One standard birth narrative of cinema credits British inventor R. W. Paul with creating the first camera which could be cranked in reverse in April 1896, adding that it “allow[ed] the same to be exposed several times” (cf. Mast and Kawin 23). If this is the case, it perhaps explains why the Lumières did not pursue reverse motion screenings earlier, but it raises a consequent question: did Paul? A thorough search of the Times of London, the London Standard, and a number of other London papers from 1896 available on Newspaperarchive.com leave the question open, but in a way which suggests that Paul did not screen his films in reverse before the Lumières, if at all. The London Standard frequently ran printed advertisements for screenings of Paul’s Animatographe at the Alhambra theatre beginning in March 1896, often noting the hand-tinting of the films, and, in the latter half of that year, the size of the screen displaying them and the names of all the films showing (rather remarkable considering that competing advertisements for the Cinématographe never go into any such detail). Despite this, no screenings are ever advertised as playing in reverse. The same goes for Paul’s Theatrograph, which played at another venue.

59 motion during the age of cinema proper. For instance, shortly past the seven-minute mark in Joris Ivens’ poetic film Regen [Rain] (1929) there appears a shot of about two seconds which depicts the concentric ripples formed by raindrops striking the surface of a puddle. However, in this high-angle view, the ripples do not spread out from the raindrop, but rather converge toward it, indicating that time has been reversed. Since the shot is brief and the reverse motion is both unmotivated and unique in the film, I suspect that Ivens may have spliced the shot in upside down by mistake, thus generating the reverse motion by accident.29

Given that it was possible to simulate something like the reversal of time on the motion toys of cinema’s prehistory, we might also expect that the aspects of the

“cinematic episteme” which entail reverse motion should have been present elsewhere in culture before the invention of cinema “proper” in the . Indeed, this is what we find: the seeds of reverse motion grew up in the human imagination concurrently with the development of the technologies which would eventually make it visible. In 1895, the

29 Since strips of 35mm celluloid film spool through cameras and projectors vertically (while the images on them are horizontal), flipping a strip of film upside down results in an upside-down image with the direction of time reversed. Because of this, it would generally be impossible to not notice a shot that had been spliced into a film backwards, but the high angle of the aforementioned shot in Ivens’ film makes up and down difficult to discern. For a more dramatic example of an experimental filmmaker who deliberately spliced film upside down to generate inverted images running in reverse, see Joseph Cornell’s By Night with Torch and Spear (ca. 1942). For a more mainstream context, have a look at George Cukor’s 1949 film Adam’s Rib. When Adam and Amanda Bonner ( and Katharine Hepburn) screen movies for some friends, a single brief shot of Amanda and Adam in a boat appears upside down, narrativized as a mistake. In the film within the film, Adam’s oars conspicuously un-row in reverse motion. A different kind of accidental reversal played a creative role in Standish Lawder’s film Necrology (1969), which depicts a stream of people conveyed by escalator in reverse, an effect which makes them seem to ascend into the heavens. In an email interview with Vivian Sobchack, the filmmaker revealed: “I had shot the scene three times, all in regular forward motion, and still the cropping and was not right and I knew after viewing the third attempt that I had to shoot the scene again. Still I thought, this last shoot had some interesting material which I wanted a quick second look at… so, rather than re-winding and screening the reel again, I thought let’s simply flip the reverse switch on the projector … which is what I did, and to my amazement a totally unexpected set of sensations unfolded on screen. Necrology was really born in that casual, instantaneous flip-of-the-switch decision and I returned to Grand Central Station with the Arriflex loaded backwards” (qtd. in Sobchack “At the Still Point” 155-156).

60 same year that the Lumières premiered their Cinématographe, English novelist H. G.

Wells penned The Time Machine. This science-fiction classic neatly exemplifies literature produced by the age of the cinematic episteme, because it imagines a machine which, like cinema, can visibly alter the flow of time. Though the bulk of the short novel concerns The Time Traveler’s adventures with Weena some 800,000 years in the future, he also describes the events outside of his machine as they appear to him during . In this sense, The Time Machine has a cinematic character (for cinema is nothing if not a machine of temporal manipulation giving spectators views of the world), as

Albert Turpain claimed in 1918 when he called cinema a “machine for exploring time” and credited it with being able to definitively picture some of the details of Wells’s novel

(qtd. in Albera 134). The Time Traveler pulls a lever to adjust the rate of time’s passage, then sits still and observes time in states of dilation (accelerated or reversed), much like an audience might observe undercranked images or reverse motion in the cinema. “As I returned,” The Time Traveler explains in the final chapter, “I passed again across that minute when [the housekeeper Mrs. Watchett] traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered” (71). Note that while

Wells’s description of the reversal of time and entropy reverses the order and direction of events without any trouble, he avoids any events with as detailed a causal sequence as those Hospitalier imagines (smoking a cigar or boxing, for instance).

Literary scholar Joss Marsh identifies several other works of fiction which in their visual imagination draw on precinematic screen practice, most notably an 1847 novella

61 by James Anthony Froude titled “The Lieutenant’s Daughter” which introduces temporal reversal as a narrational trope. While bedridden with a fever, the narrator of the work receives -visit from a group of demons which unfold for him the tale of an unfortunate young woman named Catherine, who commits suicide after an old madam entraps her into a brothel and the johns abuse her. But in a remarkable twist, the demons recount the story backward. Here, the narrator describes the reversal of time as it first appeared to him:

The aged heavy-laden patriarch gathered up his children into his loins again, and laid off his burden of experience year by year, and walked lighter and gayer, and more foolishly for it. Nature followed the same inverted rule. You saw the tea coiling up like a water-spout, out of the tea-cup into the mouth of the pot, and no one looked surprised. Great ships came up out of the sea, and joined their seamy planks, and drowned sailors gathered up their lives again, and back, sternforemost, they went to port. Effects and causes had changed places… (Froude 203)

While Froude’s motivations for experimenting with such unconventional narration were agnostic in nature – he wished to ingeniously debunk Christian notions of freewill, sin, and by thwarting the moralistic teleological formations which often encrust upon forward time narratives – Marsh demonstrates that Froude did not devise this proleptic storytelling device in a vacuum, but was influenced by the visual language of contemporary magic lantern shows.30

30 Were we to broaden our search to seek descriptions of temporal reversal without a specifically Victorian technological inspiration, we’ll have no trouble finding them in ancient texts. Here I provide two examples. In Plato’s dialogue Politicus (ca. 365-360 B.C.E.), Stranger reminds Young Socrates of an old tale that there was once a time when the sun rose in the West and set in the East, but that god saw fit to reverse it. In an era which antedates “clock time” and therefore gauged the hour by the movement of the sun, we might read the reversal of the sun’s direction of motion across the sky as equivalent to the reversal of time itself. Several hundred years before this, the biblical books of Isaiah and II Kings both tell the story of a miraculous sign given to King Hezekiah during an illness, in which the sun momentarily moved backwards in the sky, causing “the shadow cast by the sun on the stairway to the terrace of Ahaz [to] go back ten steps” (Is 38:8, II Kings 20:11 p. 374)). A footnote in the Saint Joseph Edition suggests that this “stairway” might be better translated as “sundial,” again suggesting the divine reversal of time (ibid., p.

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Therefore, the cinematic episteme grew out of precinematic technologies as well as precinematic modes of thought, both of which featuring striking forerunners of cinematic reverse motion. Realistically, however, Louis and Auguste Lumière likely had neither literary harbingers of temporal reversal nor motion toys on their mind when they invented and marketed the Cinématographe. But could the inventors of what was briefly the world’s dominant apparatus for the presentation of moving pictures (as well as the eventual namesake of cinema itself) have been so unaware of the simple mechanical capabilities of their device? Even granting that the Lumières (or one of their operators) could have discovered reverse motion in early 1897 by accident, they would have had to have done so in apparent ignorance of Hospitalier, the invented media amalgam Queroult, the December 1896 Kinetoscope experiment, the February 1897 Biograph screenings, and perhaps still more that my research did not uncover. Or, if they accidentally discovered it earlier, they ignored its marketing potential (curious for a pair of brothers with enough business and engineering acumen to have already been the heads of the

“biggest European manufacturer of photographic plates” (Bordwell and Thompson 8) when they invented the Cinématographe). In 2’s 100th-anniversary presentation of select films from the Lumière catalog, the narrator suggests that the Lumières were

“assiduous” readers of La Nature, the journal in which Hospitalier published his article, and argues that Hospitalier’s piece alerted them to the possibility of reverse motion (“No.

40, Démolition d’un Mur”). But if this is so, what accounts for the gap of over thirteen months between Hospitalier’s speculative piece and the Lumières’ first advertised

862). And likely there are even earlier intimations in mythic texts of the human capacity to at least imagine time’s reversal.

63 screenings of reversed films? (After all, the creation of reverse motion on a

Cinématographe required no post-production trickery and either minimal or no modification to the projector.) This may remain an open question.

Despite that, Gaudreault’s notion of the “cultural series” illuminates Hospitalier’s prescience in his conception of reverse motion. In the first and second paragraphs of his article, Hospitalier locates the cinématographe on two cultural series: that of scientific instruments in general, and then specifically that of phonography (or recorded sound).

Because of the first, he positions cinema as the descendant of a number of scientific apparatuses which shocked consciousness by revealing that which could not be perceived by unaided human senses. Accordingly, he ascribed to the cinématographe the duty to depict what normal vision would deem impossible—in this case, the reversal of time.

The second cultural series, that of phonography, allowed Hospitalier to conjecture how this could be accomplished. Hospitalier impressively noted that both the phonograph and the cinématographe register sections of duration by continuously sampling instantaneous sensations through time. One may sample the audible and the other the visible, but they each also control the pace of registration and playback – the very velocity of time – by means of turning a crank. If their operation was analogous in these two respects, he judged, they ought to have other attendant properties in common as well. Thus,

Hospitalier reasoned that if reversing the crank on the phonograph could produce the bizarre cacophony of reversed sound, reversing the crank on the cinématographe ought to produce the analogous sensation of reversed motion for the eyes. And so he transplanted temporal reversal from sound to sight. Thanks to Hospitalier’s background as an engineer rather than an entertainer, exhibitor, or artist, he was able to see past the

64 cinématographe’s photographic registration, its mode of presentation (projection), and the it inspired during reception to instead recognize its fundamental temporal mechanism. I argue that, to this day, cinema’s identity rests entirely on its registration, translation, and reproduction of time. As Deleuze would much later note in his theoretical division of movement-image from time-image, the events of the profilmic space and the industrial developments of film grammar generally just distract from cinema’s fundamental nature as a time-form. But by analogy to the phonograph,

Hospitalier implicitly grasped cinema’s temporal identity and applied it to one of cinema history’s foundational thought experiments.

I would like to note, however, that Hospitalier was not the first to discover the affinity between the phonograph and the cinématographe. Their histories intersect and overlap in other ways as well. Not only did Thomas Edison invent both the phonograph and the kinetograph (his motion picture camera), his early designs for the kinetograph were clearly patterned directly after the phonograph. Declaring that he meant to do for the eye what the phonograph did for the ear, Edison’s original October 1888 caveat for the “-kinetograph” specified a camera designed to register images 1/32 of an inch wide on a rotating cylinder quite like that of the phonograph (Musser 64). This design proved unworkable, and Goodwin and Eastman’s invention of flexible roll film provided

Edison’s assistant W. K. L. Dickson another means of registering a great series of images. The marketing of the phonograph and the kinetoscope also resembled one another. In 1890, the Automatic Phonograph Exhibition Company began to market coin- operated . These nickel-in-a-slot devices were the precursor of the jukebox, but also the forerunner of Edison’s first kinetoscope parlors (Musser 59). And though it

65 took the film industry several decades to precisely synchronize sound and image,

Dickson and Edison experimented with both precise (the Dickson

Experimental , 1894) and loose synchronization (they briefly marketed devices called “kinetophones,” which were kinetoscopes of performances which played along with a piece of music of the appropriate tempo on a record, but without precise synchronization (Musser 87-88)) from nearly the beginning of cinema.

It should not surprise us that Edison cut certain design elements and some of his business plan for both devices from the same cloth. Nor should Hospitalier’s ingenious topological comparison between the two. But in acknowledging this, we ought to acknowledge a corollary as well – that reverse motion, the intersection of cinema’s propensity for science and its capacity for spectacle, may not have so rapidly emerged had its material substrate and history lacked these crucial commonalities. If cinema – in its barest sense of the presentation of moving images – had been developed by different people, at a different time, or from different functional building blocks, might the possibility of reverse motion have remained inaccessible? I do not ask only on behalf of reverse motion, but on behalf of cinema’s overall relationship with time. Compared to cinema as we now know it, a different device may have translated time incommensurably, producing alternate time-images and divergent cultural epistemes in all matters of temporality, reproducibility, space, specificity, historicity, and the like.

A return to the notion of automatisms both enable and motivate this thought experiment into the ways cinema might have excluded reverse motion had it been based on a different mechanism of temporal registration. Rodowick and Cavell assert that “the creation of a medium is the creation of automatisms” (Virtual Life 42). But the

66 genealogy does not begin there. At the very least, the medium must first have a physical basis, and that physical basis (at least in the case of media based on technological reproducibility) must have itself been produced by automatisms in the field of invention.

Each invention, considered solely in terms of the structure of the device itself, inherits a cultural series of concepts which travel through history embodied into objects. What more important insight can the notion of the cultural series tell us than the striking fact that technological apparatuses reify ideas and carry ideologies inside them, enacting the episteme encoded into their structure whenever they are used? Cavell and Rodowick’s notion of the automatism considers how practices and aesthetics carry, exchange, and develop meanings over time. But why shouldn’t it apply to concrete devices as well? I consider it necessary to broaden automatisms to include more material, more scientific, more industrial, and more technological terms. Long before cinema became an artform, it was an invention; and before it became an invention, its concepts and constituent parts gestated for centuries (as we Musser demonstrated) before coalescing into any kind of a finished technology.

Automatisms, therefore, should not remain solely the province of art; the fields of invention and innovation in general are activities defined by automatisms as well. All notable inventions to some extent integrate existing mechanisms to create devices with new sets of properties and possibilities. In fact, such synthesis was the great contribution of the Lumières. In their cinématographe they condensed the peak of human achievement in photography, flexible roll film, projection (the brilliant light of the

Molteni lamp), intermittent movement (they perfected an eccentric ratchet from a sewing machine), and more to create a machine which would lead the industry. They modified

67 many existing machines and arranged them into an elegant and robust device.

Revolutionary works of art often appear in much the same way – through mastery of the forms and techniques (automatisms) which have come before, modified and arranged in such a way as to redefine the possibilities of the medium. But technological automatisms circumscribe aesthetic automatisms. Unless the artist also dons the mantle of the engineer and invents a new device, they cannot aesthetically innovate beyond the inbuilt limits of any given device. As such, we should never theorize cinema’s aesthetic automatisms without recognizing that they were initially the properties of a device which was forged by the creative automatisms of science and engineering. For the present discussion, we must admit that the aesthetic questions surrounding reverse motion could never have been asked if cinema’s many inventors had not created a machine with the material potential to rewind sections of time.

The expanded notion of the automatism reinvigorates a battery of historical inquiries into cinema. For instance, it allows us to ask how a different technological basis of cinema might have radically altered its resulting aesthetics. It also prompts us to ponder the manner in which each cultural series implied ways of thinking about cinema that made innovations more possible to certain inventors and exhibitors and less possible to others. And thus broadened, the discourse of automatisms intersects with the genealogical method, for it is also the duty of the genealogist to illuminate what did happen in history by sketching out what might have but did not. This is to say that in addition to documenting the fine details of what actually happened without teleological editorialization, the genealogist also implores us to creatively consider what did not happen, what nearly did not happen, what might have happened, and what else was

68 possible to have happened within the soupy power matrix of history. By unearthing the dynamics which created history, the genealogist gives an account both of actualized forces and of unrealized potentials. By zeroing in on forces at the moment of germination and potentials at the moment of tessellation, the genealogist mobilizes their own imagination (and that of the reader) to consider other possible courses which history could have taken as a way of contextualizing the courses it did take.

Let us imagine, then, what cinema and reverse motion might have otherwise been.

Three years before the unveiling of the cinématographe, Emile Reynaud’s projecting created magic lantern shows with hundreds of glass slides linked to each other in sequence by metal fasteners. It lacked the flexibility which allowed the spooling of celluloid onto a reel, and it could not create a seamless illusion of motion (Reynaud’s shows were proto-animation), but it was the first device able to project anywhere near such a large quantity of sequential images. Reverse time on such a device would have been impossible, since its images were illustrated “ideal poses” not produced by the indexical registration of time. Emil and ’s Bioskop, which premiered in Berlin on November 1, 1895, featured two projectors placed side-by-side, one to project the odd-numbered frames of the film, and the other to project the even-numbered frames. As it perhaps sounds, this device was impractical and soon abandoned. But had it not been abandoned, could reverse motion have arisen by accident on such a device?

And if not, by what analogy might a thinker have conceived of reverse motion on the

Bioskop? The , a flip-card peep-show device, appeared on American boardwalks in the late 1890s. Like Edison’s kinetoscope, only one person at a time could view the “film,” which was printed frame-by-frame on cards mounted on a drum.

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Though it offered the individual spectator unmatched power to deform time by slowing, accelerating, and “pausing,”31 it could not be turned in reverse, and reverse motion would have required the purposive individual re-ordering of all cards on the drum. And though television’s gestation was to take much longer, early devices for line-by-line scanning of images and electronic transmission of such data began to appear in the 1870s and 1880s.

Had the culture of motion images descended from the radio rather than photography, chronophotography, and the phonograph, its foundational temporal paradigm would have been one of broadcasting rather than of recording. And as we may immediately observe, reverse motion could never have originated on a motion-image model based on instantaneous transmission of televisual presence, because without the registration of time and an interval between recording and broadcast, reverse motion simply cannot be created.32

Stated succinctly, there are many ways to create serialized images without the necessity of flexible roll film, and some of them do not entail reverse motion as a material consequence of the device. For this reason, we should count ourselves fortunate that reverse motion entered film grammar early, because this ensured that later innovators would intentionally grandfather it into all later devices. When it was no longer the responsibility of the projectionist to generate it, cinematographers wound cameras

31 A fact emphasized in the company’s catalogs. “In the operation of the MUTOSCOPE, the spectator has the performance entirely under control by the turning of the crank. He may make the operation as rapid or as slow as fancy dictates, or he may maintain the normal speed at which the original performance took place: and, if he so elects, the entertainment may be stopped by him at any point in the series, and each separate picture may be inspected at leisure” (American Mutoscope 7, original emphasis). 32It occurs to me that of all possible films, all but one could theoretically begin projection before shooting had wrapped. The one exception is a film composed simply of a single unbroken shot (of any running time) projected entirely in reverse motion. Since reverse motion makes the first frame last and the last frame first, all the footage for such a film would have to be shot before even one frame could be projected. As such, reverse motion necessarily opposes itself to instantaneity and physically could not have arisen without the ability to record sections of duration.

70 backward or turned them upside down. Later, optical printers printed individual frames in reverse order. Nowadays, a single button labeled “Reverse Speed” (on Adobe

Premiere and Final Cut) or “Reverse Direction” (on iMovie) algorithmically produces the same effect. But what if computer-based nonlinear editing applications lacked the explicitly coded capacity for reverse motion? Without Hospitalier, the conceptual pressure of cinema’s variable temporal ontology would surely have motivated someone else to develop reverse motion – but in what context might it have emerged?

To approach cinema, equally a technology and an art form, in terms of its automatisms and rich genealogy is to embrace its evolutionary mode of becoming and celebrate its oddities, surprises, and outliers as much as its mainstream production. As both its margins and the zones of unrealized potential beyond its margins contrapuntally demonstrate, film history resists neat classification or periodization, even if areas of creative intensity often emerge. All aspects of cinema – techniques, genres, modes, signs, and images – emerge contingently within history and continuously influence each other. Therefore, any attempt to classify these aspects of cinema necessarily impresses upon history both subtractive categorizations and teleological formations in proportion to the rigidity of the conceptual boundaries of the classification.

In the next section, I will therefore critique the restrictive system of historical classification proposed by Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books and renew the call to

Deleuze scholars to revise the shaky historical division between the two volumes of the

Cinema books, arguing that reverse motion, along with other early forms of temporal plasticity, introduced the forerunners of time-images at the moment of cinema’s birth.

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The Time-Image Before the Time-Image

Angelo Restivo writes that a “grand caesura” separates the two volumes of

Deleuze’s Cinema series: the Second World War (171). At the beginning of Cinema 2,

Deleuze outlines the reasoning behind this break by explaining that the devastation produced limit-situations and amorphous environments (“any-spaces-whatever”) in which action became impossible. Cinema of agency, he argues, gave way to cinema of seeing only. The links between sensation and action failing, time wriggled free of its subordination to movement and began to express itself within a cinema of pure optical and sound situations (xi, 1-24). Deleuze convincingly demonstrates the shift, but leaves a number of problems unaddressed. This section will present a number of reservations surrounding Deleuze’s historiography and counter-argue that any history of cinematic temporality must recognize that reverse motion manifested certain progenitors of the time-image in early cinema.

To begin, when Deleuze discusses the movement-image, his classification rests on narrative and its expression in classical continuity and montage editing. This leaves out nearly everything before Griffith. Gunning, Gaudreault, and other early cinema scholars have conclusively demonstrated that before 1910 (or so), cinema’s modes of address and signification were altogether different from what followed. Grouping early cinema under the banner of the movement-image risks suppressing aspects of it which do not conform to what followed. Secondly, Deleuze grants the Second World War privileged credit for the emergence of modern subjectivity and the consequent rise of the time-image. Why does he locate its impetus within a brief moment of trauma rather than along a long line

72 of genealogical development? Few scholars have addressed this problem of historiography in the Cinema books. David Deamer explains that “a trend exists in what might be called the Deleuzian community … [to] attempt to pass over, avoid or downplay

Deleuze’s claim that the Second World War can be seen as the founding division between the movement-image and the time-image.” He adds that “this account of the emergence of the time-image seems to be something of an embarrassment to Deleuzians if the way in which it has been consistently sidestepped is considered” (167). Thirdly, D. N.

Rodowick concedes that “there is a consistent disjunction, often within the same chapter or section, between the sophistication and subtlety of [Deleuze’s] philosophical arguments and the thinness of their demonstration in his analyses of films, which often though not always read like a kind of romanticized mise-en-scène criticism” (Time

Machine xiii-xiv). For me, this gap between claim and proof introduces a current of empirical anxiety into the Cinema books, not just in regards to his philosophical claims

(which in truth withstand such scrutiny well), but also in regards to his historiographical claims. Deleuze’s writing swells with such conceptual density that it seems at times indifferent to the possibility of counterexample, as though it were designed simply to dismiss conflicting evidence rather than to account for it.33 Even if Deleuze convincingly identifies 1945 as a tipping point, it is still far less than a break.34 Instead, the Second

33 Consider that in Deleuze’s philosophical framework, the production of images has little to do with technologies and techniques of the camera. Additionally, the content of the image is distinct from what it represents. After he dispenses with the ontology of cinema early on in Cinema 1, he never returns to a literal definition of the image. This allows him wide liberties to define the content of an image contextually or conceptually rather than visually. For example, during his discussion of the crisis of the action-image at the close of Cinema 1, he argues that Hitchcock’s Rope consists of a single shot because its images are “the winding paths of a single reasoning process” (200), even though he must have known very well that no shot in Rope exceeded the running time of a reel. 34 I beg your patience for a long but hopefully illuminating footnote on this point. When Deleuze attempts to define the aesthetic parameters of Italian , he invites serious formal errors into his reasoning.

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World War marks an inflection point which inaugurated a period of intense experimentation in cinema’s time-language. Afterwards, the time-images of the French

New Wave, of , and of other moments arrived for different reasons and in different forms, even emerging apart from a context of postwar trauma.35 The aesthetic potential for the crystallization of the time-image in postwar Europe welled up in cinema from the beginning, not just in the early work of Ozu and Welles (as Deleuze points out), but also in the avant-garde cinema of the and the playful reverse motion shorts of the turn-of-the-century cinema. One cannot deny that the horror of the

Second World War reconfigured phenomenological space and time in Europe, prompting

Consider one. The classical Hollywood editing patterns which permeate cinema of the sensory-motor schema present the audience prefabricated relationships (looker and object of the gaze, shot/reverse shot, temporal sequentiality and legibility) which spectators absorb without effort or much consideration. Deleuze, working with Bazin, argues that tended to replace this “montage of representations” with the sequence shot, thus giving the audience a section of reality “to be deciphered” rather than one already deciphered (Cinema 2, 1). He then gives the notable example in Umberto D. of “the young maid” (Maria) in the kitchen. Though the scene exemplifies a number of tendencies in Italian neorealism, I contend that it contains neither a sequence shot nor any to-be-deciphered reality. The moment in the kitchen lasts a little more than three minutes and contains eleven shots. According to all standard continuity conventions, the camera reframes on Maria as she moves, tracks in toward her twice, uses an to show what she sees out the window, and even matches on action as she sits down. Though Deleuze admits that her actions are bound by sensory-motor linkages, he argues that in this case the close study of the quotidian amounts to a “pure optical situation” (2). But if Deleuze wanted an example of a pure optical (and sound) situation, why did he not, instead, mention ’s 1931 film La Chienne? Not quite half an hour into the film, just after Dede has taken Legrand’s paintings from Lulu’s apartment, Legrand appears back in his own apartment lathering his face by a window. In the distance, framed by the window, a woman in the opposite flat hangs laundry. Meanwhile, the sound of a child practicing wafts in (though at the beginning of the shot the music seems non-diegetic). In an unbroken take which runs just over a minute, Legrand walks to a mirrored cabinet, removes a small towel, and returns to his position by the window, continuing his shave. The camera dollies to follow him around, and at the end of the shot focuses on the piano-playing child in the facing apartment before slowly fading to black. The shot serves little narrative purpose, and more importantly, it presents a moment similar to the one in Umberto D., but with a true sequence shot and weaker sensory-motor linkages. Thus, the shot in La Chienne illustrates the tendencies which Deleuze claims for Italian neorealism far “better” and was made 21 years earlier. 35 Ka-Fai Yau’s writing on this is particularly instructive. He begins with Deleuze’s timing of the appearance of the time-image (“around 1948, Italy; about 1958, France; about 1968, Germany” (Cinema 1, 211)), and after considering the different historical conditions under which each shift occurred, he proposes that the time-image arrived in cinema in 1982. Elsewhere, Dudley Andrew proposes that the “soul of cinema” has become nomadic, and that the singular tipping point of the Second World War has given way to other shifts at other times. To trace the nomadic strain of cinema, he returns to the documentary and semi-documentary films of Flaherty, Cooper & Shoedsack, and Herzog, before an extended exploration of the Malian and Senegalese cinema of Cissé, Hondo, Mambety, and others.

74 the vanguard of cinematic art to respond to postwar horror with images of shock, fractured sensory-motor linkages, and a new search for time in its pure state. But the time-image does much more than just depict “situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe” (Cinema 2, xi). The time- image also encompasses what Deleuze calls “aberrant movements,” like reverse motion, which attended both the gestation and birth of cinema.

Since Deleuze himself disclaimed that his project set out to create a history of cinema (despite the fact that it did to some extent), one might say that Deleuze therefore indirectly granted current scholars broad freedoms to revise his historiography as a way to bulwark his other claims. I propose that the introduction of early cinema into the prehistory of the time-image will establish a far richer history of the time-image than the one which Deleuze provides, while at the same time indicating that the movement-image was neither solely dominant nor simply a given at cinema’s inception. Happily, there exists some evidence that Deleuze himself wished for this kind of intervention. “It took the modern cinema to re-read the whole of cinema as already made up of aberrant movements and false continuity shots,” he writes in Cinema 2. “The direct time-image is the phantom which has always haunted cinema, but it took modern cinema to give a body to this phantom” (41). Thus, he charges the reader in the preface to the same volume that

“we must look in pre-war cinema, and even in silent cinema, for the workings of a very pure time-image which has always been breaking through” (xiii). Even with this excellent rallying cry, Deleuze’s history risks effacing the very real energy and creativity of early cinema, which should neither be called movement-image nor time-image, though it played freely with the building blocks of both. I therefore argue that even if the time-

75 image was not fully born until the end of the Second World War, it was nevertheless conceived at cinema’s inception with the dawn of plastic time (that is, aberrant movements such as slow-motion, fast-motion, irrational cuts, and reverse motion).

Furthermore, the time-image of modern cinema should not be understood apart from an account of cinema’s early deformations of time and the epistemological shock which the sight of reverse motion presented to lived experience. That said, I should emphasize that though I deploy Deleuze as a scholarly foil in this section, my aim supersedes a revision or debunking of Deleuze. I wish to position temporal plasticity as a centerpiece of the cinematic episteme, illustrating that its philosophical power predates both the cinematic avant-garde of the 20’s and the modern cinema which followed World War II.

Thus, to begin, I do not argue that aberrant movements necessarily constitute time-images, and neither did Deleuze. Angelo Restivo instructively writes that the time- image crystallizes not in any particular set of formal properties, but rather in the self- consciousness of the film. Following on Deleuze’s argument that modern cinema triggered the recognition that all of cinema was “already made up of aberrant movements and false continuity shots” (Cinema 2, 41), Restivo explains that this self-consciousness of cinema “allow[ed] that which is seen to become charged with that which is unseen”

(175). Put another way, though occasional aberrant movements and false continuity shots exchanged actual-images under the regime of the movement-image, the same techniques later appeared self-consciously to create virtual images in time-image cinema. Just as a technique of representing space constituted movement-image cinema, a new modality of image-as-thought produced time-image cinema.

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Therefore, enumerating examples of reverse motion in early cinema will not guarantee the discovery of the time-image there. I must instead demonstrate that early cinema produced or had the distinct potential to produce images of thought through reverse motion. The time-image opens thought by snapping the continuities and montage-logic in classical editing, which is to say that it is a technique of fragmentation.

At an ontological level, it may be argued that cinema always already fragments space and time by parceling it out into 24 equally-spaced frames per second. Indeed, reverse motion takes this a step further by cutting cinematic time down to its smallest piece (the single photogram) and reconstituting these pieces in reverse order. But this is not what

Deleuze meant by fragmentation. It could also be argued (and has been by Mary Ann

Doane and others) that cinema reconfigured late-nineteenth century thought from the very beginning, by the mere fact that it rendered spacetime representable and participated in a pattern of technological temporal shocks that characterized urban life of the period.

But here again, while the cinematic episteme makes the time-image possible, it does not guarantee it.

If temporal consciousness emerged in early cinema, it did so apart from the mere properties of the device. Discussing narrativity, André Gaudreault writes that for the films of early cinema (he sets the cutoff date at 1915, somewhat later than Gunning and others), “two divergent modes of spectatorship” were available to viewers – that of

“exhibitionist confrontation” (here we might highlight the work of Georges Méliès, which so often involves the direct address conventions of a stage magic show) and that of

“diegetic absorption” (From Plato to Lumière 18) in which the screen mediates between the viewer and the scene (this could encompass nearly any film in which the profilmic

77 action does not acknowledge or play to the camera, including everything from Lumière travelogue films to most entries in the chase (ca. 1904-1909)). Several reverse motion films of this era seem to fall between these two poles. While many display reverse motion as a simple special effect situated within a forward-time diegesis, several deposit the viewer right into the middle of a reversed world. Consider, for instance,

Edwin S. Porter’s 1901 film Catching an Early Train. In this film, which runs a little over half a minute, a man in a bedroom gesticulates as if in a great hurry while clothing leaps from the floor onto his body. Once dressed, he hastily exits the room. The entire short plays in reverse motion, which means that during shooting Porter must have spooled the film through the camera backwards (or turned it upside down) while the quickly disrobed. The film does not signal this fact to the audience in any way which would soften the surprise of time unfolding backwards. No magician or dream sets up the possibility of the special effect, nor does the story world contain any moment which plays in forward time. Rather, the film drops the audience into a diegesis which no real human could inhabit (thus making “diegetic absorption” difficult) without an onscreen guide to shepherd them through the trick (thus, “confrontation,” but no “exhibitionist”).

Tom Gunning, however, argues that this visually-absent exhibitionist may have been implicitly present by virtue of early cinema’s mode of address. “Through a variety of formal means,” Gunning explains, “the images of the cinema of attractions rush forward to meet their viewers. … This cinema addresses and holds the spectator, emphasizing the act of display” (“Aesthetic of Astonishment” 869). Early cinema confronts the viewer, but more importantly, this confrontation enfolds the viewer into the film. In what Gunning dubs the “embourgeoisement” (“Modernity and Cinema” 313) of

78 cinema after (about) 1908, filmmakers adopted spatiotemporal codes of representation that distanced the camera and the audience to the station of unseen voyeurs on the narrative action. But before this shift, many aspects of film diegesis, film style, and film exhibition “foreground[ed] the role of the spectator” (“‘Now You See It, Now You

Don’t’” 43) Sometimes onscreen characters overtly gestured to and performed for the audience (as in many Méliès magic act films), camera placement emphasized event over narrative (as in the chase film genre or in phantom rides), and exhibitors situated film screenings within stage variety programs,36 implying that the cinema shared the same continuity of space and time between onscreen event and audience as the other performers.37 Early cinema, therefore, did not expect the audience to disavow their own presence and suspend disbelief in order to enter a narrative; rather, early cinema encouraged its audience to become active spectators on an event.

André Gaudreault further clarifies the distinction between narrative and event by contrasting the signifying operations of narration and monstration in cinema.

Monstration describes the procedure of shooting – generating raw material which displays profilmic space. After this, narration depends on the activity of the editor, who by contextualizing each shot produces “a continuous guided reading for the spectator”

(“Narration and Monstration” 34). In this view, the act of narration (editing) involves interpretation. Whereas “the monstrator’s product, the shot, is as temporally ambiguous as could be” (33) produces sequences which clarify time for the

36 One such program advertised “One-Man-Italian-Opera, … Marvelous Cinematographe, Acting Elephants, Educated Cats, And a Phenomenal List of Vaudeville Stars.” (“Keith’s.” Boston Daily Journal, 29 October 1896: 7.) 37 Jan Holmberg goes so far as to suggest that the “ideal [early cinema] spectator is seated inside the image itself.” He additionally reminds the reader that Gorky’s “Kingdom of Shadows” was not a picture seen, but a place visited.

79 audience, giving them little to temporally interpret.38 From this, we may remark that if the spectator lost his or her active role in negotiating cinematic time as soon as continuity editing began to dominate mainstream cinema, then the ambiguous monstration of early cinema must have relied upon the mental activity of the spectator more than has been previously acknowledged. In contrast with the cinema that followed, early cinema did not offer viewers a sequence of already-read signs, but rather a series of to-be-read events and images. In early cinema, the editor did not read cinematic time to the audience, but allowed them to read it themselves.

Thus, the activity of the spectator was neither ancillary nor incidental in early cinema; rather, early films aesthetically implied the presence of an active spectator because these films depended upon the activity of the spectator to constitute their meaning. On a basic level, one can plainly see this operation in early film adaptations of popular stories. Early versions of Joan of Arc, Alice in Wonderland, Jack and the

Beanstalk, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Life of Christ, and others did not retell the stories in question so much as they restaged notable scenes. The audience’s role was twofold: to recognize the mise-en-scène signifiers of these familiar tales and then to mentally import their narrative context to complete them. In the cases where early films did not restage familiar stories, the films still depended upon the audience to play the role of extradiegetic narrator, contextualizer, or captioner. Accordingly, early films adopted a style of presentation which implicitly or explicitly included the audience as necessary

38 This assertion agrees with Deleuze’s arguments about the movement-image as well as Bordwell’s characterization of Classical Hollywood continuity editing as constitutive of an “excessively obvious cinema.” (cf. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson)

80 enunciators in their circuits of signification. Therefore, the images of early cinema cannot be understood unless the spectator's activity is included in the analysis.

Furthermore, if mental-images and time-images exist in early cinema, we cannot hope to find them by restricting our search to the space between the first and last frames of a film print. Rather, we must survey the mental activity which erupted at the site of collision between audience and film, because as far as early cinema is concerned, the audience was included in the filmic event. If the inevitable mental-images which some of the audience generated in response to the shock of early reverse motion prompted reconsiderations of the fundamental nature of time, these reconsiderations were not merely a wayward viewer’s whimsical use of the film. Rather, they properly belong to early cinema’s system of images, because these films implicitly drew their semic boundaries in a broad circle which circumscribed the audience into the film. Once we consider the film-and-audience circuit the “text” of early cinema (and stop restricting it to the celluloid reel, as in later cinema), then the locus of the time-image in early cinema becomes clear.

Let’s consider what proto-time-images might have erupted within that film-and- audience circuit in the presence of reverse motion by examining a Billy Bitzer’s 1905 short The Impossible Convicts. The film runs about three minutes and consists of five shots from a single camera position (which crucially helps to hide the edits). The first shot, which plays in reverse motion, depicts a group of prisoners appearing to descend a staircase (frame left) into a cellblock (which the camera views obliquely, with the foreground on frame right receding toward a vanishing point somewhere behind the staircase on the left). Having reached the bottom back-first, they each position

81 themselves in front of a cell (again, back-first) and appear to leap backwards into their cells as the door closes over top of them. The guards retire, appearing to hop up the staircase backwards. After a hidden edit, one of the guards descends the stairs in forward motion with a tray of food. He lets one of the inmates out (to help him?), and this inmate strikes him over the head, steals his keys, and begins to release the other prisoners. The next three shots all play in reverse motion and depict an increasingly bizarre series of events as the inmates and guards alike leap in and out of cells, culminating with a great wrestled struggle that concludes with the inmates and guards appearing to slide up the staircase. Throughout the film, the move about in curiously mannered ways characterized by stilted gestures which help to obscure the direction of time. By grafting a straightforward tale of imprisonment and escape onto an unmotivated mixture of forward and reverse-motion shots, the film subverts the audience’s attempts to make temporal sense of it; sometimes, the swinging of the cell doors provides the only certain indicator as to the direction of time. Does The Impossible Convicts propose itself as spectacle? As comedy? As provocation? As embedded in the logic of dream? The film refuses to justify its aesthetic decisions, leaving this work entirely to the audience and whatever interpretive schemas they can generate on the fly.

Whether the audience can extricate itself from this enigma or not matters little;

The Impossible Convicts functions as a proto-time-image film precisely because it repudiates so many of the linkages which classical cinema would forge. Miriam Hansen describes the early cinema viewer’s position as one of “surrender to the manipulations of time on screen” (110) (at least until continuity editing standardized and suppressed cinematic temporality), but she does not mean to imply that this surrender involved an

82 extinguishing of thought. Instead, aberrant movements in early cinema had the potential to produce radical images of difference. Recall, for instance, the Queroult article which I quoted in the first section of this chapter, in which the author advised exhibitors to warn viewers of reverse motion in advance, “for otherwise they might think themselves the victim of a dream, a hallucination, or something worse” (“Working it Backward” 3). The potential for surrender and shock in early cinema’s use of reverse motion may be nowhere more apparent than in The Impossible Convicts.

At the end of Cinema 1, Deleuze lists five prerequisites for the emergence of the time-image in cinema: a reality which is dispersed and full of gaps rather than singular, sensory-motor links which have become so weakened that perception rarely or straightforwardly leads to action, characters which take meandering journeys or trips in which the main action is perception, a metacinematic consciousness of and response to the clichés which permeate movement-image cinema, and the dawning consciousness of a conspiracy of power behind the world’s misery (207-213). While The Impossible

Convicts lacks the political content of Deleuze’s last criterion, it surprisingly anticipates the rest. The diegesis of The Impossible Convicts accounts for neither the reversal of time nor the peculiar actions of its protagonists in the second half; the presence of reverse motion puts effects before causes, thus inverting the causal direction of the sensory-motor link and rendering it meaningless; the spectator (the site of mental-images in early cinema) is dumbstruck by the chaos on screen and left to ponder its purpose aimlessly; and the film mocks whatever cops-and-robbers clichés there could have been in cinema at the time with its reverse-time burlesquing of the action. Moreover, The Impossible

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Convicts falsifies itself39 by unstably hanging a storyline which runs forward upon a series of shots that play backward. By 1906 audiences were accustomed to a certain amount of reverse motion in particular routine contexts. In the case of an actuality played backwards, the vector of time remained clear, even if reversed. And in the case of those brief moments of reverse motion used as special effects within forward-time narratives, the direction of the story suppressed the temporal transgression of the reverse-motion by forcing it to wear the mask of forward time. Bitzer’s film, however, overlays two arrows of time running in contrary directions without giving one primacy over the other. Thus, the first, third, fourth, and fifth shots of The Impossible Convicts are internally incompossible in that they simultaneously present two strands of time – a narrative one

(playing forward) and an indexical one (reversed) – which cannot both be equally “true.”

The possibility of a stable truth therefore disappears and the audience is left to generate new images of thought and time in its absence.

Perhaps due to the tantalizing presence of curiosities like The Impossible

Convicts, Gunning places early cinema within the lineages of both Eisenstein’s theory of attractions and avant-garde cinema in general.40 In Cinema 2, we see that Deleuze returns to these same two sites – Eisenstein’s “cinema of the punch” (158) and Artaud’s concurrent efforts to overturn “the totality of cinema-thought relations” (167) when he seeks to identify the origins of cinematic shocks to thought. Deleuze traces a lineage backward to precisely where Gunning has traced it forward. Linking these chains together will help to establish genealogical continuity between the images of early

39 cf. the first section of Ch. 6, “The Powers of the False,” in Cinema 2, 126-137. 40 Cf. “The Cinema of Attraction” and “Modernity and Cinema.”

84 cinema and the eventual emergence of the time-image. I should emphasize here, however, that continuity is not the same as identity. There are crucial differences between the temporality of early cinema and later time-images. The cinema of attractions, Gunning argues, was a cinema of thrills, shocks, confrontation, and disorientation. He adds that over time these shocks, which at first responded to the patterns of everyday urban life of the turn of the century, congealed into ambivalent distraction. Early cinema, then, may have been a cinema of shock, though it was not often one of nooshock. At the same time, it was also a cinema of event, but not of narrative. Thus, early cinema contained the raw material of both the movement-image and the time-image, but neither of these primordial proteins had yet assembled into viable organisms. My argument that early cinema predates the movement-image should not be taken to imply that its images were therefore time-images, but rather that early cinema germinated both kinds of images.

Stunning prolepsis tends to characterize moments of ontogenesis. As the cinema came into being, in one way or another it disclosed everything it would become.

Ultimately, the value of discovering proto-time-images in early cinema consists in the understanding that even if over time routinized thrills numbed the possibility of original thought, the aesthetic exuberance of early cinema still bristles with potential. As Deleuze remarks, “if cinema does not die a violent death, it retains the power of a beginning”

(xiii). And from its beginning, much of this power related to the multiplicity of new images which temporal plasticity made available to humankind. The personal correspondence of the Lumières discloses that they understood that varying the cranking rate on the cinématographe would produce slow-motion and fast-motion. Louis wrote in

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November 1895, “I don’t think that we can rely on variations in cranking to provide variations in exposure because that would meaning filming shorter scenes in fine weather and longer ones on cloudy days. When the film is projected, either the characters will move too slowly or there will be a waste of film because successive frames will appear on the screen with an unnecessary speed of more than fifteen frames per second” (Letters

38). And as discussed in the first section of this chapter, though Georges Guéroult was falsely credited with the invention of reverse motion, his real work sought to develop a different sort of aberrant movement – time-lapse photography. He wished to use to synthesize movements too gradual for the human eye to perceive. In his presentation before the Paris Academy of Sciences, he even situated fast and slow motion on the cultural series of phonography (just as Hospitalier had!) by adding, “We know that by turning a too fast or too slow, we can at will put the same phrase in the mouth of the highest soprano or the deepest bass.”41

Thus, I contend that both the conception of the time-image and the heart of the cinematic episteme can be traced to the birth of temporal plasticity and before. In many ways, our ability to fully reckon with the historical and philosophical ramifications of cinema depends upon our appreciation of the consequences of temporal plasticity to thought in the era of film. Reverse motion claims a favored position in this genealogy, if only because the shock of the possible which accompanied the birth of cinema was pushed in reverse motion to a shock of the impossible. To its first beholders reverse motion must have catalyzed complex and unprecedented mental-images of comparison

41 405. My translation from the French: “On sait que, dans le phonographe, en donnant au cylindre une rotation plus ou moins rapide, on peut à volonté mettre la même phrase dans la bouche d'un soprano suraigu ou d’une basse profonde.”

86 between their lived experience and this new uncanny vision of the world moved by an alien mode of time. The spectatorial shock at this reconfiguration of time opened the cracks through which time-images would eventually flow.

In the following chapters, I will examine first how this flow was dammed by the use of reverse motion as spectacle, special effect, and comedy, before I turn my attention to its gradual deployment by other filmmakers to explore history and cinema’s fundamental relationship with time. Though the embourgeoisement of cinema all but extinguished the subversive possibilities of temporal plasticity, reverse motion and its kindred deformations of time survived by wearing all manner of until later artists rediscovered and unlocked their radical potential.

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CHAPTER 2: REVERSE MOTION AS SPECTACLE AND SPECIAL EFFECT

In the previous chapter, I began my re-examination of cinematic temporality via reverse motion in several interrelated ways. First, I provided evidence that the appearance of reverse motion did not occur by accident, but instead by adapting reverse- playback techniques in phonography to motion picture technology. Then, I explored a number of historical methods by which we might understand the genesis of the technology of cinema and its relationship with time, particularly as it relates to reverse motion. Finally, I proposed that such complex genealogies of aesthetic and scientific creativity can both enrich the historical framework which Deleuze proposes in his

Cinema books and reveal of the time-image in the reverse motion of early cinema.

As I noted at the previous chapter’s conclusion, the ascendance of bourgeois aesthetics during the transition from early cinema to classical cinema forced potentially- transgressive techniques like reverse motion to hide out in cinema’s back alleys or else wear the disguise of forward time.42 Aesthetically and ideologically grounded in narrativity, the classical Hollywood cinema depends on a specific technique of temporality to preserve the continuity of its storytelling and the impression of diegetic wholeness. Perhaps because the overt presence of reverse motion would have upset the fragile illusionism of such narrativity, mainstream film production quietly liquidated most applications of reverse motion from its toolkit with the rise of classical Hollywood storytelling. However, reverse motion hid out in nearly every sort of margin and periphery, both inside and outside the mainstream. It lived on within the mainstream as a

42 Deleuze makes a similar point early in Cinema 2 when he observes, “[I]f it is true that aberrations of movement were recognized at an early stage, they were in some sense corrected, normalized, ‘elevated’, and brought into line with laws which saved movement, extensive movement of the world or intensive movement of the soul, and which maintained the subordination of time” (39).

88 form of camera trickery or special effect, where it wore the mask of forward time. It also appeared from time to time in comedies, where mock subversiveness was tolerated as long as it remained nonserious and playful. Reverse motion persisted beyond the industrial reach of classical cinema, too, in the counter-aesthetics of avant-garde and experimental films, later even popping up in emergent short forms like music videos and internet videos.

In this chapter, I take up the history and legacy of reverse motion’s use across cinema history in the overlapping forms of spectacle and special effect. While these applications were largely indistinguishable in early cinema, the advent of narrativity quickly clarified the functional difference between the two. Here, I define spectacle as any screen event which draws attention to itself as itself; or, put another way, any event which presents itself principally as its own attraction rather than in service to an overarching narrative line. While cinematic spectacle appears in many forms and in many degrees according to the extent of its service to or supersession of narrative, any use of reverse motion which purposively draws attention to itself automatically breaks the forward flow of narrative time and emancipates itself as spectacle. As such, forthright reverse motion appears rarely, if at all, in classical cinema. By contrast, I define the special effect as a technical means of bringing a narrative event to the screen. For instance, when director used reverse motion in The French Connection

(1971) to create a shot which appeared to show a camera mounted on an elevated train crash into the rear of another elevated train (he simply backed the camera away from the train then printed the shot in reverse), he used reverse motion as a special effect. For the

89 sake of a special effect, the technical process seeks to hide itself in order to preserve the diegetic illusion.

The fact that reverse motion can function as either spectacle or special effect makes it rare among cinema’s stable of effects and techniques. This oddness was apparent even from the outset, when reverse motion entered film grammar in early 1897.

By that time the novelty of the cinematographic mechanism in itself had begun to wear off and exhibitors sought further attractions to reignite public interest. But unlike travelogue films, newsworthy actualities, or views of boxers, dancers, or stuntmen with which it shared the screen, reverse motion did not base its appeal primarily on the content of the profilmic event. Rather, it refocused public attention back on the marvelous properties of the device, which could not only register and replay time, but could thrillingly deform it as well. When exhibitors showed existing films in reverse, the reversal of time always upstaged whatever objects occupied the frame (though certainly the appeal must have been intensified in proportion to the kinesis of the events which it reversed). Reverse motion did not attempt to hide itself in the manner of other trick effects. Whereas other techniques, like the multiple exposures or substitutions43 found in many trick films, depended on their own concealment to pleasurably baffle the audience, reverse motion (at least at first) stood proudly front and center and spoke for itself. Some years afterward, reverse motion “became” a special effect in that filmmakers began to conceal its use within a disguise of forward time. But at first, reverse motion appeared as spectacle: a bit of virtuoso stuntwork in the apparatus

43 Here I mean the use of a jumpcut to substitute one object for another, as in a dummy for a person in Alfred Clark’s 1895 film The Execution of Mary, of Scots.

90 speaking for itself, rather than a hidden means of achieving a trick. Early on, exhibitors even emphasized reverse motion’s temporally-transgressive attraction by identifying films to be screened in reverse in program notes and advertisements.

Narrative cinema quashed all this, preventing time from speaking for itself and forcing it to function as a surface for movement. Perhaps unlike any other form of temporal plasticity, the case of reverse motion’s marginalization provides excellent terrain upon which to examine both the ideology of mainstream film production and the many dissenting voices outside it. Thus, in this chapter I seek to furnish both an account and an explanation of the subordination of reverse motion within classical cinema as well as an exploration of reverse motion’s service as a movement-image outside of classical cinema (in avant-garde film, music videos, post-classical cinema, and so on). I will argue that at the inception of classical cinema, the narrative mode offered reverse motion a choice: flee to the margins in order to persist as spectacle, or submit to wearing the mask of the special effect and live on within forward-time narrativity. To advance this claim, I must first return to the opening decade of the Twentieth Century and examine the technological, aesthetic, and ideological changes which both attended and engendered the transition from early cinema to classical cinema. To do so, I will survey the use of reverse motion in early cinema, analyze in depth why the narrative mode needed to expel the spectacle-application of reverse motion, and then trace a series of developments since then, describing reverse motion’s appearance as spectacle in post-classical cinema, music video, and avant-garde film (in particular, the work of Maya Deren), as well as its role as a special effect in a number of films, including Cissé’s Yeelen and the work of Jean

Cocteau.

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The Changing Technologies and Exhibition Practices in Early Cinema

The historiographical challenges facing cinema in general face reverse motion particularly strongly during cinema’s first decade. André Gaudreault writes that cinema was “born twice,” first with the invention of a procedure for recording and projecting sections of time (ca. 1890-5), then in the emergence of cinema’s routinized theatrical sphere of reception (which took root between 1908 and 1912) (“Culture Broth” 20). The technological history of the invention of cinema does not end in the mid-1890s; rather, it embarks upon a more complex phase of development. Once cinema became a mass entertainment, all further innovations entered the world always-already in conversation with an existing field of capitalist and aesthetic production. As such, no questions about the industrial aesthetics of cinema—especially those of early cinema when the public’s thirst for novelty exceeded that of any era since—can be adequately answered without a brief discussion of technology. In particular, rapid technological changes redefined reverse motion production and reception a number of times in quick succession in the late

1890s. The tale of reverse motion’s rise as a form of spectacle speaking for itself in early cinema and its quick fall into the margins thereafter cannot be told without a quick discussion of the technologies which brought it to the screen.

Like cinema, reverse motion was also born multiple times – first in Hospitalier’s conceptualization of January 1896, then in its transformation from a scientific technique into a marketable attraction about a year later, and then still again several years later when it transitioned from an operation in the sphere of reception (that is, something projectionists did to increase the attraction of existing films) to a technique of filmmaking

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(first in shooting (turning the camera upside down), then in post-production (with the introduction of optical printers as a way to reverse frame order)). This second transition also mirrors a broader transition in the history of cinema. Charles Musser explains that beginning in 1896, “Exhibitors were in charge of what would later be called ‘post- production.’ They chose the one-shot images, provided an order, determined the way they would be projected, and chose the sound accompaniment. The functions of what would later be called ‘editing’ and ‘programming’ were not yet clearly differentiated”

(63). The famous shot of the firing point-blank into the camera in Edwin S.

Porter’s 1903 epic The Great Train Robbery exemplifies this strange distribution of authorship; at its original release, each exhibitor was given the choice of placing the iconic shot at the very beginning or at the very end of the film. Gaudreault and Gunning suggest that exhibitors maintained this kind of control until 1909 (“Introduction” 12).

The shift of creative control from exhibition to production in some ways enabled the rise of narrativity and diegetic logic, which, as I will explain in a moment, effectively marginalized reverse motion.

During the tumultuous cultural evolution of early cinema, reverse motion first entered cinematic vernacular in early 1897 as the bailiwick of projectionists. During this brief period, reverse motion could not function except as spectacle, since every reversal of an existing film by a projectionist could not help but draw immediate attention to the projector’s time-distorting properties. But scarcely a year afterwards, methods of generating reverse motion began to undergo a series of shifts, along the way passing from the sphere of reception into the sphere of production, a shift which would in time dramatically attenuate reverse motion’s potential for spectacle within the mainstream.

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The primary innovation, most instrumental in relocating reverse motion into the hands of filmmakers, arose directly from the automatisms implied by the physical design of cameras and projectors. On Edison’s Kinetoscope and Vitascope, the Lumière

Cinématographe, and basically every other film projection system to come after them, the film spools through the projector from top to bottom.44 This means that a strip of film encodes time along the same spatial axis on which it displays height. As such, a strip of film flipped end over end will both reverse time and flip the image upside down.45 Thus, early filmmakers quickly realized that they could generate reverse motion by filming scenes with their cameras turned upside down. Since an inverted camera produced an upside-down forward-time shot, filmmakers could swap the head and tail position of this strip of film to produce a right-side-up reverse-time shot.

This was not, however, the only method. In Henry Hopwood’s 1899 volume

Living Pictures, an overview of motion picture technology from motion toys to the turn of the twentieth century, the author briefly describes an inverting lens attachment which allowed a scene which had been shot right-side-up to be projected in reverse time while still running through the projector from top to bottom. If a projectionist was unwilling or unable to create reverse motion by running the projector backwards, this “reversing prism” afforded them a workaround: the projectionist could load the film into the projector upside down (thus reversing the order of its frames), and the reversing prism, manufactured by the Warwick Trading Company, optically flipped the image right-side- up again (214-5). But such lens attachments did not catch on, perhaps because they

44 One notable exception, the Vistavision process, ran film through the camera horizontally, but this didn’t come about until the 1950s. 45 Here again I refer the reader to Joseph Cornell’s By Night with Torch and Spear (ca. 1942).

94 substituted the hassle of running the projector in reverse with another hassle: attaching and detaching an extra optical device on the front of the projector.

For the sake of convenience and to reduce dead time during screenings, exhibitors soon wanted reverse motion films which they could run through their projectors like any normal forward-motion film. Beginning in late 1897, The International Photographic

Company of 150 Worth Street, New York, became perhaps the first company to cater to this market when they began to offer several films which “show action reversed while running films through machine in regular way.”46 So reads (in part) the blurb accompanying their film Drinking Scene (Reversible), catalog no. 240. The description continues, “Instead of showing two parties advancing and shaking hands, they shake and back out of room, beverage spilled from bottle, gathers itself up from the floor and jumps into the bottle, which rights itself on the table, &c. Other ludicrous results are produced.”

In the year following, International Photographic Co. offered several other reverse motion films, including Diving and Swimming (No. 332), an appropriation of the

Lumières’ famous reversal of Divers at the Bath in Milan47, and Money For All (No.

338), in which “Father Knickerbocker” throws cash and silver coins to a crowd

46 The International Photographic Co. A handwritten note on this copy, which originates from the collection of the Museum of , NY, suggests that it dates from “after 1897.” Though it may be difficult to precisely date these films, Drinking Scene (Reversible) appears in the 1897 “Full Catalogue” of Maguire and Baucus, but does not appear in their April 1897 catalogue. Thus, while Drinking Scene (Reversible) dates most likely from late 1897, the other reverse motion offerings of International Photographic Co. listed above probably come from 1898. None of the three appear to have survived. 47 Like many popular early films, Divers at the Baths in Milan inspired a series of imitators, such as Edwin S. Porter’s The Reversible Divers; reverse-diving also notably appears in Riefenstahl’s (1938) and Vertov’s Kino-Eye (1924). By the late 1920s, the amateur filmmaking magazine Movie Makers advised against reversed diving, writing: “Even so simple a trick as the reverse is good for a laugh, and to get this all you have to do is turn the camera upside down. One of the earliest of these shots was a diver in straight and reverse motion, jumping in and out of the water. That went stale long ago” (Sargent124). This helps to explain the jeers that greet the screening of a shot of a reverse-motion diver in ’s 1929 film . By 1938, Movie Makers’ distaste had intensified: “[T]here is not much point in using reverse motion to show the diver springing back to the board from the water. This time worn device no longer brings even a chuckle…” (Ellis 358).

95 assembled beneath him until reverse motion returns the money to him. They advertise both of these latter films as “straight and reverse,” in that the first half of the film plays a shot forward, followed immediately by that shot’s reversal for the second half, with “no stopping or adjusting necessary.”48

Immediately on the heels of the discovery that turning a camera upside down could produce reverse motion during shooting, other professional filmmakers developed another technique which permitted them to generate reverse motion entirely in post- production. The optical printer, which would one day facilitate a range of visual effects, especially those involving the compositing of multiple images into a single image, was originally developed to produce reverse motion. Effects historian Richard Rickitt tells the tale:

Around the turn of the century, British film pioneer Cecil Hepworth devised a system by which he pointed the lens of a projector into that of a camera and, by projecting and photographing one frame at a time, could re-photograph an image. Hepworth used his technique of ‘projection printing’ to produce The Frustrated Elopement (1902), in which the forward-moving action occasionally reversed, mid-scene, to make characters and action move backwards. This was achieved simply by changing the direction that the film moved through the projector during re-photography. (56)

Though not all films after The Frustrated Elopement immediately adopted this technology, a quick examination of the reverse-motion films made beforehand reveals the difference its absence made. Consider the 1901 Edwin S. Porter Film Aunt Sallie’s

Wonderful Bustle. In it, a woman falls headfirst off a wall and then, thanks to reverse motion, seems to bounce on her “wonderful bustle” back up to the point from which she had fallen. Had Hepworth’s “projection printer” been available to Porter, he might have

48 All three scenes are also described with various synonyms for “comic” or “absurd,” underscoring that only shortly after the introduction of reverse motion, the film industry had already institutionalized its use as a primarily comic effect within the cinema of attractions.

96 reprinted the frames depicting of Aunt Sallie’s fall in reverse order to simulate her bounce back up. But this is not what he did; the shot of Sallie falling and the shot of

Sallie rising contain slightly different images. This reveals that Porter shot the fall at least twice, once normally and a second with the camera upside down or the film turning through it backwards, and then cut them together to produce the effect.

Aesthetically, however, the optical printer made little difference in a march toward narrativity which was already underway by the time. The “straight and reverse” aesthetic mentioned above attempted to replicate the look of the popular projectionist’s trick within the sphere of production. As such, it signaled the end of reverse motion generated within the sphere of reception while smoothing the transition to an era in which all aesthetic decisions would become the purview of producers rather than exhibitors.

With the rise of multishot films at the end of the 1890s, reverse motion quickly lost its place as a spectacular effect applied to films entire and began to be deployed as a trick effect usually restricted to individual shots or scenes. Thus, the displacement of reverse motion from an effect of projection to an effect of production, along with the simultaneous rise of multishot films and the development of classical narrativity, contributed to the eventual “reassignment” of reverse motion from spectacle to special effect in mainstream cinema.

The Variety of Reverse Motion Spectacle in Early Cinema

After the relationship between production and exhibition shifted, the aesthetics of reverse motion diversified. A survey of surviving films and catalog descriptions through

97 the close of the early cinema era (about 1907) reveals certain recurring patterns as well as appreciable diversity. In some films, reverse motion appeared as an unmotivated or unexplained anti-narrative attraction. In others, it masked itself as a forward-time visual effect within a narrative diegesis. Despite the fact that at no point did industrial filmmakers of this period institutionalize their use of reverse motion around a single stable set of aesthetic principles, certain long-term trends did emerge. A list of about two dozen should suffice to convey a sense of the breadth of early cinema’s industrial applications of reverse motion.49

The Serenaders (F. S. Armitage and Billy Bitzer, 1899 (copyrighted 1902)) Avenue de l’Opera (Alice Guy, 1900) The Bathers (Cecil Hepworth, 1900) The House that Jack Built (George Albert Smith, 1900) The Artist’s Dilemma (Edwin S. Porter, 1901) Aunt Sallie’s Wonderful Bustle (Edwin S. Porter, 1901) Building Made Easy, or How Mechanics Work in the Twentieth Century (unknown, 1901) Catching an Early Train (Edwin S. Porter, 1901) The Puzzled Bather and His Animated Clothes (James Williamson, 1901) The Reversing Sign Painter (unknown, 1901) The Yokel’s Luncheon (reversing) (George Albert Smith, ca. 1901) The Frustrated Elopement (Percy Stow, 1902) The Spring Fairy (Segundo de Chomón, 1902) The Escaped Lunatic (Wallace McCutcheon, 1903) The Maniac Chase (Edwin S. Porter, 1904) Climbing the American Alps (F. A. Dobson & Billy Bitzer, 1905) An Eccentric Burglary (Frank S. Mottershaw, 1905) The Impossible Convicts (Billy Bitzer, 1905) King of Dollars (Segundo de Chomón, 1905) Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Wallace McCutcheon, 1905) Magic Roses (Segundo de Chomón, 1906) Enchanted Glasses (Segundo de Chomón, 1907) The Enchanted Pond (Segundo de Chomón, 1907) The Hypnotist’s Pranks (unknown, 1907) Ki Ri Ki, Japanese Acrobats (Segundo de Chomón, 1907) Pumpkins Race (Le Course des potirons) (Louis Feuillade, 1907)

49 Please refer to Appendix 1 for brief plot summaries and discussions of each of these films.

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The Runaway Horse (Le Cheval Emballé) (Louis J. Gasnier, 1907)

This list, though unavoidably incomplete, illustrates a number of aspects of early reverse motion aesthetics worthy of remark. First, at the turn of the century (1899-1901), the use of reverse motion varied widely. Some films emphasized the spectacle of reverse motion by playing a single scene forward then backward, as in The Bathers, The House that Jack Built, and The Reversing Sign Painter. Others included reverse motion as only a brief shot within a film that otherwise told a simple forward-time narrative, as in The

Serenaders and The Artist’s Dilemma. Still other films played only in reverse, emphasizing comedy, spectacle, and temporal ambiguity, as in Catching an Early Train.

Secondly, though reverse motion soon came to be associated with at least one genre of early film, this pattern of use did not preclude other forms of experimentation with reverse time. The Escaped Lunatic, The Maniac Chase, An Eccentric Burglary,

Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, Pumpkins Race, and The Runaway Horse all belong to a short-lived genre known as the chase film, which André Gaudreault identifies as a transitional form linking attraction-based cinema to narrative cinema (“1904-1905” 143).

Not all chase films employed reverse motion, and those listed above feature it in only one or two of their ten to twenty shots. In these films, reverse motion produces manic, unnatural motion which the spectator is meant to read as a comic effect within a forward- time diegesis. Subordinated to the overarching plot, the reverse motion does not threaten to derail the forward course of the narrative; rather, it merely intensifies the absurdity and attraction of the chase. Appropriate to the chase film’s transitional status between attraction and narrative, the reverse motion functions transitionally as well. On the one hand, it does call attention to its own temporal derangement, and therefore functions as

99 spectacle, but at the same time it leaves the flow of the narrative intact, and therefore subordinates itself to forward time, anticipating its later uses as a special effect. But Billy

Bitzer’s The Impossible Convicts (discussed in depth in the previous chapter), which also features a chase, departs substantially from the chase film model. Reverse motion appears in four of the film’s five shots. As a consequence, the cause-and-effect relationships of the chase remain illegible and no stable forward-time diegesis ever crystallizes in The Impossible Convicts. Meanwhile, the genre (which predated the chase film by about half a decade) continued to explore fantastical applications of reverse motion independent of the proto-narrativity of the chase film.

Indeed, the trick film genre continued several years after the “end” of early cinema, in apparent defiance or ignorance of the rise and spread of narrativity. Consider, for instance, Segundo de Chomón’s 1912 Pathé film Metamorphoses. Though it continues the tradition of a magician performing a series of tricks for the audience past its nominal heyday, it illustrates that this genre had not yet exhausted itself, nor had it run out of new reverse motion tricks. In close-up, a drinking glass (or what looks like one) burns from top to bottom on a small stand. Just as the flame fully consumes it, a cut replaces it with a shot of a burned ball, which then un-burns (in reverse motion) until it is whole again. With the help of a bit of stop-motion animation the ball playfully spins around, then ignites and burns in forward motion. As it is nearly consumed, another cut replaces it with a shot of a burned figurine of a bird, which then un-burns, just as the ball did, and so on. However, despite Chomón’s continued inventiveness, such cinema was on the wane. In fact, the rise of narrativity not only made trick films a vanishing relic of

100 the past; it also restricted and over time attenuated the use of reverse motion within narrative films.

But thirdly, though germinal forms of narrative may have existed since

L’arroseur arrosé,50 the free use of reverse motion in early cinema demonstrates that the first films were not at all bound by it. As Tom Gunning advises, in cinema prior to 1908

“the assumption of narrative primacy becomes more of a barrier to understanding than a useful hypothesis” (“‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’” 42). At the start of the decade filmmakers felt no need to narratively explain the reverse motion in their films. No producer of any reverse-diving film ever felt the need to establish a rationale covering why the divers experienced reverse time. Accordingly, it may assume too much to suggest that these “characters” “experience” the reversal of time, since to deem them characters capable of experiences assumes that the film established and situated them within a narrative space, or diegesis. In such “straight and reverse” films as The

Reversible Divers and The Bathers (among others), camera and editing effects do not subordinate themselves to the conventions of an imagined narrative space; rather, the persons onscreen appear merely as performers within an ambiguous event space which yields to the cinematic apparatus’s display of its technological abilities. The camera and editing do not disavow their presence here, but rather use the profilmic event as raw material for a playful deformation. Building Made Easy takes this operation a step further by seeming to introduce a story space before deploying reverse motion within it without narrative justification. An audience which asks what force sends the bricks

50 The Lumière film often cited as the first example of narrative cinema. English titles include Watering the Gardener, Tables Turned on the Gardener, The Sprinkler Sprinkled, The Waterer Watered, The Sprayer Sprayed, The Gardener Takes a Shower, and The Gardener and the Bad Boy.

101 sailing to the top of the building will have to conclude that the cinematic apparatus itself did it, impinging upon the narrative to effect a droll miracle. If a diegesis can be said to exist in Building Made Easy, its boundaries are drawn wider than in later mainstream cinema, encompassing the camera and projector as forces which can act within the story.

All such chicanery had disappeared, however, by the end of the decade. The films of the emerging classical narrative cinema began to situate and justify their remaining uses of reverse motion in a way that no film did at the beginning of the decade.

Consider the reverse motion in J. Searle Dawley’s version of Frankenstein, shot for

Edison in 1910. Dr. Frankenstein mixes chemicals in a large crucible inside a furnace, and over the course of several minutes a body seems to emerge from the vessel. The effect was achieved by showing the burning of a prop body (complete with flailing arms manipulated by ) in reverse. As the scene plays, the editor cuts back and forth between Frankenstein, watching from outside the furnace, and the effects shot of the un-burning body, which the montage situates as representing Frankenstein’s point of view. Thus, Dawley clearly signals and narratively encloses the reverse motion as a special effect that represents an event which occurs within the forward flow of story time.

Though the film delays the progress of the storyline in order to emphasize the visual attraction of the reverse motion, the story nevertheless continues, and the effect serves the demands of the narrative. Furthermore, Dawley does not display the reverse motion directly to the audience as spectacle-in-itself (as an earlier trick film would have done), but rather as the perspective of one of the film’s characters. In its approach to reverse motion, Dawley’s Frankenstein emblematizes certain key shifts in cinematic space and time that occurred during the historical transition from early cinema to classical cinema.

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It might even be possible to say that by the end of the first decade of the

Twentieth Century, aberrant motion in general was no longer considered an attraction by many, but rather a laughable “mistake.” Consider the 1910 Lux Films offering, Bill as an

Operator. In it, a bumbling recurring character named Bill takes a job as a projectionist and accidentally runs the film too slowly, too quickly, upside down, and in reverse. The audience in Bill’s theater becomes exasperated at these deformations of time

(“ Stories” 1310). The reverse motion does not appear as an attraction in itself, and the (meta)audience watching Bill as an Operator is not meant to laugh at the reverse motion itself, but rather at Bill’s incompetence which the presence of reverse motion signals. I cannot declare with confidence whether such a shift in reverse motion’s relationship with comedy – from laughing in enjoyment to laughing in derision – indicates a broader disdain for spectacle that is said to have attended the rise of

“bourgeois” narrativity at that time, but clearly something had changed.

Narrativity, Diegesis, and the Marginalization of Reverse Motion

During the transition from early cinema to classical cinema, the hierarchical relationship between spectacle and story inverted. Whereas early cinema crafted bare- bones scenarios only as necessary to justify spectacle, classical cinema introduced a new paradigm of narrative ascendancy which tamed spectacle and restricted its eruption to certain contexts and conditions. As the above list of films confirms, reverse motion was

103 a prominent technique of spectacle in early cinema.51 But unlike many other attractions of the period, such as costumes, chases, color, camera movement, and other forms of visual effect, reverse motion all-but-disappeared from classical cinema. Why was this so? To answer this question, we re-open some of cinema’s enduring narratological questions. I contend that the ostracism of reverse motion cannot be chalked up to a mere stylistic whim; rather, narrative cinema’s fundamental configuration of space and time could not accommodate reverse motion. Therefore, a study of the transition from early to classical cinema with reverse motion’s banishment in mind will reveal new insights into the ideological prerequisites of narrativity.

Existing research into early cinema has already revealed a number of insights crucial to this question; chief among them, the twin precepts that narrativity was neither native nor necessary to cinema and that early cinema was not at first a primarily narrative mode. Tom Gunning argues that films just after the turn of the century emphasized situations over stories, display over narrative, and surprise over suspense. They featured

“actants” rather than characters and emphasized action over narrative consistency.52

What we today consider basic narrative conventions had to be discovered by trial and error or adapted uneasily from existing extracinematic narrative modes. For instance, before parallel editing conventions coalesced, certain films attempted to illustrate simultaneity with split screens, double exposure, or by playing simultaneous scenes

51 Without naming it specifically, Gunning encompasses reverse motion into his discussion of early cinema spectacle in three ways: to the extent that it calls attention to itself, reverse motion foregrounds the act of display; to the extent that it displays the marvelous properties of the camera and projector, reverse motion plays to the fascination early audiences had with the machine of cinema – that is, the “technological means of representation”; and to the extent that reverse time puts effects before causes, it participated with techniques of delay, surprise, dis/appearance, and transformation to create a temporality based on the “unpredictability of the instant.” (“‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’” 43, 49) 52 “The Cinema of Attraction” and “1902-1903”

104 consecutively. For longer stories, filmmakers opted to restage familiar narratives from religion, literature, or history (such as the life of Christ, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the

Dreyfus affair). For such depictions of well-known tales, the spectator’s role mainly entailed recognition rather than any deeper intellection. In most cases title cards or long scripts, to be memorized and recited by a presenter, guided the audience through the signifiers they were supposed to notice. Sigmund Lubin’s version of the life of Christ

(The Passion Play, 1905) came with a nine-page lecture to be read before the film played, in addition to a further two thousand words of text to be “committed to memory and recited in the dark while [the] moving pictures are being exhibited” (Lecture). In these ways, lecture texts and public foreknowledge furnished films with a form of narration that filmmakers had not yet discovered how to achieve autonomously. In time, however, this cinema of monstration53 gave way to a rich set of formal conventions which could communicate complex cause and effect relationships between people and objects across multiple shots and multiple locations. Shooting and editing techniques provided classical cinema with a legible spatiotemporal syntax. This continuity-logic began to take over industrial filmmaking, and its rules had no place for certain techniques or forms of autonomous spectacle which early cinema welcomed. That said, the rise of continuity editing techniques does not in itself account for the sidelining of reverse motion in classical cinema. Correspondingly, though the flow of cinematic narration may be safeguarded or guaranteed by continuity conventions, there is much more to narrative cinema than a mere description of the techniques it tends to deploy. Paul Ricoeur stated

53 That is, of mere showing or display, as opposed to narration. Cf. Gaudreault “Narration and Monstration.”

105 the issue straightforwardly when he wrote, “The art of storytelling is not so much a way of reflecting on time as a way of taking it for granted” (40). The bedrock of narrative cinema consists of a fundamental approach to the nature of cinematic space and time.

Drawing on Barthes, Maureen Turim called this approach the “proairetic code,” describing it as “a kind of assumed background against which narrative events unfold”

(11). I choose to call it diegetic logic, and I argue that without the concept of a diegesis, narrativity would be impossible. Gunning defines the diegesis as “a fictional world of places and characters in which the action of the narrative dwells” (“‘Now You See It,

Now You Don’t’” 43) — a familiar definition, but one which treats the diegesis merely as a neutral container for narrative. Were the diegesis such an inert receptacle, the distinction between early cinema and classical cinema would not be as great as it is.54

Therefore, I argue that diegetic logic is an active force. In order to preserve narrative, diegetic logic tends to banish from the diegesis any force which might threaten its stability, including reverse motion.

The diegesis encompasses and underpins a set of evolving aesthetic conventions in shooting, editing, and sound design which, when linked to ideological dispositions

(and profit models) geared toward certain kinds of storytelling, allows narratives to unfold with habituated syntactical clarity. The diegesis is not simply a “holding” space in which the story takes place, but rather a constitutive space which enables the story to take place, imbued with properties and according to a logic which permits narratives to occur.

54 After all, though no continuity conventions governed the shooting and editing of early cinema, few films of early cinema overtly “break” continuity rules. And even though films of early cinema frequently depict events with clear cause-and-effect relationships, most of them did not possess anything like a present-day concept of narrativity. It is therefore insufficient to claim that early cinema lacked narrativity or lacked continuity conventions. Rather, it lacked the ideological prerequisite which would generate both; it lacked the diegesis.

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Far more than simply designating the “story space” of a film, the diegesis entails codes and logics of representation through which a few basic principles may convey a broad spectrum of narratives. If narrative is analogous to movement, then the diegesis corresponds to the underlying physical laws which govern that movement while also making it possible.55 By understanding what the diegesis permits, we may understand the constraints and limits which govern narrativity. And more specifically to this project, we may understand the marginalization of reverse motion in classical narrative cinema.

In all cases, audiences in the cinema encounter on the screen a space – however representational or abstract, however realistic or fantastical – which is immiscible with the space which they physically occupy in the theater. Though some traditions of cinema

(eg., the avant-garde) reflexively maintain awareness of the artifice of screen space, both early and classical cinema sought to disavow it. However, they implemented opposite solutions to the problem of dissolving or bridging the distance between spectator and film. On the one hand, the diegetic logic of classical cinema attempts to virtually stitch this gap shut by, as Pierre-Emmanuel Jaques puts it, expecting the spectator “to enter the diegesis” (288). Once “there,” the film maintains the illusion by refusing to acknowledge the presence of the spectator (Gunning “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’” 43). By contrast, early cinema attempted to span the space between itself and the audience often by staging its spectacles as if they occupied a space coextensive with that of the theater.

Especially in trick films and magic-act films, the cinema of attractions positioned itself as

55 One may study motion in itself and generate predictive models about it without understanding the underlying physical laws (the study and description of motion in itself is called kinematics, which conveniently shares its root with “cinema”), but without these laws, the origins and limits of motion remain obscure. Diegetic logic is, of course, however, not a “law,” but rather an ideological orientation of cinema with very deep roots.

107 a form of expanded theater, addressing and confronting the spectator, often performing directly to them. As surrogates for a stage (and, in the early days, occupying the very same stages as vaudeville programs and variety acts), the ambiguous “event-spaces” appearing onscreen in early cinema acknowledged both the audience’s presence and the film’s objective to entertain them. To summarize, whereas classical cinema solved the problem of suture by shepherding the audience virtually into the film, early cinema solved the same problem attempting to disavow its virtuality and present its tableaus as if they really occupied the space of the theater.

Since early cinema adopted a kitchen-sink ethos of entertainment, hybridizing and expanding upon the various forms of stage performance and trickery of the day, the

“event-spaces” of early cinema were less internally-consistent and less rule-bound than the more fully-formed diegeses of classical cinema. These configurations of cinematic space directly influenced their corresponding forms of cinematic time; as such, early cinema’s approach to time resulted in monstration rather than the narration of classical cinema. Working with Paul Ricoeur’s conception of narrative time, Gunning explains that narrative does not simply concatenate a series of events, but rather gathers

“successive moments into a pattern, a trajectory, a sense.” He contrasts this with the temporality of early cinema, which configured time according to a series of appearances or displays with weak or unimportant links between them. He describes early cinema as mobilizing only an “intense form of the present tense.” (“‘Now You See It, Now You

Don’t’” 44). Accordingly, Gunning argues that the audience’s experience of time in early cinema was “strongly discontinuous,” as opposed to the rigorous continuity techniques of classical cinema (49). In the context of early cinema, reverse motion appeared as a trick

108 among tricks, participating in an environment of unpredictability, surprise, and delight.

Since there was no continuous flow of time to break, reverse motion’s retrograde temporality did not transgress early cinema’s conventions of event-space or monstration.

It did, of course, clash with the spectator’s everyday experiences of time, but this shock and confrontation was precisely its purpose and its pleasure.

By contrast, the purpose and pleasure of classical narrative cinema depended upon cause-and-effect linkages to generate the smooth overall trajectory of narrative that

Gunning wrote about. In that context, reverse motion demolishes narrative arcs.56

Axiomatically, narrativity deploys tenses besides the present tense. As it sketches cause and effect relationships, it activates attention to the past and the future. Narrativity mobilizes the viewer’s expectations of what will happen and, in order to justify what is happening, the viewer’s memory of what has happened. By contrast, films which take place not in a narrative diegesis but in an event-space merely concern the now-ness of a continual present moment and do not mobilize the viewer’s attention appreciably beyond that. Consequently, effects like reverse motion do not transgress the boundaries of such a space. In the context of early cinema, reverse motion merely produced a bizarre and novel form of that present tense. It posed no threat to narrative continuity because there were no links to narrative past or future in early cinema that it could break. As such, the desire for spatiotemporal continuity and wholeness which led to sophisticated techniques of elision, parallel editing, flashbacks and much more in classical cinema also found it necessary to restrict the use of reverse motion nearly to the point of its disappearance.

56 In certain forms of post-classical cinema reverse motion has on rare occasion appeared as a narrative technique in its own right, deployed as an investigative strategy for remembering or discovering an event hidden backwards in time. I will address such narrative applications of reverse motion in a later chapter.

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Put another way, shooting a profilmic event does not in itself tell a story, instill narrativity, or establish diegetic logic within that shot (hence the ambiguous temporality of much of early cinema). Other conventions, both in shooting and in editing, both formal and ideological, must crystallize into a diegetic system to produce a narrative.

Deleuze argues, for instance, that each shot must “already be a potential montage”

(Cinema 2, 35) in order that their concatenation might make movement-image cinema possible. Considering this problem in terms of the historical time of the image, Philip

Rosen proposes that each shot is already a historical “document” (of the moment of shooting), and that the challenge of narrativity consists in how to make those documents represent a fictional continuum of time rather than their own. He writes, “The conversion from document to diegesis is thus a process involving the temporality not just of the image, but of organizing the subject's relation to an image that represents not one but two past times” (172). Of course, a shot in reverse motion remains a document, but its deformation of time makes linkage with other shots, and thus a spatiotemporally legible diegesis, nearly impossible. Reverse motion is almost always immiscible with conventional narrativity because its unmotivated or unrestricted introduction into a diegesis will necessarily upset the continuity-logic of that diegesis and derail whatever narrative it may be attempting to tell. For this reason, classical narrative cinema almost entirely ostracized reverse motion, in most cases restricting it to appearing only in the mask of forward time as a special effect.

The rise of diegetic logic and the classical narrativity which it made possible did not, however, dispel the public’s interest in spectacle. So the culture industry continued to provide spectacle, but now upon the graded terrain of classical narrative cinema, with

110 de facto restrictions on the types of spectacle permitted and the contexts of its appearances. These conditions of spectacle’s are worth noting, because they shed further light on the problem which reverse motion must have posed for narrative.

Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson render an unambiguous account of the ideological motivations for aesthetic choices under Hollywood’s industrial production model when they write:

Just as the specifications for a machine involve degrees of tolerance in individual parts, so too we might think of the standardized film. As we study the industry’s discussion of its product and the grounds on which it competed, we find a repetition of characteristics considered desirable in the film. Primary ones are narrative dominance and clarity, verisimilitude, continuity, stars, and spectacle. We might think of these as product specifications which guide the boundaries of the film's construction but within those boundaries tolerance is permitted. (96-97)

Not by accident the authors list narrative clarity and continuity before stars and spectacle; Hollywood released plenty of second features successfully without the latter, but they installed the former into all their films. As such, spectacle survived only in the cases that it could be subordinated to narrative. Put another way, spectacle always required narrative motivation. Thus, sumptuous costumes, elaborate sets, eye-catching special effects, Technicolor (and other color processes), Cinerama (and other stereoscopic technologies), stereophonic sound, and high production value for nearly any reason could appear as spectacle without threatening narrative.57 Even camerawork or editing could at times function as spectacle, as long as their excess did not muddle or overwhelm the narrative: “Flagrant technical virtuosity can also contribute to spectacle. … In the silent cinema, complex and daring lighting effects; in the sound cinema, and

57 In fact, Bordwell, et al, point out that spectacle in many cases more potently sold a film than did narrative: “Ensuring that the consumer knew these [elements of spectacle] were installed within the film was part of the work of the publicity and exploitation segments of the sales departments...” (100).

111 byzantine camera movements… all testify to a pursuit of virtuosity for its own sake, even if only a discerning minority of viewers might take notice” (21). Bordwell, et al, also identify Slavko Vorkapich’s resplendently-decorated montages as potential spectacle, in addition to their function as efficient narrative elision (74). Thus, in the presentation of costumes, sets, and the like, monstration in itself did not necessarily overwhelm narrative; likewise, in the virtuoso use of camera, lighting, or editing, the bending of certain shooting and cutting conventions did not in itself necessarily overwhelm narrative either.

So, what sorts of spectacle or effects could overwhelm the narrative? Sally

Stockbridge, writing on the mode of address of the music video (one of the few forms which welcomes reverse motion), claims that classical Hollywood narration practiced indirect address, but that moments of spectacle confront the audience with a more direct kind of address (par. 2). This is a helpful insight, but the category of “direct address” designates more than one practice. In comedy, a character (such as those played by

Groucho Marx) may directly address the audience as a purposeful violation of the conventions of classical narrativity, but since such a brief violation serves the raison d’être of comedy, its transgression is permitted as benign and, above all, motivated by genre. But reverse motion’s form of address carries the potential to confront the audience more directly, puncturing the hermetic seal of the diegetic world, sending time cascading backwards, and subverting the basic continuity principle of cause-then-effect while at the same time violating diegetic verisimilitude to the laws of physics or, more simply, any possible lived experience of time. As such, whenever reverse motion calls attention to itself within otherwise objective story space, its over-intense eruption of direct address

112 shatters the diegesis’s illusionistic disavowal of its own constructed-ness. Though later cinema developed conventions of dream, memory, and fantasy which harnessed the expressive power of reverse motion while containing the threat it posed to the diegesis, classical narrative cinema was unable to contrive such a solution.

Hiding Behind a Mask: Reverse Motion as Special Effect in Classical Cinema

Classical narrative cinema deployed diegetic logic to ensure and safeguard the legibility of narrative. While many sources of spectacle were allowed to continue more or less as themselves within this new context of narrativity, reverse motion was deemed, in essence, too transgressive to continue to speak for itself. In this section, I will discuss one of the limited contexts under which reverse motion endured in classical narrative cinema: that of the special effect. Whereas spectacle, however meaningless it may appear, retains the power of temporal transgression, classical cinema’s use of reverse motion as special effect forced it into a state of double disavowal. When used as a special effect, reverse motion not only endures the misrecognition of time as movement in movement-image cinema in general, it further submits to masquerading as forward time. Since narrative cinema proscriptively demands forward, linear, causal sequencing of time and discards any technique which might violate that dictum, reverse motion’s most clandestine use – the signification of forward time – became its most durable in the mainstream. In this section, I will briefly account for patterns in that mainstream use and then discuss how Souleymane Cissé’s film Yeelen (1987) deploys reverse motion as a

113 special effect thematically to engage issues of storytelling, power, and national identity in

Mali.

To shoot in reverse motion with a traditional film camera, all one needed to do was to turn the camera upside down during shooting and then splice the resulting shot into the rest of the film backwards. By the , hobbyist publications like Movie

Makers ensured that this trick became common knowledge. “The comic value of the reverse motion effect, made simply by holding the camera upside down while taking the picture,” wrote columnist Russell C. Holslag, “is well known. Then, after the film has been processed, the particular strip so taken is cut bodily from the rest of the film, turned end for end and spliced in again. This will bring the picture right side up on the screen, but the motion will be reversed” (278).

The simplicity of shooting upside down caused amateur and professional aesthetics of reverse-motion special effects to grow up side by side and then, in some cases, to quickly stagnate. In a 1937 issue of Movie Makers, Louis Ell suggested that reverse motion could help to fake a car crash by positioning two automobiles with bumpers touching, shooting as the rear car backs up quickly, then reversing the results

(332). Professionals and amateurs alike repeated this technique for years to come.58

Though reverse motion’s utility in films of horror and magic encompasses considerably greater creative spark and variety, it has also accumulated a number of tropes. Again in

58 In 1973, Malkiewicz and Mullen echoed this advice in their text : a guide for filmmakers and film teachers, writing, “Reverse motion is also used to make stunts safer; for example, if you need a speeding car to come to a quick stop right in front of an infant in a baby carriage, you could start the car at the near position and have it quickly drive away in reverse gear” (40). And again, three and a half further decades later, Gael Chandler duplicated this advice in text on : “for safety reasons, a car is filmed as it abruptly backs away from a child. Later the shot is reversed so that the car looks like it will hit the child” (144). Meanwhile, Hollywood also used this technique from time to time, as in William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), in which a “train’s-eye-view” shot of one El train crashing into another was created by backing the train away quickly and playing the result in reverse motion.

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Movie Makers, authors of the 1930s advised the use of reverse motion to make fish appear to leap from the water (Kidder 200) and to depict story worlds in which children, repentant of a mess they had made, summoned a magical force to cause milk to unspill or plucked petunias to fly to their hands for flawless replanting (Lawrie 25). In the same vein, Thomas Sipos dedicates two pages of the fifth chapter of his

Aesthetics, an instructional text on horror filmmaking, to exemplifying the “supernatural” possibilities of reverse motion, sandwiched between similar discussions of freeze frames and . He describes scenes from the films Deadly Blessing, The Girl with the

Hungry Eyes, Shadowzone, Squirm, and Evil Dead 2, emphasizing reverse motion’s ability to grant both living beings and inert matter unnatural forms of agency: blood flowing against gravity, worms rolling uphill, and smoke retreating from the sunrise. In all these cases, reverse motion produces bizarre movement within a section of narrative time that moves forward (128-130). In only one example, that of the film Gothika, does he discuss reverse motion’s ability to place viewers within the altered subjectivity of a character’s memory or dream, in which time can shuttle back and forth to access the trace of a repressed event.

Beyond the horror film, nearly any genre which involves the uncanny or the miraculous might deploy reverse motion to create a magical effect. For instance, consider the Biblical epic: in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956),

Moses parts the Sea with the assistance of reverse motion sending the towering waves crashing backwards. Even in ’s revisionist entry in that genre, The

Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Jesus reattaches the right ear of the high priest’s servant (which Peter had sliced off) with the help of a little reverse motion. The sound

115 even runs backwards for a moment, highlighting the miracle as a specifically cinematic one. The same expectation applies to the film: in The Red Shoes (Powell and

Pressburger, 1948), the enchanted ballet slippers appear to magically tie themselves just after Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) leaps into them, a trick accomplished by pulling the ribbons away with a nearly-invisible wire, then splicing in the result backward. An

American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981), more a fairy tale than a horror film, features a famous visual effect in which the man transforming into a werewolf seems to rapidly grow lupine hair – a trick accomplished by reversing a shot of the hair being pulled back through false skin. Even in science fiction, where technology takes the place of miracles, reverse motion might still appear: in Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966), Guy

Montag and the other firemen ascend their futuristic fire pole with the help of reverse motion.59

As magical, oneiric, or otherwise alien diegeses intensify, reverse motion special effects may also approach pure abstraction, as in the cases of the backward-flowing red liquid in ’s Under the Skin (2014) and the backward-flowing white liquid in its aesthetic ancestor, ’s Eraserhead (1977). The not-quite-diegetized realm of the title sequence also allows mainstream filmmakers wider leeway with abstract reverse motion. The opening titles of ’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the

Body Snatchers, for instance, feature the body snatchers’ globular genetic matter vibrating and ascending from the surface of their distant planet while tendrils of smoke un-dissipate in reverse motion. While the visual appeal of reverse-motion fluid dates all

59 The reverse-motion ascent up the fire pole trick dates back at least as far as ’s short The Fireman (1916), albeit in a comic context. That film also features two reverse-motion shots of Chaplin appearing to drive a team of horses backwards, as in The Runaway Horse (1907) and (1909).

116 the way back to the reversible divers films of the 1890s, the more immediate progenitor of such unnatural plasmic currents is to be found in the avant-garde: for instance, the close-ups of turbulent plumes of colorful liquids converging toward a point offscreen in

Mieczyslaw Waśkowski’s 1958 short Somnambulists. Still further back, amateur filmmaking magazines described similar techniques in the 1920s and 30s with suggestions to create title sequences using reverse motion shots of waves un-crashing over the title spelled out in sand, un-burning the letters of the title spelled out in a flammable material (“Tricks for the titler”), or even un-scattering the letters of a title spelled out in rice or a small powdered material (King 603), a trick which appeared notably in the 1959 opening titles for The Twilight Zone.

So far, I have identified a representative selection of reverse-motion visual effects which are all, to one degree or another, legible as reversals of time. If, as I have suggested, effects designers and camera operators sought to suppress any visual sign of time’s reversal in order to preserve the forward flow of the narrative, perhaps excellence in the mainstream special-effects use of reverse motion should be defined at the opposite limit: by the complete obfuscation of the direction of time. The few film production textbooks which mention reverse motion often make suggestions along such practical lines. Steven Bernstein, for instance, writes that a shot which “requires [a] helicopter to swoop into a close-up is nearly impossible if performed in the ordinary fashion,” but much easier to accomplish by beginning in close-up and pulling back (212). Here, one recalls the scene in RKO 281 (Benjamin Ross, 1999) in which implores

Orson Welles, “I still think we should under-crank and play it backwards,” referring to the which swoops in to a close-up of Susan Alexander and her jigsaw puzzle.

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Whether Welles broke a camera ignoring Toland’s advice or not is immaterial; insiders confirm that using reverse motion to reverse the direction of a shot from a precise framing to an imprecise framing, or otherwise to simplify the camera operation, was a well-known technique within the industry. Director John Sturges, for instance, once attested to its dramatic possibilities in the opening shot of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955):

Here's an interesting technique. In order to make the shot where the helicopter apparently is going to crash into the front of the train, we flew the helicopter with the train, dropped down over the front of it and kept going beyond it - a little safer that the other method - and then ran the film backwards. ... Nobody wanted to fly that close to the thing. The film was printed backwards in an optical printer in order to make it appear that we were flying into the train rather than going with it and then dropping in front of it.

In addition to helping cameras hit their mark with ease and safety, reverse motion also helped to make plausible human movements more fluid or more exact. Examples include Chaplin’s ride back out of the machine which had eaten him in Modern Times

(1936)60, Jack Palance’s reverse-motion mounting of a horse in Shane (George Stevens,

1953), and a few moments of Busby Berkeley’s pool choreography framed in overhead shot during the “By a Waterfall” number in Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933), in which the reverse motion allows the swimmers to simultaneously “snap into place” on several key poses.

Despite their variety and historical persistence, many of these special-effects applications for reverse motion rarely rise above the level of production trivia in relation to their films’ thematic, social, or historical value. However, several films have found a way to use reverse motion “magic” to metonymically imply cinematic magic as whole,

60 The fact that Chaplin reversed the profilmic machine by reversing the filmic machine strikes me as a marvelous joke in itself.

118 thus focusing a range of concepts through the cipher of reverse motion. I shall presently discuss an example of the thematization of reverse motion in Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen

(1987).

Power over Time and Transcolonial Identity in Yeelen

Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (or Brightness, 1987) tells a familiar story: that of a hero’s quest to defeat the forces of evil. Set in the Bamana culture of pre-colonial Mali, protagonist Nianankoro must overcome his father Soma’s misuse of the Komo’s secret spiritual magic power. In Yeelen, Cissé works to reconnect a continuum of Malian identity, which had been broken apart by the colonial period, by orchestrating a meeting of Komo-magic and cinema-magic. Cissé mediates precolonial and post-colonial identities through the cinema, using light and reverse motion to metaphorize and illustrate cinema’s power to depict and therefore preserve the Komo’s power.

It is a popular rhetorical move in writing about Yeelen to compare Cissé’s role as a filmmaker with that of the griot, the traditional oral poet-historian in Bamana and other

West African cultures. Philip Gentile writes of the power of the griot, saying that “the spoken word, in its capacity to release nyama, or utilizable but potentially dangerous energy, is considered by the Mande to be a possible source of danger and disorder” (128).

According to Patrick McNaughton, the Mande people see nyama as a natural (rather than supernatural) mystical force, an animating spirit, a flow of energy, and an arbiter of world-morality which above all must be revered and controlled. Blacksmiths, bards

(griots), and sorcerers number among the members of Mande society who wield the most

119 nyama (15-20). Since cinema represents both a technological practice as well as a mode of storytelling, the role of appears to synthesize the social roles of the griot, , and the sorcerer. I claim that Yeelen’s covert reflexivity examines cinema’s properties, its power, and its relevance to postcolonial Malian identity through metaphoric recourse to all three. The golden-tinged cinematography of Yeelen maintains the titular “brightness” as an ever-present visual theme, uniting the cycles of nature (the brightness of the sun) with Komo magic (Soma’s fiery sacrifices), and the cycles of daily life (campfires) with the power of those who wield the most nyama (the blacksmith’s forging fire). In the literal sense that the projector’s light displays all cinematic images, cinema itself provides the source of all such brightness, and like the blacksmith’s brightness-power, cinema’s power is also a technology of brightness. During the final showdown between Soma and Nianankoro, each activates his crystal power object

(referred to in most English subtitles and by many authors as “fetishes”) and unbearably bright light streams out, blinding and ultimately annihilating both of them. Thus, Cissé signifies Komo power and the struggle over Malian identity through the metaphor and medium of cinema power: light itself.

Cissé furnishes another metaphor of cinema’s magic-power near the midpoint of the film when he uses reverse motion to depict one of Soma’s summoning spells. In this scene, Soma sets up his Mari post (also called a “magic pylon”) in preparation for a sacrifice. As he has the entire film, Soma seeks Nianankoro and calls upon Mari to dry the lakes, level the mountains, and find for him “what has been lost.” To this end, he summons an albino human and a “red dog” to the pylon for ritual sacrifice. The dog appears first, arriving on scene in a reverse-motion shot which seems to make it run

120 backwards. Cissé renders Soma’s magic with one of cinema’s classic tricks. However, when the albino appears, the man playing him awkwardly walks backwards into the scene without the help of reverse motion. Immediately, the aura of surprise and delight which accompanied the sudden mysterious shot of reverse motion dissipates. Why employ two different techniques when the summoning of the albino could have been shot the same way as the summoning of the dog? What are we to make of this? Existing literature on

Yeelen offers little assistance on this specific point, though it does underscore the relationship between religious power and time. Calling on a formulation by Mercia

Eliade, Philip Gentile identifies certain moments in Yeelen as representing “sacred time,” which he calls “a mythical time made present,” and which by the power of religious practice is “by its very nature reversible… [and] endlessly recoverable and repeatable”

(133). Though Gentile refers specifically to the nondiegetic symbolic inserts of the lion and elephant to represent Nianankoro and Soma at the film’s climax, he does not, despite his use of the word “reversible,” notice the shot of actual reverse motion in the film. So setting any possible production rationale aside, I would like to suggest that the apparently clumsy juxtaposition of the reverse motion summoning of the dog and the forward motion summoning of the man wryly relegates Soma’s power several notches beneath cinema-power. The scene draws attention to the marvelousness of the cinematic trick (of reversing time) in contrast to the banality of Soma’s trick (merely impelling a man to walk oddly). Thus, albeit indirectly, Yeelen contends that whereas Soma can exercise limited authority of objects and energy, cinema’s dominion extends to power over the direction of time itself.

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This broader claim to the power of cinema, which the metaphors of light and reverse motion serve and advance, positions Yeelen within Mali’s postcolonial struggle.61

In Yeelen, Cissé carefully crafts a metaphorical alignment of Komo, griots, and cinema to assert cinema’s powerful discursive role in the definition of postcolonial Malian identity.

To this end, the story of Yeelen encodes a picture “of contemporary Africa where the old generation of the founding fathers of the independence struggles do not want to share their power with the rising generations” (Boughedir 114) as represented through the ciphers of Soma and Nianankoro. The specifics of Cissé’s critique of General Moussa

Traoré, the corrupt one-party ruler of Mali at the time who reneged on his promise to gradually return constitutional to the people, lie beyond the scope of this analysis. Thankfully, Cissé’s use of reverse motion indicates his will and cinema’s power to go beyond the grinding of a single political ax; rather, it establishes the power of the griots and the wielders of nyama within a temporal order. This is to say, the reverse motion shot of the dog in Yeelen emblematizes cinema’s power not just to speak to the present moment, but also to reach into history, draw images from it, and introduce them into struggles for identity in the present. By troubling the direction of time, reverse motion signals a journey into the past of Malian identity. Yeelen was not the only

African film of the 1980s to seek access to a precolonial past; in fact Manthia Diawara proposes that there was a small movement of films that sought to “return to the source” in order to locate in precolonial culture and tradition and solution for problems of the postcolonial era (160). What is at stake for Cissé in his “return to the source”?

61 For deeper discussions of postcolonial cinema in this context, cf. Harrow Postcolonial African Cinema and Givanni Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema.

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Following Diawara, I argue first that he wishes to muster the temporal power of cinema to re-establish a continuity between the past and the present, redeeming traditional

Malian systems of cultural power and updating them by analogy to the contemporary moment. Though the good and bad uses of power are, as Diawara suggests, dialectically opposed in Yeelen (with Cissé siding with the younger against the corruption of their elders), Cissé also seeks to unite, rather than oppose, the precolonial and the postcolonial as a way of preserving and producing Malian identity. In fact, rather than a postcolonial identity, it seems that Cissé seeks to establish the possibility of a transcolonial identity which bridges the colonial moment rather than either simply disavowing it or surrendering to its persistent “psychological colonialism” (cf. Iweriebor 480). Yeelen draws upon precolonial identities not only as a way of preserving history but also as a way of writing a future apart from the one the colonial powers had attempted to write.

Thus, cinema emerges not just as a symbolic successor to the griot’s storytelling power and the Komo’s magic power, but moreover as the synthesis of these two forms of power in the postcolonial age. Through recourse to profound reflexive metaphors involving cinematic light and the “magic” of reverse motion, Yeelen demonstrates cinema as a powerful technique of time, positioning itself as a fit instrument to reconnect time transcolonially and carry the magic of the past into the present.

The Negotiated Reappearance of Reverse Motion in Post-Classical Cinematic Spectacle

At the same time in the West, a different development was afoot. For a variety of historical reasons too lengthy to treat here, the late twentieth century saw an easing of

123 continuity conventions in narrative cinema which allowed many marginalized techniques to regain a position within certain mainstream genres. But unlike some other forms of temporal plasticity, reverse motion was not freely welcomed into the toolkit of attractions in post-classical cinema. Its continued absence clarifies the ongoing limits of narrativity established at the beginning of the 20th Century. A timely volume of essays, titled The

Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, examines the struggle between spectacle and narrative in contemporary cinema. Among the essays featured there, the most important to this project is Vivian Sobchack’s “Cutting to the Quick,” which examines slow motion as an attraction in action cinema. Since slow motion is also, like reverse motion, an instance of aberrant movement, its rise to prominence illustrates the extent of spectacle’s renegotiated position within post-classical cinema, as well as the reasons for reverse motion’s continued marginalization.

Slow motion, Sobchack explains, makes visible “the movement of movement” – what she also calls “the poiesis of physis” – to allow the viewer to analyze and even fetishize the fine detail of complex motion as an attraction in itself (341). Slow motion can also enhance a film’s fetishization of an actor’s body or performance, but Sobchack argues that both slow and fast motion pique our curiosity in a deeper way. Aberrant movements, she contends, lay bare our own perceptual limitations by revealing patterns and information outside of our everyday empirical (344). Since the viewer’s curiosity about motion itself cannot serve a narrative end, Sobchack argues that these micro-movements (such as the raindrops and swords in the slow-motion action sequences in Hero (, 2002), her favored example) “assert their temporal and spatial autonomy from the narrative and, indeed, overwhelm it” (345). Here, my study of

124 reverse motion prompts me to raise an objection. If, as she claims, it is acceptable in mainstream cinema for aberrant motion to suspend or supersede narrative development, then why have we yet to see the appearance of operatic sequences of unannounced but foregrounded reverse motion in such fight scenes? It is simply because the narrative of

Hero and other such films depends on the outcome of these fights, and while they appear on screen principally as fetishized spectacle, the narrative never fully disappears, the physical laws of the diegesis remain in place, and narrativity’s cause-and-effect principles emerge unscathed. Not all aberrant movement can function equally within mainstream cinema. Whereas slow motion merely stalls a narrative for the sake of spectacle, reverse motion deployed in a similar way would threaten to tear the stability of the diegesis apart.

To understand the level of threat, consider the methods of containment used to rein in reverse motion in two recent action films which feature both slow motion and reverse motion. The comparison will illustrate that whereas slow motion may participate in the development or ongoing “now-ness” of a narrative, reverse motion may only appear in order to indicate a safely-separated past tense, and often in conjunction with other forms of aberrant motion or visual abstraction designed to soften the force of its transgressiveness. For the first film, consider Dredd ( Travis, 2012). In a dystopian future in which violent cyborg “judges” have replaced traditional police officers, the vicious Ma-Ma Clan has taken over control of the impoverished block to mass-produce a drug called “Slo-Mo,” a narcotic which causes the user to experience time “at 1% its normal speed.” For several extended moments in the film, the camera enters the subjectivity (though rarely the ocular perspective) of a Slo-Mo user in order to treat the audience to that poiesis of physis – a glittery ballet of splashing water or tumbling shards

125 of glass in super-slow-motion. Interviews with writer/producer Alex Garland suggest that he wrote Slo-Mo into the screenplay because he wished to narratively justify the kind of extreme slow-motion shots he enjoyed in nature documentaries.62 But just because one form of aberrant motion appears as a narrative event does not mean that others will as well. At about the midpoint of the film, a new recruit named Anderson employs her psychic powers to enter a kind of shared mind-space with a Ma-Ma henchman named

Kay. Inside, Anderson peers in on Kay’s memory to discover, through a flurry of jumpcuts, exaggerated color grading, and jittery fast motion, a quick series of reverse motion shots of violence and drug production which reveal his role in the gang. The reverse motion appears in order to illustrate a past event from within a subjective space of memory during a moment of pause from the film’s action-oriented narrative trajectory, and only alongside other amped-up visual techniques to rationalize its strangeness.

Consider as well Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: Retribution (2012).

Picking up exactly where the previous installment left off, the first four minutes of

Retribution depict a kitchen-sink action scene playing out entirely in slow reverse motion. Importantly, slow motion and reverse motion co-occur, as though slow motion’s familiar presence in action cinema functioned as a spectacle-signal to similarly situate the reverse motion and to underscore its comparable visual appeal. The slow motion additionally ensures that the reversal of time does not strike the eye as transgressively bizarre, but rather as operatic poeisis-of-physis spectacle. By commencing at the beginning of the film, the reverse motion does not interrupt the narrative; it accompanies

62 Garland says, “They used high-speed photography. You see a whale or a shark breach the water. You’d be watching something about an animal then you’d stop thinking about the animal and you get transfixed by not the animal but how water droplets connect and touch against each other. Somehow like a real trip, sort of stepping outside it but staying attached at the same time” (qtd. in Pereira).

126 the opening credits sequence only, during which Hollywood conventions do not insist on narrativity. On the soundtrack, nondiegetic music softens the reverse motion, easing consumption of the images by not confronting the viewer with reversed diegetic audio.

When this four minute visual overture concludes, the film “zooms out” to contextualize the reverse motion spectacle within a narrative mode; the footage we had been watching joins a number of other floating screens swirling past our vision in a virtual space. Alice

(the protagonist, played by Milla Jovovich) appears before us on one of these screens and, in a moment reminiscent a player debriefing at the outset of a , recapitulates the story of all the previous Resident Evil films while footage from them plays nearby. At the end of this resolutely unambiguous exposition, an edited version of the opening four minutes plays back in forward motion, so as to clarify all causal relationships for the viewer and to ensure that the reverse motion does not in any way jeopardize the legibility of the narrative to come.

The sidelining of reverse motion continues to the present in dominant narrative cinema – far longer than would seem necessary – despite Sobchack’s implicit claims about the present permissibility of spectacle overrunning narrative. To the extent that conventions of editing and camerawork can produce the impression of more continuous or more discontinuous cinematic space and time, the implicit maintenance of a diegetic logic in filmmaking as a necessary prerequisite for narrative continues to delimit and conventionalize most formal choices while restricting or specializing the use of techniques deemed a threat to diegetic legibility or stability. Narrative cinema still depends on the sanctity of the diegesis, even as intensified continuity flaunts the techniques which guarantee it in order to emphasize spectacle. Diegetic logic continues

127 to direct the aesthetic applications of reverse motion on the terrain of post-classical cinema.

Spectacle in Other Spaces: Reverse Motion in Music Video

Outside of feature narrative cinema, other forms of moving picture media do not always ally or align themselves to the dictates of diegetic logic, and no form of contemporary media organizes its images around the principle of providing spectacle more strongly than the music video. At the birth of MTV in 1979, music videos functioned as – and were rightly regarded by many in the music industry and critical press as – mere forms of advertisement – “the biggest advertising venture in history,” according to Billboard (qtd. in Feineman 11). This unambiguous telos of profit, coupled with music videos’ tendency toward hyperkinetic visual style and the elevation of fashion over substance, positioned them as convenient exemplars of the ills of the postmodern moment. While these criticisms of music video were definitely relevant then and continue to be relevant now, the rise of this new moving image format made certain aesthetic discoveries possible which might not have emerged otherwise (cf. Peverini

141). In this section I will provide aesthetic and historical accounts of reverse motion in the music video, beginning with a brisk classification of some of the reigning functions and tropes of the reverse-motion music video, and then proceeding to an analysis of the historical forces which allowed for the re-emergence of undiluted spectacle in the music video form.

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Though reverse motion almost always functions on some register as spectacle when deployed in the music video, its most prominent local meaning depends entirely on its interaction with the song that plays atop it. While some authors on the music video have emphasized synchronic or synaesthetic bonds between music and image (cf.

Gabrielli 90-91), with one illustrating, interpreting, or granting affect to the other, other scholars argue that music video is semiotically syncretic, grafting music and image together into a new form of signification entirely (cf. Peverini 137). Both perspectives lend useful insight to the present discussion, as we observe that the collision between music and reverse motion can function either way. I observe that the two interact principally in five ways: to supplement the sonic appeal of the song through high-entropy spectacle, to dramatize a narrative suggested by the song, to enact a wish enunciated by the song, to strategically match or interpret sonic events, or to transport the performers to an impossible spacetime, thereby generating a new register of musical/performative time.

The first category, in which reverse motion merely creates highly-kinetic and visually-ornate spectacle, recalls the conspicuous entropy-production of the reversible diving and demolition films of early cinema. Notable entries in this category include the reverse sky-diving, gymnastics, explosion, and more in the video for Bentley Rhythm

Ace’s “Bentley’s Gonna Sort You Out” (1997); competitive eater Hirofumi Nakajima reverse-eating a table full of food in a single take in Roman Coppola’s video for God

Lives Underwater’s “From Your Mouth” (1998); the moment in ’s video for ’s “Deadweight” (1997) in which shoes seem to walk in front of feet (an effect accomplished by reversing footage of walking backwards while dragging shoes tied to feet by tiny strings; according to an interview with Gondry, he got the idea from Norman

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McLaren’s A Chairy Tale (1957) (cf. Bangs)); and the video for Seether’s “Driven

Under” (2002), in which a car un-explodes in super-slow reverse motion for the length of the video.

Secondly, reverse motion appears as a mode of narrativity in some videos, though the context of the music video ensures greater emphasis on spectacle. For instance, Johan

Renck’s video for Beyoncé’s “Me, Myself, and I” (2003) cuts back and forth between

Beyoncé in a boudoir performance-space directly to the camera (in forward motion) and a reverse-motion narrative depicting the aftermath of a character (played by

Beyoncé) discovering evidence of her significant other’s infidelity. The emplotted events on screen show her first un-bathing, then un-undressing, un-walking, un-keying his car, un-smoking, un-fighting with him, and finally un-confronting him. Jamie Thraves’ video for ’s “The Scientist” (2002) operates according to a similar logic. As lead vocalist Chris Martin reverse lip-syncs the line “I’m going back to the start,” the video follows him as he reverse-walks from a city into the countryside, where he enters the driver’s seat of a car which then un-crashes, un-killing his character’s girlfriend. In both cases, the reverse motion loads the unfolding of the narrative with heightened importance. As each subsequent moment of the video recedes closer to revealing the short narrative’s inevitable inciting incident, the viewer must reassess the preceding banal images (of post-breakup bathing, of post-accident walking) in terms of new information which coats them in the residues of an ever-more-traumatic past. But despite involving a viewer in the construction of mental-images, both videos still run on spectacle: In the case of Beyoncé’s video, by sensually displaying bodies and the accoutrements of a

130 wealthy lifestyle, and in Coldplay’s video, by emphasizing the poeisis of physis during the car crash.

The lyrics of “The Scientist” express a desire to rewrite the past, a wish which motivates the video’s impossible retrograde trek through time. A similar craving to revise past choices motivates the reverse-motion video for David Cook’s “Come Back to

Me” (Gavin Bowden, 2009), in which the singer reverse lip-syncs his way back to his girlfriend and then, shifting into forward time, starts over with her. The wish-impulse has also produced such varied entries as Julien Temple’s maudlin video for Enigma’s “Return to Innocence” (1994) and Saman Keshavarz’s imaginative video for the Cinnamon

Chasers’ “Luv Deluxe” (2010). The latter reinterprets the desire for redemption as a zeal for replay by following a kind of video-game logic which retells the boy-meets-girl plotline three quite different ways. At the juncture of each telling, brief “rewinds” intervene to send the story back to the start for another chance at getting it right.63

From the earliest days of music video, some directors manipulated archive footage to synchronize with, or, at best, interpret events in the music. For instance, Bruce

Conner’s 1982 video for and Brian Eno’s “America is Waiting” briefly features a flag in front of the Capitol waving forward and backward in time to the music.

In what we might retronymically call a “gif aesthetic,” Conner rhythmically replays short bits of found footage to both match the repetitive nature of the song and pictorialize the song’s practice of remixing bits of existing audio material. Whereas Conner used editing

63 Keshavarz further experimented with reverse motion’s potential for narrativity in music video in the first section of his visionary video trilogy for Russ Chimes’ Midnight Club EP (2011). In it, he crafts a tense kind of puzzle by rapidly intercutting two narrative lines, one playing forward and the other playing in reverse. The kinesis of the fast-paced editing and the reverse motion sustains purely visual interest until the two lines “meet in the middle” with a shared scene that reveals that they were the first and second halves of the same story.

131 and reverse motion to underscore musical events at the level of the beat, David Mallet’s

1981 video for and Queen’s song “Under Pressure” uses two shots of reversed archive footage to signal resolution in the harmonic structure of the song. The first shot, of a building un-imploding, occurs just past a minute into the video. Visually, it follows a montage of buildings and a bridge imploding in forward motion – un- destruction bookending destruction. Musically, the shot of reverse motion accompanies exactly two measures of the song and plays at the end of an eight-bar bridge during which the vocal part modulates from D major into B minor while an alternation between G and

A chords (subdominant and dominant in D major) delays the return of the tonic. The un- imploding building shot plays as the tonic returns and the bass part plays the line F# - G -

A - D, ascending to match the building as it seems to magically rise back into place. The second shot of reverse motion concludes the video, resolving its visual, harmonic, and lyrical tension with a slow reverse motion shot of an explosion which had played in forward motion near the beginning of the video. In both cases, the visual undoing of dramatic scenes of destruction interpret the lyrics’ urgent hope that giving love “one more chance” might set the world right again.

Finally, and perhaps most impressively, certain videos link reverse motion to music in such a way as to create a syncretic event with synergistic properties that reconfigure the boundaries of musical and cinematic time. The best and most prominent example of this persists in the trope of reverse lip-syncing. While dating back at least as far as the 1989 video for Danny Wilson’s song “The Second Summer of Love,” it appeared most notably in ’s celebrated 1995 video for The Pharcyde’s

“Drop.” In it, the members of The Pharcyde appear to walk and rap the song forwards

132 while the physics of their own bodies and the objects around them move in reverse. The group achieved this effect with the help of linguist named Robin Belvin, who phonetically transcribed the lyrics of the song as they sound played in reverse into a series of syllables which The Pharcyde learned over about five days of rigorous study

(“Making of ‘Drop’”). Jonze surrounds the performers with plainly irreversible events

(people falling over, glass smashing, animals running) to underscore the strangeness of the lip synchronization. But beyond its mere visual oddity, the clip intermingles two different flows of time – forward and reverse – within a single composition. This doubling of the orders of time in the video imbues the audiovisual event with a chronotopic dimension beyond that established by either the rhythm of the music or the mise-en-scène of the video. Unlike the other categories of reverse motion music video I have discussed, the reverse lip-sync video does not merely superimpose aberrant motion upon musical time; rather, it synthesizes a fully bitemporal spacetime which neither form could create on its own. Such reverse-lip-sync clips fulfill the aspiration of the music video to, in Laura Frahm’s words, “move beyond [the] established spatiotemporal coordinates” (155) offered by either form individually. But on a further level, the reverse lip-sync video cleverly manages to overlay both the spectacle application of reverse motion and the special-effect application of reverse motion in a single frame. With the un-shattering glass and backwards jumps speaking for themselves as pure spectacle in the background while the vocalist simulates forward time through reverse motion lip-syncing in the foreground (thus functioning as what I defined as a special effect at the outset of

133 this chapter), “Drop” reunites the uses of reverse motion which narrativity long ago differentiated.64

The preponderance of music videos which feature reverse motion implies a critical question: what made this resurgence possible? Just as we accounted for the marginalization and near-disappearance of reverse motion following the historical close of early cinema, we must also account for what brought about the return of a cinema of attractions and, specifically, what permitted reverse motion to flourish once again. Two accounts of this phenomenon are possible, the first sketched on purely aesthetic terms, and the second argued on a foundation of historical market analysis. Both positions agree that the subordination of image under music accounts for the expanded visual palette of the music video, but they arrive at this conclusion through different routes.

The aesthetic account centers on the formal problems posed by combining motion picture and music, which tend to conceive of time in incompatible ways, and how they were creatively resolved. In Experiencing Music Video, Carol Vernallis argues that videos must subordinate their form to the form of their songs, which she claims are both “rarely teleological” (17). While pop songs certainly exhibit multiple forms of goal-directedness – to satisfy the profit models of the culture industry by setting up and resolving simple harmonic tension within a repetitive verse-chorus structure, for

64 Plenty of imitators have since followed, including the videos for Goodshirt’s “Blowing Dirt” (2001), Jack Johnson’s “Sitting, Wishing, Waiting” (2005), and Mutemath’s “Typical” (2007), all of which are also single-shot long-take videos, a structural choice which virtuosically maximizes the temporal alterity of the juxtaposition of foreground lip-sync and background high-entropy mayhem. The reverse lip-sync has even made the leap to internet-native content, as in the case of YouTube entertainers Rhett and Link’s video “2 Guys 600 Pillows (Backwards Music Video)” (2010), an offering complete with a clickbait title designed to apprise the potential viewer of the exact nature of the spectacle installed therein. In this way, the YouTube naming-as-advertising practice recalls the use of words like “eccentric,” “magic,” “impossible,” or, more plainly, “reversing” in the titles of early reverse motion films so as to signal to prospective exhibitors and audiences what lay in store.

134 instance – surely Vernallis refers to the specific narrative causal linkage of beginning, middle, and end. Whereas the wavelength (so to speak) of a ’s narrative arc spans and comprises the entire running time, the wavelength of each cycle of harmonic tension and release in a pop song is much shorter – usually the duration of four chords caught in symptomatic repetition, or the interval between chorus and chorus as a listener awaits the pleasure of the melodic hook’s re-appearance. As such, even if one may abbreviate a film narrative to the running time of a pop song, the conventional construction of narrative time differs fundamentally from the pop song’s rudimentary cycles of musical time. Thus, while narrative may still successfully appear in music video, other approaches to temporal patterning may more successfully pair with music.

Hence, a broader and more diverse palette of formal techniques than that developed to convey conventional narrativity appears in music video to suit the music. Vernallis writes that “all of the qualities of the image—the way it is shot out of focus, at odd angles, through distorting lenses, at different speeds, lurid colors, with strangely textured and constructed sets, where editing occurs between gestures, and figures are facsimiles of people—serve to form an image that makes room for, matches, or plays against the music’s sense of time” (133). The formal resources of the image track serve the temporality of the song, and whether through mimicry or counterpoint, the video tends to support and respond to the music without overwhelming it. Vernallis states this unambiguously: “The musical track is both a priori and a stern master unto which the image must bend” (136). In her latest book, Unruly Media, Vernallis attempts to widen her focus and treat viral video and digital cinema under a similar methodological banner.

Though the results unfortunately tend toward the anecdotal, generalized, and ahistorical,

135 her foregrounding of the relationship between music and image still yields a number of insights. Her approach suggests, albeit indirectly, that the appearance of reverse motion in music videos, YouTube videos, and even television commercials may have been made possible, at least in part, by the prominence of music in these forms of video. Just as

Herbert Windt’s vaulting score in the men’s diving sequence at the conclusion of Leni

Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) justifies the ecstatic reverse motion which suddenly appears there, the musical aspect of music videos perhaps permits the reverse motion sometimes seen there. Or at least the music smoothes out the ragged, bizarre, or shocking temporalities of the image track in some cases. Writing on the “” effect in (1999), Vernallis argues that “the soundtrack is called upon to serve as a witness and provide all temporal materials, like pulse and duration” (283). Similarly, we may argue that the music in music video provides a temporal anchor which safely allows the image track to indulge in extravagant editing, dilation of time, and other techniques which might have proved disruptive or destabilizing on their own.

Alternatively, the historical account of the resurgence of reverse motion and other formerly disruptively anti-narrative devices in music video begins with a straightforward precept: the video exists to sell the song. To this end, Jody Berland urges readers to remember that “however bizarre or disruptive music videos appear, they never challenge or emancipate themselves from their musical foundation, without which their charismatic indulgences would never reach our eyes” (25). And since the song makes the video possible, the video, in the selling of the song, must not pursue its own separate agenda or in any way foreclose on possible means of enjoying the song. Neil Feineman puts it this way: “Rather than destroy the viewer’s ability to interpret the song, many video directors

136 deliberately design the video to elicit an open-ended response” (27). Here a question arises: under the compulsion to create a space of open-endedness, toward what aesthetics will music video naturally gravitate? Feineman suggests that most directors opt for a

“more abstract style” rather than narrativity, if only because “videos are meant to be seen repeatedly” (13) and the appeal of a very short narrative might pall more quickly than would the appeal of a video that permits a greater number of interpretations and points of viewer interest. For this reason, Will Straw argues that videos often intertwine several traditionally-immiscible spaces, juxtaposing an extra-diegetic singer/band against images of narrative or poetic scenarios which cannot be considered “fully-diegetized.” In all cases, Straw continues, “ambiguity… is left intact” (16). Here, a new profit model rejects the aesthetics of classical cinema. Contrary to the voyeuristic space of classical cinema,

Berland argues that “while music fills a space and surrounds you in it, functioning as an extension of your body into the social, and vice versa, television attempts to surround itself with you, to draw your eyes to a single spot and to fix the rest of you before it” (36).

This emergence of a parasitic form of what Jonathan Beller calls “attention economy” – that is, the imperative under capital that the music video (as well as other forms) must forcibly demand the viewer’s attention and thus their consumptive energy – paradoxically seems to have undone the dominance of narrative in certain forms of motion picture media. In the music video, we observe the ascendance of a doctrine of any-image- whatever, or rather, whatever-image-necessary to maintain the spectator’s consuming gaze. Thus, the highly-rigid formal structure of the pop song directly motivates “a proliferation of textual practices” defined by “radical pluralism or eclecticism” (Straw

14) in the image tracks of music videos. This, of course, includes reverse motion,

137 deployed as a strategy of producing market differentiation for a song exactly patterned after the harmonic, instrumental, and lyrical structure of thousands of other successful songs. Will Straw adds that the culture industry specifically orchestrated the return of the single at the end of the Seventies (supplanting the politically-oriented rock LP of the preceding decade) because they saw it as “the most efficient commodity form” for them to market (13). As songs subsequently became increasingly uniform and interchangeable, music video intervened to pick up the aesthetic slack, but bound to a regime of marketing.

Thus, even as the culture industry lifted formal proscriptions from the music video, it left ideological constraints intact. So while reverse motion as spectacle may have successfully found a home upon the terrain of the music video which it could not find in classical cinema, it still did not reach a limit in its examination of motion there.

Likewise, classical cinema also failed to discover a limit in its exploration of reverse motion as a special effect. (Here I refer to Deleuze’s deployment of the word “limit” in

Cinema 1, which he uses it from time to time to indicate a case where some filmmaker or school pushed a class of image to the threshold of another class of image.65) These limits occupy a zone of central interest to this project precisely because they mark regions of aesthetic and philosophical becoming. At the outset of this project, I asked how cinematic temporal plasticity would redefine human notions of time by transforming it from an object of contemplation into an object of manipulation. Mainstream image

65 For instance, Deleuze discusses such “limits” when he identifies in Bergman the limit of the affection- image as pure fear and pure nothingness, when he discusses how Gance took the cinema of the sublime to its limit of saturation through montage and superimposition, or—the ultimate limit—when in the crisis of the action-image (as seen in Hitchcock’s mental-image and elsewhere) the movement-image went as far as it could in its development before shattering to reveal time-images.

138 production did not answer this question, but the avant-garde did. Let us, therefore, turn our attention there. After all, as spectacle, reverse motion once only signified bizarre movements; but within the films of Maya Deren, a career-long interrogation of dance, the body, and the self led to rich insights into the nature of dreams and the relationship between movement and time. Likewise, as a trick in the stable of special effects photography, reverse motion compulsorily signifies forward time; but Jean Cocteau pushed its magic into the realm of reflexivity, coaxing out of reverse motion all manner of musings on personal identity, the fuzzy line between art and the artist, and the stand of both against decay and death.

The Limit of Spectacle: Reverse Motion as Analysis of Movement in Deren and the

Avant-Garde

During the heyday of classical narrative cinema, reverse motion as spectacle mainly hid out elsewhere, exemplifying Tom Gunning’s claim that “the cinema of attraction does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground” (“The Cinema of Attraction” 64). Avant-garde and “experimental” cinema practices from the 1920’s to the present found a variety of applications for the spectacle of bizarre movement offered by reverse motion.66 Most immediately we might associate

66 Of course, avant-garde filmmakers found more uses for reverse motion than the mere discombobulation of motion. Elsewhere, I will address the meaning of reverse motion in the films and videos of Bruce Conner and Martin Arnold, also mentioning the work of Hollis Frampton, Les LeVeque, Bill Viola, and Standish Lawder. I might have also mentioned in the present section the more rhythmic uses of reverse motion in such films as The Story of a Nobody (Jo Gercon and Hershell Louis, 1930), Oh Dem Watermelons! (Robert Nelson, 1965), and (, 2002). The avant-garde is diverse enough to resist easy classification.

139 avant-garde instances of reverse motion with Dadaists and their conceptual progeny.

They introduced unmotivated reverse motion into their films to destabilize, shock, and puzzle viewers, as in Man Ray’s Emak Bakia (1926), which bafflingly proposes reverse motion shots of dropped shirt collars as “the reason for this extravagance,” Joseph

Cornell’s By Night with Torch and Spear (ca. 1940s), which cuts together found footage, sometimes upside down, producing a visually-cryptic reverse motion puzzle, and even

Jane Conger Belson Shimane‘s Odds and Ends (1959), an avowed of an , which includes reverse motion shots within a matrix of intentional meaninglessness. However, in this section I would like to give special attention to the avant-garde tendency to introduce reverse motion as an image of temporal alterity within the context of a dream. This will preface an extended discussion of Maya Deren analysis of movement through reverse motion.

Many filmmakers have crafted oneiric space with reverse motion, some fully within the avant-garde and others at its edges or in its debt. For instance, Jerome Hill’s

Fortune Teller [La Cartomancienne] (1932) features reverse motion alongside other forms of special photography to convey a Jungian narrative. Richard Myers’ 37-73

(1974) includes among its hallucinatory dream-images a shot of a man dressed as a wizard un-flinging enchanted dust from his hand. Closer to the mainstream, one encounters the indeterminate nightmare-spaces dotting the films of David Lynch, including the red room in the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91) and the un- exploding shack nested within the larger strange-loop narrative of Lost Highway (1997).

Feature narrative filmmakers often conscript oneiric reverse motion as an aesthetic shorthand for dream states or merely the altered subjectivity of a character. For instance,

140 reverse motion helps to sketch out the bric-a-brac dreamspaces in the films of Michel

Gondry, particularly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and The Science of

Sleep (2006). In the latter, reverse motion whimsically denotes altered physics within dreams, while in the former, it visually suggests the of memory. In Martin

Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (1999), reverse motion during a hallucinated dream visually implies themes of resurrection, redemption, and spiritual transcendence. More commonly, however, reverse motion evokes nightmare in horror cinema, as in Mathieu

Kassovitz’s 2003 film Gothika, in which ’s character endures a terrifying dream in choppy reverse motion, complete with a man being un-killed and rain falling up. Unlike the kitchen-sink of techniques of spatial and temporal plasticity which

René Clair and his collaborators unleashed in Entr’acte (1924) in a bid to radically open and free the cinema, the severe out-of-jointness or brokenness of time in Gothika and its ilk denotes not the liberation of consciousness, but rather its breakdown into madness.

Anna Powell points out in Deleuze, Altered States, and Film that oneiric reverse motion can even appear in films without a character explicitly entering a dream state. In such “implied dream” or “cinema of enchantment” films, nature and objects become imbued with depersonalized slow, fast, or reverse motion which the character’s severed sensory-motor links can no longer supply (41). Though reverse motion does not appear in Deleuze’s favored example of Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928),67 it does invade several other films which blur or altogether absent the distinction between waking and dream. Ironically, it does appear in Webber and Watson’s somewhat less

67 A notable absence, given the centrality of reverse motion to Epstein’s essay “The Universe Head Over Heels.” In fairness, Epstein does use reverse motion in other films; for instance, in Le Tempestaire (1947) when -master gazes into his orb to calm the stormy sea, waves suddenly crash backwards in two shots.

141 successful 1928 American version of The Fall of the House of Usher, when the shadowy figure in the brings Madeline back to life. More notably, Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) extends dream logic across its entire diegesis with a number of visual effects, including a repeating shot of a shadow un-shoveling a grave in reverse motion. Obayashi’s Hausu

(1977), a later work following a similar logic, introduces a substantial amount of surprise reverse motion into its manic wackiness, most notably during Blanche’s reverse-motion

“dance” on the piano during the meowed rendition of the movie’s theme.

The most notable avant-garde instances of reverse motion to evoke oneiric space, blur the line between waking and sleep, and to expand the vocabulary of motion available to cinema appear in the work of Maya Deren. In the words of Harmony Bench, Deren

“choreographed space as well as the bodies and objects in it” (7). Seven of her eight films68 feature reverse motion, and on several occasions she wrote in praise of its aesthetic potential. In her 1960 essay “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” she favorably positions reverse motion alongside slow motion and negative images (that is, inverted-color images or, in , inverted-value images), christening them as specifically appropriate to cinema due to the “direct relationship between reality and image in the photographic process.” By contrast, she dismisses distorting lenses and multiple superimpositions as “well-intentioned efforts” which unfortunately infect cinema with too much pictorialism and blunt the force of what she sees as cinema’s specific relationship with reality (193-194). For Deren, the close connection we feel

68 In this count I include her six finished films (, , A Study in Choreography for the Camera, Ritual in Transfigured Time, , and ), as well as the unfinished but still available Witch’s Cradle and Ensemble for Somnambulists. I do not include the rough cuts of Medusa, Season of Strangers, or her Haitian footage, posthumously released as Divine Horsemen.

142 between our lived experience of motion and its deformation in aberrant movement creates the intense signification of such shots. However, the meaning of slow, fast, or reverse motion does not cohere within the image itself, but externally to it, within the mind of the audience. She explains that when we encounter aberrant movements in the cinema, we discover their significance by recognizing that these altered rhythms differ from the

“necessary pulse” of their referent movements, which we recall from lived experience

(193-194). Deren’s emphasis on the audience’s work echoes an argument proposed in my previous chapter: that early cinema implicitly drew its textual boundaries in a wide arc which encompassed the audience, including their mental activity as a necessary aspect of cinematic signification. By putting mental images explicitly back on the table,

Deren seems to locate her praxis within time-image cinema. And because she regards cinema as “primarily a time form” (195), she writes that the most meaningful use of reverse motion “does not convey so much a sense of a backward movement spatially, but rather an undoing of time” (194). While this statement constitutes a visionary-enough aesthetic precept in itself (and Deren extols Cocteau in the same paragraph for “undoing” time in Blood of a Poet (1930)), close investigation of Deren’s work reveals that she rarely, if ever, used reverse motion in this way in her own films.

We must not regard this disparity as a shortcoming, however. Deren’s films were not meant to illustrate her writing, nor was her writing meant to support her films.

Rather, they participated in a kind of dialectical conversation, with each new film revealing further philosophical ideas which later emerged in her writing, and each new essay imagining new aesthetic territory and challenging her films to explore it. Before analyzing Deren’s films directly, it will thus be instructive to develop a fuller picture of

143 her interlocking concepts of cinema, aesthetics in general, and the role of the artist. In

1961, she wrote:

The space of the field, the ritual temple and the theater stage have been, historically, a place within which dancers moved, creating, in terms of their own capacities and human limitations, the physical patterns of emotions and ideas. But cinema provides a different order of space, is able to create a different kind of time, can even cause the human body to perform inhuman movement. (“Art of the Moving Picture” 174)

Properly contextualized, this quotation reveals two key insights concerning

Deren’s artistic sensibilities while usefully elucidating the relationship between movement and time in her films. In the first place, it foregrounds her career-spanning interest in dance and, more broadly, performance, which Deren identified as “ritual art- forms” in the Classical tradition. Renata Jackson explains that Deren’s allegiance to the

Classical springs from a pair of beliefs: that artistic creativity must be generative rather than imitative (for this reason she rejected the art-historical movements of Realism and

Naturalism, which she claimed copied the world without transforming it), and that the work of the artist involved the conscious and intentional creation of meaningful forms

(for this reason she rejected Romanticism and , which she believed surrendered this essential work to the ).69 Consequently she asserted that the space and time of cinema must be “created through filmic means” rather than by merely recording “a pre-existing theatrical or literary drama” (49). In this way, we may understand why techniques like slow motion and reverse motion came to occupy such a central position in Deren’s cinema: their specificity to cinema guaranteed the transport of the artforms under adaptation (dance, theater) decisively away from their sites of origin.

69 See Jackson 48, 72, 73, 78.

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Secondly, the quotation also helps us to understand how Deren combined ritual and dance with cinema. In addition to claiming that film had greater affinity with music and dance than with any other form (due to the fact that all three are temporally sequenced forms, unlike the plastic arts) (171), Deren believed that “the art-film must distinguish itself from theater and dance by creating movement via… spatiotemporal manipulation through shooting and editing choices” (85). Put another way, Deren felt that the camera must dance with the dancers, and that the editor must craft a spacetime for the overall ritual action which could not exist except on film. Her statements on A

Study in Choreography for the Camera confirm this: “[T]he dancer shares with the camera and cutting, a collaborative responsibility for the movements themselves. This results in a film dance which could not be performed except on film” (“Magic is New”

310). Such a dictum immediately calls reverse motion into service. True to cinema’s potential, Deren forged diegetic spaces free of familiar natural laws and logical causality.

Within these altered spatiotemporal states, she crafted exquisite movement-images, leveraging editing, camera movements, slow motion, reverse motion, multiple exposures, and negative images to explore the limits of cinema’s capacity to invent magical and dreamlike motion. Jackson explains that to Deren the technique of slow motion furnished the opportunity to “better understand the component parts of the particular movement under investigation” (90). Thus, the slowing or even reversing of time were not intended to investigate the structure of time, but to transform and highlight the structure of movement. In Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), the transfigured time modifies (and thus serves) the ritual (“causes the human body to perform inhuman movement”); the ritual does not investigate the time.

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At her most rudimentary, Deren occasionally used reverse motion as an expeditious, if still visually-striking, form of cinematic trickery. A Study in

Choreography for the Camera (1945), for instance, features a quick-cut series of reversed shots of a dancer falling which appear to give him the ability to leap preternaturally high.

A similar but more eye-catching enhancement of motion briefly erupts in the middle of the garden scene in Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946, by coincidence the very same year that Cocteau used reverse motion to similarly give flight to his lovers at the close of

La Belle et la Bête). More memorably, several shots in Witch's Cradle (1944) depict a thin black string which appears to inch up a woman's arm, an effect probably accomplished by pulling the string slowly away and reversing the result. While the first two examples simply operate as covert special effects within an otherwise forward-time diegesis, the third, by drawing attention to its strangeness, also signals the logic of a dream space. At Land (1944) takes this signaling function a step further by using reverse- motion shots of ocean waves to denote the dreamer’s entry into a space of spatiotemporal alterity. In the magnificently creative space of At Land, people and objects transform suddenly, and editing links disparate spaces and elides time without warning. However, when Deren writes that At Land takes place in “a relativistic universe,” she does not so much refer to a relativity of time, but instead one of space; that is, “in which the locations change constantly and distances are contracted or extended” (“Magic is New” 310). For examples such as these, Lucy Fischer creatively locates Deren along the lineage of the earliest trick filmmakers, most especially Georges Méliès.70 Just as Deren positioned herself as heir to ancient Classical aesthetics, so also cinema’s earliest impulses – toward

70 That said, to my knowledge, reverse motion appears in none of Méliès’s extant films.

146 spectacle, movement, and magic – invigorate her work. And by returning to these foundational sites, she discovered a way to found a new kind of avant-garde cinema.

Reverse motion’s role in this aspect of her work is limited, but relevant.

Though her ritual mode and her dance mode never fail to interpenetrate and overlap, Deren achieves something closer to embryonic time-images in her most stripped- down choreographic experiments. Ensemble for Somnambulists (1951) and the more ornate The Very Eye of Night (1958) use negative images, multiple exposures, slow motion, and a little reverse motion to create ambiguous event-spaces that mystify the indices of rhythmic dance toward cosmic dimensions. Accompanied by music, these movements, free of the narrative entanglements of some of Deren’s other projects, signify their own rhythmic character directly and, in this way, gesture toward an examination of time. Here I recall a statement which Deleuze made in reference to the films of Carl

Dreyer: “the more the image is spatially closed, even reduced to two dimensions, the greater is its capacity to open itself on to a fourth dimension which is time, and on to a fifth which is Spirit” (Cinema 1, 17). Deren’s greatest experiment along these lines was

1948’s Meditation on Violence, which features Wu-Tang and Shao-Lin martial arts ritual/choreography performed by a man named Ch’ao-Li Chi, accompanied by Chinese and Haitian drumming in a shifting sonic counterpoint. The first and last sections of the film take place against a limbo background in an interior space, with the middle section, a brief but vigorous interlude, taking place outside. This poverty of means leaves room for time-images to enter in two important ways. First, after the middle section climaxes with an arresting freeze frame, the film returns to the studio-bound choreography which began the film, but with the difference that these last few minutes

147 play entirely in reverse motion. As Renata Jackson observes, “it may not be evident upon first look that Ch’ao-Li Chi’s movements run backwards after the freeze-frame” (180).

This is crucial, because here Deren’s use of reverse motion neither overtly calls attention to itself nor engages in mere special-effect trickery. Rather, it denatures movement and destabilizes the spectator in a profound, enigmatic, and surprising way. The viewer must discover, in the course of several minutes through subtle cues in the indefinably alien motion, that an aberration of time is responsible for the strangeness on screen. And second, the reversal of time in the third section of Meditation on Violence takes the film beyond a mere A-B-A sonata form (from music) and toward something much closer to a film palindrome. In this respect, it sets the stage for the appearance of more exact palindromic exercises of , like Hollis Frampton’s Palindrome (1969) and,

Meditation on Violence’s most direct descendant, Bruce Conner’s Breakaway (1966).

Thus, in Meditation on Violence, despite her stated metaphysical aspirations, Deren came closest to overcoming movement as an intermediary for time, and to achieving a structure based on temporal patterning and duration rather than on mere kinesis.

The Limit of Special Effect: Cocteau’s Cinematic Identity and the Queering of Time

Perhaps no film artist employed reverse motion more thrillingly, more thoroughly, and more personally than the French avant-garde painter, poet, and filmmaker Jean

Cocteau. Throughout Cocteau’s filmography, reverse motion interjects with sudden bursts of magical energy that can restore broken objects, raise the dead, and send lovers skyward in numinous flight. So bound up was his body of work with an aesthetics of

148 reverse motion that it functioned not simply as an stamp, but as a resolute statement of his identity71 – culminating in the climax of his final film when reverse motion launches the Poet (played by Cocteau himself) off his funeral bier and into artistic immortality.

I thus approach this section with a pardonable measure of deference, not just to

Cocteau, but to the significant body of scholarly production which his work has precipitated over the years. In the previous sections of this present volume, scant work preceded my own on reverse motion and its aesthetic history. That is not the case here.

On the one hand, no statement on Cocteau could possibly constitute the last word on his work or its meaning. But on the other hand, my present insights on Cocteau stand in the broad shadow of the work of James S. Williams, whose extensive writing on reverse motion in Cocteau takes clear precedence over mine. In view of this, in this section I wish to enter into a dialogue with Williams, suggesting how his interpretations might be augmented to constitute what I consider a more complete picture of the reverse motion in

Cocteau.

Cocteau’s intentional inscrutability necessitates such a re-examination, even while it poses daunting problems in interpretation. In 1948, Cocteau remarked, “Some time ago now, my first film, The Blood of a Poet, had the honor of being psychoanalyzed by

Freud. Re-reading this essay, I feel it is the only possible form of criticism.”72 While psychoanalysis would certainly find much to pore over in The Blood of a Poet, Cocteau’s endorsement of it flatly contradicts statements he made at the film’s release, when he

71 Cf. Williams, Jean Cocteau (2008). He writes that in Orpheus (1950), Cocteau used reverse motion in particular “to reassert his artistic potency and stamp his seal of authorship” on the film (203). 72 Qtd. in Gercke 10. NB: Despite what Cocteau says, it appears that Freud never wrote any such essay.

149 wrote that “The Blood of a Poet draws nothing from either dreams or symbols” (Two

Screenplays). Perhaps Cocteau spoke earnestly in 1930, but during the next three decades dreamlike images and cryptic symbols proliferated in his films. Gloves, mirrors, flowers, blood, and other objects seem to “eternally return,” film after film, as if demanding an intertextual account of their meaning. As if to aid viewers and critics in this work, nearly all of Cocteau’s favorite objects appear in The Testament of Orpheus

(1960), his final film, but this time as free-floating signifiers, each one atop its own plinth, as it were, displayed for itself, apart from any narrative justification. To heighten this sense of originary disconnection, Cocteau sets much of the action of The Testament of Orpheus in either a warehouse-soundstage or underground in a vast stone quarry, implying objects and symbols not-yet-carved or not-yet-mise-en-scène. And to an extent, all the recurring objects in Cocteau can be connected in some significant way to his use of reverse motion. They are woven together, or, to punningly capitalize on Testament’s reference to the mythic Penelope, through reverse motion they are woven and unwoven together. Therefore, accounting for reverse motion in Cocteau hinges on the meaning(s) of these other motifs. Given Cocteau’s conflicting advice on the status of the apparent symbols in his work, how should we proceed? Williams offers two useful hints. In the first place, we should remember that film engages us first as a sensory experience before we can reconstruct it as a text. So in the case of Testament especially, Williams reminds us to consider “the immediate sensory meaning of the object over any symbolic value it may possess” (Jean Cocteau (2006) 101). And in the second place, we should resist “the common temptation… to decode Cocteau’s films as part of a vast network of personal and poetic symbols” which all refer to suppressed or forbidden queer identity (27).

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With these and other watchwords in mind, Williams begins his chapter “For our eyes only: body and sexuality in reverse motion” with a series of observations. First, he points out that a number of critics have attempted to build a case for Cocteau’s obsession with sadomasochistic eroticism by favoring specific signifiers: the presence of leather and gloves, the slow pacing and kinky imagination in The Blood of a Poet (1930), or the frequency of strong female characters throughout his films, to name a few. Williams counters that such a hypothesis of repressed meaning “can often turn into a futile hunt for symptoms,” adding that reverse motion supplies a number of “equally erotic moments” outside a sadomasochistic context (158). Secondly, he remarks that while writers like

Daniel Gercke have addressed Cocteau’s use of reverse motion in the past, they have fallen into the trap of only identifying moments of “(res)erection,” that is, a disavowal of castration anxiety using reverse motion to phallically re-animate bodies. While Williams acknowledges the cases in Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orpheus (1950), and The

Testament of Orpheus which Gercke identifies, he rightly argues that Gercke does not account for some of Cocteau’s subtler uses of reverse motion – to un-burn a photograph, to scramble a character’s speech, and others. Williams proposes that a deeper dialectic of creation and destruction is at work in Cocteau’s reverse motion, one which surges beneath all of cinema’s images. He writes that “all moments of film record a process of resurrection and metamorphosis” (161), in that film, at its indexical core, captures sections of time which have passed away and returns them virtually to life at the moment of projection. If all cinema involves a sacrificial Bazinian embalming of time as pretext to its later resurrection on screen, reverse motion amplifies the return of the lost moment by simulating travel backwards through time, rebuilding the ravages of entropy,

151 approaching ever-more-remote lost moments. In this sense, the marvelousness of reverse motion, cinema’s third special effect,73 reminds us of the marvelousness of the ontology of the cinematic image itself: its ability to capture and preserve time – its first special effect. But after gesturing in this direction, Williams veers sharply away and proposes as a primary argument for his chapter that these “risings, rebirths and resurrections of the

Poet” are nothing but a “lavish decoy” distracting the viewer from a different matrix of meanings underneath. In the balance of the chapter, he goes on to circuitously argue that reverse motion emblematizes Cocteau’s fascination and obsession with anality, which

Williams claims represents “the very ‘seat’ of filmic thought” for Cocteau (182). I find this argument unconvincing.74

Nevertheless, I do certainly agree that Cocteau traffics in eroticism in his explorations of reverse motion. But Cocteau sets many signs loose in his films and orchestrates dynamic free play between them, to the point that eroticism is never simply eroticism. It also attests to Cocteau’s artistic identity, which, at least in his films, integrates itself into his definition of cinema. Any reflexive investigation of cinematic ontology in Cocteau in turn activates further far-ranging play – some of it erotic, some of it artistic, all of it somehow bound up with reverse motion and with every other aspect.

For me, Cocteau’s verve and brilliance coalesce around this point: that he somehow

73 Historically-speaking, that is, after the illusion of motion and editing. 74 To be more specific, a number of outrageous claims litter the path to Williams’s anal conclusion, and many of his examples engage the topic of reverse motion either very remotely or not at all. For instance, he argues that reverse motion is inherently monstrous (162), that many of Cocteau’s uses of reverse motion “possess a strong oral component” (169), the pervasive conflation of reverse motion with behind-ness (rear projection, characters standing behind other characters, turning around) which depends on a naïve spatialization of time, and a substantial number of bizarre or vague phrasings – for instance, that reverse motion brings us “face to face with the black hole of the real” (178). While I do not reject his broader claim that reverse motion binds formation and deformation closely in the Coctelian concept of art-making, he fails to make the case that the locus of this creation and destruction somehow centers on the anus.

152 tailored for himself a set of signs which could illuminate the many interconnected facets of his cinematic identity simultaneously. To outline this play of signs in his films, I will discuss the relationship between reverse motion and four of its closest neighbors: “direct magic,” clocks, obedience, and mirrors.

In the first place, reverse motion in Cocteau always already functions as a signpost of cinematic magic in general, regardless of the context in which it appears. In an interview concerning his film Orpheus, Cocteau proffered the equivalent of a specificity argument for cinema in defense of what he termed “direct magic,” a category of special effect which includes reverse motion. The doctrine of “direct magic,” something of a personal ethos of cinematic sleight-of-hand, bound him to, in his words,

“solve the problem of trick effects without resorting to any tricks” (qtd. in Fraigneau

102). By this superficially oxymoronic statement, Cocteau advanced the idea that visual effects in cinema should only depict that which the camera-eye can see – no process shots, matte work, optical printing, or other pictorial manipulation. Through clever mise en scène, camera positioning, and editing75, Cocteau believed that he could accomplish whatever effects he needed without undermining the basic indexicality of the camera. He argued that an effect fabricated according to this principle “can be convincing, owing to the mere fact that it is seen” (qtd. in Fraigneau 106, original emphasis). Put another way, by making each shot true on its own, Cocteau ensures that the viewer, never doubting that they are seeing what the camera sees, will believe the trick, because they constructed it in their own minds. Reverse motion holds a special place among the techniques of “direct

75 For instance, by building a second identical room behind what appears to be a full length mirror, shooting at angles which alter the perceived direction of gravity, or, of course, with judicious reverse motion, all of which feature in Orpheus.

153 magic” because it creates a temporal sequence which no human could observe in life, but without invalidating spectators’ confidence in filmic indexicality. In Williams’s words, reverse motion makes us “privy to the invisible within the real” (Jean Cocteau (2006)

102). As such, because reverse motion maximizes the indexical potential for belief in the marvelous inherent in the cinematographic mechanism, for Cocteau its presence alone trumpets, “This is cinema!” in all its possibilities.

Beyond merely nodding toward his concept of cinematic specificity through reverse motion, Cocteau often also surrounded instances of reverse motion with symbolically reflexive objects, signaling an interest in a deeper investigation of the nature of cinema. As the camera and projector constitute twin apparatuses for the registration and playback of sections of time, Roland Barthes famously called them “clocks for seeing” (qtd. in Lim 8). As if intuitively aware of this familial linkage between cinema and clockwork mechanisms, Cocteau often juxtaposed reverse motion with timepieces in his films. In The Blood of a Poet, the Poet peeps through a series of keyholes in a hallway of the Hôtel des Folies-dramatiques. In the first, he observes a man riddled with bullets before a firing squad and collapsing. As the soundtrack fills with the rapid click of a pocket watch, reverse motion raises the executed man back to his feet. Just after the

Merchant enters the Beast’s castle in Beauty and the Beast, wherein a stirring shot of reverse motion appears to light the candelabras of the dark corridor, the clock over the fireplace conspicuously chimes the hour.76 When Heurtebise and Orpheus prepare to pursue the Princess, Cégeste, and Eurydice into the Zone in Orpheus, a shot of reverse

76 Here the fireplace also stands for cinema’s primal play of light and shadow. This implicit interest in the role of firelight in generating projected images – from shadow figures to magic lantern slides to the cinema – is reinforced in The Testament of Orpheus when a reverse-motion shot of a fire gradually yields a photograph of Cégeste from its ashes.

154 motion appears to make a pair of enchanted gloves leap on Orpheus’s hands. As he nervously approaches the mirror, Heurtebise tells him to look at the time. He does, and just as the two go through the mirror, the clock chimes the hour. Finally, as Cégeste pushes the Poet forth toward the greenhouse studio in The Testament of Orpheus, he indicates the time by urging, “Hurry up! The cock’s crowing!” Inside the studio, just before two shots of reverse motion unveil the large canvas and the Poet produces a picture by un-erasing a drawing in reverse motion, the narrator reinforces the time, saying, “night turns into day.” But as I wrote at the outset of this paragraph, these juxtapositions of reverse motion and timepieces merely signal a more thorough reflexive investigation on the nature of cinema. In its most pure state, nearly all the objects of

Coctelian cinema could be said to function reflexively. In The Blood of a Poet, for instance, the very first shot features Hermaphrodite stretching out their right hand to display theatrical lights and a stage. Here, Hermaphrodite indicates not just theater and cinema’s inheritances from it, but also art as a whole, which Cocteau envisioned as a kind of “hermaphroditic self-fertilisation” (Williams Jean Cocteau (2006) 176). The spinning pipe cleaner sculptures and mask visually conceptualize the cinema’s ability to put images in motion and to, perhaps cubistically, montage views of objects from multiple angles. When the transfer of the mouth brings the statue to life, it, too, resounds as a metaphor of cinema, which can play back records of dead or absent people, appearing to make them live again. After the mirror makes virtual travel possible and keyholes excite voyeuristic scopophilia, the final act of the film takes place in a theatrical space wherein the woman turns into the statue which had been brought to life earlier, completing an unconscious cycle of inspiration and artistic production. Such reflexive energy brims

155 very close to the surface throughout Cocteau’s work, and by The Testament of Orpheus, which features at least thirteen instances of reverse motion, it often went hand-in-hand with his signature reversals of time.

Because of this tendency toward pan-reflexivity in Cocteau, quite a few reflexive symbols become with more traditionally erotic symbols, with reverse motion often performing the dual work of supporting both drives. In the first three cases of timepieces and reverse motion given above, reverse motion did not simply appear alongside a clock, but also near a door or portal, boundaries which characters cross or transgress. While there may be a certain encoded eroticism implicit in penetrating such boundary openings in Cocteau (Orpheus’s phallic hands piercing the mercury mirror, the

Merchant’s shadow rapidly expanding over the aperture of the door before entering , etc.), any such eroticism at least overlaps a reflexive analysis of cinema’s scopic regime – the voyeurism in The Blood of a Poet, and the large mirrors-as-picture-plane- portals (like the cinema screen) in The Blood of a Poet and Orpheus. And of course, reverse motion often accompanies the reflexive analysis of cinema inherent in the staging of passage between virtual worlds: the reverse motion which ejects the Poet back out of the mirror in The Blood of a Poet, the reverse motion which seems to raise Belle out of the wall into her father’s house when she uses the Beast’s glove-based teleportation system, and the reverse motion shots which send Orpheus and Heurtebise back out of the mirror at the end of Orpheus. Here, gloves also appear frequently (when Cocteau appears as The Poet at the beginning of The Testament of Orpheus, he makes a cheeky point of removing, , and returning for his gloves); their erotic potential seems plain enough on its own, but when Cocteau wraps it up in the erotic reflexivity of mirror

156 penetration, it becomes all the more clear that cinematic reflexivity and eroticism always intertwine in his films.

That said, the eroticism of reverse motion in Cocteau cannot be understood apart from reverse motion’s inherent reflexivity. By this, I mean to argue that whenever reverse motion functions erotically in Cocteau, the nature of this eroticism can only be discovered by recognizing its equally strong links to cinematic ontology. Therefore, I return to Daniel Gercke’s formulation of the “(res)erection.” Indeed, Cocteau cultivated a habit of raising horizontal bodies vertical in reverse motion – a refrain which expanded from a single instance in Beauty and the Beast to two in Orpheus to three in The

Testament of Orpheus. But these “erections” of lifeless bodies are not willful acts on the part of the characters. In all cases, though especially in Orpheus, some external force or magic in the plot re-erects the limp body, just as in all cases the effect itself cannot be accomplished by the will of the actor, but only by the action of the projector. Reverse motion, in these instances, compels the bodies on screen to obey the apparatus’s rule over time and surrender to a kind of involuntary excitation. Several times, Cocteau textually emphasizes the submissive eroticism of obedience in conjunction with reverse motion.

Immediately after the Princess raises Cégeste in Orpheus, she demands, “From now on you will serve me.” “I will serve you,” he replies. “You will obey my orders.” “I will obey your orders.” Likewise, when she raises Eurydice: “You will obey my orders.” “I will obey.” Finally, before she sends Orpheus backwards through time out of the Zone, she asks, “Will you obey me?” “I will obey you,” he breathlessly replies. “ Whatever I ask?” “Whatever you ask.” In The Testament of Orpheus, the Poet agrees to obey

Cégeste immediately after reverse motion sends the skeleton mask tumbling upward from

157 the ground to his face. However, a moment later, this discourse of obedience crucially reverses. Echoing and implying the eroticism and reverse motion of the numerous boundary-crossings in Cocteau’s previous films, judges Heurtebise and the Princess accuse the Poet of several crimes, including “trying to enter illegally a world not your own.” They add, “Disobedience is a religion with you.” Thus, the labile signification of reverse motion can infuse both obedient involuntary excitation and disobedient transgression with a potent eroticism. This means that the sadomasochism which critics like Richard Dyer and others readily identify in Cocteau (Now You See It) takes both the dominant and submissive sides of this sexual economy, and reverse motion accompanies them both.

One erotic zone in Cocteau exerts a still more powerful force however: the narcissistic zone of the mirror. Though especially true in Orpheus, much of Cocteau’s cinema may be understood not simply as the compulsion to cross forbidden thresholds often represented by mirrors, but rather as the deeper drive to meet one’s own image, to gaze upon it, and ultimately merge with it. If there are no mirrors in The Testament of

Orpheus, it is not because Cocteau has abandoned this rich symbol, but rather because

The Testament of Orpheus represents his final success in merging the actual with the virtual; the entirety of the film takes place on the other side of the mirror as well as, equally, in the “real world,” as Cégeste claims early on. The narcissism for his own image in the mirror (or in the artist’s canvas, which cannot depict anything but the self, as the Poet learns in The Testament of Orpheus) extends to the surface of whole films, prompting Cocteau to populate them with all sorts of reflexive gestures such as those outlined above. Through the figure of the mirror, narcissism and cinematic reflexivity

158 merge. But in Cocteau, the narcissism of mirrors eroticizes his films’ overarching reflexive patterns, in which reverse motion plays a key role. By staging each film as a reflexive investigation of cinema itself, he sought to make each film into an organism which could gaze upon itself narcissistically, which is to say, reflexively, and he interfolded this with a narcissistic investigation of his own identity and being. By his last film, every impulse in Cocteau’s filmmaking merged – reverse motion, time, eroticism, reflexivity, mirrors, narcissism, obedience, art, death, and so on – until finally each exciting all the others even as each signified all the others.

By the time he reached the apex of his filmmaking powers in Orpheus, Cocteau even found a way for forward time and reverse time to indistinguishably merge and entangle. In the final moments of the film, when the Princess reverses time and Orpheus and Heurtebise have just passed back through the mirror in the bedroom, a close-up depicts Orpheus removing the gloves from his hands. The shot plays in forward motion, but it occurs during a section of the film which takes place in reverse time. How could this be? A sensitive viewer immediately realizes that this forward motion shot is, in fact, the reverse of an earlier shot in the film – that of the “uncanny”77 reverse motion which sent the gloves snapping onto his hands so many scenes before. Since the first scene utilized reverse motion to create a magical effect in forward-flowing narrative time, this reversal of time brought about an image which might be unique in cinema – the reversal of a reversal, which is distinct from forward motion. I choose to call this effect “obverse motion.” Cocteau managed to contort the time of movement-image cinema like no other film artist. It seems insufficient to characterize his use of reverse motion as special effect

77 Cf. the attempt at a Freudian analysis of the reverse motion gloves in Palmer and Michael 131.

159 or even aberrant movement. It transcends that, toward something which I might best characterize as a “queering of time.” In Cocteau’s films, this reverse-motion queering of time energetically repudiates and subverts normative narrative flow, interrupting the habituated propriety of continuity techniques to introduce something magical, erotic, and contrary to the normative scripts of narrativity. Reverse motion boldly celebrates its own otherness in Cocteau, giving him an opportunity to celebrate himself, artistic creation, and the cinema, all the while treating the audience to the pleasure of such a truly enjoyable transgression.

Speaking of Cégeste’s resurrection in Orpheus, Vivian Sobchack claims that such

“unheimlich” reverse motion thematically foregrounds “the essential irreversibility of human temporality and… mortality,” adding that “metaphysics overtakes mere trickery” in such effects (“At the Still Point” 135). Here she reminds us that through reverse motion, Cocteau used cinema to think concepts. It is on the edge of such images of thought that reverse motion encounters its limit as a special effect. Here, where the narrative remains intact, although impinged upon by all bizarre manner of magic and strange visuals, the narrativity endures the maximum of reverse motion’s transgressions against it. Cocteau’s placement in this section is, perhaps, a compromise, since on either end of his output (The Blood of a Poet and The Testament of Orpheus), we witness the near-complete dis-incorporation of reverse motion from a narrative schema. Even his more mainstream films flaunt the implicit requirement that reverse motion disavow itself.

But flirting with such transgressions provides much of the pleasure of Cocteau.

The pleasurable transgression of deforming movement and time is not unique to

Cocteau, however. Indeed “transgressive deformation” could serve as a working

160 definition of comedy. Therefore, in the next chapter, I will interrogate the comic appeal of reverse motion, deploying an extended survey of comedy theories to determine what reverse motion has in common with more time-honored comic signifiers and, therefore, why we might naturally find reverse motion funny. Armed with these insights, I will explore the one film in cinema history which allowed reverse motion to completely overrun its narrative: Oldrich Lipský’s 1966 Czech comedy Happy End.

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CHAPTER 3: REVERSE MOTION AS COMEDY

Why is reverse motion funny? From the very beginning, even as science writers and the public alike received early reverse-projections of existing films with pronouncements of awe, they were already laughing, too. Describing the first reversal of the Lumières’ Demolition of a Wall, a reporter at Parisian paper Le Figaro wrote, “we see all its debris engage in a comical race to seal themselves back together.”78 When

Proctor’s Pleasure Palace in played the Lumières’ Divers at the Baths in

Milan in March 1897, they advertised its reverse motion as producing a “droll effect”

(qtd. in Robinson 22). A reporter at this screening followed suit, calling the reverse motion both “comic” and “highly ludicrous.”79 Shortly thereafter, when production houses began to generate films with reverse motion already built in, they invariably advertised them with words like “comic,” “humorous,” and other assorted synonyms.

The cinématographe, at first a scientific marvel, quickly gave way to spectacle and, with the addition of reverse motion to its stable of tricks, outright comedy. But why should reverse motion be funny? What made audiences instantaneously receive this mechanical sign with scant discursive precedent as humorous?

To answer these questions, I intend to set forth a nuanced account of the relationship between reverse motion, humor, and laughter, arguing that this cinematic upending of time structurally resonates with the operations of the comic mode in general.

To clarify, I contend that in the context of the comic, temporal plasticity should not be thought of merely as a means of reshaping, but rather of “de-shaping,” in the sense of the

78 “Courrier des Théatres.” Le Figaro 6 March 1897: 4. My paraphrase and translation of the single- paragraph notice: “Ainsi, un mur ayant été démoli, on voit tous les débris de ce mur se livrer à une course comique, se ressouder entre eux, puis l'édifice se redresser subitement sans aucune intervention spirite.” 79 New York Herald-Tribune, 23 March 1897, p. 7.

162 carnivalesque transformation or the parodic deformation. Whereas all previous forms of comedy could only manipulate the physical appearances and patterns of behavior of characters, cinema allows the to subversively skew (and thus skewer) time itself. The work of this chapter, then, consists of situating an extended review of relevant theories of comedy and laughter (superiority, incongruity, evolutionary biology, genre) into the context of the plastic time of cinema before applying them to a single towering test case, Oldrich Lipský’s Happy End (1966), a Czech comedy shot almost entirely in reverse motion. Finally, at the close of the chapter I will relate Bergson's theory of mechanical encrustation to his philosophy of cinematographic duration, revealing the extent to which his work already constitutes a theory of temporal plasticity in comedy.

Practically all theorists of humor, comedy, or laughter mention with some degree of hand-wringing that no satisfactory or stable definitions of comedy or the comic (and plenty of other related terms) have ever emerged. Many also lament the sheer bulk of conflicting theories on comedy, or worse, the number of theorists with similar ideas who insist on proprietary terminology. And most authors from both of these camps also point out that many other authors have raised similar complaints without resolving them, as I just did. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that many thinkers on the topics related to humor begin with fundamentally different research questions or philosophical aims. Some study the nature of laughter, others work toward a theory of the structure of jokes, others treat the more nebulous category “humor” as a social phenomenon, and still others classify and write histories of the loosely-defined “genre” of comedy in literature, film, and elsewhere. Nearly all such inquiries share some valence with the present study, though not a one on its own could be said to present a full enough picture.

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Consequently, the present project risks convolution and distraction unless it immediately puts limits on itself by clarifying its question. Rather than a general study of theories of the comic, this section proposes to answer the following: Why does reverse motion appear to lend itself so readily to a comic mode? And, a related question: How does reverse motion function comically? These interdisciplinary questions imply other prerequisite inquiries into both the nature of laughter and the forms of comedy. Making matters more difficult, no existing theory of comedy fully accounts for both the production of jokes, the reception of jokes, and the “apparatical” relationship between the spheres of production and spheres of reception. Because of this, I will draw on studies unrelated to film which classify and propose models of laughter itself, as well as more traditionally filmic approaches to genre and narrative structure in comedy. I will structure this section roughly historically, beginning with the nature and function of laughter as proposed by superiority theories, then drawing on various incongruity theories to identify the structural features held in common by various triggers of laughter, turning to evolutionary biology to discuss the role of laughter in cognitive development, and finally considering cinematic comedy as a specific, pseudo-social80 laughter-trigger with genre affinities and modal tendencies. In its most abbreviated form, this section will conclude that film comedy seeks to stage a series of surprising violations of social norms which the audience agrees to receive as nonserious and playful.

80 I adopt the term “pseudo-social” from Rod A. Martin, who writes that laughing while experiencing comedy alone “can usually be seen as ‘pseudo-social’ in nature, because one is still responding to the characters in the television program or the author of the book, or reliving the memory of an even that involved other people” (5).

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Superiority

Superiority theory assumes, in essence, that laughter results in the sudden perception of the self as better than another, either through one’s own triumph, or, more commonly, through another’s folly. As straightforward as this premise appears, however, it has precipitated a wide spectrum of moral conclusions about the status of laughter.

Plato, for instance, judged that by laughing, a person surrendered their soul (which he felt was best governed by reason) to the indulgence of baser desires. Worse, he proposed, laughter corrupted people of superior moral standing by causing them to take pleasure in the actions of their moral inferiors (Hokenson 25). On the other hand, expressed confidence in laughter’s power to instruct the audience on the pitfalls of the comic butt’s transgression of social norms and, thereby, to lead them toward moral behavior through negative reinforcement. According to this view, laughter derisively celebrates the gap in status between some laughable buffoon and the audience, or, as

Charles Gruner summarizes its explanatory value: “to understand a piece of humorous material it is necessary only to find out who is ridiculed, how, and why” (14). In the case of the humorous uses of reverse motion, this rubric provides a straightforward solution: even at its most rudimentary, reverse motion subjects images of humans on film to deformations which might appear foolish (such as walking backwards or un-drinking a glass of water), and thus transforms them into the butt of a joke. However, such a perspective positions the cinematic apparatus as a kind of “derision machine”—a theoretical move with ramifications worth exploring.

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While the positive moralism of Aristotle (comedy as social corrective) has reigned as the dominant current of superiority theory for long periods of time, Plato’s darker disapproving view periodically returns to prominence, most notably in the work of

Thomas Hobbes. Nearly everyone who has ever written about laughter mentions a single paragraph from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). In the paragraph in question,

Hobbes identifies laughter as a class of “grimaces” aroused by a passion he calls “sudden glory,” and he writes that it arises in a human “either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves” (36). Though some authors divide these pronouncements from their context in Leviathan, the surrounding chapter offers important clues to the uses to which Hobbes’ theory ought to be put. For starters, like Plato, Hobbes did not set out to craft a theory of laughter, but rather of human governance. His single paragraph on laughter appears in section VI of Leviathan, titled

“Of the Interior Beginnings of Voluntary Notions, Commonly called the Passions; and the Speeches by which They are Expressed.” In this section, Hobbes constructs a concise theory of sensation and response, both in terms of how the mind moves the body and in terms of how the received upon the body transmits to and transforms the mind.

He does not consider laughter in the context of comedy, but instead only within the social sphere: in the direct exultation of the self or in the derision of a social other. Were we seeking a theory of comedy or even of jokes to analyze reverse motion, we would need to look elsewhere. However, if we were to consider the reversal of a section of film as direct social act – as indeed it was in 1897 when projectionists first began to play films

“straight and reverse” live at public screenings – Hobbes may supply some insight.

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These early uses of reverse motion as a comic intervention upon existing films, in which projectionists subjected indices of persons to live temporal disfiguration, appeared within the sphere of reception as jolting interruptions of the onscreen action, even if the audience knew to expect them.81 This “suddenness” furnishes half of Hobbes’s criteria for laughter. In the centuries following, most prominent theorists of laughter or comedy have recapitulated at least this point, even if they have parted ways on others. Kant, for instance, called laughter “an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing” (209). And Schopenhauer, whose influential incongruity theory contests much of superiority theory, nevertheless retained suddenness as an essential aspect of laughter in The World as Will and Idea (1818): “the cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it” (qtd. in Martin 63).

Hobbes’s bifurcation of the nature of “glory” into either one’s own triumph or another’s failure also proved accommodating to shifting trends in comedy. Whereas audiences may have once laughed with the rewinding projectionist and at the silly motions which resulted in the people moving on screen, as time passed this gag “went stale” and later audiences turned their laughter instead toward the projectionist, cinematographer, or editor, who they perceived as inept (sometimes sympathetically so) for running the film

81 Several of the more “successful” comic uses of reverse motion since early cinema have also been presented or understood as an impingement upon the forward time of the narrative “from the outside”, as when plays footage of running men forwards and backwards in What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1967) and in any use of reverse motion in the television show America’s Funniest Home Videos (or any show like it).

167 in reverse.82 Patrick O’Neill claims that in the right cultural environment, the first kind of superiority-laughter – that of glory in the self – can develop into sympathetic humor, in which the humorist “sees himself as the potential victim” (37). While reverse motion may not naturally activate this kind of sympathy by itself, it seems to be able to welcome it in combination with other comic signifiers.

Were there a number of examples of reverse motion serving insightful anti- establishment satire or critiques of power, the moral question raised above might be moot. But in my study, reverse motion does not tend to serve broader social goals when deployed as comedy. Therefore, we may do well to heed the grimmer pronouncements of writers like Charles Gruner. He argues that superiority and aggression motivate laughter in all forms of humor, no matter how superficially different they may appear. In defense of Hobbes, Gruner deploys a quasi-scientific account of the evolutionary development of laughter, writing that laughter began not as a play-signal, but rather as a whoop of victory over a vanquished enemy (56-7). He claims that over time, the whoop and its trigger were socially displaced and abstracted a great number of times before reaching their present form: laughter directed at anything that could be made to appear ridiculous.83

82 See films such as Bill as an Operator (1910) (discussed in chapter 2), Keaton’s The Cameraman (1929), or Cukor’s Adam’s Rib (1949) for instances of reverse motion presented as cause to laugh at an exhibitor’s or a filmmaker’s failure. 83 In Gruner’s account, this process accelerated with the arrival of language, which made it possible to abstractly conjure incongruity at any moment, instead of simply in response to direct observation of a real- world event. Thus, he argues, when we laugh at ourselves, we declare our superiority over the foolishness or misfortune of our past selves. When we laugh at puns and wordplay, we exult in triumphing over the cognitive puzzle. If tellers of puns laugh more, it is because they have successfully tricked the listener. No doubt, he would claim that when cinema introduced images of time running backwards – images of difference par excellence – we incorporated them into our superiority paradigm.

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While some aspects of Gruner’s argument have drawn reasonable scrutiny84, his defense of the centrality of derision in humor remains difficult to shake. Freud, for instance, attempted to distinguish between “tendency” wit (wit in the service of insult or derision) and “harmless” wit (wit lacking any aggressive or hurtful content), but could not produce a single example of a joke that was entirely devoid of “tendency,” even if the “joke- work” of decoding the pun was itself fundamentally neutral (Grotjahn 10). Arthur

Koestler reached much the same result in The Act of Creation (1964), when he acknowledged that the cognitive resolution a pun or riddle did not in itself make it funny

– some modicum of aggression, however encoded, is necessary as well (Martin 64).

To analyze reverse motion in terms of Gruner’s allegations, I would like to propose a spatial metaphor which topologically relates the technological basis of cinema to the act of telling superiority-based jokes. Derisive humor depends upon between “winner” and “loser” which may be conceptualized spatially: the joke-teller and those who laugh are constructed as “insiders,” those who are “above.” The comic butt, on the other hand, is an outsider whom the joke makes low. The spatial terms can be construed differently (right/left, forward/backward, etc.) as long as the joke separates the laughers from the laughed-at. In the earliest reverse-projections of existing films, projectionists functioned as something akin to joke-tellers, standing with but behind an audience which directed its laughter toward the personages on screen. In the years that followed, the direct intervention of the projectionist disappeared, but the real physical space of the audience and the represented space projected upon the film screen remained

84 Such as his use of Jungian psychoanalysis to support a discredited Lamarckian account of evolutionary inheritance, or his dubious use of recapitulation theory to draw parallels between his account of the evolution of laughter and the stages of what children find funny as they mature into adulthood.

169 ontologically separate. That said, most films sought to overcome this separation either by explicitly addressing the audience (as in early cinema) or by constructing a diegetic space into which the audience could imagine themselves entering (as in classical cinema). Such conventions allowed “joke-tellers” of many stripes to appear on screen and yet remain

“on the side” of the audience. But when reverse motion intrudes into a narrative film, it shatters any strategies that might have minimized the phenomenological distance between seat and screen. In a film like What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1967), the audience may be able to overcome the Brechtian distancing produced by Allen’s re- of a Japanese film and achieve partial absorption in the comic plot, but in the scene when a group of henchmen quickly disembark a boat in reverse motion (one of them claims to see a mouse and the film suddenly runs backwards), any absorption becomes impossible.

During this moment of reversal, the film reduces the characters from simple (but human) buffoons to mere objects which the film manipulates. The reverse motion establishes onscreen a virtual temporal space the like of which we can never physically inhabit, making us suddenly and vertiginously cognizant of the permanent structural immiscibility of audience space and screen space.

Does the unmotivated intrusion of reverse motion into a typical narrative film (a rare event, to be sure) elevate the audience to some sort of virtual psychological station from which they might tend to perceive themselves as superior to the people on screen?

Since the audience is permanently exempt from the caprices of reverse time, might they regard personages subjected to it as risibly inferior? And since the psychological separation of the joke-teller and audience from the comic butt seems to be a structural principle of superiority theory, does the powerful separation between screen and audience

170 wrought by the presence of reverse motion naturally align reverse motion and superiority theory? It would seem so. Furthermore, if reverse motion cannot produce comedy except in an explicitly morally-suspect way, we may ask whether this makes it more or less problematic that jokes which conceal their tendentious aspects. To understand not just the final trigger of laughter but also the form and structuring of jokes, we must turn to incongruity theory.

Incongruity, Resolution, and Norms

Whereas superiority theory amounts to an affective theory of spectatorship in its analysis of the of the laughter response, incongruity theory approaches the phenomenon of comedy from the aesthetic angle, investigating formal patterns within jokes themselves. The notion of the intellectual contradiction, the cognitive mismatch, forms the backbone of incongruity theory. While the affinity between comic reverse motion and superiority theory may not seem intuitively apparent, surely the incongruity of reverse motion to our lived experience is self-evident.

Incongruity theories generally hold that when we apply universalizing concepts to objects or events (in everyday life or in the context of comedy), and the concepts predict that we will observe a different outcome or set of properties than we actually see, we experience a feeling of cognitive incongruity. In the case of wordplay, we may find fault in our concepts, which did not prepare us for a word’s double meaning or the semic ambiguity of a phrase. In the case of , the performer’s body may move in a way which we perceive as eccentric or accidental compared to the way people

171 normatively conduct themselves. A sudden appearance of reverse motion may unseat our narrative expectations. And such incongruity may cause laughter. But under what conditions?

After all, nearly anything could become incongruous in the proper setting, and humorous incongruity comprises a very small subset of all possible incongruity.

Psychologist Göran Nerhardt argues that too sharp or consequential an incongruity may produce fear, and too eccentric an incongruity may produce mere puzzlement rather than pleasure (many unsuccessful attempts to produce comedy through reverse motion fall into this latter category). Nerhardt hypothesizes that “[t]he greater the divergence of a stimulus from expectation in one or many dimensions, the funnier the stimulus,” but his experimental test of this model suggests instead that too much divergence from expectation makes stimuli less funny (59-61). La Fave, et al, level a more substantial attack against the ambiguity of incongruity theory when they write that while some incongruities may simply go unnoticed, even perceived incongruity is, at best, “a necessary condition of humour, [but] clearly not sufficient” (86). Granting this, what else is necessary?

The incongruity must be resolvable. In The Act of Creation, draws a relationship between art, science, and humor, saying that all three are driven by epiphanal moments wherein the brain links previously unlinked concepts, an event which he calls the “bisociative click.” In humorous wordplay, the joke depends on the farfetched linkage of two unrelated concepts which are, often by accident, somehow adjacent in language. By encoding a puzzle with clues to its own resolution, the joke affords the listener the opportunity to discover bisociative revelations, which they

172 celebrate through laughter. In this view, it is the solubility of the mismatch, not the mere presence of incongruity, which produces humor. When a listener surprised by a punchline quickly retraces the joke mentally and discovers the manner in which a signifier has been made to mean two things at once, this resolution of incongruity occasions a mental satisfaction which is said to enrich the laughter. Or, as Shultz and

Horibe (1974) found experimentally: “incongruity without resolution is funnier than no incongruity, but resolution of the incongruity is even funnier” (qtd. in Martin 67). From this perspective, we may remark that the potential comedy of reverse motion depends on our recognition of the reversal as reversal. It is not enough to recognize the motion on screen as strange; rather, when we mentally imagine the reversed footage playing forward and realize that all the strange motions we see were produced by playing banal motions in reverse, we might laugh at our discovery. Consider the reverse motion used in the

Swedish bookstore scene in Top Secret! (Abrahams, Zucker, and Zucker, 1984). Partway through the scene, one of the characters seems to throw books onto high shelves with impossible precision, thanks to the help of reverse motion. The strangeness of this motion may strike us as funny in its own right, but as soon as we work out how the scene must have been shot (with a person behind the shelf pushing the books off, to be caught by the “thrower”), we might find the moment even funnier. Furthermore, when we mentally re-forward everything else in the scene, we discover that in order for the actors to appear to be walking normally, they must have actually been walking backwards during the shoot. Here, the reversal of filmic time is not funny merely in itself, but rather in combination with a different kind of reversal (walking backwards). Thus,

173 incongruities may crop up in both the manifestly bizarre (as in the book “throwing” in the present example) and in the nearly-normal (as in the reversed backwards-walking).

What, then, establishes the boundaries of incongruity? What makes an incongruous thing incongruous, a ridiculous thing ridiculous, or a foolish thing foolish?

The answer to both questions is the same: a “norm.” Any joke, gag, or otherwise humorous stimulus depends upon an implicit worldview or norm which it references by staging a violation. The background of a norm makes the ridiculous thing ridiculous in superiority theory just as it makes the incongruous thing incongruous in incongruity theory – at least, as long as spectators are willing to agree with what the joke tacitly offers as a norm. In the case of reverse motion, the silliness of movement which it produces violates norms of linear causality and the direction of entropy, at least as we all intuitively understand them from having lived exclusively in “forward” time.

Historically, however, the violation of a social norm in comedy tends to spring from a desire to point out and subvert that social system’s failures by lampooning them.85 To the extent that physics are not just a mere social norm, but a background condition of reality which no social movement could replace, reverse motion comedy can rarely direct itself in a satirically-biting or socially-progressive way. Thus, reverse motion may often strike the viewer as irrelevantly silly rather than truly funny. But this need not necessarily be the case. Well-constructed incongruity functions as a derision-catalyst, wherein the hearer of the joke (or the viewer of the comedy) receives a mismatched dyad consisting of an implicitly sacrosanct norm and person or thing which, through action or event,

85 This is to say that the “norm” need not necessarily be normative; rather, a joke may take a lofty moral position as its norm and deride the normative in terms of its failure to meet an ideal.

174 comes to represent an inconsistency with or violation of that norm. In ascertaining the incongruity, the audience member may seize upon its wrongness, graft onto it a similar object for which they harbor antipathy, and act out their latent derision by laughing at this temporary surrogate. In terms of the present study, this means that we need not laugh at reverse motion in order for reverse motion to trigger laughter.

Laughter and Evolutionary Biology

Superiority and incongruity theories meet upon the terrain of norms: to superiority theory, laughter castigates that which falls short of or transgresses a norm, and to incongruity theory, crafters of comedy seek to humorously encode or reveal the violation of a norm. But why might our brain gravitate toward norms, at least as far as laughter is concerned? To answer this, we may wish to account for the biological origin and cognitive substrate of laughter, an ongoing question in evolutionary biology dating back to Darwin (cf. Gervais and Wilson). The roots of laughter, biologists tend to agree, predate both culture and language (411). Thus, we should not be surprised that reverse motion, which has no direct linguistic equivalent, can nevertheless trigger laughter.

Panksepp and Burgdorf propose that “affects are intrinsic aspects of emotional operating systems in the brain, and thereby constitute centers of gravity around which the decision making and operational/instrumental features of the surrounding cognitive processes revolve” (533). Deploying twelve categories of evidence to support that the chirping which rats produce when tickled is analogous to human laughter, they argue that the basis of human laughter has been in the biological pipeline for as long as 70 to 90 million

175 years. Panksepp and Burgdorf also outline something akin to incongruity theory when they propose that adult laughter developed from the “unpredictability” that produced laughter in infantile tickling and rough-and-tumble play (542). But when they add that

“children that prevail in play tend to laugh the most,” they gesture in the direction of superiority theory (543).

Unlike most philosophers and theorists of laughter, evolutionary biologists distinguish between laughter deployed purposively as a social sign (to indicate play or to express interest in a relationship) and laughter which erupts involuntarily. Gervais and

Wilson, who paint the most comprehensive picture of laughter’s evolution in the biology literature, begin by differentiating the two. The latter involuntary kind, called Duchenne laughter, is a genetically-encoded universal human behavior with a range of triggers: from peek-a-boo surprise in infants to tickling and rough-and-tumble play in children to culturally-specific verbal or conceptual humor in adults, which Gervais and Wilson suggest all originate in “a common ‘laugh generator’ in the brainstem” (403). Non-

Duchenne laughter, on the other hand, does not arise spontaneously, but is deployed volitionally as a social signifier. For the purposes of the present project, it seems sensible to bracket a discussion of the role of non-Duchenne laughter, since scientists and cultural theorists alike presume that it does not play a meaningful role in spectatorship. This may be especially true in the case of reverse motion, which, having no real-world analogue, could never elicit non-Duchenne laughter in a social situation. I intuit that there remains much research to be done on laughter triggered by technological effects without a pre-existing social equivalent – from reverse motion in cinema to

176 phonograph records played at the wrong speed to all manner of glitches in computer graphics.

How might reverse motion have become one of the multiplicity of stimuli which can engender Duchenne laughter, and how might understanding the forces governing its emergence shed light on the mental and social functions which such laughter serves? To answer these questions, Gervais and Wilson summarize the position of B. L.

Frederickson, who proposes that a great deal of selective pressure weighed on our newly- bipedal ancestors in Pliocene Africa (ca. four million years ago) as they migrated through the continent in response to climate fluctuations. According to her theory, it became advantageous to cultivate positive emotions in social settings in response to these stressors so as to “broaden thought-action repertoires and build physical, cognitive, and social resources, thus promoting fitness” (413). Laughter also facilitated the opening of nonteleological mental pathways which in time would help to elaborate other useful cognitive skills. It appears that over the generations, neurological links between play and laughter broadened to allow other stimuli, such as a “more generalized type of nonserious social incongruity,” to elicit laughter outside of a play context (414). Other scientists link laughter to another way by arguing that laughter may have “originally evolved as a reward for pattern recognition” (Lynch 147). According to this view, the mental resolution of an incongruity builds intelligence, regardless of whether that incongruity arrives in the form of droll wordplay or an image of time running in reverse.

Here, science affirms that comedy actually opposes meaninglessness at its heart, but is rather, in the words of James Feibleman, “rigorous[ly] logical,” and sometimes

177 constitutes “the most intellectual training that the common uneducated person ever receives” (121).

Comedy as Genre: The Semantic/Syntactic Mismatch and the Improbability Pact

Having explored the evolutionary origins of laughter and linked superiority and incongruity theory through their shared reliance on norms and transgression, we move ever-inward to investigate the nature of comedy, specifically film comedy. In this section, I would like to propose that reverse motion’s particular deformation of reality shares structural principles with many reigning conventions of film comedy and thus is well-suited for use there. But in order to demonstrate this, I must first explore the nature of the comic mode; that is, of comedy as a genre. Does film comedy merely concatenate a series of jokes, or do jokes imply or at least tend to gravitate toward certain types of narratives? In Taking Humour Seriously, Jerry Palmer explains that a long historical debate “centers on whether there is any unequivocal relationship between comedy as a literary form, and funniness; in general, the conclusion has been that there is no necessary relationship between the two… [but at best] an elective affinity between the two” (112).

He adds that, for the most part, the structuring of comedy films follow of the conventions of “realist” filmmaking, with clearly-defined space, linear causal sequencing, and all the other main trappings of storytelling in the continuity model.86 To this we may add one further historical observation: while comedy (or, at least, the comic mode) does not out of

86 Continuity conventions explain, in part, why reverse motion has been so rare in comedy since early cinema.

178 necessity require any specific narrative constitution, film comedy since the rise of classical narrativity has demonstrated a preference for narrative structures which promise but delay joy. In more general terms, many writers, from Aristotle on, have agreed that comedy considered as a genre must, in the overall shape of its narrative, move from chaos to harmony, from disorder to order—in short, toward a happy ending. In

Aristotle’s words, “the bitterest enemies in the piece… walk off good friends at the end, with no slaying of any one by any one” (1467). Proposing a catharsis-centered

Aristotelian theory of comedy, Dana Sutton suggests that comedy must abide, above all, by two rules: “that nothing serious may be transacted and that plots must have happy endings” (65). Zvi Jagendorf offers instead that the happy ending of a comedy re-appears with such frequency because of a shared wish between artist and audience to suspend the rules of reality. Drawing on Northrop Frye, Jagendorf affirms Palmer: “Comic endings are in themselves a convention, an agreement between poet and spectator rather than a necessary outcome of the material” (12).

Anyone familiar with the anarchic potential of comedy – its madcap production of incongruity at the level of the joke, the gag, or the bit – might find it paradoxical (or at least incongruous) that such a disorder-centered form would, in its macroscopic structure, tend toward the establishment of order. Reverse motion shares this peculiarity with comedy. I characterize this structuring principle as the semantic/syntactic mismatch: that incongruity, disorder, and sometimes outright chaos at the microscopic level of the joke somehow sum to joy, order, and a happy resolution across the full macroscopic arc of the narrative. George Butte calls this coexistence of order and disorder the “fundamental doubleness” of comedy, writing, “The ritual of this ancient comedy has a double

179 character, acknowledging death and denial in order to erase or at least defuse them”

(106). Not only is comedy double in this sense; so is reverse motion itself. Moment to moment, reverse motion produces absurd-looking visual effects, seemingly disordered but both delightful and perplexing due to our inability as humans to meaningfully conceive of effects preceding causes. But the visual disorder of reverse motion (its incongruity with our lived experience of time) paradoxically shuttles the spectator back down time’s arrow, toward a station of reduced entropy and, therefore, more order (in a thermodynamic sense). Thus, reverse motion naturally encompasses both aspects of comedy’s double-structure, producing macroscopic “order” through microscopic

“disorder.”

But these notions of order and disorder, while informative, locate the foundation of comedy in a prevalent, but not universal, set of structural conventions. What principles, if any, inform all comedies? Unlike certain genres, such as the Western or the historical epic, no objects inherently signify comedy or can be expected to appear in every comedy. Rather, comedy can be built from any objects whatsoever, as long as they evoke a laughter response from the audience. Thus, we must define comedy not as a genre of object (that is, in terms of objects on screen), but rather as a genre of affect, a genre defined by audience response. As Geoff King puts it, “nothing is just comic: things are comic in particular ways and for particular reasons” (4). For this reason, King prefers to characterize comedy as a “mode” rather than as a genre, which is to say, a way of presenting a narrative rather than a structural rule for that narrative. Coincidentally, reverse motion holds a similar status within a filmmaker’s toolkit. Reverse motion does not designate any particular profilmic material, but rather a mode of reshaping existing

180 sections of filmic time. Likewise, we do not recognize reverse motion on the basis of the objects on screen, but rather by how it confers a temporal “affect” to those objects—by how it alters their apparent transit through time. Comedy and reverse motion, then, both signify themselves by deforming existing signifiers.

Once we acknowledge that no array of semantic signifiers or set of syntactical rules could cover all of what we consider comedy, we must also admit that the “stuff” of comedy does not reside on screen, but in the audience. Comedy’s semantic is not the joke, but the laugh. The business of comedy is, therefore, not the business of joke- production, but the business of affect-production. Further spurred by Rick Altman’s seminal work on genre, in which he argues that “in order to understand which semantic and syntactic factors actually make meaning… it is necessary to subject them to a further analysis based on the uses to which they are put” (210), we discover that all film comedy centers on a kind of pact. The film industry proposes spaces of laughter-production – “I want to make you laugh,” and audiences agree – “I want to laugh.” While the success of a text in any genre depends on the unification of intention and reception (audiences seek certain kinds of pleasure, genres differentiate and attempt to provide such pleasure), the pact of comedy takes a peculiar form because comedy depends upon a nonserious frame of mind. In his “reversal theory” of comedy, Michael Apter argues that human minds constantly switch back and forth between a temporary safety zone characterized by playfulness and a more permanent zone devoted to real-world problems, characterized by seriousness. The former mode of thought he designates as “paratelic,” which is to say,

“without a goal,” and opposes it to the latter “telic” (goal-directed) mode of thought.

Laughter, he explains, depends on our ability to shift into a paratelic mode of thought in

181 order to enjoy nonseriousness (qtd. in Martin 75). From this perspective, I argue that the genre of comedy depends on a mutual suspension of telic thought on the part of both the film and the audience. The film must present its events as nonserious, and the audience must also agree to receive them accordingly, with, in Palmer’s words, “the demands of common-sense rationality … suspended” (97). Put another way, not only do audience and film mutually agree to suspend telic thought, they must also agree to suspend, in many cases, reason and probability. This quasi-scientific formulation overlaps neatly with reverse motion, since viewers of reverse motion must also momentarily set aside their expectations of physical reality in order to enjoy images of time unfolding backwards. And not only do comedy and reverse motion both structurally predicate themselves on their embrace of improbability, they each call upon the audience to enter a kind of improbability pact with them. Put another way, humans face reality through narrative art out of a desire to overcome it. In tragedy (and generally in real life), reality overpowers desire. In comedy (and in reverse motion), the wish triumphs; the shared desire to transcend reality fuels an engine of the improbable.

In nearly every genre besides comedy, audiences deride coincidence and absurdity as narrative weakness or irresponsibility, but in comedy the audience and the film strike an implicit improbability pact together. Through this pact, comedy invites the audience to participate in an act of deconstruction. The audience cannot remain passive, but must implicitly agree to momentarily suspend their own experience of reality and accept the film’s deconstruction of the normal for the purpose of mutual play. In entering into this improbability pact, the audience enthusiastically consents to a construction of the world based not on the familiar probabilities of everyday life, but rather on the

182 chaotic improbabilities of the comic regime, which places the unlikely at its center by the virtual will of the audience wishing to upend the prevailing rules of reality. Watching reverse motion, too, entails an acceptance of an image of unreality – a willingness to witness entropy decreasing, despite the fact that it has probably never done so on a human scale during the life of the universe. These complementary pacts of reverse motion and of comedy do not disavow reality, nor do they lack self-awareness. We understand them as pacts. So as comedy escapes from the probabilities of everyday life to reveling in coincidence and incongruity, it joyfully and cathartically confirms its own unreality. Reverse motion, likewise, exults in the symbolic defeat of a reigning norm of life, but its images ultimately point back to time’s irreversibility.

This suspension of reality is crucial to our understanding of the importance of comedy, because laughter alone is neither necessarily progressive nor cathartic.

However, an audience activated by its participation in the improbability pact of comedy becomes engaged in a deconstructive project that takes pleasure in tearing down reality’s prevailing norms. Andrew Horton argues that the nature of this deconstruction derives from film’s specificity. Film encompasses and condenses a number of systems of signification: it inherits acting from theater, borrows language games from literature, composition from film and painting, and so on. Any one of these might be manipulated to create comedy on film. But Horton argues that the specificity of film comedy ought to be located in “film’s ability to destroy and manipulate time and space for its own purposes” (19). On this point I wholly agree. The raw material of film depends less on surrounding cultural norms than literature or theater, which must communicate through the arbitrary symbolic signifiers of written or spoken language or the iconographic

183 signifiers of costume or social performativity. Instead, film as a machine obeys pure physics, recording indexical traces of pure sections of temporal duration as registered in profilmic events which obey thermodynamic and other physical laws. The technological ontology of film is bound to these universal laws of physics. Thus, to make comedy in film through the manipulation of space and time is to make comedy by suspending universal laws, many of which are understood intuitively through experience and without the intermediary of an arbitrary system of signification. Laughter arose prelinguistically and reverse motion arose extra-linguistically. Here, reverse motion and comedy converge, for reverse motion transcends culturally-bound language systems and communicates to anyone experientially familiar with the arrow of causality within the flow of time.

Reverse Motion’s Affinity with Comedy in Happy End

At the outset of this study of reverse motion and comedy, I set out to answer a series of questions. Briefly stated, how does reverse motion participate in the humor of a comedy film? What shared nature or structure predisposes reverse motion to the comic?

To address these inquiries specifically, I now turn to the example of Happy End. The film tells its story almost entirely in reverse motion, beginning with the end of the fabula, the beheading (or rather, un-beheading) of protagonist Bedrich Frydrych, and working its way back to the start of his life, a “happy end” to be found in the halcyon days of his childhood. Bedrich narrates the affair as though this reversal of time were his life. He characterizes his un-beheading as his birth, his un-apprehension by the police as his

184 graduation from the school of his youth (prison), and his un-murder of his wife as of her dismembered body parts required to begin their married life together.

The film straddles the line between pitch-black humor and silly farce, never revealing whether Bedrich “really” lives his life in reverse or, if not, whether his elaborate comical misrecognitions of the forward causal narrative of his life result from a crazed dream at the moment of his death or a concerted disavowal of his crimes. Any viewer approaching the singular peculiarity of Happy End faces the sink-or-swim proposition of keeping an exactly inverted narrative line straight in their heads, a daunting challenge which may blunt the effectiveness of some of the comedy, turning it into a kind of dumbstruck awe.

Happy End was directed by Oldrich Lipský, a minor figure in Czech film.

Thomas Barrett specifically disincludes him from Czech New Wave, writing that Lipský was “much less political than directors such as Jiri Menzel or Milos Forman, and less aesthetically challenging than someone like Frantisek Vlácil” (107). Lipský’s greatest success as a director was the loopy Western-musical-parody (1964), a film which he also oversaw in its original stage version as the artistic director at the Theatre of

Satire in Prague. Czech film history scholar Peter Hames situates Lemonade Joe as one of “a whole range of apparently less ambitious works based around popular genres and references to ‘Western’ culture,” though he acknowledges that it surpasses the other parodic works of its time to achieve cult status in Czech cinema circles today (49).

Hames mentions neither Happy End nor Lipský’s equally outrageous comedy I’ve Killed

Einstein, Gentlemen (1970) in his appendix filmography for Lipský. Aesthetically,

Lipský’s comic strategies in Happy End have little to do with the “mock realist” style that

Charles Eidsvik identifies as dominant in the film comedy of Eastern Europe at the time.

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Nevertheless, Happy End does enunciate certain themes of futility which Eidsvik identifies elsewhere in Eastern European comedy. In other comedies of the period, plot progression becomes impossible due to the dysfunctions that arise in a contradictory sociopolitical system. While Happy End takes this an absurd (as opposed to mock- realist) step further by literally reversing the direction of its syuzhet, the thematic kinship is still apparent.

That said, what, specifically, generates laughs in viewers of Happy End? On the most basic visual level, the silliness of motion deformed by time running in reverse provides a basic level of mirth. But often, Lipský enhances such images by pairing them with other comic signifiers. For instance, he plays cartoonish incidental music during many scenes, and some play in fast reverse. He also favors action which would be at least mildly funny in forward time. Consider, for instance, the fight between

Bedrich and his wife’s lover, Jenik, the game of leapfrog which the inmates play in the prison yard, or the exaggerated facial expressions which Julia (Bedrich’s wife) and Jenik make at each other as they eat a plate of pastries together, Jenik shoving each one whole into his mouth (an effect much funnier in reverse, as he appears to endlessly withdraw one after another whole from his mouth). Lipský also plays up the unpredictability of reverse time. The increase in entropy which accompanies the passage of forward time muddles or obscures usable information, making the particulars of the past sometimes difficult to discern. Thus, another apparent paradox of reverse motion (or of time’s arrow) arises: though it might seem intuitive that causes should be fully deducible from their effects, they are not. The obscuring consequences of entropy, when coupled with the subtractive spacetime sampling system of cinema (for cinema falls far short of

186 recording the quantum states of every particle in front of its lens), makes reverse time just as surprising and unpredictable as forward time – if not more so. The viewer cannot know what will come next, even within a continuous shot of reverse motion, despite having already seen what comes after it. The past escapes prediction and, therefore, often comically surprises.

For further comedy, as well as to ensure the possibility of narrative legibility,

Lipský also introduces another level of reversal into Happy End. While the moving image inverts its direction at the level of the photogram, Lipský opts to reverse dialog at the level of the line.87 This is to say that every line of dialogue (with two or three exceptions) plays forward on the soundtrack while the actors lip-sync in reverse to match it. Hence, the spoken humor in Happy End is not sonic, but syntactic. Throughout the film, answers precede questions, and questions appear to receive absurd answers in the form of an answer to an earlier question which the viewer has yet to hear. For instance, at Bedrich’s execution, the witnesses remark:

Witness 1: One. Witness 2: Has he got any children? Witness 3: Five-seventeen. Witness 4: What’s the time?

Or, as Julia and Jenik flirt with each other:

Jenik: I’d like to call you Julia. And you can call me... Jenik. Julia: Or dominoes. Jenik: Why don’t we play a game of cards, Mrs. Frydrych?

Or, at Bedrich and Julia’s wedding:

87 “Backwards,” the first episode of the third series of the BBC sci-fi comedy program (1989) also takes place in a reverse-time world, but since not all characters experience the reversal equally, it approaches the problem of dialogue in a much less consistent way.

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Priest: What God has put together, let man not separate. Julia: I do. Priest: I’m asking you, Julia, here in face of God, do you take Bedrich to be your husband? Bedrich: I do. Priest: I’m asking you, Bedrich, here in face of God, do you take Julia to be your wife? Bedrich: No. Priest [referring to the couple’s kneeling posture before the altar]: Is it too uncomfortable?

In each case, the humor strikes the viewer twice – first, when banal questions appear to receive incongruous answers, and second, more deeply, as the viewer re-arranges the dialog into its forward-time order and muses at the script’s cleverness.

Through this work of mental forwarding, deeper levels of comedy emerge in

Happy End. In order to understand their relationship with the surface-level incongruity of reversed time, I would like to offer an analogy to Deleuze’s discussion of firstness, secondness, and thirdness in Cinema 1. I will describe the process in general terms first, followed by an analysis of what these steps imply for an understanding of Happy End.

When reverse motion first appears on screen, before it registers as a reversal of a cinematic record of time, only its craziness is apparent – its jerky causelessness, its disjointed frenzy. It appears almost as the temporal equivalent of a Deleuzian any-space- whatever, characterized by “instability,” “pure quality,” “pure power” (109-111) – a kind of temporal affect. As the nature of the aberration of time becomes clear to the viewer, reverse motion takes on the character of a Deleuzian originary world. Originary worlds, writes Deleuze, are “composed of unformed matter, sketches or fragments, crossed by non-formal functions, acts, or energy dynamisms which do not even refer to constituted subjects” (123). Appropriately, in Happy End the reverse motion is not characterized

188 simply by ostentatious high-entropy action, but moreover by violence – the violence of execution, of murder and butchery, of furniture-smashing and fire.88 Deleuze explains that in originary worlds affects and qualities pass through impulses to give birth to action.

Once the viewer recognizes the nature of the chaotic movement on screen, this reverse- motion-as-impulse-image pushes the spectator’s mind toward action. Both to understand the snaking narrative as well as to get some of the jokes, the spectator “decodes” the reverse motion by mentally simulating images of “obverse motion,” which is to say, a mental approximation of what the forward-flowing section of time which was used to generate this reverse motion might have looked like. The mental labor undertaken to imagine reverse motion “forwarded” corresponds to Deleuze’s action-image. Finally, armed with a virtual image of obverse motion, the viewer may seek to compare it to the actual image of reverse motion before them.89 Doing this generates a mental-image of comparison, or what I term a “comparison-image”, which orients the reverse and obverse side-by-side to make sense of what they mean together. This final step, which produces a relation-image between the affection-image on screen and the imagined action-image, corresponds to Deleuze’s notion of the mental-image. And so, in recognizing and analyzing reverse motion, the viewer passes through states of intellection corresponding to Deleuze’s schematization of Peirce’s firstness, secondness, and thirdness: the affection-image, the action-image, and the mental-image.

88 Similarly, the legendary point of origin of reverse motion – the Demolition of a Wall on the grounds of the Lumière factory – is also marked by the formlessness and violence of an originary world. 89 Here, you may have noticed that the “actual image of reverse motion” is itself a virtual image of a forward-motion shot which must have preceded it. Such are the vagaries and circuits of exchange between the actual and the virtual in Deleuze’s conception of the crystal-image.

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The humorous potential of the “firstness” of reverse motion—that is, of the absurdity of aberrant movement on its own—should already be apparent. The

“secondness” of obverse motion and the “thirdness” of the comparison-image also correspond to deeper levels of comedy in Happy End. Most obviously, the viewer’s ability to recognize reverse motion and “correct” it puts them at something of a mental advantage—a station of superiority—over Bedrich, who never seems to notice that his life runs backwards. His entire voice-over track amounts to a massively incongruous misrecognition of everything around him. He describes a cabaret as “girls dressing up in warm clothes set to music.” He misidentifies the un-receiving of wedding presents as an opportune moment to “get rid of some junk.” He saves Julia’s life four or five times, but in each instance imagines with some relish that he is trying to kill her. Bedrich re- inscribes the narrative of his life according to a fool’s teleology which misrecognizes deaths as births and first meetings final partings. In each instance, the audience, safely impervious to reverse motion, conceives its superiority in proportion to Bedrich’s misrecognitions. As Bergson noted in Laughter, “a comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself” (16) – a state of fairs definitely in evidence throughout Happy End.

Thus, I would like to also situate Happy End as a satirical dig on narrativity in general, especially in light of Lipský’s other time-bending and genre-upsetting work.

Though reverse motion smashes narrative causality to bits by its very nature, Bedrich’s descriptions force it back together in a laughably unstable configuration. In no way except through Bedrich’s risible chain of misprisions could Happy End be considered a film with a happy ending – after all, Bedrich slays his wife and dies by guillotine; and in

190 this respect, it seems to attack the convention of the happy ending through a satirical inversion. In a way, Happy End also confirms (by pretending to disavow) a trend in modernist literature which Patrick O’Neill named “the comedy of entropy.” Tracing developments in mathematics, physics, and philosophy over the past few centuries,

O’Neill identifies a pan-disciplinary breakdown of the possibility of certainty. Faced with living in a universe in which determinism gives way to statistics (thermodynamics and entropy), and in which systems of rules or laws give way to paradox (as shown in

Cantor and Gödel’s work in set theory), the modern artist must construct meaning rather than discover it. Consequently, O’Neill argues, humor has stepped into the stable of serious art, which now acknowledges itself as a realm of play, trapped in unresolvable absurdity (23). Though Lipský hardly compares to, say, Robbe-Grillet in this sense (the latter an example used in both Deleuze and O’Neill), he nevertheless recognizes the episteme of modern rootlessness and explores it. Happy End only manages to achieve the happy ending promised in its title by playing the entire story in reverse and depriving its protagonist of the ability to tell the difference. Yet at the same time, Happy End also seems to ludically exult in Bedrich’s absence of reason, inviting its viewers to do the same, according to comedy’s improbability pact. Like reverse motion in general, which confirms the irreversibility of time by appearing to reverse it, Happy End both mocks

Bedrich’s misrecognitions and encourages its audience to playfully indulge in them.

Thus, through the complementary techniques of comedy (which points to the serious by disavowing it) and reverse motion (which upholds the rule of forward time by pretending to overturn it), Happy End sketches a picture of the bleakness of modern life by appearing to playfully erase it.

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In this way a fiercely modern text, Happy End also poses grave problems for reason. After all, Bedrich’s misrecognitions arise from reasonable interpretations of the impossible events surrounding him. Since he somehow lacks the insight necessary to determine that he’s travelling the wrong way through time, Bedrich makes the most of what he does know: from his perspective, animals begin as cuts of meat and, after his intervention, end as whole and alive. Thus, he concludes that he assembles animals.

Viewers, able to generate comparison-images of reverse and obverse motion, know that he deludes himself. But the plot somehow conspires to preserve Bedrich’s bubble of ignorance; no force external to his world ever threatens his internally-consistent (but wrong) appraisals of time and causality. Faced with this, viewers may realize that their recognitions of time function no better or worse in the world of Happy End than

Bedrich’s misrecognitions. Furthermore, the longer that nothing bad happens to Bedrich as a result of his misrecognitions, the more the film insists that Bedrich’s insufficient logic suffices for the illogical world that he lives in. Thus refusing any attempt to monopolize reason against him, the film confounds any audience feelings of superiority.

If superiority-laughter once functioned as a social corrective, it does so no longer; the film deflects laughter at Bedrich back at the audience, making their reasonable protestations (“you’re not an animal assembler, you’re a butcher living backwards!”) seem utterly superfluous and foolish. By the end, the audience laughs less at Bedrich’s misrecognitions, and more at itself for misrecognizing the nature of the film.

What, then, can be concluded about the narrative of Happy End? Does it present the story of fool unaccountably living his life backwards, or perhaps of a murderer disavowing his crime at the moment of his execution? Lipský refuses to provide an

192 answer, but on this issue of narrative and comedy some further points are necessary. I would like to suggest that Happy End may be best understood as a final confrontation between comedy and narrative. In his influential article “Pie and Chase,” Donald Crafton argues that since the end of early cinema, the gags in comedy (the “pie”) have always conflicted with classical cinema’s imperative to craft a smooth linear narrative flow (the

“chase”). In this view, gags always intrude on the narrative as incongruous interruptions.

By their nature, they are immiscible elements which cannot be smoothed, ignored, or rationalized by narrative. As such, the gag also encompasses, in certain instances, anti- narrative camera tricks: “for instance, double exposures and animation, that exploit the film medium’s capability of disrupting the normal vision that the narrative depends on for its consistency and legibility” (110). Reverse motion, of course, counts as such a disruptive trick. In his analysis of the /Leo McCarey comedy of coincidence and errors His Wooden Wedding (1925), Crafton identifies a comic form where the aim is not for the narrative to achieve anything, but rather to simply provide a sturdy enough framework on which to hang mayhem and jokes while providing motivation for a cascade of absurd situations. He remarks that “by the time final closure is achieved… the audience experiences relief, but also a temporal waste, a temps perdu because the ‘story’ has been set back to a time before the film began (the plans for a new wedding have to be made). All that transpired was ‘excess’ – slapstick” (115). Happy

End literalizes the notion of “temporal waste,” for in every successive frame the film is

“set back to a time before the film began.” Nothing is accomplished in Happy End, it is only undone. The world approaches mirthful order only by unmaking itself, as well as by demolishing the notion of a causal plot. Of course, Bedrich tries his best in the voice-

193 over to impress teleology onto the reversal of time, but it never sticks. Just as reverse motion reveals the irreversibility of time, so also the reversal of the narrative of Happy

End reveals that Bedrich’s life came to nothing and meant nothing in either direction.

Thus, Crafton locates the “message” of slapstick films in the assaults that spectacle levies against narrative (117). By earlier identifying reverse motion as spectacle of the first order, I positioned it as an anti-narrative force which can only oppose linear causality. Thus, certain cinematic traditions forced reverse motion to don the costume of forward time and subdue its threat to the tradition of causality. But reverse motion may also function in the context of a gag, and in such cases it powerfully participates in the gag’s interruption of narrative by also interrupting the forward flow of time. In popular film, one of the longest such interruptions appears in the Swedish

Bookstore scene in the Zucker Brothers comedy Top Secret! (1984), which plays in reverse motion for about a minute. But in the case of Happy End, reverse motion extends across the entire film, undermining the assumptions and hegemony of narrative tradition.

Lipský’s other films also feature nonsensical barrages of loopy gags (as in Lemonade Joe,

1964) as well as time-travelling antics which lay waste to the course of history (as in I’ve

Killed Einstein, Gentlemen, 1970). It seems safe to say that Lipský didn’t have much concern with the uninterrupted flow of time or chains of causality. If his career can be construed as a narrative-pummeling project, then Happy End must be its crowning achievement.

Tom Gunning agrees with Crafton that American comedy (an influence on Lipský, if Lemonade Joe is any indication) based itself on gags rather than plotting, but refines Crafton’s diffuse account of the gags it favored. Gunning argues that in order

194 to capitalize on the audience’s continued fascination with the mechanism of cinema (that is, how this image-making machine worked), early comedy filmmakers developed cinematically-specific gags centered on machines and devices which recalled the cinematic apparatus (“Crazy Machines” 88). These mechanism-based gags, far from interrupting narrative, structured it according to rigorous causal principles. The more precise the machine, Gunning writes, the greater the comic disruption it produced.

Lipský must certainly have been at least intuitively aware of this tradition of mechanical causality in slapstick, because the aesthetic of Happy End both affirms and subverts it simultaneously. On the one hand, by reversing time, Happy End frustrates the established order of setup-then-punchline, replacing it with a continuous plane of time-as- joke, occasionally punctuating this plane with an outsized action as comic spectacle.

Happy End does not merely create humor by upending causality; it mocks the tradition of causality itself. But on the other hand, Happy End lionizes the cinematographic mechanism by basing nearly every joke on the editor’s ability to reverse the playback direction of time. Surprisingly, Gunning fails to mention that before early cinema screens filled with mischief-making machines, the projector itself functioned as the first cinematic mischief-making machine—one capable of throwing filmic time into reverse at a puckish whim. By demolishing diegetic causality, Lipský re-crowns the cinematic apparatus as the machine of machines.

By arguing that cinema’s specific brand of causality-based slapstick originates in a fascination with the cinematic machine itself, Gunning affirms a strong link between comedy and the mechanical. In fact, his assertion that comedy achieves greatness in proportion to its transformation of the world into a vast mechanism recalls one of Henri

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Bergson’s famous statements on laughter: “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine” (29). So far, I have situated the comic nature of reverse motion in terms of its ridiculousness, its incongruity, its peculiar relationship with order, its improbability, its counterintuitive affirmation of forward time, and its demolition of narrative and causality.

One final piece remains: its mechanical nature. Any time a movie camera registers a section of duration, its subjects all profilmic persons and objects to a mechanical regime of time. Though regular playback tends to hide this fact, aberrant playback – such as fast, slow, and reverse motion – tends to produce laughable images. To understand why this might be so, I call upon Bergson’s analysis of the imposition of the mechanical upon the natural.

Bergson and the Mechanical: a Temporal Theory of Comedy

Why does Bergson align the mechanical with the comic? First of all, throughout

Bergson’s writing the mechanism takes a number of forms, functioning in all of them as a kind of foil for his of life and becoming. Helpfully, comedy scholar Jan

Hokenson warns against hearing the word “mechanical” too literally, pointing out that

Bergson uses it to designate any force which opposes itself to life’s freedom of becoming. Thus, Hokenson generalizes the mechanism as a “behavioral” or “perceptual” category (50). Simply put, the mechanism designates that which restricts, misrecognizes, or opposes becoming. To the extent that any force impedes the vital becoming of life,

Bergson believes that life develops countermeasures to attempt to expel that force. At the

196 level of the social, he argues, laughter evolved as a corrective to identify, expose, and purge the mechanical from the presence of life. “The rigid, the ready-made, the mechanical,” Bergson writes, “in contrast with the supple, the ever-changing and the living… in a word, automatism in contrast with free activity, such are the defects that laughter singles out and would fain correct” (130). In Happy End, for instance, the mechanical reversal of time blocks Bedrich’s becoming. If the audience laughs, it does so to symbolically triumph over the effects of cinema’s mechanism.

The cinematographic mechanism has a special place in Bergson’s writing which suggests that his theory of the comic might be especially suited to the cinema. In

Creative Evolution, Bergson laments that our method of thought in itself resembles the mechanism of cinema, in that we mentally arrange concepts and perceptions onto a chain of becoming-in-general (as best we can imagine it), just as film arranges instantaneous photograms representing all kinds of particular movements upon a continuous reel which restores their movements by moving-in-general. But as in the cinema, so in the mind: these approximations of life deal only in stillness, never in becoming. Just as the technological basis of the cinematograph “implies the absurd proposition that movement is made of immobilities” (325), Bergson argues that the ego cannot build a “duration which flows” out of separate states, no matter how it connects them (4). But even limited by the mechanical in its own powers of thought, life naturally resists rigidity, regulation, repetition – anything which would impose the properties of nonlife upon it and halt its becoming. Just as his philosophy of the mechanism of ordinary knowledge in Creative

Evolution depends on an analogy to the cinematograph, so here we might best apply his

197 mechanism-centered theory of comedy to the same historically-specific mechanism: the cinema.

Bergson summarizes his theory of the comic in an oft-quoted formula: that which we find funny always consists of “something mechanical encrusted on the living”

(Laughter 37). By this, he means to encompass a great many things – an external force which causes inflexibility or accidental, involuntary motions in a body; an absent- mindedness which leads to a similar ‘malfunction’, be it physical (such as a pratfall) or mental (a slip of the tongue); an “inner mechanism” of thought which goes out-of-sync with the world, leading to all manner of ludicrous behavior (is in Don Quixote’s foolish characterization of windmills as giants); the loss of self within routine and repetition (as under the machinery of a bureaucracy); a person who pretends to be a thing or a thing made to resemble a person (a , for instance); an appearance which trumps reality; a body which weighs down the will of the soul;90 and more. Throughout Happy End, we observe such comic events over and over. Reverse motion transforms mouths into ostensible food-making machines. Reverse motion, more generally, subjects bodies to involuntary motions (no motion can be volitional when effects precede causes). But most importantly, Bedrich, faced with this inexplicable retrograde movement of time, succumbs to the rule of a defective “inner mechanism” which cannot help but confabulate mad explanations to account for it all. Bergson explains that absurdity consists of “a very special inversion of common sense… in seeing before us what we are thinking of, instead

90 Here, especially, we see the connection to silent film comedy – Alan Dale proposes that all slapstick, in addition to being “mechanical,” constitutes a “response to the frustration of physical existence” (28). Bergson develops a similar sentiment when he describes the tragicomic scene of a body which has become “a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft” (Laughter 50).

198 of thinking of what we see” (184). This self-consistent “reason” of stupidity perfectly encapsulates Bedrich’s addled mental state – as when he praises his young daughter while she burns (un-burns, in reverse) a pile of his money, saying in voice-over, “She had a sense of our financial problems. All she needed was a small fire, and she could pull bills out of it.” In a way, our recognition of the defectiveness of Bedrich’s “inner mechanism” points to the inadequacy of the cinematographic mechanism of normal thought to everyday life.

So Bergson’s schematization of the comic covers at least most of what we intuitively find funny and lights the way toward additional insights on Happy End. But a misgiving remains. Ignoring for a moment the expansive definition he gave it, why did

Bergson choose the historically-bound term “mechanism” to develop a theory of comedy meant to apply to all of human history? And what, after all, is “mechanical” about absent-mindedness or the frustration of having a body? A century distant from Laughter, during a time when the merging of human and machine is already underway, the metaphor of the mechanism feels particularly nineteenth-century. And while this might end up dooming Bergson’s take on comedy in the long run, it need not disqualify it for our attention here. After all, cinema is historically-bound, too, a by-now-antiquated machine which arose from and ended up shaping the balance of a particular moment in modernity. Even if Bergson’s mechanism theory of comedy cannot serve comedy for all time, it still applies rather well to the specificities of film comedy. Besides, as a philosopher of becoming, Bergson could hardly have believed that his approach to laughter would apply indefinitely into the future or past. And it need not anyway. As a product of the machine age, it adeptly suits cinema, a machine par excellence.

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What, then, might Bergson’s theory say of reverse motion in cinema? For one thing, Bergson makes it clear that duration, the pure continuum of time upon which life’s becoming occurs, is irreversible. “Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things,” he explains, “and leaves on them the mark of its tooth. If everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the same concrete reality never recurs” (Creative

Evolution 48). Since time cannot reverse, that which would simulate its reversal encrusts a mechanical operation onto becoming. However, I hasten to clarify, all of cinema’s images already do just that, reducing its human actors to clockwork ghosts in a machine.

Why shouldn’t cinema’s very existence, then, leave us endlessly doubled over in fits of laughter? Well, most of the time, we willingly participate in cinema’s disavowal of its inherent illusionism; we ignore the phenomenological distance between the index and its referent, conflating the two. Indeed, as long as the framerates of registration and playback match, the apparatus successfully mimics the pace of life and thus hides the fact that cinema has encrusted its mechanism upon it. But when the film slows, accelerates, or reverses, we can no longer ignore the strings, as it were, which manipulate the mechanized bodies on the screen. The mechanical regime of time subjects human indices to a kind of , and when aberrations of that time turn the puppetry perverse, we must laugh at the bodies caught in the thrall of the machine. In short, reverse motion lays bare cinema’s mechanism, giving us a lifelike image of people as they gesticulate in physics-defying spasms unlike any we have experienced in everyday life.

Simultaneously, we are struck by “the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement” (Laughter 69), an incongruity which Bergson formulates as central to comedy. Thus, the guiding question of this chapter—“Why does reverse

200 motion lend itself to the comic mode?”—receives from Bergson a thundering reply: temporal plasticities like fast, slow, and reverse motion are the apex of the comic in cinema, for no other comedy on film could ever be so completely encrusted by the mechanical.

Even more importantly, however, Bergson’s theory of mechanism is a temporal theory, a theory of becoming. While many theories of comedy invoke or involve time by, for instance, focusing on cognitive processes (which take place in time), tracing historical developments in humor, or even proposing rules of (the “sudden” in sudden glory), no other major theory of comedy considers its object in terms of temporality the way that Bergson’s does. This is crucial, because by situating encrustation within a theory of general becoming, Bergson’s work furnishes a basis on which to consider temporal plasticity within a general theory of the cinema. If cinema provides for the capture and storage of the traces of sections of time against inevitable decay, then techniques of temporal plasticity (especially reverse motion) allow us to symbolically fight back against and ludically triumph over those ravages of entropy. Understood both in Bergsonian and thermodynamic terms, even the normal flow of time is infected with a

“mechanism” of decay which robs life of its suppleness and hampers or undoes becoming. Cinematic time cannot help but participate in this sickness, recording the heat-death of the universe as it happens. But techniques of temporal plasticity allow us to reconfigure and to challenge “normative” time with images of temporal deformation, fragmentation, and inversion.

Thus, temporal plasticity does not merely supply a further material for comic grotesquing; rather, it furnishes a perch from which to laugh at everyday lived time.

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Indeed, in its best moments, Happy End seizes the viewer with the realization that forward time is a series of catastrophes, mistakes, and inevitable degeneration. Though

Bedrich may misrecognize everything that befalls him, his misrecognitions prompt the spectator’s contemplation of the actual nature of time and becoming. Just as verbal humor reveals peculiarities of language and slapstick amplifies the physics of the body, the comedy of temporal plasticity slyly uncovers the nature of time. Likewise, just as incongruity intrinsically investigates normativity and superiority reveals and sometimes inverts standards of value, mechanical encrustation unveils something of the nature of becoming through comedy. If comedy, therefore, has a role to play in cinema’s development of new ways of thinking about time, it must lie in its power to reflect time back on itself. Temporal plasticity reveals time in the way that a funhouse mirror reveals space: not through fidelity, but through deformation. And just as a person inspects themselves differently in a curved mirror than in a flat mirror, so also the comic investigation of time will differ from more straightforward investigations, but so will the content of its revelations.

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CHAPTER 4: REVERSE MOTION AND HISTORY

In the conclusion of the previous chapter, I argued that techniques of temporal plasticity like reverse motion make time and becoming available for comic examination.

In this chapter, I will consider how reverse motion might engage with history, not to symbolically triumph over it, but to render its processes legible and comprehensible. In short, this chapter will position reverse motion as a mode of historiography. At its best, in hands of Soviet revolutionary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, reverse motion serves as a powerful tool for investigating, comprehending, and even writing history. Vertov used reverse motion to disambiguate the flow of time and to participate in shaping the time to come. Other filmmakers have focused this potential inward, as a technique to present or to investigate time within a fictional narrative context. And still others have sought shelter within a wish which reverse motion facilitates – to undo time by running it backwards, to retreat into an image of the past. I will account for these three broad categories of engagement in reverse order.

To interrelate the concepts of narrativity, historiography, and temporality I take as a point of departure an essay by Paul Ricoeur, wherein he identifies temporality as “that structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity” and narrativity, correspondingly, as “the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent”

(35). Ricoeur places narrativity, “historicality” (his term), and temporality-in-general on a continuum of modes through which we understand and construct time. Working with

Heidegger, Ricoeur explains that our sense of now-ness arises as a result of our pre- occupation or concern for the material events of reality which surround us. Thus, narrative time, historical time, and duration-in-general arise from the same root of deictic

203 attentiveness. However, these senses of time diverge strongly where teleology enters as a concern. Whereas time in general unfolds unpredictably and according to the chance vicissitudes of an uncountable number of contingent events, narrative necessarily entails a teleological foundation. Because “everything is already spread out in time” before the reader or the viewer encounters a story, “narrative activity… participates in the dissimulation both of historicality and, even more so, of the deeper levels of temporality”

(40). Put another way, narrative tames time by setting it down in text, in celluloid, or any other spatial media. The spatialization of narrative necessarily attenuates the contingency which properly belongs to time in its pure state. Historiography, caught between narrativity and pure temporality, is particularly susceptible to narrative’s teleological formations, and as such exists in a state requiring constant rescue from misrecognition.

In this chapter, I will discuss reverse motion’s ability to reveal the shape and nature of time through its use as a historiographical and narratological tool. That said, to tell the tale of reverse motion’s engagement with history is to tell a tale of degrees of misrecognition of history. In this chapter I will begin with narratives which use reverse motion to unwrite or otherwise disavow history, proceed to a discussion of reverse motion as a mode of recollective narrativity with important historiographical implications, and end in an analysis of Dziga Vertov’s use of reverse motion to revolutionarily write history and produce images of Soviet reality.

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Wish and Disavowal

Great international catastrophes tear gaping fissures through history—open wounds in the fabric of time and human consciousness which mark paradigmatic limits.

Traumas on a world scale have a way of mangling and reshaping thought, such that the epistemes which characterized the innocence of the “pre” shrivel and starve in the battered “post.” Such ruptures leave many of those in the aftermath wondering how they managed to miss the calamity’s advance and wishing that they might be able to cross back through time again, to a place before such pain and grief, toward a “simpler” time.

Of course, these scars are unbridgeable. We cannot re-enter the past. Indeed, even privileging the scars in history’s narrative expunges the real social and economic movements of history which led to them. Viewing history as a series of unforeseeable eruptions misrecognizes or outright ignores the material forces which really produced them. But to those yearning for symbolic return in the Twentieth and early Twenty-First

Centuries, reverse motion appears as a magical mode of time travel – a method by which a filmmaker may symbolically link the present to the lost past and allow viewers to virtually recede into it.

One can neither comprehend nor repair time by disavowing it. Nevertheless, the wish to unmake time, expressible through reverse motion, has in the age of cinema given false comfort to filmmakers and novelists alike. In this section, I will address uses of reverse motion which imagine an undoing of history, a rewinding of time. I call such uses “wish-images,” and I contend that their historiographical method is an ahistorical fantasy of nullification. Wish-images misconceive time cinematically—as a series of

205 linear points, rather than a field of historical forces and contingency—and thus naively imagine that simply resetting time to a point before the trauma would heal the past.

Wish-images constitute reverse motion’s least productive engagement with history, since they project palimpsestic desire onto the past, seeking not even to understand it, but only to destroy it. Even so, the expression of such a desire to its reductio ad absurdum limit can potentially productively reveal the impossibility of undoing the past, as is the case in the film Come and See (1985).

A typical wish-image appears early in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (dir.

David Fincher, 2008), which tangentially tells the story of a clock maker, M. Gatteau, who builds a clock which runs counterclockwise. “I made it that way,” he solemnly intones on the day of its unveiling, “So that perhaps the boys that were lost in the war might stand and come home again.” As he delivers this speech to the crowd, wish- images depict both warfare and soldiers shipping out in slow reverse motion. These images approximate footage from a film which Billy Pilgrim might have watched in Kurt

Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Upon becoming “slightly unstuck in time,” Billy witness the late movie play in reverse:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in . Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. … When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

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The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed. (73-75)

More recently, Jonathan Safran Foer staged two time-reversal scenes in his novel

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), both influenced by cinematic technology

(or its antecedents), but without referencing it directly. Foer’s novel draws heavily on

Vonnegut’s, beginning with a sly reference to a teakettle (Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a teapot), and culminating in a return to the site of the Dresden firebombing

(Slaughterhouse-Five’s center of trauma) to provide the setting of a reverse-motion dream:

In my dream, all of the collapsed ceilings re-formed above us. The fire went back into the bombs, which rose up and into the bellies of plane whose propellers turned backward, like the second hands of the clocks across Dresden, only faster. (306)

Snatches of reverse-motion description like this appear interspersed throughout a passage of stream-of-consciousness epistolary narration in which the grandmother of young precocious protagonist Oskar Schell seeks to tell him her story. The dream jumps ever- further back through a version of time imagined archetypically:

In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling. … Lovers pulled up each other’s underwear, buttoned each other’s shirts, and dressed and dressed and dressed. … My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp. Two by two. … At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed. God brought together the land and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the water, evening and morning, something and nothing. He said, Let there be light.

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And there was darkness. (306-313)

This passage mainly serves to contextualize Oskar’s journey of mourning, which he takes in response to his father’s death in the 9/11 attacks. At the novel’s close, Oskar arranges a series of photographs of a man jumping from the tower, photos which he believes to depict his father, into a in reverse order.

When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky. And if I’d had more pictures, he would’ve flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would’ve poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of. Dad would’ve left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and the plane would’ve flown backward away from him, all the way to Boston. …

And so the novel flows to its end, in fourteen more single-sentence paragraphs reuniting son and father, culminating in, “We would have been safe,” and followed by fifteen images from Oskar’s flip book, one per page of the novel, taking the falling man from the bottom of the page to the top (325 and following).

Egyptian director Youssef Chahine pulls a similar stunt in his section of the omnibus film 11’9”01 – September 11, but with far more sobering implications. In conversation with the ghost of a dead G.I., director Chahine (portrayed by actor Nour El-

Sherif) decries decades of American oppression around the world and the millions it has injured and killed. In an impassioned speech to the soldier, he says, “You have to understand that it’s impossible to go back in time.” “I’m sorry, but we can’t do anything,” the ghost replies. “I can,” says Chahine, hitting a button on his computer’s editing program. It plays reverse motion footage of both World Trade Center towers unfalling, unburning, the planes unexploding, unhitting, and vanishing from sight. “Sure,

208 going back in time with just a click,” the soldier responds, “but who could resuscitate the dead?” Chahine is silent.91

In the preceding examples, the wish to reverse history foments out of pain which the past has caused the characters. Their grief effects denial and their denial expresses itself in the desire to nullify the past. Though only Chahine’s film explicitly acknowledges that such a fantasy could never be fulfilled, the other examples subtly concede the hopelessness of the wish by positioning it as a desperate cry of grief. Even if the broader texts nudge the reader to recognize the wish as futile, by doing nothing to supply a proper understanding of history, they leave their reader to romanticize the impossibility of the wish rather than to reject it entirely. And so the reader reproduces the desire behind the wish-image in the absence of anything to take its place.

By contrast, Russian director Elem Klimov exhausts the wish-image by taking it to a kind of limit in Come and See (1985), his final film. Come and See unsparingly dramatizes German atrocities in Byelorussia (Belarus) near the end of the Second World

War through the eyes of a traumatized and terrified boy, Florya, who joins the Russian partisan forces when the war sweeps through his village. For two hours we watch as

Florya endures bullets flying inches above his head, the deafness caused by bombs exploding all around him, and the nightmare of capture by German soldiers who hold him at gunpoint as a game and burn several hundred people alive. In the final moments of the film, having just witnessed the further bloodshed of the summary execution of several

91 A similar but far less compelling moment appears in Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady (2011), in which Margaret Thatcher (played by Meryl Streep), trapped in the madness of old age, watches on her television an old home movie that had been transferred to DVD. At a painful moment, she rewinds it in frustration. “You can rewind it, but you can’t change it,” says her hallucination of her dead husband (played by Jim Broadbent). He makes no mention of the irony that she’s rewinding a DVD.

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Germans, Florya notices a framed portrait of Hitler half-submerged in a mud puddle. As a mixture of and catatonic grief fills in the lines on his prematurely-aged face, he raises his rifle and begins to fire into the portrait. With the camera framing him in close- up and positioned along his sightline (so that he appears to fire directly into the audience), each blast sets off a blazing montage of wish-images which fill the screen in the form of actuality footage of war and the Third Reich, nearly all playing in fast-motion reverse. Buildings un-collapse, planes zip backwards through the sky collecting bombs and paratroopers, smoke and flame billow in reverse, Nazi parades and marchers stream by backwards, a man unpaints a Star of David from a shop window, and so forth. On the soundtrack, a collage of Wagner, echoing Hitler speeches, popular tunes, and the noises of crowds and war collide against each other at least as frenetically as the rapidfire archival clips. Together, the sound and image fuse into a dissonant but highly kinetic mass racing back through time as quickly as the will of Florya’s rifle and imagination can propel them. Images of the unmake themselves, followed by grainier footage of a campaign from the First World War, and suddenly Hitler appears in still photos as a young soldier, then as a boy, and finally as an infant seated on his mother’s lap. Faced with the image of Hitler as a baby, Florya stops shooting. The cacophony suddenly goes silent, except for lingering echoes of Hitler’s speeches slowly receding into the background. For a long time, Florya stares into the camera with a devastated gaze as tears run down his face and the Lachrymosa from Mozart’s Requiem begins to play nondiegetically. Finally, he dashes off to rejoin his unit, and they disappear into the forest.

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Many viewers find the scene overwhelmingly powerful, which is a testament to

Klimov’s skill as a composer of sound and image. But we must not dismiss the audience’s intense affective responses as the byproduct of mere formal excess or flash- bang virtuosity without content. Rather, only by generating a surfeit of spectator could Klimov take the wish-image to a point of self-revelation – that is, to the knowledge of its own emptiness. So for the two hours of running time preceding this moment,

Klimov wound ever-tighter a reserve of potential energy of rage and grief, not just in

Florya, but more importantly within the audience. He releases it all violently and rapidly within this scene. The horror of Florya firing into the camera coupled with the shock of time suddenly shifting into reverse commingles with the just-as-potent thrill of indulging the revenge-fantasy of negating Hitler and his evils. The images speak in a kind of archival lingua franca which approaches the station of archetype. As if reacting automatically, the viewer yields to a rush of cathexis, swept up in Florya’s wish and strongly desiring it both on his behalf and the behalf of history entire. In the tradition of the greatest Russian cinema, the confrontational editing seems to hurtle the viewer toward a new state of consciousness – but the montage is an operatic red herring, a veil which the film rips away in the final moment, bringing it all to a heartbreaking halt.

Florya cannot shoot the infant Hitler; indeed, he cannot even imagine shooting the infant

Hitler. In that moment of humanity, the lie of the wish crashes down upon us. Shooting a picture of Hitler does not kill him, just as rewinding a picture of history does not turn back time.

But the desolation we and Florya feel upon the snuffing-out of our wish goes beyond the mere realization of the wish’s ineffectiveness; after all, we knew from the

211 start that reverse motion could not really undo history. The profound and immediate powerlessness we feel upon confronting that picture of baby Hitler results from the fact that it so violently forecloses our desire. It prevents our desire from further reproducing and indulging in itself. Slavoj Žižek writes that “the price of is that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desire” (59), which is to say that as long as we do not allow desire free enough rein so as to fulfill itself, the energy of desire sustains our happiness – or, in this case, our thrill, our revenge fantasy, even our tearful need to rescue the present from the consequences of the past. Here, Florya’s zealous gunfire propels the wish to an inevitable moment which the disavowal of the wish did not consider. At the bottom of all the wish fantasies mentioned above there churns an impulse to return to a prelapsarian Eden. Vonnegut represents this as Eden; Foer locates the site of original sin somewhat earlier, insisting on turning time back to a point before the universe began – indeed, before time. By defining their Edens in so remote and mythic a past, these fantasies allow desire to extend itself almost indefinitely. They do not confront readers or viewers with the reductiones ad absurdum of their desire, and thus the wish can continue even if though these works acknowledge the fecklessness of it. But Klimov, in this moment as throughout the film, spares neither Florya nor the audience. He defines

“Eden” in bald terms: to reach it, an innocent must die. But as such an action would spoil the innocence of Eden, Florya can no longer pull the trigger. Thus, Eden cannot be reached, not simply because reverse motion cannot actually take him there, but because there is no “there” to go to.

In the era of cinematic time, perhaps time itself signifies sin, original and otherwise, since time, by mere force of its passing, precipitates entropy and the fall into

212 universal thermodynamic disorder. The wish-fantasy enacted by the aforementioned instances of reverse motion is always a religious one – a desire for a supernatural hand to redeem loss, restore order, and supernaturally reset the clock of existence. Thus, such fantasies misrecognize history by presuming that a teleological or eschatological arrow guides it. Only the nihilist Come and See avoids this trap, trouncing the lie of the wish- image in three ways. First, it positions the telos of Florya’s desire within history (Hitler’s childhood), stopping the wish before it can stretch back indefinitely. Secondly, Come and See proposes that paradise cannot exist except through murder, which is to say, it cannot exist at all. The wish, therefore, does not merely seek a point in time which cannot be returned to; it seeks a space which cannot exist at all. And finally, most subtly,

Come and See presents Florya’s reverse-motion wish montage as an (at times) nonlinear collage of time. Rather than misrecognize history as a sequence of points, the film depicts it as overlapping zones of image and sound. In this context, the archival footage which Klimov deploys does not function like the naïve archetypal images in The Curious

Case of Benjamin Button, but rather as representative of hundreds of thousands of real moments spread across the matrix of the past. Therefore, even as he crafts the wish- image-to-end-all-wish-images, Klimov hints at more productive methods of historiography through reverse motion.

Reverse Motion as a Narrative Device

In the above cases, the author encloses the wish fantasy within the subjectivity of a character. Perhaps seeking to render the wish with a higher octane of disavowal,

213 several recent films have bent the genre of science fiction toward enacting the wish literally within the diegesis, using reverse motion to denote the re-writing of time. In

Donnie Darko (2001), for instance, the title character narrowly avoids being crushed to death by a falling jet engine and lives 28 days in an alternate timeline, committing crimes and learning about wormholes, Einstein-Rosen bridges, and the possibility of time travel.

At the expiration of those 28 days, the same jet engine that should have killed him rips off the wing of a plane carrying members of Donnie’s family, enters a wormhole, and flies 28 days back in time to land in Donnie’s bedroom, this time flattening him in his sleep. As the engine flies through the wormhole, the movie enters a moment of (for the most part) accelerated rewind of key scenes from earlier in the movie. This sequence begins with the nonsimultaneous sound replay of Donnie’s discussion of time travel his science teacher before the voice of Donnie’s girlfriend Gretchen fades up, wishing,

“What if you could go back in time and take all those hours of pain and darkness and replace them with something better?” Significantly, the reversal of time does not take place within a single character’s subjectivity; rather, the diegesis literally re-organizes itself to actualize Gretchen’s wish. However, in contrast to other wish-activation films and literature, the ultimate effects of the wish and the moral motivation behind it remain ambiguous, either trapped behind an ersatz Lynchian ambiguity or the lacunas of a novice director not really knowing what he wanted to say.

In The Butterfly Effect (2004), Evan (Ashton Kutcher) possesses the outlandish ability to re-enter the past at specific moments and alter events. Though directors Bress and Gruber never use reverse motion to depict this entry into the past, they use it during one fast-paced digitally-enhanced montage to express the re-alignment of Evan’s memory

214 after he has changed the past. Here, reverse motion connotes the un-writing of memory following the re-writing of time. The strain on Evan’s brain produces violent hemorrhaging, while the viewer of the film suffers only temporary annoyance. Perhaps the most maudlin offender in this subgenre of films is ’s Mr. Nobody

(2009), a bloated and byzantine exploration of freewill and possibility. In the distant future, a very old man named Nemo Nobody remembers his life as a series of intertwined incompatible timelines across which he repeatedly jumps. In several scenes, we witness him presenting an either badly-researched or intentionally pseudoscientific analysis of string theory on a television program wherein a reverse-motion shot of a wrecking ball hitting a television plays behind him to illustrate Stephen Hawking’s old idea that the universe might one day reverse its expansion, and with it the direction of time.92 This presages the scene in which Nemo, trapped in a coma, somehow by sheer will acquires the ability to revise his own past – perhaps literally, perhaps through a memory disavowal. The film does not clarify. Either way, van Dormael presents this absurd revision of time in reverse motion. Other reverse motion follows, but none of it merits analysis.

Happily, reverse motion has also participated to a limited extent in some of cinema’s less overtly kitschy experimentation with avant-garde narrative practice. In this section, I will discuss reverse-motion narrativity as cipher for historiography. That is, I will explore a number of films which have used reverse motion to disclose narrative information or explore narrative time, evaluating how these methods of narrativity analyze fictional time as a stand-in for real historical time. Though a number of films

92 Incidentally, Hawking abandoned this idea decades ago.

215 have already used reverse motion as cinematic narration, the potential for further exploration in film remains high. A look at the state of narrative time in the novel confirms this. Brian Richardson identifies six strains of violations of traditional narrativity in postmodern literature: the circular narrative (in which the end deposits readers back at the beginning of the story), the contradictory narrative (in which multiple incompatible timelines co-exist and mutually problematize or invalidate each other), the antinomic narrative (in which the events of the plot are arranged in reverse order93), the differential narrative (in which time flows at different rates for different characters), the conflated narrative (in which different zones of time “slide or spill into one another” without clear demarcation or where scenes begin and end), and the dual or multiple narrative (in which time passes at different rates in different locations) (48-52). While one could imagine reverse motion arising within a cinematic transposition of any of these non-traditional narratives, so far we have only observed it as a significant storytelling presence in the antinomic narrative (cf. Happy End in the previous chapter), the circular narrative (for instance, in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), where a shot of a shack un-exploding emblematizes the anti-linearity of the loop), and, as I will discuss presently, the differential narrative.

In academic literature on cinema, the differential narrative has received several names – the forking-path film, the multiple draft film, the database narrative, or, more generally, the puzzle film. In its mildest form, such a film tells the same story from two or more different restricted narrative perspectives. For instance, Laetitia Colombani’s

93 As in literature, so also in film, the antinomic narrative takes two forms: one in which the order of the scenes is reversed (a notion I discuss through Seymour Chatman early in my introduction) and another in which time smoothly flows in reverse (as in Happy End in film and four other examples which Richardson provides in literature).

216 feature debut À la folie… pas du tout (released in English as He Loves Me… He Loves Me

Not) (2002) tells the story of Angélique, a young student (played by Audrey Tautou, fresh from her starmaking turn in Amélie and cast deliberately against type) who falls in love with a doctor. The first half of the film presents the story as a tale of doomed unrequited love from Angélique’s perspective, culminating in her attempted suicide when the doctor spurns her. The second half of the film retells the same set of events from the doctor’s perspective, revealing Angélique as a mentally- stalker. At that medial handoff of perceptual center, the film uses fast reverse motion to rewind the story back to its origin. A similar moment of reverse-motion-as-re-examination occurs in Bart Layton’s hybrid documentary The Imposter (2012), where it signals the film’s intent to review the facts of the case again from the beginning, and this time look more deeply. Though both films explore the fact that history has multiple sides and sometimes wears multiple masks

(depending on one’s perspective on it), reverse motion does not analyze these conflicting narratives as much as it signposts their impending collision.

To the extent that reverse motion connotes an erasure of time, it can depict time as revise-able, which is to say, as a field of contingency. Thus, whereas À la folie… pas du tout merely re-assesses a single diegetic reality through a re-focalization of the narrative

(a tradition in cinema at least as old as (1950)), other films have used reverse motion to announce a stronger form of the database narrative: one in which multiple contradictory plotlines coexist side by side or consecutively. Here, the work of Alain

Resnais provides the paradigmatic examples in art cinema, and Run Lola Run (Tom

Tykwer, 1998) exemplifies the trend in pop cinema. ’s arrived in the same year as the latter and claimed a calm serio-comic middle ground

217 between the two. In it, Helen, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, is shown living two different versions of her life. The timeline splits at an ostensibly unimportant moment; as she descends the steps toward a subway platform, a little girl walking up the same stairs either gets in Helen’s way or doesn’t. Based on this contingent event, Helen either misses the subway or catches it, and the two consequent lifelines unfold for the rest of the film in cross-cut. To be sure, Sliding Doors draws mostly from Kieslowski's morally- tinged examinations of possibility, in particular Blind Chance (1987), to examine how profoundly the effects of one chance occurrence (in both cases catching a train or missing a train) can alter the course of one’s future. But where Kieslowski played his three timelines consecutively, Howitt intercuts his two. And whereas Kieslowski used sudden bursts of slow-motion decelerating to freeze frames coupled with a motto theme in the score to signal the entry into a different timeline, Howitt uses reverse motion.

The reverse motion centers on an intentionally mundane instant, and thus it does not attract the eye as spectacle or as comedy. In fact, because it appears abruptly, and without apparent justification, it functions to surprise or destabilize the viewer. It declares, “pay attention!” as it sets up and triggers the bifurcation of the narrative, the film’s central conceit and raison d’etre. Just as the doors of the train close and Helen turns to look down the track in frustration, in a flash the previous two shots play in jumpcut reverse, sending her back up the staircase where she will descend again, this time in the second timeline. In addition to its role as signal of the split, the reverse motion also activates the film’s matrix of philosophical inquiry, raising questions like,

“what if one thing had turned out a little differently?” or “how much control do we have over the outcomes of our lives?” Reverse motion can raise these questions about time—

218 and by extension about the historical contexts in which we all live—because it overtly manipulates time in a way that forward motion does not. And though Helen’s character never becomes aware of the metanarrative game the film plays with two different versions of her life, reverse motion nevertheless expresses to the audience a kind of fantasy of the revision of time: to go back, to try again.

The parameters of this fantasy should give us pause, however. Usually when films dream of revising time, they locate the revision narratively rather than metanarratively, as in the case of Galaxy Quest (Dean Parisot, 1999). At the climax of this film, television-actor-cum-spaceship-captain Nesmith activates a mysterious device called the Omega 13, which causes time to run in reverse for thirteen seconds – just enough time for him to prevent a catastrophe. Here the reverse motion signifies temporal reversal and occurs diegetically as the direct result of a character’s action.

Nesmith revises a single timeline, and the film continues. By contrast, the reverse motion in Sliding Doors forks the narrative in two and arises from the extradiegetic will of the filmmaker. Helen possesses neither agency nor awareness of this operation. In this sense, Sliding Doors conceptualizes human life as a series of actions taken by automata who cannot compare notes between the space of the actual and the space(s) of the possible, and thus cannot really conceive of how wildly different their lives might have been. Cinema makes such thought possible by juxtaposing what Deleuze named the incompossible – two sets of events which are both individually possible but cannot co- occur. Cinema puts the notion of a stable truth into crisis when it introduces incompossibility into the fabric of narrative. Deleuze calls this the “power of the false which replaces and supersedes the form of the true” (Cinema 2, 131). Falsifying

219 narration approaches the truth of history in the sense that it replaces the false assumption that history is a record of events which occurred with the meta-truth that history is a matrix of power, probabilities, and potentials, the set of all forces at play and all events which might occur. Time does not rewind in Sliding Doors so that Helen may re-play it and experience a different ending, but so that the filmmaker and the audience might re- play it and come to comprehend, as it were, the “rules” of time and contingency. By transforming Helen from an avatar with which the audience identifies into a multiplicity of pawns which the audience pretends to manipulate, narrativity, historiography, and temporality themselves emerge as the “characters” of the film, in the sense that the film reveals their entwined character. Meanwhile, the importance of the particular events of

Helen’s lives recede into the background and, ultimately, devolve into dei ex machina and too-tidy self-parody. How appropriate, then, that Sliding Doors’ recurring line,

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” quotes a sketch from ’s Flying

Circus in which a character, unsatisfied with his performance, chronically insists on restarting (or re-playing) the scene until it goes to his liking. In both cases, the narrative illusion disappears, replaced by the far-truer power of the false. Were it not for its focus on a single character, Sliding Doors might have furnished its audience with the necessary tools to properly conceptualize the multivariate contingency of history.

Whereas Sliding Doors conceives of history as a field of contingency and uses a destabilizing burst of reverse motion to emblematize its play of narrative revision, Lee

Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (1999) applies reverse motion toward a serious project of semi-historical archaeology. Though Peppermint Candy tells only one story, it presents its key incidents in reverse chronological order, using reverse-motion connecting

220 shots filmed from the rear of a moving train to signify the retrograde movement of the narrative. While these interstitials are brief compared to the rest of the film, they quietly encapsulate Lee’s broader historiographical method. Each successive scene begins earlier in the fabula than the scene which preceded it and reveals details of the life of the suicidal main character Yong-ho which had not been apparent. This narrational method implicitly advances the historical claim that the present is something like a symptom of the past; that the forces which continually produce the present cannot be perceived in the present, but hide themselves elsewhere. Counterintuitively, the accumulation of entropy entailed in the passage of time effaces the particulars of the past. Thus, while effects may seem to carry their causes inside them, the unpredictability of reverse motion shows the opposite: that the past buries itself and cannot be absolutely deduced from the facts of the present. Had the interstitials been presented in forward motion, they would have presented a rather conventional image of a receding distance, the that-which-has-been- passed disappearing, according to the familiar spatial metaphor of narrative in which railroad tracks represent a kind of timeline (track in front of the train as future, track just covered by the train as past, or simply the homophone “passed” = “past”). Instead, Lee plays this footage in reverse motion, staging a return to the passed/past as a forward movement. Though Yong-ho wishes to retreat into a lost past, Lee means to analyze the effects of two decades of Korean history through his fictionalized trauma. The process of excavating the truth of Yong-ho’s story requires excursions into successively deeper and more remote pasts, but rather than negating this history through a wish, Lee’s analysis uncovers it.

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The reverse-motion interstitials in Peppermint Candy appear extra-diegetically, perhaps indicating that the successive flashbacks do not belong to Yong-ho’s memory. A number of other films instead use reverse motion to approach and analyze the narrative past through the perspective of a character. This takes a variety of forms. Roger Avary’s

The Rules of Attraction (2002), introduces a character’s experience of time directly into its pattern of narrative unfolding when, without warning, it plays several scenes of a party in reverse motion. At their conclusion, the character remarks, “I just get the feeling my life lacks forward momentum. You know, like everything is moving so quickly that time just seems to stop.” Here, the reverse motion appears metanarratively, as if sympathetic to the character’s state of mind and free-indirectly adopting it. Of course, reverse motion may also analyze the events of the narrative as the product of a character’s mind when used as a variation on the flashback. In the first installment of The Hunger Games franchise (Gary Ross, 2012), Katniss hallucinates and falls into a dream after the tracker jackers sting her. Perhaps ironically, this hallucinatory dream provides a kind of escape from the hyperreal arena of the Games into a more real memory space. In her dream, she remembers the mine explosion that killed her father playing both forward and in reverse, as if to toggle her mode of memory from a flashback into a wish-image. The flashback also bears tinges of regret and wish at one moment in Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007). On the front lines of the Second World War, Robbie Turner remembers crucial moments of his very brief relationship and separation from Cecilia Tallis. The breaking of the vase at the and his forcible parting from her both play in reverse motion, with accompanying reverse sound. Here, the reverse-motion descent into memory also implies a rumination on the contingent nature of the events which separated them—

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Briony Tallis’s misrecognition of the nature of Robbie and Cecilia’s relationship and the damning charge of rape she made against him. Reverse motion can also effect a return of the repressed in flashback, as it does in Bong Joon-ho’s 2009 film Mother. Mentally disabled murderer Do-joon has forgotten many of the details surrounding the last minutes of life of Moon Ah-jung, the girl he killed. In a crucial moment of remembering, reverse motion reveals the presence of a third party at the scene of the crime.

Some films render irrelevant the metaphoric relationship between flashback- memory and film as a materialization of memory by simply reifying the memory replay into an audiovisual recording device. Consider, for instance, the rewinding of videotapes in ’s Caché (2005) or Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo (1989). Here, the literalized rewind does not function as a technique of narrativity, but as a technique of review or investigation within the narrative. In the faux-documentary Man Bites Dog

(C’est arrivé près de chez vous; Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde,

1992), the frame-by-frame forward-and-back reversibility of footage on a Steenbeck editing table allows the killers to review, temporally isolate, and fetishize the precise moments of their crimes. Viewed as the killers view them, the films of murder take on the character of affection-image, a surface for cathexis. However, a similar scene in

Gimme Shelter (1970), the infamous Rolling Stones concert documentary, makes a far more stunning metacinematic claim concerning the nature of perception and truth. As footage from the ill-fated 1969 Altamont concert plays, we suddenly hear Mick Jagger say to co-director Maysles, “Can you roll back on that, David?” in a sound bridge. And with that the film leaps out of the present-tense of the speedway and into post- production space some time later, where Jagger views himself on the screen of a flatbed

223 editing suite. All the images to this point suddenly shift into the past-tense as Maysles rewinds and stops the film, zeroing in on the biker’s knife frozen in its fatal path through the air, then back through time again to reveal the silhouette of a gun. By locating the murder within the explicit filmic past-tense of re-viewing footage, Maysles and Zwerin imply a phenomenological state which often accompanies flashes of trauma or violence – that it was all over before anyone quite knew what was happening. “Did you see what was happening there?” they ask themselves in the editing room. “No, you couldn’t see anything,” comes the reply. The camera, however, did see it, but its memory was not accessible for perception or action at the time of recording, but only for delayed reflection and mental-images much later. Indeed, first time viewers of the film, looking directly at the murder, often do not see it. In this sense, the editing-room scene of Gimme

Shelter does not present the reversibility of cinematic time as a mere technique for investigating history, but for providing it – filling in the gaps of human perception produced by momentary confusion or inattention.

Moreover, reverse motion has the power to reveal the misrecognitions and the absences produced by forward time. On this basis, reverse motion can function not simply as a formal element signaling nontraditional narrativity, but as a fully-developed form of narrativity in its own right. But before I elaborate what I mean here, some further definitions are necessary. Literary theorist Gérard Genette developed the term

“analepsis” to describe “any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment” (40). In less labyrinthine language, analepsis designates for literature what we call a “flashback” in film. Implicit in any definition of flashback or analepsis is the requisite leap – that the flashback must

224 return to a distant section of time by, in effect, “leaping over” the intervening section of time. But what if a moment of analepsis could return to an earlier point in time by a smooth retracing of duration, without a leap? Deployed as a form of narration, reverse motion can accomplish exactly this; its frame-by-frame rewind through ever-earlier-and- earlier moments of time amounts to a case of continuous analepsis. Thus, here I propose to retronymically designate traditional analepsis as disjunctive analepsis – analepsis of the leap – and to call reverse motion, when functioning to tell the story, as conjunctive analepsis.

In a traditional flashback (disjunctive analepsis), narration leaps from the present- tense to the past and then, in forward time, approaches that present, filling in details. As

Maureen Turim observed in her influential study of the flashback, placing the cause after the effect implies “a logic of inevitability” (17) as the events within the flashback vector toward an already-known result. But in the rare instance in which it has appeared, conjunctive analepsis can unveil the past with a kind of bizarre unpredictability. Standup comedian Demetri Martin staged an extended moment of reverse-motion conjunctive analepsis in his sketch-comedy show Important Things with Demetri Martin (Season 1

Episode 4 “Chairs” (dir. Beth McCarthy-Miller, 2009)), playing up this inherent unpredictability for comic effect. In a sketch entitled “Who Sticks Gum Under a Chair?”, a character accidentally discovers a chewed wad of gum beneath their seat in a restaurant.

Wondering how it got there triggers a series of reverse-motion shots beginning at the present and following the gum back to its point of origin – a madcap journey which includes the gum passing through all the mouths of the hooded participants at a strange religious ritual as well as a motorist spitting it into the mouth of homeless person, all

225 played in reverse. Martin’s willingness to explore causality in retrograde relates to his broader interest in reversibility and re-arrangement in wordplay, particularly through anagrams and palindromes.94 But setting aside the zaniness of the gum sketch for a moment, we discover the rhetorical power of conjunctive analepsis: not only does playing time in reverse reveal what forward time had concealed (the motion of the gum), but it reveals the past with maximal surprise. In a traditional flashback or recollection-image, as the circuit of memory moves from the sheet of past toward the peak of present, its horizon of possibility narrows toward the already-known. But when analepsis moves in the opposite direction, possible pasts spread out before it, growing more unpredictable the farther back in time we travel. And whereas forward-time analepses move teleologically, toward the already-known, tending to confirm a temporality of concealment and misrecognition, the reverse motion of conjunctive analepsis has the potential to excavate past events in such a way as to reveal the forces of time which made them, rather than the forces of ideology which overdetermined them.

Stated simply, reverse motion bears the potential to free history from its teleological shackles. Through conjunctive analepsis, reverse motion can exercise the power to decenter the study of history from the present and turn the vector of historiography toward any-point-whatever or no defined point at all. Reverse motion deterritorializes the writing of history from deterministic service to the contemporary moment, transforming the inevitable arrival at now into an unpredictable journey toward points unknown.

94 Cf. Martin’s autobiographical standup special “If I” (2004), which includes a number of jokes based on palindromic reversal (starting with its title).

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Reverse Motion and the Recognition of History in Dziga Vertov

Up to this point, one could be pardoned for presuming that reverse motion and realism have nothing to do with one another. After all, reverse motion turns time upside down, inverts causes and effects, and otherwise visualizes the impossible. But insofar as reverse motion can liberate historiography from false assumptions about the nature of history and time, reverse motion has the counterintuitive potential to reveal the real in unforeseeable ways. In the 1920’s, Soviet filmmakers guided by the impetus of revolution pursued an array of new aesthetic principles. They wanted to teach

Marxist/Leninist principles and spread revolutionary fervor through their films. They strove to open the present onto the unknown, to shed the institutions which maintained the state of the past, and forge new avenues of social becoming. They knew that to revolutionarily build the future one must see the past afresh, lay bare the real historical forces which produced it, and unmake them. Revolutionary filmmaking therefore calls for a new kind of realism, a productive realism which clears away the kinds of misrecognitions of social and ideological power which colluded in the reproducing the status quo of the past. Few filmmakers understood this necessity as well as Dziga

Vertov. Though his ideas about documentary were peripheral in Soviet film production at the time, he now stands as a central figure in the aesthetic and ideological histories of the cinema. I remain most impressed by his improbable coupling of realism and reverse motion, a one-time intermingling which no other filmmaker has duplicated.

To make sense of this unlikely pairing, I will begin this section by exploring reverse motion’s potential to reveal Marxist ideology about history and commodity.

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Then, I will interrogate the politics of the Vertov’s Kinok (Kino-Eye) movement in terms of their conception of realism, especially as it relates to the project of documenting and writing Soviet history in terms of revolutionary goals. I will propose that Kino-Eye realism was not guaranteed by any set of formal devices (such as reverse motion), but rather by adherence to Soviet ideology. For Vertov, realism did not consist in merely reflecting real-world events, but in dynamically transforming them according to the needs of the revolution. Finally, I argue that Vertov’s use of reverse motion in his 1924 film

Kino-Eye participates in an ongoing revolutionary strategy to reclaim discourses of time and history from counter-revolutionary forces.

Soviet silent cinema’s writers and practitioners quickly realized the potent role which cinema could play in the ongoing revolutionary struggle as both a shaper of consciousness and a historiographical tool. However, not all Soviet filmmakers approached the writing of history in the same way. Consider two uses of reverse motion, one from Sergei Eisenstein and one from Dziga Vertov. Eisenstein crafted what has likely become the most frequently-noted use of reverse motion in Soviet silent cinema in his 1927 historical epic October: Ten Days that Shook the World. Before the scene in question, Alexander Kerensky, head of a provisional government which enjoys the support of the bourgeoisie, explores the former Empress’s chambers in the Tsar’s palace while the film ponders the possible failure of the revolution. “In the name of God and

Country!” the film cries out in a sarcastic title card, montaging the faces of dozens of religious idols in exaggerated close-ups, followed by an acerbic “Hooray!” as the smashed statue of Emperor Alexander III, torn down by the people in the first scene, flips back upright and reassembles in reverse motion. Compare this to an iconographically-

228 similar moment in Vertov’s 1930 sound film Enthusiasm. Early on, members of a workers club strip a Russian Orthodox Church of its crucifixes, then rip the steeples from the top of the building, sending them crashing to earth. In place of these icons, they erect a large star and several flags. But for the sake of a surprising bit of visual levity, Vertov stages shots of the workers’ banners and insignia being pulled down from the repurposed church. Cutting the shots into the film in reverse motion, the proletarian emblems appear to ascend into place. Eisenstein’s reverse motion represented a speculation; Vertov’s represented a real event (albeit fancifully). For Eisenstein, reverse motion indicates the terrible possibility of receding back into the past. But Vertov wields reverse motion as a tool to write the future.

After cutting his teeth on the first agitprop films produced in the , the

Kinonedelia series of 1918, Vertov ascended the ranks of Soviet film production to helm a series known as Kino-Pravda, which he produced from 1922 to 1925. The Kino-

Pravda (“Cinema-Truth”) series was conceived as a filmed companion to the Soviet newspaper Pravda and included some two-dozen episodes produced at irregular intervals on a variety of news topics. In 1922, Vertov and his like-minded colleagues who formed the close-knit “Kino-Eye” group published a pair of manifestoes titled “We” and

“Kinoks: A Revolution,” which laid out their vision of cinema and realism. They railed vehemently against staged films, arguing that Soviet filmmaking should flatly reject the theatrical to create films of fact, in service of the revolution. Soon, the newsreel format proved inadequate to Vertov’s ambitions. And so it was in 1924 that Vertov set about shooting “2000 meters of kino-eye,” a feature-length project released under the title

Kino-Eye. The film arrived in theaters during the tumultuous days of the New Economic

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Policy, when the recent death of Lenin and the influence of various counter-revolutionary forces threatened the stability of the regime. The Soviet film industry was itself undergoing a period of reorganization, and the film met with understandably ardent and mixed reviews.

A dialectical conception of time, history, and the revolution appears repeatedly throughout Kino-Eye, drawn as a struggle between the young and the elderly and between the old and the new. Such a moment of confrontation establishes the context of the first of the three instances of reverse motion in Kino-Eye. The scene, which appears in the opening reel of the film, depicts the slaughtering of a bull in reverse motion (which is to say, the “un-slaughtering” of a bull). To appreciate the complex interaction between

Vertov’s politics and his use of reverse motion, it pays to formally analyze his montage in some depth.

The scene begins when a woman walking in full shot arrives at a sign. The next three shots depict her reading it: “Don’t Buy from the Private Sector – Buy from the

Cooperative.”95 The fifth shot of the scene suddenly springs into reverse motion, propelling her backwards in time as she un-walks her path down the street. While clearly the sign has triggered this event, the nature of the reverse motion is somewhat unclear.

Has the sign opened a gateway to her memories, showing the viewer the actions she took before she read the sign, or does the sign itself reverse the direction of time so that she might revise her previous actions and buy meat from the Cooperative rather than from the

Private Sector? Either way, the woman “arrives” (in reverse motion) at the cooperative in the eighth shot of the scene, whereupon two title cards announce “The Cooperative

95 Vertov had included a similar signs in Kino-Pravda episode 20.

230 receives meat directly from the slaughterhouse” and “Kino-Eye moves time backwards.”

Horse-drawn carts un-depart from the slaughterhouse, and shots of meat and hanging carcasses (in reverse motion) accompany a title card which reads “What 20 Minutes Ago was a Bull.” Then a series of shots counterpoint title cards: A title reading “We give the bull back his entrails” is followed by a shot of a worker un-removing piles of intestines and other abdominal organs, a title reading “We dress the bull in his skin” precedes a shot of the dead bull being un-skinned, and the title “The bull comes back to life” sets up three shots depicting the bull being un-killed. The twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth shots of the scene show, still in reverse motion, a bull being un-driven (by a worker with a stick) through the door of the slaughterhouse. After a title locating the subsequent action “In the stockyards,” five shots alternating close-up and long (and seeming also to alternate between forward motion and reverse) depict the bulls milling around before slaughter. A title reading “In the railroad cars” sets up a subtle transition back into forward motion.

The next shot, shot thirty-three, shows bulls being un-unloaded from railroad cars, followed by three shots of the bulls on the cars and of the cars moving, during which time the direction of time in unclear. But by shot thirty-seven, of a bull eating grass and walking, the film has definitely returned to forward motion. The final few shots of the scene (accompanying the title card “Back to the herds”) are also clearly in forward motion.

The most straightforward interpretation of the un-slaughtering scene proposes that

Vertov has used his camera to produce a Marxist understanding of commodity and labor.

The nature of any finished product up for sale – any commodity – hides the labor, the work, the energy, and time that went into making the product and which are thus

231 embodied in it. Use-value and moreover exchange-value eclipse the labor-value embodied in the object. Together, the patinas of use and exchange precipitate a misrecognition of the true value of any product of labor. At the moment of the dialectical collision of the cooperative and the private sector, Vertov employs reverse motion to show how the cooperative produces its meat. Since each step of labor cannot be discerned on the surface of the product, Vertov uses reverse motion to excavate those hidden steps out of time itself. Studying commodity production in forward time often leads to a series of progressively worse misrecognitions of embodied labor as each unit of labor disappears under the seductive surface of the commodity. Therefore, to efface the fetishism often accorded to the commodity, Vertov re-orients our attention to the labor, making it precious by showing how the product would be un-made – in one sense, destroyed, but in another sense, impossible – if the labor were removed from it. Almost paradoxically, Vertov focuses our attention on the embodied labor by at every turn un- embodying it.

Thus, reverse motion can both reveal and correct the absences and misrecognitions produced by forward time. In his 1924 essay “The Birth of Kino-Eye,”

Vertov explained his belief that it was the revolutionary cinema’s duty to develop “all methods and means… to reveal and show the truth” (41). He further specified that discovering and expressing this Soviet concept of history, reality, and truth meant the invention of new ways of seeing, with the aim to make “the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, [and] the disguised overt” (41). Leading his list of techniques for accomplishing this were three aberrant movements: “the microscope and telescope of time [and] the negative of time” (41), or what we now call slow motion, fast motion, and

232 reverse motion. Through the microcosm of the un-slaughtered bull, Vertov by extension invites his audience to imagine broader historical dialectical movements which reverse motion (and other Kino-Eye techniques) could uncover and demystify. As Jeremy Hicks observes, Vertov uses reverse motion to “dig deeper into the analysis of a reality not immediately evident” (19). However, Vertov’s use of reverse motion has a knowledge- effect pointedly distinct from that of forward motion. In addition to whatever it reveals about forward time, reverse motion also produces a concurrent secondary reality: the visual pattern of time’s reversal. As such, the form inherently subverts intent. Reverse motion can never only unravel the misrecognitions of forward time, since it always already depicts reverse time. Perhaps intuitively aware of this, Vertov uses title cards to tame and regulate the meaning of his reverse motion. Because these title cards structure the viewer’s knowledge and approach to the reversed footage, they carry a responsibility to precisely caption the action onscreen and make its ideological point legible.

But Vertov’s imprecise verbal description of reverse motion risks replacing one misrecognition for another. To be fair, it is understandable why he used inexact language. Human languages develop words and concepts to describe experience. Since the spectacle of reverse motion has no corollary in everyday experience, written languages naturally lack words suited to describing it. In structuralist thinking, languages denote meaning through opposition. For instance, the opposite of the idea “to take away” is “to give back,” and each concept attains meaning by opposing the other. But there are other kinds of opposition. We might also say that the opposite of “to take away” is “to leave in place.” In the first case, the opposite of the action is computed as whatever corresponding action is necessary to reset the first action’s effects; in the second case, the

233 opposite of the action is understood as abstinence from that action. These two orders of opposite exist for nearly any verb. For the verb “to eat,” the first order opposite is “to regurgitate” (the filling of the stomach being reset by voiding the stomach) and the second order opposite is “to fast,” or simply to not eat. Note well, however, that in the case of the first order opposite “to regurgitate,” the end result is not uneaten food on a plate, but vomit. Even though the stomach has been reset to a void state, entropy and time’s arrow have produced a more disordered state in the food-material. Even in the opposition “to take away” and “to give back,” whichever moved the object and then moved it back expended energy to accomplish this movement. That expended energy, released thermally in friction and or absorbed as vibrations, can never be used again.

Entropy and the irreversibility of time determine the physical substrata of everyday life. Teleological formations in spoken and written languages reflect the human experience of living only one direction in time. Devices like the cinema furnish the opportunity to experience time differently and to perceive different properties within it, but only if we correspondingly adapt existing languages to adequately describe cinema’s new images. After all, human languages developed to describe familiar phenomena generally fail to encompass the nuance of unfamiliar phenomena. Split-second coinages often rely on imprecise analogies. When reverse motion appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, languages lacked words to precisely describe what the people had seen. That is because reverse motion offers another register of “opposite” altogether. A reverse-motion shot of person eating presents the spectacle of entropic reversal, a true

“un-eating,” wherein the food reassembles itself into its uneaten form as it comes back

234 out of the mouth. Since this cannot happen in the real world, our ill-equipped languages cannot describe it. Thus Vertov, perhaps unsurprisingly, fell back on using forward-time opposites in his title cards. Needing a term to describe the opposite of “to take away,” he writes, “We give the bull back his entrails.” But we are not seeing an animal being

“given back” his entrails. We are seeing the filmic simulation of an entropic and temporal reversal of those entrails being taken away. However ungainly these terms appear, we might call this “reverse-disemboweling,” “anti-disemboweling,” or, as I prefer, “un-disemboweling.”

It is an important rhetorical move to stifle the desire to describe reverse motion with forward-time words. In fact, our understanding of and/or participation in Vertov’s historical project depends on it. In Kino-Eye, the forward-time language used in the title cards runs the risk of introducing confusion into the film rather than clarity. The bull’s entrails are not given back to him; the entrails are un-removed. The bull is not dressed in his skin; it is un-skinned. Thus, where Vertov’s captions fall short of his images and risk undermining Kino-Eye’s ability to think history, time, and dialectics in ways previously unavailable to language, we must take care not to reproduce his errors. Sadly, some current authors continue to propagate such misrecognitions of the essential entropic properties of reverse motion. In his 2000 monograph Early Soviet Cinema, David

Gillespie poetically mis-describes this reverse motion by writing that “the meat – which had twenty minutes previously been a bull – has its insides and its hide restored, walks out of the slaughterhouse and into a field” (76). Such descriptions are lazy and misleading, but worse, they misrecognize the new temporal epistemology which Vertov was attempting to introduce.

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The specificities of cinema’s language present a challenge to all the unspoken or unthought assumptions of the world’s natural languages. As Deleuze wrote, the time- image in cinema aspires “to bring the unconscious mechanisms of thought to consciousness” (Cinema 2, 160, original emphasis). This process implies a dramatic confrontation. Accordingly, our difficulties in thinking and writing about reverse time underline the problematic entanglement of thought and natural language, if only because any attempt to think deeply about reverse motion forces us to acknowledge the inadequacy of our language to describe it. As such, reverse motion shocks the viewer with its extra-linguistic spectacle and forces the brain to produce new patterns of thought and new ways of understanding the world. In the famous “Council of Three” proclamation of April 10, 1923, Vertov, his brother and cameraman Mikhail Kaufman, and his wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova proclaimed: “The main and essential thing is:

The sensory exploration of the world through film. We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space” (14-15). The doctrine of

Kino-Eye relies on a confidence that the camera’s machine-“eye” can see and decode the physical world better than any human eye, and that therefore the camera can “think” concepts as yet unavailable in human language. Thus, with both scientific and revolutionary zeal, Vertov and his associates committed themselves to exploring and exploiting every possibility of the camera-machine.

This quest took them from a realm of cinematic discovery, in which the camera recorded and revealed history (as in the Kino-Pravda series) into a realm of cinematic invention, wherein camera and editing worked in tandem to produce new configurations

236 of space and time (beginning with Kino-Eye and culminating in both A Sixth Part of the

World (1926) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929)). Though Vertov certainly believed, like Bazin after him, that the camera guaranteed the actuality of the profilmic event,

Vertov’s goal was never actuality. In the foundational “We: Variant of a Manifesto,” he wrote, “Cinema is, as well, the art of inventing movements of things in space in response to the demands of science” (9, original emphasis). Later he proclaimed, “I am kino- eye… and through montage I create a new, perfect man” (“Council of Three” 17) as well as new spatial relationships, new spaces, and new consciousness of history and reality.

And yet, despite the obvious goals of his montage (to transform rather than simply reproduce reality), he used slogans like “Life Caught Unawares” and “The decoding of life as it is” to describe the methods of the Kinoks and the Kino-Eye project.

The confusion generated by this apparent contradiction drew substantial criticism.

An article published in Trud, September 27, 1924, reviewing and/or advertising the release of Kino-Eye writes, “It has looked at and captured life, which has not been changed by its presence, has not smoothed down its hair or taken up a pose, because it has not noticed it” (qtd. in Tsivian 99). But barely a month later, fellow documentarian and critic Vladimir Erofeev answered this claim with an article in Kino that rightly pointed out that “any filmmaker can see… [that] most of the scenes in [Vertov’s] Kino-

Eye are staged” (qtd. in Tsivian 105). Vertov did not respond to this demonstrably true claim, perhaps because the actuality-status of his footage was irrelevant to the montage goals it served. Or, more succinctly, “life caught unawares” did not exist “for the sake of the ‘unaware’” (“The Birth of Kino-Eye” 41) but for the sake of seeing people in their own clothing and their own milieu, so that the Kino-Eye might transform them according

237 to revolutionary goals. In a speech Vertov gave on October 13, 1924, he explained that due to the insufficiencies of our eyes, humans invented the microscope and the telescope; but when these devices proved insufficient, “people invented the movie camera, in order to penetrate more deeply into the seen world, in order to study and note down visual phenomena, in order not to forget what is happened and what it will be essential to take into account in the future” (qtd. in Tsivian 102). Here, Vertov’s Marxist conception of history even prescribes a moment for the invention of the camera-machine and its use in revolutionary cinema.

Needless to say, teleological figurations dominated Soviet thought at the time.

Dmitry and Vladimir Shlapentokh argue that fiction films of the same time period represented Soviet struggle as a “cosmic revolution.” Their support of this claim is twofold; first, they identify a strain of “millenarian and eschatological overtones” in

Marx and Engels’ philosophy, and secondly they point to a belief in the “omnipotence of science” which was believed would lead to mankind’s “complete mastery over nature”

(40). Kino-Eye echoes this belief in the teleological directedness of time. Vertov expresses the presumed inevitability of the dialectic both in the young vs. old montages and through the use of reverse motion to reveal the accumulation of labor in the irreversible flow of time. Beliefs that omnipotent technology could produce an ultimate utopia appear even more plainly in Vertov’s rhapsodic manifestoes extolling the camera’s machine-eye. But even at the time, these manifestoes drew scrutiny. Documentary filmmaker and film journalist Grigory Boltiansky levied this assault: “The fetishization of the movie camera is at the root of [the Kinoks’] entire world view, the theory of the Kino-

Eye, with its mystic knowledge and its different, new vision of the entire world. … They

238 forget that the filming apparatus, like all the technology of other areas, like their own way of thinking, is just a product of the development of productive forces” (qtd. in Tsivian

116). To Vertov’s teleological arguments, Boltiansky introduced a genealogical argument and, perhaps ironically, underscored that Vertov’s films and his entire method did not arise ordained from the fabric of time, but had to be willfully constructed.

Vertov’s use of reverse motion stands near the center of these manifold issues of seeing, of spectacle, of technology, of history, and of revolutionary ideology; but it was not inherently teleological. The second use of reverse motion in Kino-Eye, the amusing diving scene, features reverse motion shots of young men diving into a pond. The justification for the reverse motion may at first seem elusive. On the surface of things, the reverse diving functions as pure ocular merriment. But it also testifies to the inherent possibilities of the camera. As in Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov implicitly contrasts the Chinese magician’s trickery in Kino-Eye and his own reverse-motion trickery in the diving scene. A kinok publication of the time reads, “We oppose the collusion of the

‘director-as-magician’ and a bewitched public. Only consciousness can fight the sway of magic in all its forms” (“Kino-Eye” 66) But how are the two different? And how can tricks produce revolutionary consciousness? Though in the magician’s performance the tricks are themselves the end, in Vertov’s films, trickery (including even the stop-motion animated beetle in Man with a Movie Camera96) is only a means to an end. First, Vertov

96 Though I will not develop it here, there’s a close relationship between Vertov’s thinking on reverse motion and his thinking on animation. In A Sixth Part of the World (1926), Vertov presents a bit of stop- motion animation of fruit filling a packing crate. When the box is full, a lid approaches and seals the box, also in stop-motion, and the box zooms over to a tall stack of identical boxes. At this moment, a brief shot of reverse motion intervenes to appear to cause the packed crate to magically leap to the top of the stack. Here, the tricks of the camera illustrate the triumph of Soviet production, but they seem to at the same time obliterate reflexive awareness of themselves. Another moment in Stride, Soviet! (1926) also combines

239 marks the trick as a trick. The title reads, “Kino-eye moves time backwards” to introduce the bull un-slaughtering, and before the diving scene, the title announces, “Kino-Eye shows how one dives properly,” first in slow motion, then in reverse motion. In this case, the trick (of reverse motion) first produces surprise. This surprise triggers the viewer’s consciousness of the camera’s role in producing that trick. Vertov believed that this consciousness would effect a recognition of Soviet ideology in the processes of history, production, and social relationships. This production of recognition was precisely

Vertov’s engagement with realism.

More pragmatically, there may be another reason behind Vertov’s otherwise unmotivated use of reverse motion in the diving scene. Vlada Petric writes in some depth developing the ideological structures into which Vertov conceived of reverse motion as an element of Kino-Pravda: “‘Truth’ presented on the screen must be essential and not mechanical, ideologically functional rather than commercially entertaining” (32). And yet, a huge market share of admission tickets went to lightweight fare and “ideologically incorrect” imported from Germany, other parts of Europe, and even the United

States. Perhaps Vertov’s reverse-dive was a concession to a public that wanted to be entertained rather than simply educated. A reverse-motion shot of a man skiing in

Vertov’s Stride, Soviet! (1926), which appears without any intertitle warning or justification, might confirm such an interpretation.

animation and reverse motion (of a sort). In a sequence celebrating the end of austere bread rationing, a small slice of bread appears to leap up and pirouette in stop-motion, whereupon it is joined by other slices which gather together into a whole loaf, illustrating the plenty now available. While the use of stop-motion animation means that we are not seeing reverse motion (per the definition given in the introduction), the rebuilding of the loaf from the individual slices indicates that the frames of the animation were shot in reverse order of their use.

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Any confusion regarding Vertov’s more playful uses of reverse motion can only find resolution through a recognition of the breadth of Vertov’s concept of the “Kino-

Eye.” The camera is Kino-Eye, yes, but so is the cameraman, so is the editor, and so is the method of shooting, processing, and editing used by Vertov and his associates. The term even seems to apply to Vertov’s group, the Kinoks, their broad political and artistic objectives, and any formal experimentation at any point in the process of filmmaking that served those goals. Most importantly, Vertov’s filmmaking was necessarily, exuberantly, and whole-heartedly an ideologically goal-directed process. In the years following

Lenin’s 1922 proclamation that cinema was “the most important of all the arts” (qtd. in

Gillespie 19) and Trotsky’s suggestion that the cinema “instead of drugging the masses into submission, would emancipate them towards a new consciousness” (qtd. in Taylor

66) many filmmakers endeavored to bring the revolution to their films and spread the revolution through agitki (documentary/propaganda shorts), which toured the countryside on the so-called “agit-trains.” Thus, Vertov did not merely write history in his films, he wrote history through the dissemination of his films. Every part of the process, from shooting to distribution, bore the stamp of Kino-Eye beliefs.

The natures of documentary, history, and realism in a revolutionary society necessarily radically differ from the hegemonic concepts of the same in the West. In an essay published in Pravda, Vertov explained, “To see and show the world in the name of the world proletarian revolution – that is the simple formula of the Kino-Eye” (qtd. in

Taylor 129). The value of the “life caught unawares” consisted not in its status as genuine actuality footage (or not), but in how the camera revealed invisible truths about life and how the editor arranged those truths into a Soviet conception of reality. Reverse

241 motion did not inherently “contain” reality, because for Vertov reality did not exist in the world to be documented. Reality had to be constructed in “factories of facts” according to Soviet ideology (“The Factory of Facts” 58). Furthermore, realism and reality both refer to historical processes in Vertov—dynamic approaches to history linked to a historiographical method. In Vertov’s work, Soviet reality could not exist apart from the historical narrative of revolution and anticapitalist struggle which produced it. The ongoing historical struggle between the old and the new produced Soviet reality even as

Vertov’s Soviet concept of realism fed back into the struggle. While distinct, the concepts of history, reality, truth, and realism are inextricably enmeshed in Vertov, linked by an ongoing struggle which define them, produce them, and in which they actively participate. All shooting methods and editing methods were therefore tools in the production of consciousness. None of them in themselves guaranteed truth; rather the

Soviet ideology of revolution guaranteed truth. In short, Vertov produced his own brand of realism not with a camera, but with an ideology. For Vertov, realism was the continuous historical transformation of reality. Realism was reality transforming.

Reverse motion is a powerful technique to reveal history and transform reality, but early in his career Vertov accompanied it with title cards to explain its purpose and regulate its reception. Even with these explanatory titles, critics and theorists since have misinterpreted them as mere “tricks.” In his standard text Documentary: A History of the

Non-Fiction Film, Erik Barnouw wondered whether Vertov’s “barrage of film tricks suggested—intentionally? Unintentionally?—that no documentary could be trusted?”

(65). Richard Taylor, too, proposes that Vertov’s “use of associative montage and trick photography… represented a departure from absolute principles” (128). However, as

242 early as 1922 Vertov wrote, “What must and can be done now in ? a] Tricks and a maximum of invention during all kinds of filming. b] Improvement and invention in laboratory work, trick printing of the positive from the negative (dual and triple printing), printing various negatives into the positive (aperture inventions – laboratory montage). c] Innovation and tricks in the area of our own montage” (qtd. in Tsivian 81). The list continues from there and Vertov uses the word “tricks” several more times, making it clear that no form of experimental “trick” was off-limits to the Kinoks as long as it could tell the ongoing history of the revolution, enlivening actuality while producing new consciousness in the masses. Once one realizes that actuality was never the guarantor of historical reality in Vertov, the debate about “tricks” quickly becomes moot. Likewise, montage, because it can transform reality according to Soviet principles, does not threaten Soviet realism but, on the contrary, produces it.

At first, Vertov had to do all he could to announce and mark this radical production of realism. As he become more and more concerned with expressing the truth of how the camera transformed actuality, he found it necessary to construct ever-more- byzantine shells of reflexivity, climaxing with Man with a Movie Camera. In Kino-Eye, incipient reflexivity first emerges both in its title and in its title cards. Reverse motion first functions as a way of producing an image in a consciousness-producing way. And since the film’s titles let the viewer know what kind of consciousness it seeks to produce with reverse motion, it also becomes a film about its status as a reflexive film. Kino-

Eye’s project of transformation ends up transforming itself: into a film which both lays bare and is about laying bare the process of image-production and consciousness-

243 production. Kino-Eye is therefore also a premise and its proof, a manifesto and a revolution.

Both Annette Michelson and Jonathan Beller see aspects of reflexive consciousness-production as central to Vertov’s lifelong project. Michelson writes, “The evolution of his work renders insistently concrete, as in a series of kinetic icons, that philosophic phantasm of the reflexive consciousness: the eye seeing, apprehending itself as it constitutes the world’s visibility: the eye transformed by the revolutionary project into an agent of critical production” (xix). In other words, Vertov uses the act of seeing to reveal the eye to itself; to create revolutionary consciousness through a self-aware transformation of the eye. The revolutionary project also transforms the eye into an agent of critical production, which means two things. First, the ideology of Soviet revolution functioned to transform the way things were seen in the world. The brain could no longer interpret with a pre-revolutionary consciousness what the eye now saw with a revolutionary consciousness. Secondly, Vertov interpreted the Soviet revolution as implying that the camera must look in such a way as to transform everything about vision: how the eye saw, what the eye revealed, and how the eye understood itself in relation to the state, to its history, to industrial production, and to the production of ideology.

Michelson writes that Vertov’s belief in cinema as an “agent of human perfectibility” and “transformation of consciousness” led him from a faith in the image of the real world to a faith in the power of montage (xxv). Whereas Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and the rest of Kuleshov’s disciples employed mimesis (acting, typology) and the transformation of mimesis through montage, Vertov began with the “real” – “life caught

244 unawares” – and transformed it through montage. The truth of Vertov’s Kino-Pravda

(film-truth) was in the simultaneous coexistence and revelation of both the real and the real in its transforming state—history as object as well as process. By the apogee of his career (which I mark as Man with a Movie Camera), Vertov had also perfected a third element: the revelation of the process by which his films transformed the real—history imbricated with reflexive historiography. In Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov simultaneously shows a) footage of life in three Russian cities, b) that footage recontextualized and transformed through montage (and a number of other tricks, from stop motion multiple exposures to freeze frames), and c) the labor-process by which that transformation occurred (shooting and editing) and entered the minds of the spectators to transform their consciousness (by showing us images of the film being watched in a theater). This third element, the reflexive presentation of the method by which filmmakers transform “life caught unawares” into a film which can therefore transform the spectators who consume it, entered cinema in Vertov’s Kino-Eye.

Comparing Vertov’s radically transparent methods to historiography under

Western capitalism reveals just how revolutionary and urgently necessary his project was.

In contrast to Vertov’s production of consciousness, capitalism’s mode of production amounts to overt historical erasure. Jonathan Beller explains that under the alienated production practices of capitalism, labor processes are made to disappear behind the

“resultant sheen of the commodity form” (46). While his larger argument states that capitalist use of images cyclically reinforces that “sheen” while erasing the labor from consciousness, Vertov’s images, along with his demystification of the process of the production of images, sought and produced the opposite effect. “Vision of the kind

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Vertov produces,” Beller writes, “registers and results from the flow of industrial production/circulation, yet opposes its capital logic. … [Vertov’s] endeavor to de-reify the commodity necessarily reveals the general commodity-structure of the image” (46-7).

Put another way, Vertov opposes the image’s natural tendency under capital to reinforce commodity fetishism; he uses his images to explode the veneer of commodity by revealing what the commodity does not reveal, both about itself and about the production of images as a commodity. For this reason (and here I elaborate upon Beller), Vertov always marks the arrival of reverse motion in Kino-Eye with a title card explaining that the Kino-Eye produces this kind of image. Thus, the scene of the un-slaughtering of the bull not only demystifies the production of meat, but also the production of the film itself.

Later, in Man with a Movie Camera Vertov skips the title card, but the ubiquitous reflexivity of Man with a Movie Camera may also be considered a sufficient delineation of his project. The whole structure of Man with a Movie Camera, with its constant references to the shooting and editing of the film, serves to self-consciously mark the reverse-motion images as images which did not naturally exist but which had to be produced. Reflexivity is thus essential to Vertov’s project of revealing reality. Vertov’s reflexivity reveals the processes of production and reproduction that capital attempts to hide, and as such Vertov’s films also reveal themselves and the broader revolution as historical process to counter capitalism’s ahistorical mythologies about itself. And

Vertov’s reverse motion is quintessentially reflexive in that it elegantly reveals both levels of production: it reveals the labor embodied in the meat by un-embodying it at every step, and it reveals the constructed-ness of the film image through the spectacular shock and rupture of time running backwards.

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In hindsight, the un-slaughtering scene in Kino-Eye prefigures the scene showing the film being made in Man with a Movie Camera. In both instances, Vertov illustrates the active role of labor in the ongoing revolution. As such, traditional textual boundaries break down, and the films appear to speak to one another as parts of a historical series.

What Deleuze called “gaseous perception”—the ability through montage “to carry perception into things, to put perception into matter, so that any point whatsoever in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far these actions and reactions extend” (Cinema 1, 81)—now extends beyond the first and final frames of a single film into other films and into history itself. Though Vertov inserts a reverse-motion shot of film appearing to leap onto the spool at Svilova’s editing table, I wonder why he never used reverse motion to show a film being un-made. After all the abuse he received from actors and directors of fiction films (and even from other documentarians), what stopped him from indulging in the reflexive lesson that unmaking his own film would result in the breakdown of Soviet truth? Perhaps by that time the notion of “Soviet truth” had become so centrally regulated that Vertov’s radical perceptual idealism – liberation without didacticism, therefore unsuitable to the needs of the entrenching dictatorship – could only signify excess, formalism, and dangerous apparently-meaningless dalliance.

Vertov saw film as an equivalent mode of production to that of meat or of bread, and he demanded through his montage that meat, bread, and cinema mutually perceive each other in this way. This realization uncovers another level of reflexivity in Kino-Eye, one that relates specifically to the moment in which the film was made. Kino-Eye dates from 1924; it was released in the autumn of that year, over half a year after the death of

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Lenin, who was Soviet documentary’s strongest champion. One of the results of the New

Economic Policy (instituted in 1921 to stimulate both industrial and agricultural growth after the disastrous First World War) was to rupture the peasantry into new class stratifications while opening the back door of the economy to the private sector. The

Soviet film industry (at that time, Goskino) was also in disarray. Lacking sufficient capital to supply full programs of films to state-run movie theaters, local distribution centers began to rent films from private suppliers who drew from European and even

American studios. Vertov (perhaps rightly) interpreted the New Economic Policy as a series of concessions to the private sector that stymied the goals of the revolution and made it even harder for filmmakers to reach audiences who were, to his way of thinking, being poisoned by the dramatic action of films from capitalist nations. In 1924, A. L’vov reported (in an article titled “The Cinema’s Ulcer can be ”) that in this dangerous dearth of Soviet films, “The theatres exist exclusively from the occasional picture which is supplied by private dealers” (qtd. in Taylor 83). To make matters worse for Vertov’s industry image, at the very same time a branch of Goskino called Kultkino (which was run mainly by Vertov and his fellow Kinoks) entirely took over newsreel production. Jay

Leyda relates what happened next: “At an open meeting which took place in Moscow in

1924, the Kino-Eye group brought to light Lenin’s directive on the proportion of fact- films on every film programme. Hitherto unknown, this ‘Leninist Film Proportion’ … met with fierce opposition from the body of film workers, very nearly becoming the exclusive property of the Kino-Eye group and their several literary partisans” (177).

When Vertov uncovered the so-called “Leninist film proportion,” the dramatic directors, actors, and crewmembers in Goskino interpreted this as a self-serving power-grab. And

248 though he came to be hated and attacked by certain members of the film industry,

Goskino and Sovkino (which replaced Goskino in 1925) nevertheless had to supply him with funds to make films because of the public popularity of the Kino-Pravda series

(177). Vertov persisted in his wish that the Soviet film industry be totally restructured to favor films of fact, and according to Annette Michelson, “his theoretical claims and formulations are grounded in the concrete urgency of that task” (lv). In other words, cinema at the time was a microcosm of Russia; it was crippled economically from without, and it faced factious ideological conflict from within.

Thus, the un-slaughtering scene in Kino-Eye begins with a reference to these internal struggles: “Don’t Buy from the Private Sector – Buy from the Cooperative.”

This moment represents a double-concern for Vertov: the influence of private-sector profiteering in Soviet film exhibition, and the internal threat which overproduction of dramatic fictional films represented for him ideologically. At this moment of dialectical collision, Vertov saw it as his responsibility to turn the rudder of history and score an ideological victory through film. Though the struggle between the private sector and the cooperative was certainly a real one during the days of the New Economic Policy, Vertov deploys it as a metonym for his struggle in the Soviet film industry. And to strongly mark it as such, he throws the film into reverse motion at the moment the confrontation arises.

To reverse time was to seize control of time, as indeed all uses of reverse motion interrogate time in some way. Here, exerting such radical agency over time signifies

Vertov’s desire to firmly define history as a dialectical process (acted cinema vs. Kino-

Eye; private sector vs. cooperative), since montage thinking and dialectical thinking had

249 fused in both Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s theory at the time (Michelson xxvi)). In taking control of time so dramatically, Vertov forces his audience to participate perceptually in history. In this unification of perception, Vertov illustrates that buying from the collective is incumbent upon any of the participants in this moment of history. At the sight of the Cooperative poster, the montage appears to self-activate to tell the tale of

Soviet time, to take control of historiography and write history so that it serves Soviet aims. The film must take control of time to illustrate not just the story of embodied labor, and not even just the events of history, but most importantly the dialectical ontology of history. Regardless of the audience’s own beliefs, Vertov suggests that they must buy from the collective because the dialectic proves that this is the way that history is going.

By extension, he asserts (here and throughout his career) that films of fact must overcome fictional films because the history demanded it. In time, of course, the Party would come to disagree with Vertov.97 Nevertheless, his revolutionary reversals still pulse with the same promise. His films insist that we may only be able to build a better future for ourselves once we have unraveled our pasts. Through reverse motion, Kino-Eye insists that we must turn back time to take back time.

97 Where Vertov desired to explore every possibility of a fully liberated cinema, by 1930 the Party had begun to enforce uniformity and didacticism. In such an environment, reverse motion was not freeing, but damning. In an ironic twist, the actual forces of history did not dialectically unify the “trick” of reverse motion and Soviet ideological realism, as Vertov wished. Instead, it cleaved them into a sharply divided . Thereafter, reverse motion could not tell the tale of embodied labor; it could not shock the masses into consciousness; it could not signify dialectical history; it could not transform actuality according to revolutionary consciousness; it could not ideologically produce and guarantee realism; it could not emancipate perception; and it could not replace capital with vision. Almost overnight, all the glories of reverse motion became no more than a naughty formalism, and within a decade Vertov’s career evaporated.

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CONCLUSION

In a shot of reverse motion, the final moment of reception coincides with the earliest moment of registration. Put another way, the conclusion deposits the viewer back at the beginning. In this conclusion, I hope to fold my dissertation back on itself in a similar way, but upon arriving again at the start, I wish to plunge a few steps further, to points both “before the beginning and after the end,”98 from which I might explore additional questions and avenues of research available to a historical, aesthetic, and scientific study of reverse motion or other investigations into temporal plasticity.

Throughout this project, I have emphasized the audience’s role in the phenomenon of reverse motion, founding many of my arguments on the principle that reverse motion shocks thought and forces viewers in its presence to imagine images not on screen. In my discussion of Dziga Vertov, I claimed that his use of reverse motion in

Kino-Eye was meant to destabilize viewers’ lived notions of the shape of time and urge them toward Marxist revelations regarding the temporality of the embodiment of labor, the capitalist erasure of the worker from the surface of the commodity, the shape of the real historical process of revolution, and, reflexively, the camera’s powerful role in creating new images and engendering new corresponding patterns of thought. To Vertov, the act of filmmaking and the act of film-viewing were doubly historical processes in a revolutionary context: on the one hand filmmaking wrote and interpreted history according to Soviet principles, and on the other hand film-viewing then acted on and within history by effecting revolutionary consciousness in the masses. Vertov viewed the documentary project as one of shaping reality just as much as one of expressing reality.

98 To borrow a phrase from Eliot’s Burnt Norton (or , if you prefer).

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From this perspective, which embraces all of cinema’s methods, technologies, and tricks, reverse motion does not lie; rather, it produces a theretofore unseen truth through its action on a section of actuality. With the audience’s attention and participation, reverse motion demystifies time by revealing the kinds of misprisions and absences in consciousness which living in forward time naturally produces. While many filmmakers since Vertov have explored similar ideas in narrative contexts, few have used reverse motion as incisively to rid the passage of time of its absences and immemory, though some, such as Peter Howitt (Sliding Doors) have used reverse motion to signal an investigation into the contingent nature of time’s passage. Working from a point of wishful disavowal, other filmmakers have even applied reverse motion toward a willful destructive misrecognition of time, using it to imagine rewinding unpleasant history away. But in the most honest of these examples, Klimov’s Come and See (1985), reverse motion, however antinomic it appears on its surface, nevertheless reveals the irreversibility of time.

The fact that film is reversible but time is not99 can create a cinematic situation which may at first appear contradictory or incongruous. Incongruity is a basic feature of most humor, and it may explain why reverse motion’s manipulation or transgression of normal cinematic temporality has consistently functioned humorously across film history.

In my third chapter I appraised and adapted a range of theories of comedy to seek out the structural features of reverse motion which make it amenable to humor. From the angle of superiority theory, reverse motion deforms the actions of normal individuals into foolish and laughable trajectories. From Bergson’s perspective, the cinematic apparatus

99 To adapt a phrase which is backmasked into E.L.O.’s song “Fire on High” (1975)

252 subjects onscreen personages to unnatural movements; through our laughter we reject this

“mechanical encrusted on the living” which opposes the flow of life. Considered in terms of genre, reverse motion and comedy click because comedy tends to unleash anarchy at the level of the joke while building to an ordered happy ending, much the same way reverse motion puts the world crazily out of joint moment by moment while macroscopically moving the film strip toward a point of lower entropy, or more order. In this chapter, I again foregrounded the participation of the spectator, explaining that the laughter response triggered by reverse motion depends upon our split-second mental comparison between the events as they appear in reverse motion and our mental approximation of what the same events would look like in forward motion. No one milks the full extent of this mismatch better than director Oldrich Lipský in Happy End (1966), a film presented almost entirely in reverse motion and telling the tale of Bedrich, a man trapped in a reverse-time world but mis-describing his experience as though he were living life forwards. Though Bedrich does not realize that he is stuck sailing backwards through time, we viewers do, and it frees us to ludically celebrate a kind of victory over time.

Filmmakers Jean Cocteau and Maya Deren also used reverse motion to break free of time’s forward flux. As I argued at the close of my second chapter, Deren’s

Meditation on Violence (1948) uses nearly-imperceptible reverse motion to develop the avant-garde dance film nearly as far as the structural film of the 1960s, and Cocteau’s

The Testament of Orpheus (1960) takes reverse motion’s function as a special effect to an autobiographical apotheosis, creating a thoroughly reflexive film in which every sign, reverse motion chief among them, attests to the power of cinema and to the life of

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Cocteau the artist. Chapter 2 began on much humbler ground, however, examining how reverse motion, which once flourished as a central spectacle in early cinema, was banished to cinema’s margins by the forward-time diegetic logic necessary for narrative cinema. In the balance of the chapter, I explored the nature of the spaces in which reverse motion lived on. For instance, to continue within classical cinema, visual effects designers made it wear the mask of forward time, utterly disavowing its temporal transgressiveness. And yet, certain filmmakers squarely within the narrative tradition

(such as Souleymane Cissé, director of Yeelen) found ways to employ reverse motion thematically and philosophically. Still, even within the relaxed temporal rules of post- classical action cinema, reverse motion still rarely makes an appearance. By contrast, reverse motion came to thrive in the freer “event-spaces” of music video, where culture- industry profit models introduced it simply for its exotic look.

In many ways, the music video recapitulates many features of the films of early cinema, emphasizing as it does spectacle, surprise, immediacy, and attention-grabbing over narrativity. However, the films of early cinema, while they perhaps also stood in stylistic opposition to bourgeois entertainments of their day, cannot be considered mere mind-deadening distractions. In fact, many early films depended upon the engaged thought of the audience. As I argued at the close of my first chapter, the films of early cinema implicitly inscribed the audience into their spaces of monstration and event.

When early films like The Impossible Convicts (1905) confronted viewers with contradictory and narratively illegible reverse motion, those viewers were left to contend on their own with the aberrant temporality they saw, and it was precisely within these thoughts that something like time-images first emerged in the cinema. Met with such

254 evidence, the Deleuzian historiography of cinema’s images loses some of its authority.

In the balance of my first chapter, I addressed two other aspects of cinema’s birth narrative, bringing new research and analysis to some of its oldest questions. Most importantly, I showed that reverse motion was not born by accident when a Lumière operator happened to crank Demolition of a Wall (1896) in reverse, but rather that reverse motion was first imagined by a French science writer named Édouard Hospitalier, who surmised that if sonic records of duration could be turned backwards on a phonograph, then visual records of duration on the cinématographe ought to have the same property.

Freed from the fable of accidental discovery, the history of the development of motion picture technology takes on a wholly different character. On the one hand, the material and ideological foundations of cinematic temporality, including reverse motion, circulated in culture throughout the 19th Century, and many of these cultural series coalesced in what we came to call cinema. But on the other hand, other devices with different techniques of representing time could have also formed the mechanical basis of cinema, and reverse motion as we know may never have come about. Just as images of reverse motion reveal the unpredictability of the past, so also the birth narrative of reverse motion was a space of substantial contingency.

Thus, back before the beginning of reverse motion, a different set of events could have possibly led to a cameraless cinema, a cinema without indexicality, or a cinema based on instantaneity (like television) rather than on registration and replay. In such cinemas, reverse motion may have taken a very different temporal ontology, or not have arisen at all. Here I would like to speculatively consider the possibility of reverse motion and other time-images within a vectoral cinema. Until quite recently, cinema staked its

255 identity on the recording of profilmic space using an optical sensor (whether photochemical or digital). But now, new ways have emerged: the most up-to-date performance capture technology in digital cinema maps the movement of bodies as vectoral instructions in three-dimensional space (rather than as reflected light compressed onto a two-dimensional picture plane). This makes it possible to reconstruct captured movements from the point of view of a virtual “camera” shooting from any angle. The possibilities for analysis of time under dilation and reversal are enormous, and largely unexplored. Though for the moment optical sensors triangulate the position data of performance capture reference points, there is no reason in principle why the telemetry of these reference points cannot be mapped into vectoral space without traditional optical devices. One of the earliest forerunners of today’s performance capture technology was developed right alongside the forerunners of cinema, and by the same person: Étienne-

Jules Marey. Along with chronophotography, Marey also developed devices able to continuously sample the motion of single parts of animals’ bodies without the aid of an optical sensor. In his 1874 work Animal Mechanism, Marey described two ways of continuously sampling the motion of single body parts of a bird in flight. He built and tested an air-actuated valve which opened and closed an electrical circuit corresponding to the vertical movements of a bird's wing. This was connected to a stylus which transcribed the movements onto a vertical rotating drum: “The writing point will trace a wavy line, the elevations and depressions of which will correspond with each change in the direction of the movement of the wing” (Marey 227). The analog readout on the cylinder (similar to a seismograph or a cardiograph100) provided a vectoral map of one

100 Marta Braun suggests the similarity to the cardiograph in “Chronophotography: Leaving Traces” 95-99.

256 aspect of the flight of the bird, or, if you like, a mathematical graph describing wing displacement as a function of time. Of course, such a record of time could in principle also be turned backwards. And because Marey’s graphs of animal motion do not produce a discontinuous photogrammatic dataset which we must mentally connect, but instead sample space continuously, from a Marey graph one may derive a function of the form f(t) = P, or position as a function of time. Differentiation, integration, or other transformations of such a function could produce calculus-based time-images which would far outpace the wonder and delight of reverse motion (which, in mathematical terms, merely multiplies time by -1).

Even without a lens, the Marey methods still take as their subject matter real events in real time and space. But vectoral cinema could also be produced—and, indeed, is produced with far greater ease—in computer-generated environments. This implies a further question: what is the status of reverse motion created inside a graphics engine, with simulated physics? Lacking indexical registration of profilmic space at equidistant temporal intervals, do such images of simulated motion have any time to reverse?

Consider an example: Rich Nosworthy’s Vimeo gem Unified (2013).101 In this two- minute , several thousand small computer-animated cubes un-fall in something like slow reverse motion, returning to the “unified” configuration of a perfect 8-by-8-by-

42 cube array in the final moment of the film. The fact that the physics engine runs in reverse seems plain enough here given a real-world familiarity with gravity, elastic collisions, and momentum, but to dub this shot “slow motion” makes the assumption that these simulated cubes are relatively small, when there are no real objects in the video

101 Online: https://vimeo.com/68596504

257 against which to make such a determination. But is it reverse motion if the images are simulated? In , artists draw “ideal poses” frame-by-frame and constitute a simulation of motion from them. Since traditional do not record time or sample their images at regular temporal intervals, there can be no such thing as reverse motion in traditional animation. But computer-animated motion like that in

Unified does sample its images regularly in time, albeit a simulated time. Surely the motion in Unified is exactly as real as the time which made its simulated physics possible, and in that sense Unified is a reverse motion film. We might call it reverse motion of simulated time, or non-indexical reverse time. Allowing this expanded definition of reverse motion opens up the possibility of producing reverse motion images of physics different from our own, with meanings yet to be discovered.

Suggesting that reverse motion can exist in computer-simulated environments relies on the idea that we perceive reverse motion in general by reference to our empirical experience of physics. That is, we recognize or ratify movements as “reverse motion” by comparing them to our memory of other movements. Is such a circuit of reference available to the movements of traditional animation? Is reverse motion possible in a world of “ideal poses”? Strictly-speaking, no—but another closely-related form of reversal is available to animation: the palindrome. Traditional reverse motion has, of course, made some use of the palindromic form, most notably in early straight-and- reverse projections (such as that of Demolition of a Wall), as well as in structural filmmaking (Bruce Conner’s film Breakaway (1966), which plays exactly the same

258 forward or backward), and now even in a small but rich subset of online shorts102 which attempt palindromic narrative almost as a form of Oulipian constraint. But by reusing short sequences of frames arranged in mirror order, some animated films also feature small palindromic structures. Consider Winsor McCay’s How a Mosquito Operates

(1912), in which he saves time and effort animating by repeating frames of the mosquito turning his head back and forth or plunging his proboscis in and out. Since these drawings do not comprise an indexical record of duration, I do not suggest that one sequence of frames should be considered forward and the other reverse; rather, their mirrored topology establishes each as the reverse of the other.

Any art form which spatially sequences time includes the possibility of palindromes. In music, retrograde forms in serial composition (in particular Webern’s op. 21 Symphony (Starr)) frequently feature palindromic structures, as do moments in

Schubert, Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, Haydn’s Symphony No. 47, and even

Guillaume de Machaut’s 14th-Century palindromic rondeau “Ma Fin est Mon

Commencement” (Newbould). Reverse time in recorded music of course predates reverse motion in cinema (as Édouard Hospitalier knew) and, in keeping with my desire to investigate reverse motion from “before the beginning,” a quick look at reverse sound points the way to further inquiries into reverse motion. In the first place, modern instances of reverse sound tend to have a haptic character—that is, the hand backscratching the record on the turntable directly intervenes at the moment of playback, as if to investigate the sound. The link between record scratching and small forward-and-

102 Yann Pineill’s Symmetry: A Palindromic Film (https://vimeo.com/81151091) is a good place to start, and its comments section points the way to other similar films.

259 back circuits of “scrubbing” in moving images should be intuitively obvious, but a number of short films and videos depict it explicitly, such as Jamin Wayans’s Spin (2005) and the music video for Missy Elliot’s “Work It” (, 2002) (which features one of the more notable uses of reverse-sound in the era of turntablism). And other films from much earlier in cinema history have put a similar technique to other uses, as in

Charles Ridley’s incendiary satirical détournement of Nazi footage Schichlegruber Doing the Lambeth Walk (1940). But none until recently have attempted an investigation of time like that implied by backscratching a record. Using a fragile homemade optical printer and working from a finely-detailed score, Martin Arnold attempts just that kind of critical microscopy of time in his film Pièce Touchée (1989), the first of his Cinemnesis series. Scrubbing an 18-second clip of The Human Jungle (1954) back and forth repeatedly in very small sequences of frames, Arnold completely dismantles the semiotic hierarchy of classical cinema which puts narrative-signs above physics-signs. By scraping the narrative off narrative cinema, Arnold builds time-images out of movement images and directs attention toward the fundamental nature of cinematic time. Though in interviews Arnold gives the impression that his project is psychoanalytic, I would like to argue that it is semiotic. When Arnold claims that “Hollywood cinema is… a cinema of exclusion, denial, and repression” (11) he really means that cinema of the movement- image stifles the time-image from breaking through. And by contracting his circuit of forward-and-back oscillation to its isentropic limit of two frames (as he does at the beginning of Pièce Touchée), Arnold does not just reveal the limit of reverse motion, he unwittingly points the way toward a long-overdue re-evaluation of the articulations of the cinematic code. Against the claims of Pasolini and Eco, Arnold’s work (a kind of film

260 theory in its own right) implies that minimal functional unit of cinema (the second articulation) is the single frame and the smallest meaningful unit (the first articulation) is two frames. For in Arnold’s work, cinema does not signify the spatial, the photographic, the iconic, or any other code inherited from another medium; it investigates and signifies time only, and through the forward-and-reverse circuit, Arnold discovers and interrogates the limit of cinema’s ability to articulate duration.

Something else is also at work in Arnold which suggests still a further inquiry. In his chapter “The crystals of time” in Cinema 2, Deleuze follows a discussion of flashbacks and memory with the remark that from its early days, cinema “looked for bigger and bigger circuits which would unite an actual image with recollection-images”

(68). A circuit of memory is established in a film whenever the film from the present to the past and back again. Deleuze takes this circuit and contracts it to its smallest point, calling this limit the crystal-image. To the extent that Arnold’s scrubbing constitutes a palindromic circuit of memory, his films should also function to reveal time in the manner of the crystal-image. When Gilles Deleuze defines the crystal-image, he first likens it to a mirror: the simultaneous coexistence of the actual (the person before the mirror) and its virtual (the mirror image), the smallest possible circuit of present and past united at the peak of present. He explains that the actual and its virtual participate in continual exchange and, though discernible, confuse by nature of their mutual double- ness. While Arnold’s films could easily furnish an excellent new way to examine the crystal-image, another object seems even more apt for this investigation. In Michel

Gondry’s music video for Cibo Matto’s song “Sugar Water” (1996), the screen is split in two while a four-minute long take plays in forward motion on the left and reverse motion

261 on the right. Thus, though there appear to be two sides to the video – right and left, forward and reverse – there is only ever actually one side, presented simultaneously in two states. It appears that “Sugar Water” functions as an artistic elaboration of the crystal image. Gondry’s video explodes the peak of present (the location of the crystal-image) by dilating time’s instantaneous forking procedure into a four-minute-long instant wherein one can both contemplate the dual-facet of the actual-forward/virtual -reverse and interrogate what Deleuze calls the “hidden ground of time,” its two flows of passing- present and preserving-past. The left and the right side of the screen in “Sugar Water” both represent aspects of the present, one in the process of becoming-future and the other in the process of becoming-past. A video like “Sugar Water” compellingly suggests that were we able to expand the crystal, to make it larger than the instantaneous point of time, we would discover that it has a structure which can be investigated.

Even the title “Sugar Water” invokes Bergson’s thought experiment by which he intuited that the individual’s experience of duration links to the duration of the whole of the universe. In Bergson’s hands, cinema functioned for the first time as an object of philosophical discovery. I fear that in the course of cinema history we may have lost a bit of our capacity to stand in awe of what cinema can do. Recall the rapturous terms in which Jean Epstein once linked the wonder of reverse motion to a philosophical inquiry:

The constant increase in entropy is the catch which stops the gears of the terrestrial and celestial machine from ever moving in reverse. Time cannot return to its origin; no effect can precede its cause. And a world which would claim to break with or modify this vectorial order seems both physically impossible and logically unimaginable. Focus attention, however, on a scene in an old avant garde film or a slapstick comedy that has been filmed in reverse motion. Suddenly, with an undeniable precision, the cinema describes a world which moves from its end to its beginning, an anti-universe which until now man had hardly managed to

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picture for himself. Dead leaves take off from the ground to hang once again upon tree branches; rain drops spurt upwards from the earth to the clouds; a locomotive swallows its smoke and cinders, inhales its own steam; a machine uses the cold to produce heat and work. Bursting from a husk, a flower withers into a bud which retreats into the stem. As the stem ages, it withdraws into a seed. Life appears only through resurrection, crossing old age’s decrepitude into the bloom of maturity, rolling through the course of youth, then of infancy, and finally dissolving in a prenatal limbo. Universal repulsion, the energy loss of entropy, the continual increase of energy constitute truth values contrary to Newton's law and the principles of Carnot and Clausius. Effect has become cause; cause, effect. Could the structure of the universe be ambivalent? Might it permit both forward and backward movements? Does it admit of a double logic, two determinisms, two antithetical ends? (20-21)

Epstein’s poetic zeal reminds me that cinema does not merely occasion thought; cinema thinks—it creates thought. Moreover, the phenomenon of reverse motion proves repeatedly that the cinematic mechanism is not limited in its range of thought by human powers of thought. Bergson argued that the cinematic mechanism describes the mechanism of ordinary thought, and he was right. Epstein wondered whether the universe itself might take after film, and surprisingly, it might. In his book The Theory of

Everything, Stephen Hawking writes that, contrary to our lived experience of thermodynamics,

The laws of physics do not distinguish between the past and the future. More precisely, the laws of physics are unchanged under the combination of operations known as C, P, and T. (C means changing particles for antiparticles. P means taking the mirror image so left and right are swapped for each other. And T means reversing the direction of motion of all particles—in effect, running the motion backward.) (105)

Surprisingly, 35mm silent cinema, the terrain upon which reverse motion was first elaborated, seems to have the same properties; that is, it can survive something like C, P, and T operations. Time may be reversed by flipping the film strip end to end. This corresponds to the “T” which Hawking discusses. Celluloid film is also bilaterally

263 symmetrical and can be loaded in the projector flipped left/right (like the P operation).

And, of course, both a negative and a positive print may pass through the projector with equal felicity (this inversion of black and white echoes the exchange of particles for antiparticles, or C). Does this mean that the Deleuze’s great claim that cinema can think the universe because the universe is made of images comports with quantum theory? Not quite, but it at least suggests that the reversal of time holds continued interest for both the sciences and the arts and could provide the basis for much additional productive dialogue between the two disciplines.

In this conclusion, I have endeavored to encourage the exploration of as many new aesthetic and scientific avenues as I could imagine. And while the bulk of this project has tended to approach reverse motion in something akin to realist terms, I now see that animated and computer-generated variations on reversal should have a place as well. By expanding the tableau of reverse motion, I embrace the fact that even indexical cinema did not feature anything like a one-to-one correspondence with reality. Ever since the arrival of editing in 1895 (the first special effect; reverse motion was the second), Bazin’s myth of total cinema has slowly but certainly evaporated. Dominant cinema aesthetics do not aspire to represent the world, but rather to invent new worlds.

In this sense, though the linking of chronophotography to phonography in sound cinema represented the apotheosis of the representational goals of many prior artforms, cinema’s unanticipated power to create immersive fictional worlds unexpectedly took art history in a new direction. Simply stated, cinema was not just the last of the visual arts; it was also the first of a new regime of virtual arts.

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This, of course, results directly from the material properties of the cinematic apparatus. To film something is to algorithmically register time upon a spatial substrate.

Spatializing time transforms it into a moldable material, which, once reshaped, may be transmuted back into event by means of a playback algorithm. As I asked at the outset, what consequences face human consciousness as a result of temporal plasticity? Despite listing a number of them throughout this project, I now wonder what role timidity might have played in the historical use of this incredible power. After all, reverse motion’s minor and unsung role in cinema history might have much to do with its ambiguous status as a special effect. Editing fuses samples of real spacetime into new configurations which simulate non-existent worlds. But what does reverse motion do? Almost oxymoronically, it both imagines a world unbound by time’s arrow while at the same time confirming the irreversibility of entropy’s accumulation. Reverse motion must call attention to itself, while editing can remain invisible. Reverse motion smashes narrative logic, but editing tidily expedites it.

Reverse motion seems doomed to wander the margins of cinema aesthetics forever as an orphaned sign. Over a century ago it arrived in the world as a misshapen and somehow uncanny visual pattern. It resembled everything we knew of the three dimensions of the physical world, but it violated the dimension of life and becoming—the dimension of time. How could it be redeemed into a meaningful framework? How could its alterity be overcome? Reverse motion was brought up by filmmakers who searched for its parents in spectacle, comedy, history, the palindrome, and many other places, but never found them. It never secured a permanent place in the language of cinema. So still it wanders, presenting images of time and worlds which can never be inhabited, searching

265 for an identity which it may never find. Whenever it plays, the surface of the screen represents the boundary of a wish which cannot be crossed. In the realm of film theory, it could have been adopted by any perspective which considers time, cinematic ontology, history, dreams, entropy, formalism, or voices at the margins. But apart from a few articles or chapters, no scholarly tradition claims it either. Where will it go?

At this moment, something else about Epstein’s quotation above also resonates with me: a profound joy. It reminds me of an anecdote told by David Thomson near the end of The Big Screen. He writes that decades ago while teaching at Dartmouth, on a lark he decided to screen Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock (1945) on two projectors simultaneously—the first 45 minutes on the left in forward motion with sound, the last 45 minutes on the right, silent and in reverse. He recalls:

The two halves met tidily in the middle. The audience yelled with glee. … The effect was ravishing: it may be the most exciting film show I have ever seen. … How was it ravishing? It woke the audience up. I don’t mean that the Dartmouth students were asleep or inattentive. But this was a fusion of narrative, cinema, and technology that no one had witnessed before. Looking at the screen was miraculous again… (522-523)

In an interview quoted in Sitney’s Visionary Film, Ken Jacobs recalls a similar event from the 1960s. He had borrowed Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) to study it privately with Jack Smith, and the two had an ecstatic experience: “We looked at it in every possible way: on the ceiling, in mirrors, bouncing it all over the room in corners, in focus, out of focus, with a filter that Cornell had given me, without it, backwards. It was just like an eruption of energy…” (qtd. in Sitney 331).

Both stories remind me of the very first projectionist-led screenings of reverse motion, those playful interventions, and both also recall the public’s thrill and amazement

266 at the first sight of reverse motion, long before cinema became the industry it is today, and long before anyone had attempted to understand it through philosophy or film theory.

They attest that cinema was once a realm of invention and discovery, and that it can continue to be one, both in film theory and in film practice. The promise of the stories told by Thomson and Jacobs is the promise of an endless renewal of cinema, which is the promise of reverse motion itself. By running the film backwards, we can return once more to the potentials of cinema’s beginning. There, we will find out what comes next— new directions for research and exploration into the future—just after the end.

267

Figure 1. Paris Cinématographe program from March 1897 which mentions in bold, after the list of 13 films, that “The last two scenes will be shown in reverse.” Reproduced in Rittaud-Hutinet Le Cinéma des Origines 39.

268

Figure 2. Cinematograph program for Proctor’s Pleasure Palace, NYC, from March 1897, indicating that films and 8 and 12 will be shown in reverse, producing a “droll effect.” Reproduced in Robinson The History of World Cinema 22.

269

Figure 3. First known newspaper advertisement in Paris promoting reverse motion at the Cinématographe – “Vues à l’envers,” or “Views in reverse,” and the names of the two films which were to be shown in reverse – Demolition of a Wall and The Divers at the Bath in Milan (aka The Baths of Minerva, at Milan, Italy). In Le Figaro, 6 March 1897, p. 5

Figure 4. Édouard Hospitalier’s article “Curiosités Cinématographiques,” which describes how reverse motion might be created in cinema in a similar manner to the way that reverse sound was already being generated on phonographs – by turning the crank backwards. He also imagines what several scenes might look like in reverse, including drinking, smoking a cigar, or a fighter throwing off his clothes. Published in La Nature, 25 January, 1896: 114-115.

270

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APPENDIX I: DESCRIPTIONS OF FILMS LISTED IN CH. 2

The Serenaders (F. S. Armitage and Billy Bitzer, 1899 (copyrighted 1902)) A clarinetist and a trombonist stand on the street playing for a woman in a second-story window. When the clarinetist becomes angry and kicks the trombonist, a very brief reverse motion shot appears to carry the latter upwards to a ledge outside her window. The Library of Congress description misrecognizes this effect, writing that it “appears to be achieved through stop motion and a wire” (“The Serenaders”).

Avenue de l’Opera (Alice Guy, 1900) A view of the title Paris locale in reverse motion.

The Bathers (Cecil Hepworth, 1900) As noted above, many film companies besides International Photographic Co. produced their own knock-offs of the Lumières’ Divers at the Baths in Milan. When the The Bathers was offered for sale in the 1902 Edison catalog, it was listed under the name Bathing Made Easy (Brooke “The Bathers”). Edwin S. Porter made a version for Edison called The Reversible Divers (1901). Lubin Films produced one called High Diving and Reverse, quipping in their June 1904 catalog, “We know of no better picture for a headliner in a short subject than this” (“Lubin’s Films” 13-14). In 1905, Segundo de Chomón made The Fantastic Diver for Pathé, in which a man leaps from a diving board and emerges from the water in reverse ten times in a row. Selig Polyscope went so far as to list two reverse-diving films in their 1907 catalog, titled Reversible Divers and Bathers with High Diving. They advertised the latter as “An illusion which never fails to bring down the house” (74, 82).

The House that Jack Built (George Albert Smith, 1900) A little girl erects a structure out of building blocks. Her brother appears and tauntingly knocks it down bit by bit. At the midpoint of the film, a title card reading “Reversed” appears. Thereafter, the scene replays in reverse motion, and with the mischievous Jack now appearing to rebuild his sister’s house by magic.103

The Artist’s Dilemma (Edwin S. Porter, 1901) Dreaming, an artist attempts to paint a model on a large black canvas. A trickster/demon figure emerges from a grandfather clock and pushes the artist

103 Brooke “The House That Jack Built.” Brooke suggests that, in the context of G. A. Smith’s other narrative experiments of the period, the second half of the film could be interpreted as fulfillment of the little girl’s wish for the house to be restored.

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aside. In reverse motion, the demon quickly un-paints the picture, revealing a full-length portrait of the young woman.104

Aunt Sallie’s Wonderful Bustle (Edwin S. Porter, 1901) “Aunt Sallie” and a male companion walk atop a bridge or rampart. She falls headfirst off the wall, out of shot, and then, with the help of reverse motion, appears to fly back up to the spot from which she fell. The viewer is meant to assume that she bounced on her bustle.

Building Made Easy, or How Mechanics Work in the Twentieth Century (unknown, 1901) The Edison Manufacturing Company Catalog describes a scene in which, after a man with a wheelbarrow deposits a load of bricks at the base of a building under construction, “a brick mason then appears at the window with a tub, and holding it on the window sill, the bricks begin to fly from the ground into the tub” (88). The lengthy catalog description notes additional reverse-motion spectacle, advertising the film as “an entire novelty” containing “effects never heretofore accomplished.”

Catching an Early Train (Edwin S. Porter, 1901) This film consists of single shot which plays in reverse, appearing to depict several articles of clothing leaping from the floor onto the body of a man in a hurry to leave.105 A similar gag showed up some years later in the Urban film The Guard’s Alarm (Walter R. Booth, 1908), in which a railway guard buys a new alarm clock and has magical/comical dreams as he tries to sleep through it. In one scene, “As the guard runs backwards, his uniform clothing, article by article, flies to him and is hurriedly donned” (“Stories of the Films” 125).

The Puzzled Bather and His Animated Clothes (James Williamson, 1901) In this film, partially an elaboration on the reverse-diving trope, “a would-be bather tries in vain to undress, dives into the water fully clothed and reverses out in a swimsuit, whereupon his clothes leap out of the water and ‘magic’ themselves onto him” (Doel and Clarke 153-154). We might also group this film inside a larger set of films in which maddening series of inexplicable events conspire to prevent a character from accomplishing a task. Notable entries in this “under difficulties” genre include the Méliès films The Inn Where No Man Rests (1903), The Black Imp (1905), and The Luny Musician (1906), though those do not feature reverse motion.

104 The description of this film in the Library of Congress blatantly misrecognizes the reversal. They write, “He gestures to the artist, goes to the easel and with a large brush paints off the dark color. A picture of the young female model emerges” (Niver 14) 105 Niver (49) cites the film for its “trick camera effects,” but does not state that it has only one trick camera effect: reverse motion.

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The Reversing Sign Painter (unknown, 1901) Advertised in the Edison Manufacturing Company Catalog as a “puzzle picture,” the film depicts a sign painter who falls from his ladder when a cyclist collides with it, and then the same replayed in reverse: “By mysterious manipulation of the film we cause the bicycle to right itself and the rider to mount upon it and ride backwards out of the picture, while the stepladder suddenly rights itself and the painter springs backward on the top of the ladder....” (87)

The Yokel’s Luncheon (reversing) (George Albert Smith, ca. 1901) The Charles Urban Trading Company catalog describes the title character “devouring spoonfulls [sic] of pudding which action when reversed produces most ludicious [sic] results.” The following page of the catalog describes another film called The Monk's Maccaroni [sic] Feast (Reversing), also by Smith, offering much the same action, but with a different personage and foodstuff (110-111).

The Frustrated Elopement (Percy Stow, 1902) A father observes sneaking out her window with a suitor. He orders the young man to return her to her bedroom, which causes the couple to slide back up the ladder (in reverse motion).

The Spring Fairy (Segundo de Chomón, 1902) At the end of the film, the spring fairy seems to gather bouquets of flowers to her, each of which flies onscreen in reverse motion. Chomón repeated this sort of effect several times in later films. 1906’s The Troubador opens with the title character appearing to catch sheet music as it flies on screen in reverse motion. 1907’s The Red Spectre (co-directed with Ferdinand Zecca) features a red skeleton seeming to catch large blocks as they fly on screen in reverse motion, then causing them to leap into a wall-shaped stack atop which a moving image appears in double exposure. (This specific trick of un-toppling a wall upon which appears a double-exposed image also shows up in Chomón’s Magic Bricks (1908).) And in 1908’s Magic Dice, Melle Susanna (a frequent performer of magic in Chomón’s films) repeatedly appears to catch oversized dice flying in from offscreen before causing them to leap into elaborate structures.106

The Escaped Lunatic (Wallace McCutcheon, 1903) At about the midpoint of this film, the title character seems to jump into a tree (with the help of reverse motion) as guards pursue him. At this point, his flight from the asylum takes a turn, and in the second half of the film, he makes his way back to his cell.

106 Though Chomón is often sidelined as a Méliès copyist in abridged histories of cinema, close viewing of the seventy or so of Chomón’s surviving films reveal that he employed a broader set of aesthetic devices than Méliès, including multiple forms of animation, extensive exterior shooting, cutting in to close-ups, and reverse motion. Almost unbelievably, in the Méliès films which survive, not one through 1907 uses reverse motion.

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The Maniac Chase (Edwin S. Porter, 1904) Under directions from Edison, Porter plainly reshot McCutcheon’s American Biograph and Mutoscope film The Escaped Lunatic, with nearly identical shots and the same bit of reverse motion. It was one of several plagiarized Porter did of AB&M films around this time.

Climbing the American Alps (F. A. Dobson & Billy Bitzer, 1905) “Running the camera backward, shows … hop backward up a hill” (Niver 58)

An Eccentric Burglary (Frank S. Mottershaw, 1905) A chase film in which reverse motion allows a group of thieves to appear to jump backwards into a second-story window, among other oddities.

The Impossible Convicts (Billy Bitzer, 1905) A mix of forward and reverse motion shots, this film depicts a bizarre series of narratively-illegible events, apparently depicting a prison break. For a fuller description and a discussion of this film’s ambiguity, please refer to the description in the first chapter.

King of Dollars (Segundo de Chomón, 1905) After a magician's hand makes a series of coins appear, disappear, and rain out of man's mouth in close-up, the closing shot shows the tinted gold coins leaping out of the dish into the hands above using reverse motion.

Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Wallace McCutcheon, 1905) In this chase film, a single shot of reverse motion carries the characters and the pig up a chimney. This shot is also visible in Ken Jacobs’s 1969 re-imagining.

Magic Roses (Segundo de Chomón, 1906) A magician uses reverse motion to cause an apparently disorganized pile of flowers on the stage to ascend into a festive arrangement hanging from the ceiling.

Enchanted Glasses (Segundo de Chomón, 1907) In medium close-up, Melle Susanna un-pours water from a row of glasses.

The Enchanted Pond (Segundo de Chomón, 1907) Immediately following a jumpcut in which a line of women disappear, reverse motion sends water into another woman’s bucket, making it appear as though the women transformed into water and shot into her bucket.

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The Hypnotist’s Pranks (unknown, 1907) In this Gaumont film, “horses and vehicles are made to run backward [and] men do various almost impossible gymnastic feats” under the influence of fake hypnotism.107

Ki Ri Ki, Japanese Acrobats (Segundo de Chomón, 1907) This trick film enhances its effect by employing two tricks at once. Scene after scene, the title “acrobats” assume a number of ostensibly difficult poses. Though the neutral black background makes it appear as though the characters are standing, they are in fact lying flat on their backs (or on a slight incline) with the camera filming them from above. Each shot of them getting into a pose is instead a shot of them getting out of it played in reverse.

Pumpkins Race (Le Course des potirons) (Louis Feuillade, 1907) This film “uses reverse motion to animate its pumpkins for the purposes of a chase” (Fell 34)

The Runaway Horse (Le Cheval Emballé) (Louis J. Gasnier, 1907) In this chase film, which was remade by D. W. Griffith in 1909 as The Curtain Pole, which includes a nearly identical deployment of reverse motion, at least one shot of the chase plays in reverse.

107 Advertisement in The New York Clipper, 4 January 1908: 1280.

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