Towards a History and Aesthetics of Reverse Motion A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Andrew M. Tohline August 2015 © 2015 Andrew M. Tohline. All Rights Reversed. 2 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 3 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 it possible for the first time to view a simulation of entropy’s reversal – that is, to watch time run backwards. 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 film 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 comedy, 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. 4 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 feedback 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. 5 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 Emergence of Reverse Motion as a Technological Idea ........................................ 49 The Time-Image Before the Time-Image ..................................................................... 71 Chapter 2: Reverse Motion as Spectacle and Special Effect ............................................ 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 Mask: Reverse Motion as Special Effect in Classical Cinema ........ 112 Power over Time and Transcolonial Identity in Yeelen .............................................. 118 The Negotiated Reappearance of Reverse Motion in Post-Classical Cinematic Spectacle...................................................................................................................... 122 Spectacle in Other Spaces: Reverse Motion in Music Video ...................................... 127 6 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 Genre: 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 Dziga Vertov .............................. 226 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 250 References ....................................................................................................................... 270 Appendix I: Descriptions of Films Listed in Ch. 2 ......................................................... 292 7 LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: Paris Cinématographe program from March 1897 .......................................... 267 Figure 2: Cinematograph 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 8 INTRODUCTION Until nearly the end 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 attention 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 art 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 cut, 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. 9 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 play back the altered event. What are the consequences of temporal plasticity on human thought and consciousness? What new kinds of thinking or new creative possibilities does it make available to us? What reconfigurations of our understanding of narrative,