Movement Behind Your Back

Movement Behind Your Back: Cinematic Technology in Light of Simondon’s Philosophy of Technology University of Amsterdam Research Master’s Thesis in Media Studies Department of Media Studies Vladimir Lukin e-mail: [email protected] Supervisor: Dr. Abe Geil Second Reader: Dr. Marie-Aude L. Baronian Third Reader: Dr. Bernhard Rieder “La représentation du mouvement est la raison d’être du cinématographe, sa faculté maîtresse, l’expression fondamentale de son génie. […] l’affinité du cinématographe pour le mouvement va jusqu’à découvrir celui-ci là où notre œil ne sait pas le voir. ” — Jean Epstein, Le Cinéma du diable 2 Abstract Movement is the essence of cinema. But it is not the movement that we see on the screen but movement that happens behind our backs — both literally, in the cinematic apparatus in the movie theater, and metaphorically, for it defies our conceptual grasp. Thus, this thesis addresses the question of technical production of motion — the question which, as Tom Gunning aptly remarks, is “the repressed Freudian subject of film theory”. By drawing upon Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology, this thesis attempts to lay bare the technicity of cinematic technology and also to reveal the reasons why it remains misunderstood and under-theorized in the current debates on the moving image. This thesis contends that cinematic technicity can be defined through the three technical operations, namely, movement data organization, movement analysis, and movement synthesis. As this thesis attempts to demonstrate, the misconception of cinematic technicity occurs on both the technological and conceptual levels. If optical technologies obscure cinematic technicity on the technological level, I claim the concept of the image obscures our conceptual understanding of movement. It the process, this thesis provides a critical rereading of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts of cinematic movement and suggest to restage the current debates on the moving image not in terms of the image but in terms of movement. The project concludes by turning to the MPEG video codec family and explores its politics of movement production hidden in its algorithms. The final chapter explores datamoshing and glitch techniques in video art in order to show that these practices not only subvert the logic of standardization of codecs but also develop further cinematic technicity in its ability to generate new types of movement. Discussing datamoshing in negative terms of lo-fi aesthetics, suggesting image degradation, media theorists, I claim, fail to notice the politics of movement that grounds this aesthetics. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction: Movement Behind Your Back ..................................................5 2. The Technicity of Cinematic Technology......................................................10 2.1. Simondon’s philosophy of technology: Technicity as the Process of Concretization ...............................................................................................................................10 2.2 Technological Determinism and the Master Narrative .......................................13 2.3 The Absolute Origin: The Photographic Revolver of Jules Janssen ....................15 2.4 Minor and Major Improvements: Photography of Motion .................................18 2.5 The Interface Effect...........................................................................................21 2.6 The technicity of cinematic technology: Marey’s Movement Machines...............22 2.7 The Intermittent Movement: Edison and Lumière Brothers...............................26 3. Cinematic Technology in the Grip of Metaphors of Subjectivity...................29 3.1 Motion Production: the Repressed Subject of Film Theory ................................29 3.2 Bergson: Cinema as False Movement.................................................................32 3.3 Deleuze: Cinema as Real Movement ..................................................................36 3.3.1 Deleuze’s second commentary on Bergson......................................................37 3.3.2 Deleuze’s first commentary on Bergson..........................................................40 3.4 Toward a Politics of Movement..........................................................................44 4. Video Codecs and the Politics of Movement .................................................46 4.1 Video Codecs: That Obscure Object of Study ....................................................48 4.2 MPEG and Movement Coding/Decoding Algorithms .........................................49 4.3 The Metaphysics of Tamed Movement...............................................................53 4.4 The Structural Film 2.0: Datamoshing as Subversive Artistic Practice ...............57 4.6 Window Water Baby Moving/Window ater aby oving: Medium Specificity vs Technicity ...............................................................................................................61 4.7 The Smile of Mary.............................................................................................66 5. Conclusion...................................................................................................68 Bibliography ...................................................................................................70 4 1. Introduction: Movement Behind Your Back In 1954 Martin Heidegger published what is now considered a classical essay “The Question Concerning Technology”. With it, he inaugurated a new era in philosophy. From that moment the question concerning technology started to gain a prominent place in theoretical debates, not only in philosophy but also in sociology, cultural and media studies. Film studies was no exception. The recent anthology Technē/Technology, published by the Amsterdam University Press in 2014 in the series The Key Debates: Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies, eloquently demonstrates that today technology still remains a pressing issue. The increased attention on the technological dimension of film studies is due to two main reasons. On the one hand, the scholars belonging to The New Film History movement and then media archaeologists argued that the history of cinema could not be treated anymore as a linear, progressive, and teleological process (Elsaesser ed., 1990; Gaudreault ed., 2012). Consequently film studies witnessed the proliferation of research into cinema’s origins and its early days which produced a plethora of film genealogies, quite often incompatible with one another. On the other hand, the advent of CGI-technologies forced film scholars to pose anew the classical Bazinian question: “What is cinema?” Obviously, this question urged scholars to reexamine the technological basis of cinema, since it has been radically transformed in recent decades (Manovich, 2001; Rodowick, 2007). Screening practices also underwent serious transformations. The variety of ways cinema can be screened posed a serious challenge to film scholars and, as a result, studies of different cinematic dispositifs have flourished (Albera ed., 2011). That lead Thomas Elsaesser to claim that the main question for film theory today is no longer “What is cinema?” or even “When is cinema?” but “Where is cinema?” (“Early Film History” 21). Thus the ontological and historical modes of thinking about cinematic technology gave way to a topological one. My project does not seek to enter directly into these debates, which would produce yet another film ontology or trace a different genealogy of cinema. Rather, I 5 wish to explore these accounts of cinema, which are sometimes contradictory and incompatible with one another. What conditions these accounts, I contend, is the technicity of cinematic technology. To be clear, I deliberately use the term technicity in order to distinguish myself from common approaches that understand technology in terms of either social relations or experience and subjectivation. One of the most basic premises of my project is that cinematic technicity possesses some kind of agency and cannot be accounted only by its social and sensorial effects. Of course, humans and technology is so deeply entwined and connected that sometimes it is difficult to differentiate them. However, as I will try to demonstrate, analyzing the technicity solely in social terms only gives us a partial picture. Some scholars already signaled the narrow- mindedness of such an approach. In his Embodying Technesis, Mark Hansen argues against the view that technologies must be "one hundred percent" social and “that the cultural construction of technologies somehow exhausts the extent of their impact on our experience” (3). In his Transductions, Adrian Mackenzie claims that “technologies are … difficult to access in terms of subjects and societies” (XI). In Onto-Cartography, Levi Ryant asserts the right “to speak of the powers of things themselves, to speak of them as producing effects beyond their status as vehicles for social relations” (3). At last in his Protocol, Galloway challenges the hierarchy of terms and describes his project as not a work “about information society, but about the real machines that live within that society” (17). My project is very much in line with this type of inquiry and attempts to extract the technicity of cinematic technology from the complex network of socio-cultural relations onto which it is inevitably intertwined. Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology serves as the methodological basis for

Load more