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
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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.
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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 my project. The reason for this is threefold. First, since the technical object is in the center of his theory, his conceptual toolbox enables the exploration of the technical sphere in its own terms and differentiates it from the socio-economical sphere. Second, the concept of technicity allows theorization of the way technical objects evolve without bogging down in minute descriptions of various mechanisms. At the same time, it enables the analysis of cinematic technology in all its temporal and special variety. As I will argue, the three fundamental questions of film theory as
6 described by Thomas Elsaesser are in fact closely related. It is impossible to answer the question “Where is cinema?” without a preliminary answer to the question “What is cinema?” But this question, in turn, is also impossible to answer if we don’t know the genesis and evolution of cinematic technology, that is, if we don’t know the answer to the question “When is cinema?” In contrast to deterministic accounts on technology, Simondon’s theory doesn’t claim “media defines our situation” (Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter XXIX). On the contrary, it recognizes the openness of technological evolution and incorporates socio-cultural factors.
Approaching cinema from the Simondonian perspective, I will claim, allows us to pose the question of the technical production of motion — the question which, as Tom Gunning aptly remarks, is “the repressed Freudian subject of film theory” (“Animation and Alienation” 2). For as I will try to demonstrate, the essence of cinematic technology, to paraphrase Heidegger, is nothing optical. Seeing from the Simondonian perspective not only allow us to pose the question of the technical production of motion but it also lays bare the possible reasons why it has been repressed. Movement is the essence of cinema. But it is not the movement we see on the screen but movement that happens behind our backs — both literally, in the cinematic apparatus in the moving theater, and metaphorically. It is the movement which escapes today even dispositif theory. For, as I will argue, formulating a question in terms of dispositif (the conditions of screening of moving images) obscures the question of cinematic technicity (production of moving images), since the latter precedes and grounds the former.
Blinded by the radiance of the moving image on the screen, we fail to notice the technical movement which, in the era of analog cinema, lurked in the cinematic apparatus and now lurks in the algorithms of video codecs. This movement, as Mackenzie convincingly demonstrated, now remains on the sub-representative level. And as Hansen argued, due to the complexity of digital media we cannot grasp it in the movement of perception, for we remain ‘operationally blind’ to it. But, in fact, this was always the case. In the era of analog cinema, the coupling of the cinematic and optical technology was so tight that we failed to notice. However, Simondon’s
7 conceptual toolbox allows the separations of the technicity of cinematic technology from the optical one even during its first days.
Approaching the cinematic technology from the point of view of its technicity, I claim, induces the need for the conceptual articulation of movement and image in the notion of ‘the moving image’ which replaced the notion of the film (Gunning, “Animation and Alienation” 2). In order to explore this articulation, I propose to distinguish between the aesthetics of the image and the politics of movement, or, to be more precise, the politics of movement production. As I will demonstrate, different film theories and filmic production put into practice different politics of movement. Movement manipulations can be valorizes, as was the case of the first wave of French avant-garde filmmakers with their concept of photogénie, or it can be downplayed or even barred, as certain theoretical works of Andre Bazin demonstrated. However, in order to stay within the limits of the technical sphere, I ultimately turn to look at the MPEG video codec family in order to reveal the politics of movements operated in motion rendition algorithms. Analyzing certain datamoshing films which make this politics visible, I attempt to explore the ways in which the politics of movement affects the aesthetics of the image.
Chapter description
Following Chapter One (“Introduction: Movement Behind Your Back”), Chapter Two (“The Technicity of Cinematic Technology”) explores the pre-history of cinematic technology in order to lay bare its technicity. The chapter introduces Simondon’s conceptual framework and situates my project within the current debates in film theory and media archaeology. The main aim of the chapter is to untangle the genealogy of the cinematic technology from that of optical technologies in order to demonstrate that what accounts for cinematic technology as such is its operations of movement analysis and synthesis. These operations can be implemented in various ways as the history of pre-cinematic technologies demonstrate. However, on the conceptual level they remain stable. In addition, optical technologies, I claim, serve as interfaces of cinematic technology. While they are indispensible for movement data detection and projection, on the level of technicity, however, they remain external to
8 cinematic technology and historically contingent. Optical technologies, I argue, obscure the technicity of cinematic technology. Therefore it is the movement and its manipulations and not image that defines cinematic technology. Revealing the technicity will enable me to show how it grounds our ontological theories.
If Chapter Two analyses the misconception of cinematic technicity on the technological level, Chapter Three (“Cinematic Technology in the Grim of Metaphors of Subjectivity”) analyses its miscomprehension on the conceptual level. If optical devices obscured cinematic technicity on the technological level, I claim the concept of the image obscures the concept of movement. In order to trace possible reasons for such misconceptions, I take on a critical rereading of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts of cinema in order to demonstrate how the concept of the image contaminates their understanding of cinematic movement. Instead of issues of the image— thinking cinematic movement in terms true/false — I argue we need to reformulate the debate in terms of the issues of movement and consider cinematic technology in terms of virtual/actual: which new (virtual) movements that cinema enables and how. Such reconfiguration of the debate allows posing the question of the politics of movement production.
Chapter Four (“Video Codecs and the Politics of Movement”) how the cinematic technicity was transformed by digital technologies. Specifically, it critically examines MPEG video codec family in order to lay bare the politics of movement hidden within its algorithms. By drawing upon Bergson and Deleuze’s distinction between the ancient and the modern way of considering movement, I reveal the paradoxical way in which video codecs combine these two ways of considering movement in their algorithms. In addition, I explore datamoshing and glitch techniques in video art in order to show that these practices not only subvert the logic of standardization but also develop further cinematic technicity in its ability to generate new types of movement. Many media theorists, I claim, fail to notice this as they continue to discuss datamoshing in negative terms of the glitch aesthetics, suggesting image degradation, and fail to notice that it also introduces new types of movement into cinema.
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2. The Technicity of Cinematic Technology
Before looking at the history of pre-cinematic technologies, I must first introduce Simondon's conceptual framework. I will explicate and assess Simondon's most basic notions and will try to distinguish his approach from both media archeology and the social construction of methodologies on technology. In rereading the history of pre-cinematic technologies, I will try to lay bare the technicity of cinematic technology which, as I will argue, can be defined through the three technical operations, namely, movement data organization, movement analysis, and movement synthesis. My aim in this section will be to distinguish the lineage of cinematic technology from that one of optical devices. As I will argue, merging genealogies of optical devices and cinematic technology together obscures the technicity of the latter and leads to its misreading, for the concept of image prevails over that of movement. Lastly, I will conclude this section with a discussion on the opportunity for new critical assessments of film ontologies, and how I will move forward with a critical assessment of the concept of cinematic movement in film philosophy.
2.1. Simondon’s philosophy of technology: Technicity as the Process of Concretization
Simondon doesn’t propose a general theory of technology, nor does he attempt to define the essence of technicity as such. Rather, he attempts to account for the universe of technical objects in all its variety and diversity1. Such a middle-level approach immediately poses certain methodological complications. Right at the start of his thesis On the Mode of the Existence of the Technical Object (1958), Simondon
1 As many scholars indicated, the driving force of Simondon’s philosophical project is ethical. He fought against the misrepresentation of technics in public consciousness and sought to reintegrate technology back into culture. For more on the ethics of technical culture see Gilbert Hottois Simondon et la philosophie de la « culture technique ». Bruxelles: De Boeck-Wesmael, 1993.
10 warns against two fallacious, if common, ways of thinking about technology. First, we can theorize technical objects as a tool and think about them, as Simondon puts it, “in terms of the practical end it is designed to meet” (On the Mode 11). But this approach immediately leads us to confusion. For example, both an analog clock and a digital clock perform the same function or, to use Simondon’s vocabulary, they both were designed to serve for the same practical end, namely, to show time. However, on the structural level they operate differently and employ different technical elements. As Simondon rightly remarks: “Usage brings together heterogeneous structures” (On the Mode 11). At the same time, one cannot simply analyze a given technical object in terms of its structure. Furthermore, the same structural elements can be found in different technical objects — for example, in a digital clock and in a digital doorbell — as such, a simple description does not suffice. The same structural element can perform diverse functions in various technical devices. In order to get out from theoretical impasse, Simondon suggests analyzing how these structural elements evolve and transform when they are used in specific technical objects: “The individual technical object is not such and such a thing given here and now (hic et nunc), but something that has a genesis” (On the Mode 12). As Simondon demonstrates in On the Mode of the Existence of the Technical Object and elsewhere2, we can only get access to the specificity of technological object. This is why he defines the technical object as ‘a unit of becoming’. He elaborates this point further: “The genesis of the technical object is part of its being. The technical object is something that does not exist prior to its becoming, but that is present at every stage of that becoming” (On the Mode 12). In other words, we shouldn’t only analyze the current structure and its constitutive elements of a specific technical object. We must also take into account the temporal dimension, that is, we must trace the evolution of this structure in the course of inventions and improvements. One might notice a Bergsonian inspiration lying behind Simondon’s project: it is only by taking into account both the actual (a given structure) and the virtual (the genesis of this structure) that we can get a proper understanding of the specificity of a technical object.
According to Simondon, what defines technical evolution is the process of refinement. Again, he warns us not to think too hastily of refinement in terms of
2 See especially his course L'invention dans les techniques. Seuil, 2005.
11 usefulness or profitability. Economical and practical reasons, indeed, play an important role in the evolution of technical objects but these are only external criteria which obscure the essential nature of the technical object. Here, he subtly argues against Marx: “If technical objects evolve in the direction of a small number of specific types, it is by virtue of an internal necessity and not as a consequence of economic influences or practical demands; it is not the production-line that produces standardization; rather, it is intrinsic standardization that makes production line possible” (On the Mode 17). The internal necessity Simondon mentions here is a process of concretization. A historical example of the car engine might help to elucidate his idea.
Invention, Simondon states, begins with a primitive or abstract form. In the abstract form of the car engine, each sub-system is independent. We can even say that the 1910 engine is more ‘perfect’ than the 1956 engine. Simondon supports this seemingly paradoxical claim with the following example: “Old engines work on fishing boats without breaking down after being taking out of worn-out cars” (On the Mode 13). And this exactly testifies to the abstract character of the old engine. But one cannot equip a boat with a modern engine simply because every part of it is interrelated and dependent on one another that together they form a technical ‘individual’: “In the current engine every piece is so well connected with the rest by reciprocal exchanges of energy that it cannot be other than it is” (On the Mode 7). For example, the shape of the modern engine has been formed not only to perform its function effectively but also to incorporate some elements of the cooling system. Thus each element of the concrete technical object is interrelated with others and performs not only its initial function but also that of others that used to be external to it. As Simondon notices: “Technological progress is achieved through a dialectical relationship between mediation (adaptation to the end terms …) and autocorrelation, the relation between the technical object and itself ” (qtd. in Chabot 11). We can therefore summarize that the abstract car engine — and the abstract technical object in general — lacks the system of autocorrelation: “The different parts of the engine are like individuals who could be thought of as working each in his turn without their ever knowing one another” (On the Mode 14). Thus, Simondon arrives at the conclusion that the evolution of the technical object is defined by the process of concretization: “[The] divergence of functional aims remains as a residue of
12 abstraction in the technical object, and the progressive reduction of this margin between functions of polyvalent structures is what defines the progress of a technical object, it is this convergence that specifies the technical object” (On the Mode 16). We might conclude that the Simondonian analysis of technicity aims at distinguishing certain tendencies within the development of technical objects and attempts to account for technical object on the basis of the tendency which engenders it. Simondon’s approach to technology is thus in compliance with his ontology of individuation which can be summarized in the following motto: “To know the individual through the individuation rather than the individuation starting from the individual” (qtd. in Barthélémy 207).
Having described Simondon’s basic theoretical presuppositions, I will now attempt the rereading the history of proto-cinematic technologies in order to reveal the technicity of cinematic technology thereby complicating and articulating his theory of concretization. But before I proceed, a couple remarks need to be made regarding the aim of my analysis and possible misreadings of Simondon’s theory.
2.2 Technological Determinism and the Master Narrative
In recent decades, film theorists have radically reconsidered early film history. Film scholars like Tom Gunning, Noël Burch, André Gaudreault, Thomas Elsaesser and many others have tried to reread the first years of cinema in its own terms. Having abandoned the idea of linear history, they criticized the idea of early cinema as a primitive precursor of the matured narrative cinema and, instead, theorized it as a complex phenomenon whose cultural identity and aesthetic motivation significantly differs from the cinema as we know it today.
In its turn media archaeology — a recently established academic discipline partially inspired by the New Film History movement3 — questioned the dominant modes of media historiography and aimed at a radical revaluation of the technological history of media and cinema in particular: non-linear, non-teleological, and non- progressive. Many new methodologies have been proposed: Kittler’s discourse
3 See chapter 2 of Jussi Parrika. What is Media Archaeology? Polity, 2012.
13 network analysis, Zielinsky’s variantology, Huhtamo’s theory of topoi, to name a few. In his recent article, Deac Rossell criticises film historians for their persistent commitment to ‘master narrative’4 and, instead, proposes to consider the social construction of technology for it enables the consideration of “the artefacts of early cinema … symmetrically, giving equal weight to both successful and failed innovations” (318). Against the background of such paradigmatic shifts, Simondon’s theory of technical concretization might look hopelessly outdated, if not, naïve. For at first glance, it is subject to both technological determinism and a neglect of socio- economical factors. I propose such miscomprehensions of Simondon’s theory should be immediately dispelled.
First, Simondon is by no means a technological determinist. It is not a coincidence that he talks about the genesis of the technical object, for the technicity of the technical object can only be inferred retrospectively. Jean-Yves Chateau explicates Simondon’s theory of the technical invention: “There’s but the objectivity of the successful, realized, and accomplished invention … which allow retrospectively to qualify the preceding process as an ‘invention’” (17, my translation5). Even when Simondon talks about the “essence”, or the “absolute origin” of the technical object, he understands it temporally, that is, both as the principle of identity and the principle of production: “Technical essence can be recognized by the fact that it remains stable across an evolutionary line, and not only stable, but also productive of structures and functions through internal development and progressive saturation” (qtd. in Barthélémy 215).
Second, a reader of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects might get the impression that Simondon ignores socio-economical factors considers its importance minor for the question of technicity. Nonetheless, as his lecture courses
4 “The principal assumption that underlay this inadequate perception of the years of invention of moving pictures in the nineteenth century concerned an unexamined belief in the steady progress of technology, a technology whose success was its own justification and which evolved in an inevitable and unerring way towards the matured cinematic institution of projecting narrative (and sometimes documentary) films to mass audiences in large fixed cinemas” (Rossell 306) 5 “Il n'y a ici que l' objectivité de l‘invention réussie, effectuée , achevée , de l' objet effectivement inventé, qui, après coup et rétrospectivement, autorise à qualifier le processus qui l'a précédée comme celui d'une « invention ».”
14 testify, Simondon analyzed technology from both objective and subjective perspectives. The theory of technical concretization is mirrored in his theory of the psychology of technical invention6. Besides, his theory of technical concretization doesn’t neglect the importance of socio-economical factors —his 1974 lecture contains considerations on “social, cultural and, economic” conditions of inventions (L'invention dans les techniques 310) — but, at the same time, it doesn’t allow them to be the sole determinant of technological development7. In that respect, his approach stands in stark contrast with the theory of social construction of technology which argues that “technological artifacts are culturally constructed and interpreted” (Pinch and Bijker 40). Simondon’s theory provides a conceptual toolbox that allows to reveal the agency of technological artifact and which grounds social interpretations.
Finally, my analysis might give an impression of building a master narrative of the invention of moving pictures as it only deals with the apparatuses which contributed to the cinema as we know it today. Choosing only these inventions was my conscious decision dictated by the nature of my research and shouldn’t be understood as an argument against Simondon’s theory and its supposed narrowness. As I indicate further, Simondon’s conceptual toolbox allows representing the history of cinematic technology as a garden of forking paths. Furthermore, my analysis doesn’t attempt to account for the history of cinematic technology in all its variety. Rather, it aims at laying bare the technicity of cinematic technology as we know it today. And the fact that video codecs — one of the dominant forms of cinematic technicity today — is the final destination of my project justifies this decision.
2.3 The Absolute Origin: The Photographic Revolver of Jules Janssen
My historical analysis starts with the account of Jules Janssen’s experiments for it is here, I contend, we can see “the absolute origin” of cinematic technology.
6 For a detailed discussion of the objective and subjective sides of the technical invention and their relationship see Jean-Yves Chateau’s introduction in Gilbert Simondon. L’Invention dans les technique. Paris: Seuil, 2006. 7 As Simondon remarks in his course Imagination et Invention: “It would be partially false to say that invention is made to obtain a goal, to realize an effect that was known in advance’ because ‘true invention contains a leap, a power that amplifies and surpasses simple finality and the limited search for an adaptation” (qtd. in Barthélémy 216).
15 Optical devices, like camera obscura, laterna magica or optical toys of the XIX century, as I will explain, belong to a different technological lineage. For the sake of my argument, it is useful to mark the difference between them. Therefore, I bracket off the history of optical technologies despite admitting that analyzing them could also bring new insights into media theory.
Pierre-Jules-César Janssen (1824-1907) was a French astronomer who succeeded in photographing the different phases of the passage of Venus between the sun and the earth. It is an extremely rare phenomenon which occurs only twice in a century and, in order to document it, Janssen constructed a device known as the ‘Photographic Revolver’ which allowed him to take a series of successive pictures at regular short intervals (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Janssen’s Photographic Revolver
French film historian Laurent Mannoni describes the Photographic Revolver as “a system with a rotating disc coated in photosensitive emulsion, whose circumference would be revealed and exposed at successive intervals by an intermittent electrical mechanism” (300). Although it was still a very primitive device, seeing from a Simondonian perspective, it nonetheless had a certain level of auto-correlation. As Mannoni further specifies: “The instrument was self-contained, and produced the series of images itself without intervention from the operator. The circular plate was inserted in the revolver, and the operator pressed a release pin which activated the clockwork mechanism constructed by Rédier” (301). This
16 machine marked a true beginning in chronophotography, though “at the same time it didn’t have any significant future, since the sensitive disc … could only record a limited number of images” (Mannoni 301).
Janssen dreamed about a device that would allow one “to capture successive ‘instantaneous’ images of humans or animals in motion” (Mannoni 301). Bearing that in mind, we can deduce a first preliminary formula of moving image technology:
movement analysis via ‘instantaneous’ images + automatic succession
Janssen’s Photographic Revolver was far from perfect and his followers undertook serious attempts to improve it. Still, here we can already see a direction of technical improvement — increasing the speed of automatic succession by means of increasing the number of ‘instantaneous’ images and improving the photosensitivity of a photoplate. One immediately notices here a paradoxical rationale which lay behind this technical invention — in order to analyze movement one needs to decompose it into a sequence of static images.
As for the technicity of this invention, we can see that it consists of constructing a technical object with a specific function by using other technical objects (other examples include Plateau’s Phenakitoscope, daguerreotype, the revolving devise, and the Maltese Cross). Their functionality, however, had nothing to do with the functionality of a newly constructed technical object, for here they serve only as elements of the new technical object and lose their individuality. Pascal Chabot neatly summarizes Simondon's point: “Technological invention consists of assembling a coherent system from disparate elements” (14). These disparate elements can be both natural and artificial. They form what Simondon calls the pre- individual and serve as conditions for the appearance of new technical individuals.
My analysis of Janssen’s device might be summarized with an insightful remark by Virgilio Tosi which confirms the preliminary technical formula of cinematic technology:
17 The real birth of cinema is not to be found in the invention and development of the cinematic spectacle. […] The real birth of cinema was determined in the nineteenth century by the needs of scientific research, by the need (and the gradually increasing technical possibilities) to record physical reality in its dynamic quality for the purposes of analysis, discovery and therefore understanding. (Tosi XI, my italics)
At the same time, Janssen took as his task not only the analysis of movement but also its reproduction. When he presented his device to the Société Française de Photographie on 1 April 1876, he wrote: “The property of the revolver, to be able to produce automatically a numerous series of closely spaced images as required of a rapidly changing phenomena, permits us to approach some interesting questions of physiological mechanism relating to the walk, flight and other movements of animals…” (qtd. in Manonny 303). But it was Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne- Jules Marey who later succeeded in this task. I will now proceed from the astronomical observations of Janssen to the physiological experiments of Edward Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey in inscribing movement.
2.4 Minor and Major Improvements: Photography of Motion
Since the technicity of cinematic technology is the primary aim of my analysis, I will skip biographical details of the inventors of pre-cinematic technology. In this section I will concentrate on the technological aspects of Eadweard Muybridge’s (1830-1904) photographic studies of motion8.
In his book The Great Art of Life and Shadow, Mannoni has a very telling chapter title — “Eadweard Muybridge and the Photography of Motion”. It neatly summarizes Muybridge’s approach and the paradox lying at the origin of cinematic technology. Although Muybridge brought about a very sophisticated system for making pictures of galloping horse, he did not attempt to invent an automatic system
8 As Simondon argues, technicity possesses its own temporality which should be distinguished from a ‘general’ history. Major and minor improvements discussed in this section can be understood as processes and points of reference which structure the technical temporality.
18 for taking successive instantaneous photos. Instead, he used a row of photo cameras. The shutter of each was triggered by a thread as the horse passed (in later studies he used a clockwork device to set off the shutters and capture the images). Muybridge achieved impressive scientific results but on the level of technicity it wasn’t a step forward. Muybridge “rigidly adopted a single and unique method of taking pictures. Even though it was improved over the years, a technical solution which involved photographing movement with batteries of twenty-four or even forty cameras in series had no future” (Mannoni 308).
Fig. 2. Muybridge's battery-of-cameras method.
Muybridge’s system for taking pictures of moving bodies is often considered one of the predecessors of cinema. Although it is true that Muybridge tried to solve the same scientific problem as Janssen, from a technological perspective, he didn’t invent anything new, nor did he improve on the system devised by Janssen. A picture of a battery of cameras is a perfect example of the definition of abstract technical object given by Simondon: “The different parts of the [technical object] are like individuals who could be thought of as working each in his turn without their ever knowing one another” (On the Mode 14). Instead of inventing a new device from different heterogeneous structures, Muybridge simply combined several technical objects of the same structure. One cannot help but think about Muybridge’s spacious system (see Fig. 2) which he built in his yard when one reads the following lines from
19 Simondon about the abstract technical object: “Because of its analytical character, this object uses more material and needs more construction work; while it is simpler logically, it is more complicated technically because it is made from a bridging of several complete system” (On the Mode 18-19).
We can say that Muybridge made a minor improvement. Simondon distinguishes between minor and major improvements in the following way: whereas major improvements increase the synergy of functioning through structural transformations, minor improvements just “diminish the harmful consequences of residual antagonisms” (On the Mode 36). As he elaborates his point further: “Minor improvements are harmful to major improvements, because they conceal the real imperfections of a technical object by using non-essential devices, incompletely integrated into the functioning of the whole, to compensate for real antagonisms” (On the Mode 36). What was the real antagonism at the origin of cinematic technology? We can say that it was the problem of analyzing movement (something dynamic) by means of instantaneous images (something static). The automatic system for taking and consequently reproducing successive images invented by Janssen was the first technical answer to this basic problem or antagonism. It was still too abstract, and it was the technical genius of Marey, Edison and the Lumiere brothers who made essential, or major, improvements and turned a nascent cinematic technology into a concrete technical object. The important thing to keep in mind is that “minor improvements promote a false understanding of the continuity of progress in technical objects” (On the Mode 37). We should pay attention to leap in the development of the technical object, since its “genesis is achieved by essential and discontinuous improvements” (On the Mode 38). As one can notice, from that perspective, Simondon’s conceptual framework is by no means linear and teleological for it allows the exploration of different processes of concretization with the same ‘absolute origin’, Augmented by his theory of socio-economical and cultural conditions of the technical invention, his conceptual framework enables the accounting of both successful and failed inventions. “Many abandoned technical objects are incomplete inventions which remain as an open-ended virtuality and could be taken up once more and given new life in another field according to the profound intention which informs them, that is, their technical essence” (On the Mode 38). One can see here an attractive theoretical paradigm which in comparison with dominant media
20 archaeological practices — epistheme (Albera), discourse networks (Kittler), or topoi (Huhtamo) — departs from the technicity and doesn’t consider technological artifacts as solely “culturally constructed and interpreted’ (Pinch and Bijker 40) while, at the same time, escaping the pitfalls of technological determinism.
2.5 The Interface Effect
Before I move on to describe Marey’s experiments in inscribing motion, I would like to pause on the following moment of Muybridge’s biography, since it looks quite emblematic. When Muybridge got decent pictures of the galloping horse the question arose how to present them to the public. As Mannoni describes: “Finally, at the end of 1879, Muybridge too began to wonder about the magic lantern. It was a classic intellectual progression: the inventor perfects a new method of animation, but then needs to exhibit it to everyone ‘on a big screen’” (311). This historical evidence illustrates an important point — cinematic technology and optical technologies belong to different genealogical lines. Different inventors used different optical devices, such as the magic lantern or the Zoopraxiscope, in order to present the results of their research. What’s significant here is that all these devices were only important for demonstrating the results of movement analysis. By using a term form software studies, they can be described as interfaces9 between cinematic technology and a human being. And history gives us a plethora of examples of different types of interfaces — the magic lantern, Edison’s peep-show, Lumiere’s projector, etc. Indeed, the invention of the movie projector was essential for the establishment of cinema as a phenomenon of mass culture, but there’s nothing essential about the movie projector from the point of view of the technical genesis of the cinematic technologies. Therefore, we should be careful not to confuse cinematic technology with optical technologies even if they are so closely connected that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between them10.
9 Lev Manovich defines interface as “the ways to represent (‘format’) and control the signal” (“Media After Software”37). As it will be explained further, in the case of cinematic technology the signal is represented in the form of movement data. 10 As I will try to demonstrate in Chapter Four, this distinction became more pronounced during the era of digital cinematic technologies.
21 Still, it would be an overstatement to say that concretizations of optical devices and cinematic technology have nothing in common. They are not external to one another: if anything, they are tightly related, which explains why conceptualizations of the moving image are so biased toward the image rather than movement. But, as Simondon stresses, the process of concretization includes both the technical individual and its associated milieu. As Simondon writes: “the technical being creates around itself [the technical milieu] and that conditions it in the same way that this milieu is conditioned by the technical being” (MEOT 56-57). In other words, the technical object and its associated milieu are coextensive to one another. Optical devises affect the process of concretization of cinematic technology, for they define the way movement data is registered and represented. At the same time, cinematic technology also affected the process of concretizing optical technologies11. As sensitive receivers, optical technologies supply the cinematic technology with movement data; as projecting devices, they allow to represent movement in a legible way12. But as Alexander R. Galloway demonstrated, interface is a “control allegory" (The Interface Effect 30); it is important to take into account not only what it enables but also what it hides and limits. The significance of this inherited characteristic of interfaces will be explored in the Chapter Four of my thesis.
2.6 The technicity of cinematic technology: Marey’s Movement Machines
French scientist and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) invented many different apparatuses for capturing images of movement. In 1863, he constructed the “Sphygmographe” — a graphical plot of the pulse. He also recorded muscular movement by the means of the so-called “Myographe”, not to mention a
11 The following observation by Rossell supports my claim: “Although many historians today consider the magic lantern, and magic lantern culture, a significant precursor of moving pictures, a symmetrical look at the facts and artefacts of alternative optical intermittent mechanisms discards the idea of the magic lantern as only a ‘precursor’ of moving pictures. Instead, the magic lantern was the environment into which the cinema was born, the milieu which nursed it through its extended period of invention to about 1903” (321, my italics). He then describes how optical technologies fostered the development of the cinematic technology: “Projection on larger screens demanded an absolute steadiness in the picture” (323). 12 On legibility of movement and cinematic technology see Mary Ann Doane. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Harvard University Press, 2002.
22 host of other scientific instruments — Polygraphe, Dromographe, Cardiographe, and other thermographs. Initially he ignored photography, believing that the graphic approach was a “universal language” of science. After he became acquainted with Muybridge’s experiments, however, he changed his opinion and, starting from 1878, he began to incorporate photographic technologies into his own research. In 1882 he significantly improved Jannsen’s photographic revolver by making his own ‘photographic rifle’ (gelatino-bromide plates were more sensitive then the daguerreotype or collodion). Still, his two major improvements were the fixed-plate chronographic camera and the celluloid film chronophotograph.
Marey presented his new photographic process at the Académie des Sciences on 2 July 1882. A distinctive feature of this device was that it could combine several successive images on a single photographic plate (Fig. 3). Another important feature of the technical structure of the chronographic camera was that it took a series of images at strictly regular intervals. As Mannoni comments: “It was not the case in Muybridge’s system, in which the horses themselves, travelling at varying speed, released the electric shutter” (338).
Fig. 3. Examples of Marey’s chronophotography.
We can see thus than in terms of its technicity it was a major improvement in comparison with Muybridge’s system. First, the system was auto-correlated — it
23 made pictures automatically. More importantly it was an attempt to solve the basic antagonism of dynamic movement/static images lying at the core of cinematic technology. Photography here was used to record not the trace of the physical body but the trace of the movement itself13. This is especially noticeable on photographs where Marey dressed his subject in a dark costume with narrow strips of shiny metal. One cannot help but think of Marey as a precursor of motion capture technologies.
By combining several shots on the same plate Marey tried to overcome two limitations of the photographic rifle. First, a rotating disc allowed him to make only a limited number of pictures. Second, each picture represented only one fragment of motion, whereas for Muybridge the task was to represent movement in its entirety. His invention was only a partial solution to these problems and still had certain shortcomings. Marey was aware of them. For instance, he complained: “If the object is animated with too slow a movement, or if it is performing movements in a single location, the images are imperfectly separated or even completely superimposed” (qtd. in Mannoni 341). It is only by using the sensitized paper strip and then the celluloid film that he was able to solve this problem. On 3 Octover 1890, Marey filed his first patent on the photography of motion where he wrote: “This apparatus is arranged to receive successive images on a strip of sensitized film. This film is mounted on enclosed spools; it moves rapidly past the focal point of the lens and stops during the time of exposure” (qtd. in Mannoni 343).
As Mannoni comments on this event: “At last, life and motion had been captured and secured in all their phases on a flexible, sensitive, transparent base: the film” (321). Due to its compact size and flexibility, the film stock allowed a more advanced level of integration and auto-correlation. We can also see how the basic antagonism of movement via static images is solved here. The filmstrip moved intermittently and stopped during the moment of taking a photo.
13 As Doane remarks: “He [Marey] moves from the graphic method to the photographic method only to defamiliarize, derealize, even de-iconize the photographic image” (54). This might be seen as a confirmation that when the technical object forms an element of the new process of concretization it redefines its technical functionality. As I will demonstrate in Chapter Three, the confusion of photographic and cinematic technologies was one of the reasons of Bergson’s misunderstanding of cinema.
24 Another important distinction of Marey in comparison with his predecessors is that he tried to provide not only movement analysis but also its synthesis. Janssen and Muybridge’s main concern was how to present the results of their research to their audience, both to professionals and laymen. For Marey, synthesis was about verifying the results of analysis of movement. As Mannoni remarks: “Synthesis would allow him to confirm whether or not the analysis had been made correctly” (324). So, when he needed to illustrate his experiments, he used a turning zoetrope or projected a chronographic image with the magic lantern, but at the same time he started to think how to make a chronophotographic camera reversible, that is, how to make it not only able to record movement but also to reproduce it. He eventually designed a chronographic projector, but it was still far from perfect. The main shortcoming was the lack of a system for image stabilization: “Marey’s films were not perforated. This was a major defect, since without perforations the movement of the film throughout the camera was not constant and the pictures were not evenly paced” (Mannoni 345- 346). It was Edison who used the perforated filmstrip for the first time. Marey’s failure to construct a decent projector might be also partially explained by his ‘scientific’ mind. As François Dagognet surmises in his monograph Etienne-Jules Marey. A Passion for the Trace: “It was not a matter of chance that theoretical success was accompanied by lack of interest and partial failure in the practical sphere. Marey preferred absorbing the spectacle of the world into graphs rather than the opposite. He had no interest in the artifice of fictitious moving images” (157). Even if this claim is debatable, it is difficult to deny that Marey was more disposed to movement analysis than synthesis in his scientific endeavor.
Marey’s experiments allow us understand better the genesis of cinematic technology. Our formula now should look as follows:
movement analysis/synthesis via instantaneous images + automatic succession by means of the intermittent movement mechanism.
However, as Marey’s experiments demonstrate, there are many systems to produce instantaneous images. They can also be recorded in the variety of ways. In addition, we should bear in mind that images didn’t necessarily have to be instantaneous photos. Marey oscillated between graphic and photographic modes of
25 representation and we shouldn’t deny the former simply because it didn’t play a major role in the history of cinema as an art form. Again, my concern here is the genesis of cinematic technology and not its dominant socio-cultural forms. Abstracted from the historical formulation, the basic formula of cinematic technology runs like this:
movement data + movement analysis + movement synthesis
On a level of technicity, moving technology is the assemblage of these three basic and inevitably quite abstract (in the Simondonian meaning of the word) elements. It organizes data in a certain way in order to enable operations of movement analysis and its consequent synthesis. Obviously the engineering problem of movement analysis and synthesis can have different solutions as the history of technology clearly demonstrates. What’s important to keep in mind is that all three operations are important in cinematic technology. As I will try to demonstrate at the end of the chapter, they are incompatible ontologies.
2.7 The Intermittent Movement: Edison and Lumière Brothers
A typical historical account of Edison and the Lumière brothers’ contribution to the development of cinematic technology usually sees the most drastic difference in their spectatorial usage. On the one hand, Edison’s Kinetoscope was designed for individual viewing while, on the other hand, Lumière’s Cinématographe was contrived as a projecting device which, in turn, defined its subsequent social- economical success. From the point of view of Simondon, however, this was a minor improvement that obscures the essential difference between these two apparatuses. In addition, as I indicated above, optical media belong to a different technological lineage. Therefore, in my analysis, I will concentrate my attention on the structural differences between these two devices.
From the perspective of technicity, the first important movement is the fact that for Edison both analysis and synthesis were equally important. In the first draft of his patent he famously wrote:
26 I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion, and in such a form as to be both Cheap practical and convenient. This apparatus I call a Kinetoscope ‘Moving View’. (qtd. in Mannoni 389, my italics).
Since his initial source of inspiration was the phonograph, he tried to implement the Kinetoscope with the photographic cylinder. “But in November 1889 there was a complete about-turn: Edison abandoned his optical phonograph to adopt the process of photochronography on a sensitized strip, as recommended by Marey since 1888. He added one essential element, possibly borrowed from Reynaud: perforation” (Mannoni 391). It was perforation that allowed him to implement a sufficiently regular drive mechanism and to stabilize movement. However, Edison used perforation only for making films and not for their demonstration in the Kinetoscope. In the Kinetoscope the band travelled continuously. In addition, the film band was looped allowing only a very short film to be shown. These characteristics indicate a lower level of auto-correlation.
The Lumière brothers, on the other hand, retained the mechanism of intermitted movement for the Cinématographe. Two pins or claws were inserted into the sprocket holes punched into the celluloid filmstrip; the pins moved the film along and then retracted, leaving the film stationary during exposure. Louis Lumière designed this process of intermittent movement based on the way in which a sewing machine worked, a tactic that Edison had considered but rejected in favor of continuous movement. This allowed him to get a stable reproduction of movement and, coupled with its relatively small size, allowed the Cinématographe to achieve a concrete character as an invention.
Discussing the history of the Maltese Cross, Rossell notes: “From the beginning, there were many proposals for constructing a mechanical intermittent movement” (321). By analyzing the history of these mechanism, he somewhat scornfully remarks: “Historians are well aware of the great variety of intermittent mechanisms offered on the market in the early days of moving pictures, but have either simply chosen to ignore those that were not in the ‘mainstream’ of later practice
27 or have passed off this tumult of activity as merely attempts by various latecomers to find a patentable device not in conflict with prior apparatus” (321). While the study of alternative technical devices might be important for the film history, it doesn’t add much to the discussion of the technicity of cinematic technology. Technicity is accounted by the initial antagonism (‘the absolute origin’, or ‘essence’) and the technical functionality which has been suggested in order to overcome this antagonism in its temporal development (via minor and major improvements). Specific technical devices are implementations of the process of concretization, partially by definition. Ontologically preceding the technical object, the process of concretization by no means determines particular actualizations of the virtual tendency contained in the technicity. In the Cinematograph, movement data was organized as a series of photographic images, which were related to each other by means of intermittent movement. But as I will show in Chapter Four, movement data organization has been significantly transformed when digital technologies entered into the associated milieu of cinematic technology.
To sum up, Simondon believed that the effects of invention exceeded the formulation of the initial problem:
Concretization brings not only new properties, but complementary functions, beyond those sought after, which we might call ‘super-abundant functions’. ... These properties of the object surpass expectations; it is a partial truth to say that an invention’s purpose is to attain an objective, to produce an entirely predictable effect. An invention is brought into being in response to a problem, but its effects extend beyond the resolution of the problem, due to the superabundant efficacy of the created object when it is a true invention (qtd. in Chabot 15).
It seems that the whole history of cinema attests to this claim: starting as a scientific tool, cinematic technology became the major art of the XX century, not to mention its other numerous functions in industry, education, etc. It was thus a true invention.
28 3. Cinematic Technology in the Grip of Metaphors of Subjectivity
In the previous chapter, I tried to lay bare the technicity of cinematic technology and argued that cinematic technicity lies in the technical operations of movement manipulation. Thus, movement should be put at the center of our conceptualization of the cinematic technology. In “Animation and Alienation”, Gunning observes: “Today the novelty of new media has once more foregrounded technological motion, as the “moving image” asserts its priority over the more limited entity “film” (2, my italics). However, as Gunning rightly remarks, in spite of the technological revolution we have been witnessing in recent decades, relatively little attention has been devoted to the question of the technical production of motion. In this chapter, I will analyze possible reasons for such an imbalance from the point of view of film philosophy. In order to do this, I will provide a critical reexamination of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts of cinema, two philosophers for whom movement was central in their philosophical projects. By inverting Friedrich Kittler’s thesis on media as metaphors for senses, I would like to reveal a reverse process, namely, how subjectivity provides metaphors for the cinematic technology and thus obscures its technicity. By putting to the fore the concept of the image, metaphors of subjectivity overshadow the more fundamental technical operations of movement data organization, movement analysis and synthesis. In conclusion, I will discuss how reconfiguring the debate not in terms of the image, but in terms of movement, reveals certain problematic and under-theorized zones in film theory.
3.1 Motion Production: the Repressed Subject of Film Theory
The historical accounts testify that movement was the key feature that intrigued first film spectators. As Doane writes: “In the early days of the cinema, the film was sometimes run backward, exploiting a curiosity about the limits of the machine, its uses and abuses” (108). One of the common entertainment tricks at that time was starting the film projection with the still image and then putting it into motion in front of the eyes of the astonished audience (Gunning “An Aesthetics of
29 Astonishment” 116). Another telling example is the anecdote about George Méliès who was way more intrigued and fascinated with the moving leaves in the background of the Lumiere brother’s Repas de Bebe (1895) than the ostensible event or the proto-narrative of the movie. All these testimonies lead me to agree with Doane’s assessment that “much of [early] cinema could be characterized as the sheer celebration of movement for its own sake” (177).
However, although movement reproduction was determinative for the reception of cinematic technology as these historical illustrations testify, scholars of early film history tend to neglect the problem of cinematic movement in favor of other issues. While discussing pioneering work of Marey, Doane admits the importance of the question of movement but nevertheless makes it subordinate to the questions of time storage and representation. In her monograph on Marey, Picturing Time, Marta Braun concurs with Doane’s assessment that although Marey studied motion, his more primordial concern was the problem of time. And, as the title of Francois Dagogne’s book Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace suggests, the key notion of Marey experiments for him was that of the index. We can see through the example of Marey that, although scholars admit the importance of the notion of movement, they relegate the question of its technical production as subordinated to other seemingly more fundamental issues. As Gunning eloquently remarks: “The technical production of motion may form the Freudian repressed subject of film theory” (“Animation and Alienation” 2).
Gunning’s provocative claim should not be taken too literally. He doesn’t argue for a more deeper media archeological research of the cinematic apparatus, nor does he appeal to the cognitive theory to explain the perception of motion. Rather, he addresses the question from the philosophical perspective and immediately invoces Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze — two philosophers who not only elaborated their original conceptualizations of movement but also related them to cinema. For both of them, however, the question about cinematic technology was primarily the question of whether the cinema produces false or true movement. Bergson condemned cinema for its impossibility to give the direct intuition of movement, while Deleuze argued the opposite. While critical to both Bergson and Deleuze, Gunning seemingly concurs
30 with them that the question of cinematic motion is primarily the question of human perception or, more broadly, sensorium.
However posing the question in terms of truth is misguided when we try to analyze the technicity of cinematic technology. As I will argue, by imposing the metaphors of subjectivity (primarily that of perception) onto cinematic technology, both Bergson and Deleuze miss its technicity. For, as John Lechte demonstrated, the concepts of image, perception, and subjectivity are genealogically connected. In his Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image, he remarks: “To the extent that there is a detailed analysis and philosophy of the image in modern accounts, they almost invariably give precedence to the perceiving subject or the observer” (11). On a more fundamental level, Lichte adds, the concept of image is intrinsically entwined with the concept of truth. First, as Lichte demonstrates in his analysis of Plato’s theory of Forms in Republics, to see for Plato means to see truly, that is, to know ideal forms. The metaphor of the cave clearly supports this claim for the shadow on the wall is the index of the material object which, in turn, refers to the ideal Form. As Lichte summarizes: “To see, therefore, enters into the conceptual canon of Western philosophy. ‘To see’, then, is not to engage with a semblance or with an imitation of reality; it is instead equivalent to an engagement with the truth itself” (14, my italics). Further, Plato specifically addresses the problem of the ontological status of the image in the Sophist. After discussing paradoxes of the image with the Eleatic Stranger, Thaetetus comes to the conclusion the image is an entity in which “real and unreal do seem to be combined in that perplexing way” (qtd. in Lechte 17). In the Sophist, Lechte distinguishes two conceptual series — that of ‘appearance’, ‘image’, likeness’, ‘existence-being’ and that of ‘form’, ‘being’, ‘model’, and ‘prototype’ — entwined with the problem of the image and concludes: “Mingling within both series, sometimes fore-grounded, sometimes back-grounded by Plato, is the question of the difference between truth and falsity” (17, my italics). While the concept of the image certainly has a long and intricate history in the Western thought, this basic paradox of truth and falsity (or real and unreal) remains, as it were, the prime mover of theoretical debates.
Relying on Lichte’s observations, I would like to argue here that in order to pose the question of the technicity of cinematic technology we need to, as it were,
31 reconsider Platonic thinking not in terms of true/false (what I would call the problematization in terms of the image) but in terms of virtual/actual (the problematization in terms of movement). The question of cinematic technicity is not if it produces a real or false movement but how it enables to discover and actualize new types of movement, in other words, how it allows translating virtual (i. e. imperceptible, invisible, unrepresentable etc) movements into actual 14.
3.2 Bergson: Cinema as False Movement
Henri Bergson’s attitude toward cinema is well known. In his Creative Evolution (1907), he condemns cinema as the achievement of Western metaphysics. The original sin of the Western thought, according to Bergson, consisted in thinking movement by means of immobile ‘snapshots’ or moments to which an abstract idea of time as succession is then added. Bergson’s firm belief was that departing from immobility, one would never be able to attain ‘real’ movement. Seen from this perspective, the cinematograph was an ambiguous alley. On the one hand, it effectively refutes Zeno’s paradoxes about movement for the spectator doesn’t see the succession of the still images onscreen; she, to use Bergson’s vocabulary, intuitively grasps the moving image as an inseparable whole. On the other hand, the examination of cinema’s technical basis indeed confirms Bergson’s thesis: the movie camera which runs static photograms at the constant speed of 24 or 18 frames per second looks like a perfect embodiment of the Western tendency to consider time homogenously in spatial terms and to represent movement by means of immobile ‘instants’. Bergson’s philosophical project, on the contrary, was aimed at fighting against the mind’s ‘cinematographical’ tendencies. As it is well known, Deleuze — arguably the most prominent and consistent Bergsonist in the history of film theory —
14 Overturning Platonism immediately brings to mind Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum. After introducing the concept in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze seemed to abandon it. However, as David W. Smiths notes, the concept of the simulacrum underwent a transformation and were reformulated in terms of Deleuze’s own ontology: “In Deleuze’s own ontology, things no longer “simulate” anything, but rather “actualize” immanent Ideas that are themselves real, though virtual” (116, my italics). My project thus in a certain way continues Deleuze’s project. However, contrary to Deleuze I seek to explore virtual/actual dimensions not on the level aesthetics by on the level of cinematic technicity which grounds aesthetical practices.
32 had to resort to Bergson’s earlier book Matter and Memory (1896) in order to redeem cinema from the original metaphysical sin of which Bergson accused.
Closer inspection, however, reveals that Bergson’s condemnation was not that categorical. In order to reveal his ambivalent attitude, I would first like to analyze the famous paragraph from Creative Evolution containing his critique of the cinematograph:
The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. (Creative Evolution 322, my italics)
What is noteworthy in Bergson’s account of the cinematograph is that he examines the production of cinematic motion in relation to the question of perception and intellect. In his lecture course Optical Media, Kittler notoriously claimed that technical media “override our senses” (36); as a result, they provide models and serve as metaphors for our subjectivity15. At first glance, Bergson’s account confirms Kittler’s thesis. But, in fact, what Bergson states here is quite the opposite: he imposes the metaphor of human subjectivity on cinematic technology. Comparing the
15 “We knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors” (Kittler, Optical Media 34).
33 cinematograph unfavorably with perception, Bergson unwittingly imposes onto cinematic technology the demand to produce ‘real’ movement and, since the cinematograph doesn’t comply with this demand, he simply disregards the question of the technicity of cinematic technology as unimportant.
Cinematic technology, as I will argue further, cannot be accounted for by human subjectivity. In other words, such an approach only partially reveals the technicity of cinematic technology. Therefore, one can identify a certain dialectical relationship between human and cinematic technology: while, as Kittler claimed, media provide us with metaphors for subjectivity and override our senses, (or, as his predecessor and inspirer Marshall McLuchan claimed that media serve extensions of man’s senses16) on the other hand, our metaphors of subjectivity overshadow the technicity of cinematic technology17.
Yet, as I mentioned earlier, Bergson’s condemnation of cinema was not that categorical. Elsewhere he admits: “As a witness to its beginnings, I realized [cinema] could suggest new things to a philosopher. It might be able to assist in the synthesis of memory, or even of the thinking process” (qtd. in Douglass 218) Exploring Bergson’s ambivalent concept of cinema, Paul Douglass remarks: “Flawed in its technological heart, film may never represent the indeterminacy of immediate experience. Nonetheless, it can evoke the mechanisms of memory” (219). For Douglass, just as for Deleuze as will be discussed later, Bergson’s blindness to cinema’s artistic capacities could be explained by the fact that he encountered cinema in its primitive form. However, as Maria Tortajada convincingly demonstrated, Bergson’s concept of cinema mainly draws upon the scientific experiments of capturing the movement by
16 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT press, 1994. 17 Although my project doesn’t explore the question of cinematic experience, I would like to at least indicate that it allows such line of inquiry. As it has been observed, different cinematic motions can produce different subjective experiences. For example, in L'intelligence d'une machine (1946), Jean Epstein mentions cinema’s possibility to produce specific spaces and temporalities which cancel out Kantian notions of time and space. Recently, in her Cinematic Chronotopes : Here, Now, Me (2014), Pepita Hesselberth explores how digital cinematic technologies enables to produce new types of cinematic chronotopes, that is how they reconfigure our subjectivity of the spectator. What I would like to stress here, though, is the fact that space, time, affect etc are effects of cinematic production of motion. These subjective categories can only describe cinematic experience and not the cinematic technology.
34 Etienne-Jule Marey. As she puts it: “The cinematograph of Bergson belongs to genus of chronophotography, and the last one is developed in the field of science” (97, my translation18). Bergson critiqued cinema on the level of its technical operation and not on the level of artistic techniques.
Still, even on the technological level, Bergson retains his ambiguous attitude. As Pierre Montbello explicates: “Bergsonian absolute movement is at the same time mental and real, metaphysical and psychological” (293, my translation19). And if the spectator perceives the moving image, however illusive, movement has to exist somewhere. Bergson concedes: “The movement does indeed exist here in the apparatus” (qtd. in Douglass 211). The abstract character of that movement makes Bergson suspicious of it for he distinguishes ‘between an evolution and an unfurling, between the radically new and a rearrangement of the pre-existing’ (The Creative Mind 22). Obviously, the cinematic production of motion for him was an example of the rearrangement of what was pre-existing. But, in fact, this is not the case not only on the level of artistic techniques (Kuleshov’s experiments can be used as a refutation of Bergson’s claim) but also on the level of technicity. Slow-motion might serve as a paradigmatic example for it enables to reveal virtual movement20. Early French film theorists were keen to notice this capacity of cinematic technology and attempted to conceptualize it in the notion of photogénie. In his classical essay “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie” written in 1926, Jean Epstein — arguably the most sustained theorist of photogénie — argued that one of the most basic conditions of photogénie is mobility and claimed “that anyone who makes films without playing with temporal perspective is a poor director” (295). Although he went onto complicate his film theory, the basic tenets remained unchanged. Thus, in his last book Le Cinéma du Diable, he again confirms his view on the primacy of movement: “In the most general way, thanks to the photogénie of movement, the cinematograph
18 “Le cinématographe de Bergson appartient à l'espace de la chronophotographie, et celle-ci s'élabore dans le champ de la science.” 19 “Car le mouvement absolu bergsonien est aussi bien mental que réel, métaphysique que psychologique”. 20 As Manning characterizes Marey’s experiments: “[Marey] wants to perceive the incorporeal, and to do so, he must push the senses to the edge of what they can do. He must create techniques through which the senses’ virtual tendencies are transformed into actual processes for re-visualization. What we virtually feel must become actually sensed.” (86, my italics).
35 shows us that form is only one unsettled state of a fundamentally mobile condition, and that movement, being universal and variably variable, makes every form inconstant, inconsistent, fluid” (322).
To conclude, allow me recapitulate my main points. Bergson’s understanding of cinema was contaminated with metaphors of subjectivity. The question he posed — whether the cinema gives us false or true movement — and his hasty negative reply suggest the question of the technical conditions of motion production were of minor importance to him. When it comes to cinematic technology, however, the question is not if the cinema gives us real or false movement but, instead, the following questions: which new types of movement does cinema enable us to produce?; what results from it?; and how does it make the virtual movement actual? These are questions related to the technicity of cinematic technology. Paradoxically, Bergson, who put the issues of the new at the center of his philosophical research21, did not recognize the newness of cinematic technology. Showing the newness of the cinematic technology was the task Gilles Deleuze embarked on.
3.3 Deleuze: Cinema as Real Movement
Deleuze, it seems, puts movement at the conceptual core of his philosophical reading of cinema. Nevertheless, as Gunning eagerly remarks: “It would be a great mistake to equate Deleuze’s movement-image with the moving image” (“Animation and Alienation” 2). Deleuze isn’t that interested in the technological conditions of movement production. He treats the movement-image as a basic unit for a new way of thinking –– thinking with images.
Gunning dismisses Deleuze’s account of cinema as limited and instead argues for his theory of animation, in other words, the mechanical production of motion. However, here I would like to repeat the move Deleuze made in relation to Bergson and distinguish two accounts of cinema in his Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. As I
21 Bergson “transformed philosophy by posing the question of the ‘new’ instead that of eternity (how are the production and appearance of something new is possible)” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 3).
36 would like to argue, while his first account is contaminated with metaphors of subjectivity, the second one provides, if not a full-fledged account of cinematic technology, at least posing the question of technicity.
Deleuze’s first and second commentaries on Bergson (Chapters 1 and 4 of Cinema 1 respectively) both deal with the moving-image but treat it from different perspectives. While the first commentary allows Deleuze to discuss moving-images as building blocks of the Whole (in this way Deleuze reformulates montage theories of different schools), the second commentary analyses, as it were, moving-images-in- themselves and proposes their taxonomy. In both cases Bergson serves as a point of departure.
In my analysis I will start with the second commentary on Bergson. Such backward reading is conditioned by the structure of my argument. It is the second commentary that forms the conceptual core of Deleuze’s project to create a general taxonomy of cinema. Here, I will argue, just as in the case of Bergson, the metaphor of subjectivity obscures the technicity of cinematic technology for Deleuze. But going back to his first commentary, as I will contend, reveals a strange thing: although Deleuze explicitly claims that his account of cinema is a Bergsonian one, his first chapter manifests a strong if unacknowledged influence of Gilbert Simondon and his philosophy of technology. Laying bare this influence will enable me to demonstrate that, contrary to Gunning’s claim, the question of the technicity of cinematic technology could be posed even inside the Deleuzean conceptual framework. In addition, I will indicate how Simondon’s account of technicity escapes the trap of the metaphor of subjectivity.
3.3.1 Deleuze’s second commentary on Bergson
While Deleuze’s first commentary on Bergson deals primarily with the problem of movement and introduces the concept of the movement-image, the second one develops this concept by equating movement, image, matter, and light. More importantly, the second commentary serves as an introduction to the taxonomy of movement-images and sets the agenda of his project. And, if in the first chapter
37 Deleuze moves liberally between the whole of Bergson’s oeuvre, here he almost exclusively concentrates on Matter and Memory, for, as Deleuze claims, it is in this book Bergson, unbeknownst to himself, “prefigure[s] the future or the essence of the cinema” (Cinema 1 4).
What impels Deleuze to make such a radical move? The reasons are numerous. First, Deleuze argues, the Bergson of Creative Evolution misrecognized the essence of cinema because cinema as an art from was still in its nascent form. Another ostensible reason is the fact that the Bergson of Matter and Memory allows Deleuze to equate, on the conceptual level, movement and image. As Montebello remarks: “[Deleuze] needs this in order to throw a bridge between the universe as movement and the cinema as the art of images ” (Deleuze, philosophie et cinéma 23, my translation22). Finally, as Douglass notes: “[Deleuze] cleverly exploits the ’terminological ambiguities’ in Bergson’s attack on cinematic illusion, transferring the definition of Bergson’s term ‘cuttings’ from the frame to the shot” (220). But what is most important for my argument here is that using Matter and Memory allows Deleuze to address the question of perception and, as a result, subjectivity. As a consequence, he then re-conceptualizes the movement-image in terms of subjectivity.
At the same time, Deleuze addresses the question of perception rather unconventionally. As he argues, in order to understand the nature of perception we should not start from the ‘natural’ or subjective perception. Equating cinematic and natural perception was the mistake of phenomenology as well as of Bergson in Creative Evolution. The mistake eventually had led to the misrecognition of the cinema. Rather, Deleuze argues, we should start with the objective or ‘pure’ perception and, on the basis of it, derive the conditions of natural perception. In that respect, cinema promises to be an ideal alley, for it breaks with the conditions of natural perception by way of camera movement, editing, montage, close-ups, and other techniques.
22 “[Deleuze] en a besoin pour établir un pont entre l'univers comme mouvement et le cinéma comme art des images.”
38 For the sake of my argument, I will concentrate here one on Deleuze’s metaphysics of cinema, which, I claim, obfuscate the question of the technicity of cinematic technology. By drawing upon Bergson, Deleuze maintains that the universe is a constant variation and vibration: “a flowing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor center of reference would be assignable” (Cinema 1 65). Every image acts on and reacts against one another. The illusion of stability arises with the appearance of subjectivity, that is, the privileged image which introduces the gap or interval: “Whereas the other images act and react on all their facets and in all their parts, here we have images which only receive actions on one facet or in certain parts and only execute reaction by and in other parts” (Cinema 1 69). The notion of the interval allows Deleuze to introduce three basic types of movement-images: perception-image, affection-image, and action-image. He thus postulates “the existence of a double system, of a double regime of reference of images” (Cinema 1 70). The first system refers to, as it were, images-in-itself which act and react in all directions. The second one refers to the system “where all [images] vary principally for a single one, which receives the action of the other images on one of its facets and react to them on another facet” (Cinema 1 70). According to Deleuze, the newness of cinematic technology lies in its ability to generate movement-images beyond human perception. Yet, even if Deleuze’s project might be seen as an attempt in decentralizing the human subject and dehumanizing perception, the metaphor of subjectivity remains the guiding principle of his approach, as his taxonomy of image- movements indicates: the perception-image, the affect-image, and the action-image.
In Deleuze, philosophie et cinema, Montebello enumerates philosophical reasons for such operation (22-26), so I won’t delve much on it here. In my turn, I would like to situate his project within film theory. First, Deleuze liberates himself from the technical jargon (frame, shot, sequence, editing — the notions, he discusses in the second and the third chapters). Reformulating technical notions in terms of movement-images allows him to move away from the narrative and hence linguistic perspective — a dominant approach to cinema in France at that time. Second, it enables Deleuze to present and analyze cinema as a new mode of thinking –– thinking with moving-images. In the long run, this change of perspective allows him to pose the question of the relation between thought (another avatar of subjectivity) and cinema, which is one of the central theme of the Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
39 However productive such reconfiguration could be for thinking the relationship between cinema and philosophy, one immediately notices that the question of technicity disappears.
In comparing Deleuze to Bergson, Doane indicates the inversion: “Deleuze claims, on the other hand, that the movement needs to be thought in relation to the spectator rather than in relation to the apparatus, and that, for the spectator, movement is immediately given in an ‘intermediate image’" (175). Such inversion leads to certain sad omissions within Deleuze’s account of cinema. For instance, when he discusses the affection-image and refers to French theorists of photogénie, he limits himself to the discussion of close-up neglecting the important fact that Jean Epstein discussed photogénie not only in terms of space (close-up) but also in terms of time (slow-motion). Slow- and fast-motion immediately brings the question of the technical production of motion, which is a question Deleuze consistently ignores.
Yet, the first chapter of Cinema 1, including Deleuze’s first commentary on Bergson, contains the seeds of a theory of the technical production of motion. Contrary to Gunning, I claim that the question of the technicity of cinematic technology could be posed even inside Deleuze’s own theoretical framework.
3.3.2 Deleuze’s first commentary on Bergson
Deconstructing Deleuze’s discussion of Bergson’s three theses on movement by using his own method of dramatization23 will enable to see his polemical stakes. Moreover, unpacking Deleuze’s argument — for it is rather condensed and contains a lot of hidden references both to his own works and works of other philosophers, not only Bergson — will enable me to uncover Deleuze’s proto-theory of the technicity of cinematic technology.
Deleuze starts with Bergson’s first thesis which postulates that movement should not be confused with space that is covered. Spatialization of movement
23 See his Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 78-79.
40 immediately leads to spatialization of time and, as a result, the interval of movement is no longer understood in terms of duration but, instead, in terms of space. No matter how short the interval between two instants are, “movement will always occur in the interval between the two, in other words behind your back” (Cinema 1 1-2). This thesis serves a point of interference into Bergson’s famous statement about the cinematographic nature of our intellect and perception. Deleuze, however, finds this statement problematic for two reasons. First, he remarks that what the spectator perceives is not a static image to which movement is added. The spectator immediately perceives the movement-image. More importantly, Deleuze claims, we cannot equate the cinematograph with human perception for the simple reason that cinema doesn’t reproduce natural perception. According to Deleuze, Bergson couldn’t recognize this because he analyzed cinema in its ‘primitive’ stage, before the invention of montage, moving camera etc. The double movement of Deleuze’s polemical statement here is that he goes against authoritative phenomenological accounts of cinema (i.e. cinema doesn’t reproduce the conditions of natural perception) and at the same time tries to complicate Bergson’s concept of movement.
Bergson’s second thesis on movement distinguishes two modes of thinking movement: the ancient and the modern. While the ancients thought of movement as a dialectical transition from one transcendent form to another (say, birth, maturity, death), the modern way of theorizing movement proceeds from ‘any-distant- whatever’. From that perspective, time is considered as a sequence of equidistant, indifferent, and interchangeable moments. The cinematograph is the machine that perfectly embodies the second mode of thinking movement. As Deleuze writes: “We can therefore define the cinema as the system which reproduces movement by relating it to the any-instant-whatever” (Cinema 1 7). For Bergson, there’s no substantial difference between the ancient and modern concepts to movement, since they both try to understand movement on the basis of immobile cuts. Deleuze, however, claims that the second mode of thinking — and, in turn, cinema— gives us a qualitatively different way to theorize movement and its privileged moments. What’s is striking, Deleuze remarks, is the fact that this way of conceptualizing movement is very much in the spirit of Bergson’s theory of movement as the production of the new. Seen from the modern perspective “remarkable instants are immanent within movement, and their extraction represents the emergence of something new” (Bogue 23). To
41 conclude, Bergson’s second thesis serves for Deleuze as a springboard to his own account of cinema, which pulls out the cinema from the dogmatic Bergsonism and presents it as a machine for production assemblages of movement-images. In order to accomplish this theory, Deleuze proposes the third thesis where, based on his concept of expression24, he argues that movement is translation in space that also expresses something more profound, namely, a qualitative change. As a technology, cinema allows us to think with images that retain both aspects of movement, quantitative (spatial) and qualitative (temporal). Tying together movement and image in the concept of movement-image allows Deleuze to pass over the question of the technical production of such movement-images.
There is a certain problem with Deleuze’s account. The XIX century gives many examples of optical devices that produced moving images where spatial movement also expressed a certain qualitative change. Obviously, a more thorough interrogation of the technological basis of cinema is needed.
In fact, while discussing Bergson’s second theses on movement Deleuze provides an account of cinematic technology but just as with the concept of expression he does it in a passing if not nonchalant way. But it is here when Deleuze comes the closest to the discussion of the technicity of cinematic technology. The passage is worth quoting at length:
But, in fact, the determining conditions of the cinema are the following,: not merely the photo, but the snapshot (the long-exposure photo [photo de pose) belongs to the other lineage); the equidistance of snapshots; the transfer of this equidistance on to a framework which constitutes the ‘film’ (it was Edison and Dickson who perforated the film in the camera); a mechanism for moving on images (Lumiere’s claws). It is in this sense that the cinema is the system which reproduces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever that is, as a function of equidistant instants, selected so as to create an impression of continuity. Any other system which reproduces movement through an order of
24 For the importance of the Spinozian concept of expression for Deleuze’s film philosophy see Ronald Bogue’s Deleuze on Cinema (pp. 26-27).
42 exposures [poses] projected in such a way that they pass into one another, or are ‘transformed’, is foreign to the cinema. (Cinema 1 5-6)
Deleuze never quotes Simondon in the first chapter but, as Montebello convincingly demonstrates, Deleuze’s reading of Bergson is “impregnated with Simondon’s reminiscences” ("Simondon et la question du mouvement" 295). For my part, I would like to suggest that Deleuze’s account of technological conditions of the cinema also reveals a certain Simondonian influence and inspiration.
In comparison with typical accounts of the cinema’s prehistory which usually start with optical devices, Deleuze is sensitive enough to see that what defines the cinematic technology is not its optical devices or photographic basis but the specific technical operations of movement analysis and synthesis. Furthermore, Deleuze’s description of the technicity — “the cinema is the system which reproduces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever that is, as a function of equidistant instants, selected so as to create an impression of continuity” — doesn’t even mention the term ‘image’. And as Marey’s experiments, animation movies and the recent history of CGI technologies and software show, movement data can be organized differently.
What Deleuze neglects here, though, is a simple fact that the evolution of cinematic technology doesn’t end with the Lumiere brothers’ Cinematograph. Accusing Bergson for treating cinema as an art form in its primitive stage, he makes the same mistake in regards to cinematic technology. His description of the technicity of cinematic technology in its initial stage is very much in spirit with Simondon’s approach to technology. Nonetheless he confines himself to the description of the cinematic technology in its nascent stage and in doing so neglects the most basic tenet of Simondon’s philosophy of technology: “The genesis of the technical object is part of its being. The technical object is something that does not exist prior to its becoming, but that is present at every stage of that becoming” (7). In other words, while the evolution of cinematic technology remains outside the scope of his project, at the same time, his analysis begs for such an account.
43 3.4 Toward a Politics of Movement
In my analysis, I traced how the metaphors of subjectivity obscure for both Bergson and Deleuze the technicity of cinematic technology25. However, as I tried to argue, there is also a certain Simondonian influence in Deleuze’s account of cinematic technicity; this influence, I contend, enables to formulate the question of cinematic technicity even inside Deleuze’s theoretical framework. Yet this line of inquiry can be opened up, but only if one undoes the link between the movement and the image in the concept of movement-image. Why is this necessary? As my analysis showed, the problematization in terms of the image, that is via the metaphor of subjectivity, imposes to think cinematic movement in terms of true/false, while the problematization of cinematic technology, I contend, should be put in terms virtual/actual. This will allow us to ask: what new types of movement the cinematic technology enables to operate and how?
Putting movement and its technical production at the center of inquiry enables us, I believe, to differentiate between the aesthetics of the image and the politics of movement (or, more precisely, the politics of movement production). A couple of examples will help me elucidate my point. As the history of cinema shows, the attitude toward movement manipulations varied dramatically — sometimes it was valorized and at other times downplayed. When Louis Delluc discovered the slow- motion technique and praises it, he stated: “Men have, in this analysis of images, a grace that we did not suspect of them” (qtd. in Cortade 163). His aesthetical judgment in this statement unwittingly argues for a certain politics of cinematic movement. The same can be said about Epstein who, in his Photogénie of the Impondérable (1935), basically argues that slow motion reveals the virtual aspects of the mobile world:
25 I’m aware that Bergson and Deleuze weren’t alone who engaged with cinematic technology form the philosophical perspective. But, first when it comes to the question of movement and cinema, their theories still remain fundamental and paradigmatic in film studies and continue to shape current discussions as Gunning’s article Animation and Alienations demonstrates. Besides, I believe my argument can be extended to other approaches as well. For example, we can detect the metaphor of subjectivity in certain media archaeological approaches. See second chapter, of Parikka’s What is Media Archaeology ? suggestively titled Media Archaeology of the Senses. Francois Albera attests my claim: “The homology of mind and machine, for example, has been a constant, running through the work of Wertheimer and Münsterberg, the Institut de filmologie and Gilles Deleuze, right up to present-day research into “neurocinematics” (134).
44 “Slow and fast motion [techniques] reveal a world there are no more barriers between kingdoms of nature. Everything lives” (250, my translation26). As Ludovic Cortade comments, the very title of the pamphlet emphasizes “the fact that recorded phenomena reveal themselves over time in unpredictable ways” (170). The photographic image as such cannot give access to the virtual movements –– only cinematic technicity does.
This doesn’t necessarily mean more movement manipulations makes a film more ‘cinematic’. The relation between the politics of movement and the aesthetics of the image is more complex and subtle. Andre Bazin’s article Death Every Afternoon is instructive in that case. There, Bazin discusses cinematic specificity via the problem of the representation of death in cinema and claims: “I imagine the supreme cinematic perversion would be the projection of an execution backward” (31). His ethical judgment is mediated through the politics of movement (how something is reproduced) which is subject to the aesthetics of the image (what is reproduced). In this case, it is the image that takes an upper hand. Discussing the question of unrepresentability in relation of technology goes beyond the scope of my project here. However, I would like to signal here that Bazin’s analysis of the ontological paradox of the representation of death in cinema reveals a radical incommensurability between human and technical which, again, should serve as a warning against hastily equating human and technical.
Yet, politics of movement operate not only on the level of artistic practices or film theories: they can be distinguished on the technological level as well. Video codecs are paradigmatic in that sense. Therefore, in the next chapter I analyze the politics of movement that the MGPEG video codec family operates on the sub- representative level.
26 “Le ralenti et l'accéléré révèlent un monde où il n'y a plus de frontières entre les règnes de la nature. Tout vit”.
45
4. Video Codecs and the Politics of Movement
The advent of digital technologies produced a big stir both in film theories and practices. Once again, the novelty of new media has brought technological motion to the forefront as the “moving image” replaces the more limited entity “film.” Nevertheless, when it comes to the discussion of the production of digital moving images, film scholars tend to focus on practices of manipulation with the digital image by means of software (Manovich, 2001 and 2013), ontology of the digital image (Rodowick, 2007; Lechte, 2012), cinematic dispositifs (Albera, 2011), affectivity (Hansen, 2006), or spectatorship (Whissel, 2014). The proliferation of new film practices and cinematic dispositifs, their rizomatic connections with other technologies and embeddedness in complex media eco-systems erased all the limits and questioned the identity of cinema. Noël Carroll even called out: “Forget the medium; watch the movement — the movement of history and the movement of the image” (62).
However, I contend, the ontological mode of thinking cinema can remain viable even in the era when cinema seems to dissolve in complex media ecologies. Simondon’s philosophy is particularly instructive in that case for it enables to theorize cinematic technology not, strictly speaking, ontologically (what is cinema?) but ontogenetically (how did cinema come to being and how does it persist?). Framing the question in this manner escapes the pitfalls of vulgar materialism which seeks the essence or specificity of cinema in the material qualities of its medium, like the film strip, or tend to connect the birth of cinema with specific technical mechanism. Ontogenetical thinking seeks to distinguish the original problem and technical operations which engender concrete technical objects. From the ontogenetical point of view, the process of concretization of cinematic technology indeed underwent major technical improvements once digital technology appeared in its associated milieu. But no matter how radical these changes were, they were nonetheless grounded in the technicity of cinematic technology as a principle of its identity and change.
46 John Belton remarks in his “Digital Cinema: False Revolution”: “One obvious problem with digital cinema is that it has no novelty value, at leas not for film audiences” (114). Here, he states that digital technology didn’t shake cinema’s identity as a cultural phenomenon. However, cinema’s relatively stable identity can only partially be explained by social inertia or industrial influence. What grounds its stability is the technicity of cinematic technology: digital or analog, its technicity remains the same and consists in operations of movement data organization, movement analysis and synthesis. When, in The Language of New Media, Manovich enumerates different sources of movement data (live action material, painting, etc) and describes digital cinema as “a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements” (302) he describes a concrete actualization of the technicity of cinematic technology. At the same time, when in his latest book Software Takes Command, he incorporates cinema as a medium into software as the metamedium and writes: “To simulate a medium in software means to simulate its tools and interfaces, rather than its “material” (200) he, again, obscures the technicity of cinematic technology for it cannot be equated with functionality. The technicity of cinematic technology might unfold in different technical milieus and thus, given technical, but also socio-economical and cultural circumstances, can engender numerous cinematic dispositifs: the movie theater, the videoplayer, YouTube etc. In the computer metamedium, it is this technicity of cinematic technology that enables us to differentiate filmic artifacts from others. If not the ultimate horizon for our understanding of technology, technicity nonetheless imposes certain limits on social interpretations of technological artifacts.
Having identified the technicity of cinematic technology in the operations of movement analysis and synthesis, I will now consider how these operations were implemented in digital technologies. Again, the question of technical production of movement, which is pivotal for the technicity of cinematic technology, will provide me with a guiding principle. MPEG video codec family will serve me as a case study, as a paradigmatic implementation of the technicity of cinematic technology in the digital associated milieu. My aim here is to lay bare the metaphysical subtleties of MPEG motion compensation algorithms and to reveal a certain politics of movement embodied in these algorithms. I will then address certain artistic practices, like glitch and datamoshing, which makes this politics visible. Media scholars usually analyze
47 glitch art in aesthetical terms obfuscating the question of technicity. As a result, they treat glitch in negative terms, like error, malfunction, image degradation etc. Reformulating the debate in terms of movement will allow me to demonstrate that datamoshing techniques are an exploration of virtual movements. In conclusion, I will analyze Danny Snellson’s datamoshing remake of Stan Brackhage’s Window Water Baby Moving in order to address the question of the relation between the concepts of medium specificity and technicity.
4.1 Video Codecs: That Obscure Object of Study
Invented largely in response to low bandwidth of the early Internet27, video codecs add another level of mediation between cinematic technicity and screening technologies. Thus, they represent what Galloway defines as algorithmic interfaces. As he writes: “Algorithmic interfaces — even as they flaunt their own highly precise, virtuosic levels of detail — prove that something is happening behind and beyond the visible. In other words, there are some things that are unrepresentable” (The Interface Effect 86). As algorithmic interfaces, video codecs provide serious challenges for media scholars due to their extreme complexity. Adrian Mackenzie — one of the first who drew attention to video codecs — recognizes that analyzing codec is a daunting task (“Codecs” 2008). To start with, codecs require strong background knowledge of mathematics, programming, and signal processing. Second, “the very texture, flow, and materiality of sounds and images” (“Codecs” 48), yet they do this in a very counterintuitive way. Finally, a typical codec is a confusing assemblage of patents which immediately brings up the questions of political economy. Perhaps for these reasons films scholars, although aware of the importance of the topic, tend to neglect to it engage with it when discussing cinematic dispositifs or digital ecologies28.
27 In MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Jonathan Sterne claims that in order to understand the meaning of compression formats and “we need to construct a new genealogy for contemporary digital media culture”(7). However, he criticized visually biased scholars, arguing that: “When they consider its aesthetic characteristics, many existing histories of digital culture tend to emphasize its visual and visible dimensions” (248). Although a thorough study of video codecs is beyond the scope of my project, I wholly concur with Sterne’s assessment. However, I would like to indicate that, since video codecs operate on the sub-representative level, Sterne’s methodology can be put in practice even within film studies. 28 See Video Vortex Reader I & II for the discussion of YouTube video ecologies.
48 To my knowledge, apart from the pioneering work by Mackenzie, only Sean Cubitt within the humanities has brought up the question of video codecs in his latest book The Practice of Light (2014). Both of them, though, are primarily interested in the questions of political economy. Notwithstanding his ostensible “politics of hope” (12), Cubitt provides a somewhat bleak picture of how codecs impoverish the perception of moving images and, thus, sees “codec wars” as expansion of the neoliberal model of economy. In his article Every Thing Thinks: Sub-representative Differences in Digital Video Codecs published in 2010, Mackenzie anticipated this kind of critique and, by drawing upon Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), attempted to expose the hidden play of differences lying behind the repetitive nature of codecs algorithms.
Here I would like to provide a somewhat different take on the MPEG video codec family. Both Mackenzie and Cubitt treat cinema primarily in terms of image and time. I, however, will put the concept of movement at the center of my inquiry. First, I will analyze how codec algorithms organize and, as it were, theorize movement. Instead of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s Cinema books and his discussion of two ways of thinking movement in the Western thought will serve me as a guiding line. As I will argue, MPEG codec combines both the ancient and the modern way of thinking movement. Then, in order to escape the excesses of both Mackenzie’s optimism and Cubitt’s pessimism, I will address some contemporary video art works as practices of resistance to the MPEG movement politics. As I will argue, just like classical avant-garde flicker films provided a critique of the ideological effects of the cinematic dispositif, glitch video art works provide a similar critique of video codecs and they do it by exploiting their motion estimation algorithms. Thus, instead of analyzing datamoshing videos in terms of aesthetic, I will explore how these video works disclose the sub-representative politics of movement.
4.2 MPEG and Movement Coding/Decoding Algorithms
In the beginning of the chapter, I already mentioned the difficulties related to the study of codecs from the perspective of the humanities. Due to its complexity, one can analyze MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) codecs from different angles.
49 Now, one of the most prominent features of MPEG codecs is their coding and decoding of color. Both Mackenzie and Cubitt’s studies primarily concentrate on this feature. However, if we accept the fact that the technicity of cinematic technology lies in its operations of movement analysis and synthesis, movement and its coding and decoding should be placed at the center of research. Indeed, Mackenzie distinguishes two genealogical lines of the MPEG codec: that of the discrete cosine transform (DCT), which deals with the distribution of brightness and color between pictures, and that of motion compensation, which predicts transitions between pictures. Since my primary concern is the technicity of cinematic technology, I will concentrate on the second genealogical line29.
How does the MPEG codec operate movement coding and decoding? What are the rationalities that stand behind its algorithms? The first thing that strikes one’s eye is that, in the case of digital cinema, the frame ceases to be the basic unit of the film. Basically, the MPEG codec breaks down the image into blocks of different sizes and then, based on calculations, predicts the movements of these blocks. Since efficiency is the driving force of the algorithms, the codec determines the areas that don’t change from one frame to another and only traces the transition of blocks that have changed. Here’s how Richardson describes the way the partitioning operates (Fig. 4):
The AVC [Advanced Video Coding] reference encoder selects the “ best ” partition size for each part of the frame, i.e. the partition size that minimizes the coded residual and motion vectors. The macroblock partitions chosen for each area are … superimposed on the residual frame. In areas where there is little change between the frames (residual appears grey), a 16x16 partition is chosen; in areas of detailed motion (residual appears black or white), smaller partitions are more efficient. (Richardson 2003)
29 Nevertheless it must be noted that color transformations could also be theorized as a specific type of movement, namely, an intensive movement. In his essay, Mackenzie hints at that direction and recognizes that: “an account of technology in terms of intensities would be somewhat novel” (“Every Thing Thinks” 149). Indeed, such line of inquiry could be very productive since it undermines the Modernity’s predilection to think movement exclusively in spatial terms. However, for the sake of the argument, I confine myself by the geometrical concept of movement defined as translation of bodies in space.
50
Figure 4. The partition of the frame in the MPEG codec
The aim of the partition is to determine the “moving and nonmoving regions” (Haskell and Limb 1972) of the frame. This significantly reduces the size of the video file since the codec retains information only on regions that move, treating other regions as ‘static’. One of the driving forces lying behind the rationality of codec improvement is finding progressively efficient algorithms to distinguish between what is repeating and what is changing in the frame. Figure 5 illustrates how the raw video file differs from the compressed one. Contrary to analog cinema, digital cinema operates not with static images but with the vectors of movement. For some, this alone would be enough of a reason to doubt whether we could talk about genealogical connection between analogy and digital cinema. From the point of view of the technicity, however, the three basic technical operations (data organization, movement analysis and synthesis) remain the same, although cinematic technology underwent a process of concretization in a digital milieu which led to new actualizations. So one can still trace the genealogical line from digital cinema to the analog. As Mackenzie explains the operation of movement synthesis: “Decoding the MPEG stream means turning these vectors back into patterns of blocks moving around in frames on the screen. The decoding side of a codec frenetically recomposes images from blocks moving in all directions” (“Every Thing Thinks” 150).
51
Figure 5. Frames in the uncompressed (above) and compressed (below) video file. Frames 1 and 5 are the key frames.
However, motion reconstruction can only be done if we have the starting frame and the end frame. These frames are called key frames. It is only by comparing two frames that we can define moving and nonmoving blocks of the frame. Obviously, as Macromedia specifications indicate, the quality of the compressed video file depends on the quantity of key frames for “ a lower keyframe rate (such as one keyframe every six seconds) will result in a softer or blurrier image but reduces the bandwidth demand ” (qtd. in Cubitt 249). As Cubitt remarks, “Video codecs parse the medium into segments topped and tailed by key frames” (269). But this is only half of the story. Not only does the MPEG codec recompose the frame into moving and nonmoving regions, it substitutes the transition between moving regions by using algorithms of motion compensation. In a sense, it predicts transitions between pictures. In the following passage Cubitt provides a succinct description of the key elements of the algorithm without bogging down in mathematical formalism:
The MPEG-4 family of codecs isolates “ initial frames, ” also known by the animation term key frames, uncompressed frames that are used as a reference for filling in compressed frames that come between them. … Vector animation programs automate the process, extrapolating from first and last frames the trajectories of action needed to move from one to the other. This information is encoded not as full-frame animation but as an instruction set, from which the use of the term vector, referring to an algorithm that requires far fewer lines of code than describing the changing condition of every pixel. (248-249)
52 What is important to highlight here is that the codec fills in “in-between” frames with an implied movement. And in certain circumstances the algorithm of movement prediction fails, producing what is known as block boundary artifacts. The importance of artifacts for subversive artistic practices will become clear only after the discussion of two ways of thinking movement in the Western thought. Before I proceed to the discussion of the metaphysics of movement, I would like to recapitulate the key elements of movement coding and decoding in the MPEG codec:
1) The codec defines key frames and then partitions them into movable and nonmovable sections. Complicated algorithms are used in order to determine best key frames (Gerek and Altunbasak; Rathod and Nikam). 2) Based on the partitioning, MPEG reorganizes “the picture into series in motion vectors describing relative movements of blocks in time” (Mackenzie “Every Thing Thinks” 150). 3) These motion vectors are constructed on the extrapolation of the movement between two key frames. Depending on the number of key frames, their frequency, the algorithms of extrapolation, and the speed of movement (be it moving objects within the frame or camera movements), the algorithms of motion prediction might significantly lower the quality of the compressed video. As a result, micro-movements could be ‘erased’ or artifacts might appear.
4.3 The Metaphysics of Tamed Movement
In Chapter Three, I analyzed Deleuze’s view on the technicity of cinematic technology in its early stages. Here I would like to address his discussion of two major ways of thinking movement in the West that will allow us to receive new insights in the way cinematic technicity operates in the digital milieu.
Deleuze draws attention to the fact that in the forth chapter of Creative Evolution Bergson distinguishes two ways in which movement have been theorizes in the West. The ancients conceptualized movement in terms of privilege moments or, as Deleuze puts it, ideal poses. They treated every process as “the regulated transition
53 from one form to another” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 4). In explicating Deleuze’s idea of ideal poses, Bogue gives an example of the growth of an adult man: “the infant”, “the boy”, “the adolescent”, “the adult” stand as privileged and essential moments. What is happening between, therefore, is of no importance (22). A more representative example is the illustration for Aristotles’ Physics and his discussion of the projectile (Fig. 6). It clearly shows that the ancient way of conceptualizing movement consisted in thinking it exactly in terms of the privileged moments or positions, namely the starting point (A), the highest point (F) and the landing point (G).
Figure 6. A print from 1561 of a gunner firing a cannon. The path of the projectile is shown according to Aristotelian physics.
The advent of modern mathematics and the invention of calculus radically transformed our way of analyzing movement. As Deleuze himself describes it: “The modern scientific revolution has consisted in relating movement not to privileged instants, but to any-instant-whatever”. Although movement was still recomposed, it was no longer recomposed from formal transcendental elements (poses), but from immanent material elements (sections)” (Cinema 1 5). Clearly, cinema belongs to the modern way of movement analysis. It doesn’t exclude privileged moments but redefines them. As Bogue explicates Deleuze’s analysis: “Cinema makes possible a new means of understanding privileged moments, one that relies not on idealizing
54 poses but on the very discovery of the instant quelconque” (23). Privileged moments are not imposed onto movement, they are obtained through its immanent analysis.
How can this analysis relate to the MPEG codec and its algorithms of motion compensation? Paradoxically, motion compensation algorithms combine both ways of theorizing movement. They start with the determination of key frames. They impose them manually, say, every 5 seconds. This, in a way, would be the ancient way, for key frames act as privilege moments. But usually the MPEG codec uses algorithms of scene boundary detection: “Video-cut detection finds sharp transition, namely cut between frames” (Deb 330). Motion compensation algorithms can only work properly when two key frames belong to the same scene. So, in that case, we can talk about immanent movement analysis.
However, the second level — movement compensation algorithms calculate the movement of blocks from one key frame to another — clearly belongs to the ancient way of conceptualizing cinema. Motion is predicted and calculated and then imposed onto the movement, as it were, abstractly. Sometimes, when the compression rate is very high, artifacts appear: the moving image becomes blurry, or, because of poor differentiation, people can “lose” parts of their bodies30. For Deleuze, the uniqueness of cinema as technology, its Bergsonian essence, lies in its immanent analysis of movement. It doesn’t impose abstractions onto the movement, rather, abstractions like the privilege moments that can be extracted from the movement analysis. Sergey Eisentstein’s films are paradigmatic in that sense and it is not a surprise that Deleuze immediately mentions him in that respect31. Cinema is Bergsonian because, as Bogue describes Deleuze’s point, such “remarkable instants are immanent within movement, and their extraction represents the emergence of something new” (23). But if movement is predicted and calculated, as it is the case in motion compensation algorithms, the possibility of the emergence of something new
30 Some examples of such artifacts are gathered here: https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-sandy- hook-anderson-cooper-green-screen-disappearing-nose-with-pozner.t1148/ 31 “The privileged instants of Eisenstein, or of any other director, are still any-instant-whatevers: to put it simply, the any-instant-whatever can be regular or singular, ordinary or remarkable. If Eisenstein picks out remarkable instants, this does not prevent him deriving from them an immanent analysis of movement, and not a transcendental synthesis. The remarkable or singular instant remains any-instant- whatever among the others” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 6).
55 is barred. One might object that on the level of human perception it is of minor importance since micromovements and tiny artifacts and are not perceivable by the naked eye. Besides, the increase of bandwidth and constant algorithm improvements make these artifacts even more tiny and negligible. But this was one of the reasons I began my research with technicity traced through Simondon’s theory, for it allows to see that the technicity of cinematic technology beyond the constrains of human sensibility. In addition, it allows us to lay bare the rationalities lying behind these algorithms. It is true that seen from the perspective of human subjectivity “the aesthetic implicit in the MPEG-4 codec and the software it supports is at first glance an apolitical aesthetic vehicle” (Cubitt 247). But on the level of technicity video codecs reveal the rationality that goes that seem to go against the technicity of cinematic technology. In recent years the moving image culture saw an astounding and unrestricted growth but it was due to a rather repressive politics of movement. By taming the possibility of cinematic technology to explore and produce new types of movement, translating them from virtual to actual. As Cubitt bitterly remarks: “All MPEG-4 codecs (and practically every other kind currently in use) irreversibly degrade the data they start from, curtail and segment the space they picture, and diminish the possibility that anything unexpected will occur on-screen, even if it has already been recorded” (250, my italics).
On the other hand, in his analysis of MPEG algorithms Mackenzie recognizes that “at a very deep level, the architecture of an MPEG-2 codec reflects an assumption that all movement costs something in time, computation or bandwidth” (145). But what is important for him is to indicate and explore “sub-representative differences in technologically mediated perception” (“Every Thing Thinks” 140). Indeed, the MPEG codec tries to render movement properly, but it does it in a very weird way — by putting it into constrains. Hence, contrary to Mackenzie, I propose that even on a sub- representative level video codecs practice the politics of movement that aims to erase differences and subject differences to repetition. As Cubitt concludes: “In codecs, the unpredictable movement of the ideal vector as a trajectory toward the unknowable future is tamed, brought into line with the practice of actuarial risk management and investment planning” (258, my italics). In a way, there is no future nor the production of the new in the universe of video codecs. However, there are some video art practices that are trying to challenge the status quo.
56
4.4 The Structural Film 2.0: Datamoshing as Subversive Artistic Practice
The 1960s saw the flourishing of structural films. In comparison with the previous generation of avant-garde filmmakers, the structural filmmakers foregrounded the materiality of the film and the technicity of cinematic technology. Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965) is a paradigmatic example of the structural film. Made exclusively from black and white frames, the film, as its title suggests, produces the flicker effect. One can distinguish a certain dialectics of the structural film. On the one hand, it provides a critique of the technical production of moving images and its ideological effects. But, on the other hand, it might be seen as a sheer celebration of the technicity of cinematic technology, the exploration of its limits and hidden possibilities beyond the limits of human perception. At the start of the film, the filmmaker even puts a warning for epileptics. Watching The Flicker might be a hard experience, potentially even dangerous32, but it clearly shows that the cinematic technology goes beyond capacities of human perception and categories that Kant had defined as “pure a priori intuitions.” As I demonstrated in Chapter 2, while theorizing cinematic technology, one should not hasten to impose on it the metaphors of human subjectivity. Conceptualizing the cinematic technology in terms of perception, space or time gives us a distorted and limited picture of its technicity. Technicity is a tendency, and as a tendency it might be constrained either conceptually (as in the case of the metaphor of subjectivity), or technically (as in the case of video codecs). That’s why I put such an emphasis on the fact that we should discuss movement data organization, movement synthesis and analysis further, for these operations can engender different types of perception, different temporalities and topologies (Hesselberth 2014).
One might see the structural film as a critique of the technicity of cinematic technology, which lays bare its technical operations. Can we find similar practices among contemporary filmmakers? At first glance, the answer is no. Armed with CGI technologies, Hollywood began to produce high-budget blockbusters with spectacular
32 In a 2002 interview, Tony Conrad claims he knew of at least one person who suffered a seizure.
57 special effects, and as a reaction, independent and art-house filmmakers started to make minimalist, almost neorealist, films where the technicity of cinematic technology was, as it were, repressed. The films by Pedro Costa — who was hailed by some cinephilic magazines like Canadian Cinema Scope as one of the most important filmmakers of the XXI century33 — are paradigmatic in that case: his films are filmed in the slums of Lisbon with a static digital video camera without artificial lightning and using of color compensation software. However, his resistance to the dissemination of digital cameras is misleading. His rejection is aimed at the secondary improvements in the cinematic technology such as lightness of digital cameras and the cheapness of film production. Paradoxically, the representation of the poor jobless workers comes at the price: the technicity of cinematic technology, which enabled Costa to make films in such circumstances, remains unrecognized and is therefore repressed. However, when it comes to video codecs, we can find subversive practices among video artists.
Mackenzie observes: “MPEG video never flickers” (“Every Thing Thinks” 150). The reason for that, as we already know, is a totally different data organization. Therefore filmmakers had to develop new artistic means to make the technicity of digital cinema visible. French video artists Bertrand Planes and Christian Jacquemin were among the first one who started to exploit MPEG motion prediction algorithms. In 2004, they designed DivX Prime, a software program for the production of video artifacts through the exploitation of motion prediction algorithms. As the interface of the program shows (Figure 7), one can manipulate key frames and movement vectors. At first glance, DivxPrime might look as an application for producing visual effects. However, in his description of the project, Jacquemin warns against such simplistic readings. As he stresses: “This invention also interrogates the status of the software program as the instrument of progress in the community of software developers and programmers whereby questioning its essence (the function) and evolution (permanent modifications within that community)”(my translation34). Simple production of new and unusual visual effects was not an issue for Planes and
33 See “Cinema Scope Top Ten Films of the Decade”. 34 “…cette invention interroge aussi le statut du programme informatique en tant qu'instrument de progrès au sein d'une communauté de développeurs et de programmeurs, il en questionne l'essence (la fonction) et l'évolution (les modifications permanentes au sein de cette communauté).”
58 Jacquemin. Rather, DivX Prime was a tool of “nano-surgery”. Instead of improving codec algorithms, DivxPrime aimed to produce deliberate mutations. By practicing such a “heretic” act, the artist can question not only the status of software and codecs, be they open source or proprietary, but also the logic underlying the development of software. Planes and Jacquemin’s subversive strategy consisted in designing a software bastard for producing video mutants which would undermine the logic of improvement, efficiency, and standardization and, therefore, go against the representative logic of visual arts. This logic, as they argued, is alien to digital technologies and therefore restricts the creative possibilities of the computer. Seeing from the perspective of the politics of movement, one can characterize their software as both a critique of video codecs and practice of exploring the technicity of cinematic technology in the digital era. This practice engenders new lines of concretization and encourages us to explore the virtual possibilities of cinematic technologies constrained by the mimetic order of the “analog” cinema, as well as algorithms of motion prediction. DivX Prime is a software that magnifies sub-representatitive levels of algorithms and makes their operations perceptible. It lays bare the technicity of cinematic technology in a digital age whereby detecting the virtual movement operations of the MPEG codec and making them actual, that is, visible. Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin suggest glitch technique reveals “an authentic computer aesthetics” (113). However, what grounds this aesthetic is a certain politics of movement.
59
Figure 7. DivX Prime interface and the example of datamoshing technique.
In recent years, the datamoshing technique, as it is now called, has become quite popular and, one might argue, it has lost its efficiency. However, the technicity of cinematic technology is, as it were, neutral. One can talk about a politics of cinematic production of motion only when one starts exploring mediations of this technicity in culture. In Chapter Three I already provided several examples. The cinematic technology is constantly in the process of concretization, and this process doesn’t happen in the vacuum. The cinematic technology is interwoven into the complex net of socio-economical relationships which are also subject to constant change. And one should take into account these factors. Different mediations of cinematic technology reveal different facets of its technicity. From a Simondonian perspective, the technical object is not a given, it’s a temporary actualization of the process of concretization and, as a process, it is open to the future, to the new and to unpredictable, no matter how strong standardization tendencies are.
60 4.6 Window Water Baby Moving/Window ater aby oving: Medium Specificity vs Technicity
Danny Snelson’s Window ater aby oving35 (2010) is a datamosh version of Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) where the famous America avant-garde filmmaker records the birth of his first child (Fig. 8). As P. Adams Sitney testifies in his book Visionary Film, Window Water Baby Moving, together with his other autobiographical works, “have transformed the idea of film-making for avant- garde artists who began to make films in the late sixties” (150). In spite of his legendary status in avant-garde filmmaking, his works were notoriously difficult to see.
Figure 8. Still from Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959)
Digital and network technology drastically changed the situation. Needless to say, Criterion’s two DVD finally allowed hundreds of cinephiles to see Brakhage’s films, and video-sharing websites further promoted his popularity. As Snelson himself writes: “there are now dozen of online versions: in flash through a variety of services in a variety of qualities, in AVI via torrent or Rapidshare file hosting, and in high quality Criterion DVD rips on private torrent sites. Boasting hundreds of thousands of
35 https://vimeo.com/9589692
61 viewers on YouTube alone, these derivative versions are now the dominant mode of experiencing the film.” But it was not without consequences, Snelson complains: “Brakhage's signature attention to color, precision, and velocity are lost in these diversely pixelated, distorted, or glitchy versions.”
Figure 9. Still from Danny Snelson’s Window ater aby oving (2010).
Snelson explicitly states that he conceived his film as a critique of the digital renditions of Brakhage’s masterpiece: “This new datamosh version attempts to address its contemporary situation in the fullness of the current mediating technologies.” Snelson claims that digital copies don’t allow the appreciation of the rich color, the play of light and the texture of Brakhage’s film. Thus, in his annotation, he frames his critique exclusively in terms of the image and perception: “How to can we understand the 'primacy of vision' in this context? What is the act of seeing with one's own eyes in front of a console?” What escapes his attention, however, is that it is the technicity of the cinematic technology that operates his critique and gives it such a force: undermining the politics of movement of video codecs, he repeats the avant-garde gesture by reinventing the technicity in digital milieu and directing the process of concretization against the logic of standardization and uniformity.
Snelson is certainly not alone who treats datamoshing and glitch techniques in purely aesthetical terms. Thus, in Software Studies / A Lexicon — arguably the book
62 that in many ways shaped software studies as a discipline and still continues to guide research in that area — Goriunova and Shulgin claim that “glitches can be claimed to be a manifestation of genuine software aesthetics” (111). In his recent essay about datamoshing, William Brown and Meetali Kutty define datamoshing as “a practice whereby audiovisual artists actively downgrade the quality of digital images in order to render a more ‘raw’ aesthetic on screen” (165, my italics). As one can see, the discussion here is framed in terms of the image. As a result, the question of technicity is obscured and quite often mistreated for technicity is usually confounded with artistic techniques. Such confusion engenders certain theoretical paradoxes.
The first obvious paradox is that when we frame the question in terms of artistic techniques and visual effects and try to trace the origins of such practices, we immediately discover that, contrary to Goriunova and Shulgin’s thesis, glitch is by no means medium specific. Incidentally, some scholars argue that the genealogy of glitch can be traced back to certain practices of avant-garde artists and, specifically, to Brakhage himself! Discussing ‘chromatic aberrations’ in datamoshing films, Jonathan Thonon connects datamoshing with color experiments in some Brakhage’s films (“Aberrations chromatiques: de l’émulsion au pixel”). Other scholars go as far as to claim that: “A filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, has created pieces where images change extremely quickly, without respect to conventional continuity. It is impossible to see each of the images, and the functional original meaning of the images is lost. Thus, this is a type of glitch” (Ito, Stone, Yamada, and Miyazaki 155).
The second paradox pertains to the technological side of datamoshing and glitch. Usually scholars frame their discussions about technological issues in terms of the aesthetics of error, mistake, malfunction, unpredictability or even chaos. Goriuova and Shulgin admit difficulties that arise from this for “what users might perceive as “glitchy” can arise from a normally working function of a program” (111) but they disregard the question of the origin of glitches, considering them to be of minor importance for the functioning of glitches in culture. While such point of view might be appropriate to the discussion of glitches in different media, when it comes to the digital cinema, all these terms are used to describe visual effects. But as I demonstrated in Chapter Three, framing the question of technicity in terms of the
63 image misrepresents the cinematic technicity. The same claim can be made not only for analog cinema but also for digital cinema.
On the one hand, glitches are considered an ‘authentic computer aesthetics’. On the other hand, an origin for glitch aesthetics can be traced back to certain artistic practices of analog cinema. This obvious paradox cannot be solved on the level of aesthetics. But if we take technicity as a point of departure, we will discover at least the origin, if not the solution, of such a paradoxical claim.
Analyzing datamoshing and avant-garde films techniques on the level of technicity enables a revelation of what binds together these two seemingly incompatible media – analog and digital. In both cases it is an exploration of the technicity of cinematic technologies. In both cases, movement synthesis is organized in such a way in order to exceed the bounds of the image’s mimetic order and lays bare the technical operations of movement synthesis. But revealing the cinematic technicity, at the same time, entails an exploration of the virtual capacities of the cinematic technology and, as a result, leads to the production of new types of movement, which media scholars attempt to conceptualize in terms of the aesthetics of error.
However, it is important to keep in mind that on the level of technicity there is no error or malfunction, just like there was no malfunction in the case flicker films or avant-garde techniques of superimposition or placing a quick succession of disparate images. MPEG motion prediction algorithms continue to function properly even if the filmmaker messes with keyframes. One might say that glitch shows how video codecs, to borrow Mackenzie’s term, think movement. However, one should very cautious for, in that case, one can easily reinstate the discussion in terms of the image. For example, when Goriuova and Shulgin claim that glitch gives “a possibility to glance at software’s inner structure” (114) it is certainly not the case. Datamoshing films introduce new types of movement but, at the same time, they don’t reveal the way algorithms operate movement manipulations (i.e. it is not possible to deduce the function of algorithms). The question of the perception of moving images goes beyond the scope of my inquiry here, but I concur with Hansen who argues for “operational blindness” of contemporary technologies by which he means, “we can
64 have absolutely no cognitive or perceptual access to the computational processes that inform them at the moment of their occurrence” (“Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality” 33).
Thus, in the case of datamoshing films, MPEG algorithms function properly but also feed them, as it were, with movement data in unconventional ways that may produce unpredictable effects. This explains why software scholars talk about the aesthetics of error. But error is a negative way of thinking about the virtual capacities of cinematic technology in digital milieu. Conceptualizing glitch in negative terms, I believe, partially explains why initially it was “regarded as marginal” (Gorionova ans Shulgin 111). While the situation has certainly changed in recent years, in the case of cinema we can see that filmmakers still consider datamoshing as alien to cinema and see it as a property of digital art. But considering datamoshing in terms of image degradation obscures the fact that, just like Marey’s experiments and avant-garde film practices, the technicity of datamoshing aims at exploring and revealing new types of movement.
To sum up, by exploring and exploiting the same technicity of cinematic technology in different associated milieus (in this case the analog and digital cinema), filmmakers might produce aesthetical effects which might differ depending on the medium used for movement data organization. It is precisely this technicity that grounds these two positions that, at first sight, may appear incompatible: datamoshing as a genuine computer aesthetic and a technique which could be found in the film strip. And it is exactly this technicity that supports and grounds Snelson’s critique of digital transfers of classical avant-agarde’s films in Window ater aby oving. Framed as an argument for medium specificity on the level of the image problematics, Window ater aby oving, unwittingly for its creator, continues Brakhage’s project in a new and now digital milieu and on the level of the technicity (movement problematics). For, in both cases, they explore virtual capacities of cinematic technologies.
More importantly, once again datamoshing techniques testify to the primacy of movement not of the image itself but of the technicity of cinematic technology.
65 Even when Jonathan Thonon discusses Nicolas Provost’s Long Live the New Flesh (2009) — the datamoshing video work which incorporates footage from Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Kubrick’s Shining —, he does so primarily in terms of color and “chromatic aberrations”. He concedes the primacy of movement when he writes: “It is movement that makes reappear contours and form, which recreates the space and which proves to be the veritable support of the image” (9, my translation36).
4.7 The Smile of Mary
In the beginning of this chapter, I argued for the importance of the study of video codecs for film studies. Codecs are important not only for media and software scholars but also for those film scholars who are exclusively focused on close film analysis. Let me give an example from personal experience which, I believe, is particularly instructive. Some years ago when Criterion released Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal on DVD, I came across a forum discussion of the quality of the digital transfer. One of the members drew attention to the following moment in the film. Mikael, a strolling actor, has a vision of Jesus and Mary. The scene is filmed in a wide shot (Fig. 5) and, therefore, the face of Mary can be barely seen. Instead of the face, the DVD copy gives a blurred white spot. However, if the viewer would go to see a 35mm copy in the cinema, he or she would clearly see not only the face of Mary but her smile back to Mikael — a detail potentially full of meaning not only within the universe of the film but also in Bergman’s oeuvre overall. The gesture could be described as a mark of the chosen-ness of the hero and the profession of actor in general. Apparently, the video codec failed to differentiate the micro-movements on the face of Mary.
36 “C’est le mouvement qui fait réapparaitre les contours et la forme, qui recrée donc un espace et qui s’avère donc être le véritable support de l’image.”
66
Figure 10. Still from Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal (1957).
Such evidence, however anecdotal, gives a testimony to Mackenzie’s thesis: “Codecs affect at a deep level contemporary sensations of movement, color, light, and time ” (“Codecs” 49). Codecs — and movement politics they put into practice — also affect archival practices of digitization. While film buffs hail the dissemination of film culture, cinephiles complain about the decline of the filmstrip as a medium. Still, both of them rarely attempt to interrogate the new conditions beyond the level of interfaces and dispositifs. What does digitization enable? And what does it exclude and eliminate? As I attempted to demonstrate, before we talk about cinematic experience or specific cinematic dispositifs which organizes this experience, we need to make a step back and explore a more fundamental level of the technicity of cinematic technology, that is, operations of movement analysis and synthesis. For this technicity grounds and precedes any implementation of the cinematic dispositif, be it a movie theater, home cinema, or YouTube in a tab of a web-browser.
67 5. Conclusion
Throughout this thesis I have been examining the technicity of cinematic technology and the way it mediates in certain film theories, practices and technological standards. Cinematic technicity, I argued, consists in movement data analysis and synthesis and should not be confused with its surface effects (i.e. the aesthetics of the image). It is this cinematic technicity that grounds aesthetical practices and our cinematic experience (but which by no means defines it).
In The Practice of Light, Sean Cubitt remarks: “Media history does not try to analyze what time is but how it is mediated and how those mediations construct and constrain time” (235). The same can be said about movement, the underlying concept of my inquiry. As I have tried to demonstrate, while cinematic technology mediates movement, in its turn our concepts of movement mediate the cinematic technology. These mediations can be detrimental or profitable for both sides — I tried to examine dialectical relations of these mediations and certain effects they engender. Balancing out the concept of moving image in favor of movement, I have argued, enables us to distinguish the politics of movement which underlies the aesthetics of image. Even more invisible in the digital age, hidden in the thousands of lines of code, this politics of movement confines and structures not only our cinematic experience but the technicity of cinematic technology itself.
To my knowledge, few scholars attempted to explore the technogenetic potential of cinematic technologies. For example, Erin Manning hails Marey’s cinematic experiments because they were aimed at “movement that exceeds representation” (8). Her description of Marey’s machines (inspired by Simondon) is worth quoting at length because it perfectly expresses the principle of concretization of cinematic technology in general:
More than a sum of its measuring parts, the machine generates potential, registering not simply data on movement but ontogenetically adding to itself such that it is always intrinsically in the process of reinventing what a machine — or a technique—can do. (Manning 87)
68 At the same time, Manning denies digital technologies the right to individuate: “[The] access to virtuality is not yet available to digital computation, which must conform to actual ones and zeros” (64). By analyzing datamoshing technique, I tried to show the margin of indeterminacy of video codecs which, contrary to standardization tendencies and Manning’s thesis, opens digital cinema to explore further “the effects of unknowability that are virtually present in all movement” (64).
The aim of this thesis was, therefore, to articulate the ontogenetical process of (re)inventing the cinematic technology in changing associated milieu that engender new movement experiences. I tried to conceptualize cinematic technology in terms of movement, that is as the technology which allows translating virtual (imperceptible, invisible, unrepresentable) movements into actual. It is only by actively engaging with the technicity of cinematic technology that we can distinguish the technical operations, the politics they entail and aesthetic experiences they engender. Without conceptualizing the technicity of cinematic technology, movement will escape us and remain, as it were, behind our backs.
69
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