When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory… Tafler, David. Wide Angle, Volume 21, Number 1, January 1999, pp. 181-204 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wan/summary/v021/21.1tafler.html Access Provided by University of Florida Libraries at 06/15/11 12:55AM GMT Fig. 1. Ken Jacobs and The Nervous System, performance at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, October 1994. Photo by Ken Paul Rosenthal. 180 When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory… by David I. Tafler Introduction: Memory as Open Territory For a brief moment in time, film/videomakers may join with empowered spec- tators and open up the boundaries of the cinema machine. In a unique reflexive environment, film/videomakers and spectators can unravel their own memory/ history. Each, in their own way, may dredge the matrix of their home environ- ment—the country landscape, the urban grid, the tenement clusters, ethnic neighborhoods, farmhouses, barns, and the recorded ghosts of their occupation. The landscape models the intersections in their work, complex networks of intermittent movement, commerce, and ideas. The bonds stretch between the text and the spectator. Memory and technology become inseparable, the effects of each structuring the other. Prodding a living memory, the tools mediate the social experience and the social, political implications of the captured image. Efforts to explore the relationship between the social and the technical have taken many forms by many artists. Media artist Peter d’Agostino describes a childhood experience of flinching and ducking when the 3D objects came fly- ing out of the cinema screen in the nineteen-fifties. He imagines how Lumière’s David I. Tafler is Head of the Communication Department of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on interactive media and new technologies and co-edited a book with Peter d’Agostino titled TRANSMISSION: Toward A Post-Television Culture. He is currently working with the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people in central Australia on the development of their telecom- munication environment. WIDE ANGLE V OL.21 NO. 1 (JANUARY 1999), pp. 177-200. 181 © OHIO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF FILM Train Coming Into The Station prompted some discomfort on the part of an audi- ence that realized the illusion but could not break away from reacting to its shocking effects. While the “high tech” of the eighteen-nineties now looks relatively crude, at the turn of the century people ducked and scrambled out of the way of this virtual train reality. In the nineteen-sixties, Austrian film artist Peter Kubelka designed a cinema theater which enclosed the spectator in a wooden cocoon. Wooden partitions isolated the individual from the other members of the audience in order to minimize the possibility of anything distracting the spectator from his/her rela- tionship with the images projected on the screen. Not surprisingly, an indi- vidual experiences the cinema differently when isolated from the audience. For example, laughing patterns change when partitions break up the group. At times, audiences can lose their restraint. Spectators can lose their individual identity or willingness to process information individually. Group identity pre- vails. In a commercial venue, teenagers will vocally deride the manipulative conditions of a film by collectively resisting its operation. The audience resists the film’s passion and its emotional engagement by calling attention to it. They scream back at the characters by taunting the walking spectres. In a non-com- mercial screening, for example at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, adult audiences fresh from their odyssey through galleries of abstract paintings will vent their displeasure at watching an abstract film. When an audience yields to the filmmaker’s temporal control, its expectations narrow. We continue to invent the cinema. As film becomes video becomes digital, the cinema remains a fluid vehicle, perpetually in process, unstable in its projection and reception, and more difficult to interpret and deconstruct.1 Accompanying each shift, options appear that expand the possibilities for resistance within the text by forming gaps in the flow of the experience. Those intervals provide an opportunity for reconstructing meaning. The forks in the road set up decision- making junctures. Each becomes a moment of silence, a negative space. Posi- tioned to maneuver within those gaps, film and video makers and spectators can incrementally break down and gradually rebuild the codes binding them in their experience. 182 Newer interactive work restores temporal freedom, but at what cost? New decisionmaking intervals affect the arrangement of movie fantasies and speculations. At the very least, the maker/spectator pauses and assesses the situation before the text can move on. The prevailing cinema, television, de- parts from the coherence of classical drama. Navigating branches that overlap, intersect, and diverge in different directions, home television spectators channel graze, mute, record, replay, or ignore given sequences. Television commercial interruptions and their offspring MTV (music television) reinforce these inter- ruptive, fragmenting, and often abrasive patterns. No longer “ceaselessly restoring the illusion of the homogeneous and the con- tinuous,” television, nevertheless, approaches the real by “confirming the spectator in his or her ‘natural’ relationship with the world,” “reduplicating the conditions of his or her ‘spontaneous’ vision and ideology.”2 Only the reality out there has changed. In that revised reality, specific socially motivated rep- resentations trigger programmable memory. Most common, the instant-replay experience, prevalent during the screening of sporting events on commercial television, generates a brief intervalic fascination for a fleeting event. It invests that event with inflated importance, accompanying it with a dramatically charged voice-over that makes the moment into an immediate memory. In the cinema, dramatic, non-diegetic music may have the same effect. Analog causality creates seminal moments within a play of events. It shapes or choreographs particular gestures and actions within an overall sequence. Seam- less, ephemeral, and manipulable, key events rise and fall with causal regularity, changing gradually, occasionally more dramatically, but always progressively in response to numbers of stimulating factor(s). Within this fabricated encounter, the individual’s experience, feeling, and thought flows with each dramatic wave. Interruptive junctures disrupt the continuity and restore the boundaries be- tween the spectator and the screen. Decisionmaking presents variables in the formation of a collective memory where makers and viewer-participants hover between recorded events and their after effects. A number of film and video artists have probed this terrain bridging early and late twentieth century techno-social transitions. Filmmakers 183 who continue to work in a post-futuristic niche ruminate on the short-lived world captured and recreated by a mechanical cinema. Videomakers, a half a generation later, mark film’s electronic genesis. Technologically, the positioning of the spectator becomes significant. Spectator and Screen The move to digital media marks a site of convergence for so-called “experi- mental/avant-garde” film and video, the two major exploratory moving image canons of the past thirty years. As both film and tape become technical anach- ronisms, their memory and legacy open the portal for a second reading. D’Agostino’s cybernetic installation VR/RV: a Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality explores the video to VR (virtual reality) genesis and the geography of represen- tation inscribed by this transition. Filmmaker Ken Jacobs’s analytical study of an old short Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son reinvents the cinema, revisiting its origins, probing the boundary between fascination and meaning. One hundred years ago, George Melies used the cinema to build his own fantastic narratives, while the Lumière Brothers rooted their films in documenting everyday actu- alities. Looking at their work today sews together traces of the inscribed events recorded in their fluid encounter with a shifting conceptual and technical envi- ronment. That environment threatens to disappear altogether over time. Digital media anticipates the complete devolution of the screen by building a cinematic experience that “is made to happen in your head.” At the same time, it adheres to the old apparatus and the century old ways of manipulating perception. The “living” factor becomes the presence of the artist as the pro- ducer who makes the decisions to modify the recorded experience. No longer in charge (of the television remote), the spectator sits back and cognitively dives into the screen. The images on the screen cohere within the spectator. There is a violent decentring of the place of mastery in which since the Renaissance the look had come to reign; to which testifies, in my opinion, the return, synchronous with the rise of photography, of everything that the legislation of the classic optics—that geometrical ratio which made of the eye the point of convergence and centring of the perspective rays of the visible… 3 184 From old film technology, the filmmaker assembled a time machine for unlayering the multi-dimensional reality recorded on the film. Hybrid machines com- prised of odd shutters and analytical projectors warp