Afterward: A Matter of Time Analog Versus Digital, the Perennial Question of Shifting Technology and Its Implications for an Experimental Filmmaker’s Odyssey Babette Mangolte In the South of France, some fifteen kilometers east of Avignon, in the summer 1970 It is a warm evening under a sky shining with stars on a terrace, with the smell of laurel trees overpowering lavender and thyme. The cicadas have stopped at sunset and in the quiet of the night the only noises now are the crickets and the croaks of some small green frogs in the irrigation ditches in the cantaloupe fields.I look at the sky but my mind is elsewhere, enchanted by what I am hearing about a film with an intriguing title about the distance of a wave. I am left puzzled by what I am told, a marvelous account of a complex time machine and philosophical toy.I am also curi- ous to understand how one person can be so utterly fascinated by what somebody else has previously described to me as the most boring film ever made in which nothing happens, and it takes forty-five minutes to do so.1 How can something be an aesthetic revolution for one person and a negligible,inconsequential occurrence for another? That summer day I decided that I had to see it for myself, even if it meant traveling to New York City where the film was shot.(That would be my first airplane trip,my first of many other things as well.) I felt in love that night under the stars with the idea of understanding the complexity of the world and the seeming impossibility of satisfying the compulsion to solve contradictions. I also felt in love with the romantic urge to chart new territory. Time has long passed since you could think there was a choice to be made be- tween digital and analog, between pixel and silver-based. Of course you can still shoot in black and white film, but in the mind of almost everyone, film is now color, and it is digital. The image is now a bitmap made of pixels, and the grains of the silver image of the past can be added on with a simple aftereffect algorithm. Even when generated first by a film camera and not by a digital 262 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida camera, and viewed principally in the form of a film print, the interaction of digital and film is everywhere inscribed in filmmaking processes today, in cin- ematography as well as editing and scoring. This constant interaction and transfer of analog to digital and vice versa is changing the relation the film- maker has with his tools. Do the tools he uses affect the filmmaker’s subjectiv- ity? Obviously they do, and the films made now reflect these new tools. In this change, what have we filmmakers gained, and what have we lost? And is it a question of gain or loss? Or is it that the new technologies and market forces that shape what the future holds for us constitute an historical change that other forces try to reverse? If the replacement of analog by digital isn’t a matter of time anymore, time is still at the heart of the difference between the two. For a filmmaker, you could say that time is of the essence and is everywhere inscribed into film in a complex and metaphorical manner. Time is appended with an adjective and to name a few, filmmakers speak of running time, screen time, performance time, shooting time, real time, and a sense of time. All those times converge ‘as a construction’ through editing or as time regained through allusions to the past or future via flashback and flash-forward, without forgetting the ‘times’ dis- played or alluded to in the narrative and the visual and aural editing choices. Basically, a filmmaker constructs a ‘sense of time’ and a ‘sense of space’ in ev- ery film. The two are inextricably intertwined and meshed into the fabric of film itself, its projected images and playback sounds. The filmmaker alludes to and juggles all these times while thinking about and making his or her film.2 The filmmaker thinks in fragments that add up to and create time. The fragments are the shots and the addition of all the shots is the editing. But during the shooting, time collapses into duration and is visual- ized through images of spaces. So the margins between time, space, and dura- tion are blurred. Furthermore, although the filmmaker constantly counts time, measuring every shooting day, every few feet of film exposed, the seconds and minutes of possible screen time versus the running time of every shot, the result of all this counting is a film that does not necessarily produce an experience of time for the spectator. On the contrary, we often assume that a film is good because we lose track of time and are surprised on leaving the movie theater that two hours have passed. Although film is time-based, it is not always received as time-passing but rather as time-forgotten. Everything in film seems to be about time, including the camera apparatus defined by its frame-per-second speed. And we know that among the first filmmakers, Georges Méliès had great fun with tricks as early as 1900 that sub- verted the ability of the camera to reproduce real time, taking pleasure in play- ing with accelerated time or slowed down time. Certainly for Dziga Vertov in Afterward: A Matter of Time 263 Man with a Movie Camera (1929) the camera was a time machine, as it was for René Clair in Paris qui dort (1925). This fascination with camera speed ef- fects is very much alive now. We see it in Hong Kong cinema and Hollywood action films. But are spectators able to see such motion effects as an experience of time? I doubt it. I know of two films that have succeeded in creating a time experience for the viewer by collapsing time as space and time as movement. The two films are Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967) and 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). In Wavelength, the propelling forward movement of a continuous and relent- less zoom is combined with constant changes in camera stocks and color fil- ters, creating a disruption of the forward movement seen as relentless as the sound wave on the soundtrack.3 Time is both progressive and made of stop motion, like the motion picture film that is made of successive photograms. The separation of each photogram during projection is enabled by the closing of the shutter, permitting the shift from the current photogram to the next. Using digital rather than analog tools does not change any of the counting of various times during production. But I think it changes the end result at the time of projection. For the viewer, even if a film isn’t creating an experiential sense of time, it can evoke it, but the digital film is at a disadvantage in this re- gard. Why is the brightness of the LCD screen, the relentless glare of the digital image with no shutter reprieve, no back and forth between one forty-eighth of a second of dark followed by one forty-eighth of a second of projected image, with no repetitive pattern as regular as your own heartbeat, unable to establish and construct an experiential sense of time passing? And why could the pro- jected film image do it so effortlessly in the past and still can? Is it because ev- ery projected film frame or photogram is separated by black and therefore can be counted? Why is it difficult for a digital image to communicate duration? Like most filmmakers, I am intimately convinced that new technologies are a source of opportunity, and I feel betrayed by this limitation of digital. I very much want the passage to digital to be all gain and no loss. But I notice a loss when I com- pare a film projected as a film, in particular films that deal with time and dura- tion, and the same film projected from a DVD instead of a film print. Somehow, neither Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975), Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), nor Kubrick’s 2001 work very well unless you see them on film in a movie theater – and preferably in 35mm or 70mm if you can.4 And most underground films do not work either. Certainly flicker films like the ones of Paul Sharits, or the quick refocus and reframing by Stan Brakhage, don’t work well in video viewing; neither do most of Andy Warhol’s films, in- cluding The Chelsea Girls (1967). Immediately you think it is because of the 264 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida precision provided by a much more detailed film image. But maybe this isn’t all that matters to create a percept (Deleuze’s definition of a work of art).5 At the core of the difference between silver-based film and digital is the ab- sence of the shutter. No more flicker. No more heartbeat. The persistence of vi- sion isn’t called to the rescue to make possible the reproduction of movement using photograms. Film is made of still photographs after all. But the digital film is not. Underneath there is a grid of pixel-size slots, and it is fixed. Some- how the pixel makes what you see an icon; it is graphic and not sensorial. In those experiential films, time is inscribed in the emulsion grain, which constantly trades places and spaces from one frame to the next.