A Cinema Exploded: Notes on the Development of Some Post-Cinematic Forms, Matthew Clayfield

In his 2003 Variety Cinema Militans Lecture, 'Toward a re-invention of cinema,' Peter Greenaway suggested that the cinema died almost twenty-five years ago, in 1983, with the introduction of the remote control "to the living rooms of the world" [1], a sentiment that, while delightfully provocative in and of itself, I'm not sure I completely agree with. Insofar as I can see it, the remote control, far from killing cinema in one fell swoop, merely marked the first real tolling of its proverbial bell and the beginning of its slow but steady trek towards, while not the grave, a new landscape in which it would be but one of many audiovisual media, lighting a twenty-five year fuse, which is at present shorter than it has ever been before.

As Greenaway suggested in his lecture, the history of art has shown us that the "throwing away [of established cinematic language] in anticipation of a new cycle" of "aesthetic-technologies" is ultimately inevitable. The key word here seems to me to be 'anticipation,' and, along with the funeral procession and bomb fuse analogies, we might also like to apply to the period of innovation that has followed the introduction of the remote control the more biological analogy of foetal gestation, which is perhaps more appropriate given its positive focus on birth as opposed to a negative one on death. This is not a 'death of cinema' essay, and I firmly believe that cinema and post-cinema can and should coexist.

As we shall see, this gestation is taking place all around us: in the mainstream, with DVDs for films like Memento (d. Christopher Nolan, 2001) [2]; in the independent sector, with projects like Bodysong (d. Simon Pummell, 2003) [3]; in the art world, with video art; and in the academy, with praxis-based research projects like those of Lev Manovich and Adrian Miles. These are the true harbingers of post-cinematic forms and often bring together, to greater or lesser extent, two of what I consider to be the most important and exciting aspects of the post-cinematic landscape: non-linear granularity and the possibility for interactive audience participation.

Essentially, we can look at a film in one of two ways: holistically, as a more or less cohesive formal system or emotional experience; i.e., as a sole discursive entity (the film); or atomistically, as a series of smaller constituent elements; i.e., as a collection of potentially discursive entities (sequences, scenes, shots, and frames). The primary difference between the two approaches, to put it rather simplistically, is ultimately a matter where one chooses to place the emphasis in the clause "A film is the sum of its parts." Does one privilege the sum or the parts? The whole or its constituents?

Traditionally, with a few notable exceptions (i.e., the Surrealists), the vast majority of audiences, filmmakers, and theoreticians have chosen to emphasise the whole. This is hardly surprising, nor is it a bad thing. Cinema's mode of transmittal, for the greater part of its history, has dictated that, by and large, films be experienced in this way, presented in their entirety, uninterruptible, to a more or less passive audience. This is not to say that those who prefer to look at a film as a whole (i.e., the vast majority of us) automatically disregard its sequences, scenes, and so on, of course. They don't. But when they do isolate constituent elements, for whatever purpose—be it theoretical or practical—they tend to do so with the whole in mind, looking at the constituent element as just that—a constituent—and very rarely, if ever, as a potentially autonomous entity in and of itself.

Consider a Bordwellian reading of a shot or frame in an Eisenstein film (in contrast to a Barthesian reading of the same) or a digital effects technician's approach to a two-second sequence for the latest blockbuster comic book adaptation. These isolated elements are ultimately recognised to be of less importance than the whole of which they are a part. The constituent elements of an Eisenstein film are nothing to Bordwell if not building blocks in the overall formal system of the picture. The digital effects technician will labour over individual shots and frames for weeks and weeks at a time, but always with a mind to eventually integrate them into the larger framework of the whole.

There are more than valid reasons for this, of course, and these are ultimately the same reasons that interactivity in the cinema—in a direct, participatory sense, at least; i.e., in the sense that the viewer's actions directly influence the form and/or content of the work in question—has necessarily been limited. The theatrical experience, by its very nature, doesn't really allow for a high level of granularity or true interactivity. Sure, a film is made up of sequences, scenes, shots, and frames, but the manner in which they are presented to us—in a predefined and unalterable linear order—ultimately renders this fact, if not meaningless, then at least of secondary importance. Similarly, while there are indeed countless pictures that demand that a viewer at some point consciously engage with the form of a work for it to be understood and appreciated, this ultimately passive-aggressive spectatorship is not what I mean by interactivity.

However, as we have already established, cinema's mode of transmission is changing, and, indeed, changing rapidly. DVD, to take but one example, is a profoundly post-cinematic technology that is currently tied down—perhaps due to lack of imagination, though more likely due to economic reasons (believe it or not, but some people actually like to buy and own movies on disc!)—to more holistic cinematic forms.

The format's primary means of acknowledging the potential autonomy of constituent elements is, perhaps, the chapter- or scene-selection feature, a legacy of the laserdisc era that has taken on a life of its own with the introduction of DVD. A film is no longer simply a monolithic whole, but, as a result of this feature, a series of scenes that can be viewed out of predefined chronological order and in isolation to one another. This has not been warmly embraced by all, and, indeed, some have quite rightly considered it to be a decidedly uncinematic development.

The most prolific naysayer has perhaps been David Lynch, who has clung desperately to his holistic notions about cinema while simultaneously reducing the post-cinematic capabilities of DVD to zero by demanding that his films be released in this format without chapter stops. His films, he has said, are to be watched in their entirety, experienced as wholes; i.e., that the post-cinematic technology is to be a mere means of distribution, not an artistic tool in and of itself, limited by its arbitrary conformity to the cinematic mode of transmittal. This has not only been infuriating for many (and it has been) but also demonstrates an inherent naïvety on Lynch's part as well. For depriving a DVD of its chapter stops only renders a film less granular. It doesn't at all render the film any less susceptible to the whims of the zapper-wielding audience member, who, today more than ever, is often overtly aggressive towards the aesthetic object, particularly when it has been delivered to them by way of post-cinematic technologies.

At its simplest, most base level, interactivity in a post-cinematic context can be represented by the power bestowed upon the audience member by the remote control and its ability to pause, stop, play, fast-forward, and rewind. This is why the chapter-less Lynch discs are ultimately a fruitless venture; the post-cinematic mode of transmittal dictates that the filmmaker is no longer in complete control of the form of his work as it is experienced by an audience, particularly as regards screen-time, which is now almost completely at the mercy of the audience. Lynch's desire to have his films experienced as wholes will be more or less trumped by the audience's ability to fast-forward and rewind them, as they are more than likely to do as they try to work out his complex dream narratives. It is perhaps ironic that it is a Lynch film, Blue Velvet (1986), which is the subject of Nicholas Rombes' quasi-insane (and now discontinued) 'Frame By Frame' blog project, which, if nothing else, demonstrated that attempts to circumvent post-cinematic granularity are meaningless in a world where, if one so chooses, a film can be analysed, with the help of a pause or skip forward button, frame by agonising frame at a time.

Obviously, as I have already suggested, one can be a more or less aggressive audience member as regards traditional cinema as well, but the difference there is that one's aggressiveness—a proactive willingness to enter into a kind of discourse with a picture—can really only reveal the form of a work, it can't actually change or shape it. It is often said that a work of art is completed by the audience, but only in a post-cinematic context is this literally true. Again, this is not to say that a masterpiece like Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) would be better if the audience could actively control its form by way of a multi-angle function that allowed them to edit their own shower sequence in real time. I do not wish to suggest that cinematic forms are any better or worse than post-cinematic forms. Rather, what I wish to highlight, again, is the problematic manner in which our desire to conform post-cinematic technologies to the demands of a cinematic framework limits the extent to which these new forms can develop and grow.

In contrast to the chapter-less Lynch discs—and, to a lesser extent, to the hundreds of other DVDs that merely accommodate the chapter-selection feature as though it were little more than an obligatory formality—the DVD edition of Christopher Nolan's Memento (2001) gleefully embraced the granularity offered by the format. Included on the disc was a function that 'reshuffled' the order of the film's scenes, demonstrating that the picture's structure as a whole (and, admittedly, it was still a whole) was ultimately reliant on the parts that made it up, thus inverting the traditional hierarchy. In time, I think, this will come to be seen as an important milestone for this kind of mainstream content. When it was in theatres, Memento was, despite its convoluted (and in my opinion contrived) narrative structure, a relatively traditional cinematic experience. When it hit DVD, however, it became decidedly post-cinematic. Yes, the project was limited in its scope to the relatively low-granular level of the scene, and, yes, the film was still presented as a whole (albeit a drastically reordered one), but the step taken was a significant one in that the mainstream had begun to experiment with the possibilities.

Of course, the vast majority of film projects are still conceived with theatrical distribution in mind, at least as their ultimate goal. They necessarily and understandably comply, therefore, with the traditionally holistic demands of this approach. Most post-cinematic experimentation, in fact—particularly as regards granularity and interactivity—is actually taking place in the field of DVD special features. Take, for example, the database of supplementary interviews (four-and-a-half hours’ worth!) on the two-disc edition of The Corporation (d. Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott & Joel Bakan, 2003), which, in typically high-granular fashion, acknowledges the fundamental importance of the individual shot (in this case a simple talking head interview), which can be viewed on its own, or as part of either a speaker- or subject-specific sequence.

The problem, though, as with the Memento 'reshuffle' function, is that it's ultimately just a special feature—a high-granular sideshow beside the low-granular main attraction. And I should point out that I love The Corporation and the marvellous DVD package that its makers put together for it. My point is just that, all too often, soft cinema comes second to hard cinema, and post-cinema to traditional cinema—even when the former is trespassing on the property of the latter!

Enter, then, the avant-garde, independent, and academic projects, which are in a position, unlike most mainstream DVDs, to render the special feature the feature presentation. We can perhaps take Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky's 'Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database' (2005), in which "software edits movies in real time by choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules defined by the authors," [4] as exemplary of these projects, dedicated as they are to post-cinematic forms and to the primacy of autonomous, highly granular signifying units, be they images or sounds. The formal possibilities opened up by these projects are significant, particularly as regards temporality, montage, soundtrack, and mise en scène, all of which become more or less open to random modulation, variation, and repetition depending on the parameters set by the author of the code. The duration, speed, position on the screen, and frame size of each visual element, and the duration, speed, timbre, and volume of each aural element (to name but a few potentially countless variables), are not fixed in these works but fluid and malleable, marking what Adrian Miles calls "a major paradigmatic shift in terms of traditional cinematic practice." [5]

Miles' own practical work is exemplary in this respect as well, with his computer-based "softvideography" [6] not only granular in the sense that Manovich and Kratsky's 'Soft Cinema' is, but also highly interactive in that the actions of the viewer (or is it user?) qualitatively alter the form of the work as a whole, rendering it so that it never appears the same twice and is constantly in flux. In a piece "as simple in structure" [7] as 'Exquisite Corpse' (2002, with Clare Stewart) [8], which Miles himself discusses at length in an excellent essay on the topic [9], all the aforementioned variables particularly screen-time and duration—are perpetually affected by mouse movement and cursor placement. The film is made up of three autonomous video tracks, all looped, in which a story is recounted verbally by actors. These tracks, depending on which one the user rolls the mouse over at any given time, play at constantly changing frame rates. The track with the pointer over it plays at the standard frame rate, the first track to right at half that speed, and the final track a quarter. The soundtrack, too, is volatile, with the audio of the selected track being privileged over those of the other two. As the viewer moves the mouse pointer around the screen, he effectively creates a complex of different relations among the three visual tracks and between image and sound, causing us to reconsider our received notions about any number of formal concepts, not to mention about the nature of authorship in a post-cinematic environment. Miles' work might at first seem lo-fi and primitive, but it is, in actual fact, extremely complex, extremely probing, and at the forefront of the practical and theoretical exploration of these forms.

In his 1967 Theory of Film Practice, Nöel Burch wrote that "of the two different forms in which the aleatoric can occur, the first (its direct intervention in a work, whether controlled or uncontrolled) seems the more 'organically relevant' to film, whereas the second (its use in the creation of works with multiple modes of performance) seems to be the more relevant to music." [10] He goes on to say that "a film's integrity appears for the moment to be as fundamental to a definition of cinema as music's need to be sheltered from the random sounds of life," but that "prospects for a new type of film . . . are just now beginning to come into view" and that "it will be one of a complexity and richness unprecedented in the entire history of art." [11] The prospects that he describes—most notably "a film with multiple interchangeable facets" [12]—find their realisation in the forms made possible by post-cinematic technologies, a direct result of the autonomous granular unit that will undoubtedly be furthered by the emergence of formally affective audience interactivity. The resultant forms require addressing and pose a whole new set of questions. How does one approach the mise en scène that is never composed the same way twice? What meaning does a work elicit when its montage is one in which any two random shots might suddenly be juxtaposed against one another? What are we to say about screen-time when a film is designed to play forever, on a loop, ad infinitum?

Since 1983, a number of technological innovations have added to the speed at which the fuse we have been discussing has burnt: the VCR and its time-shifting capabilities; analogue and (more recently) digital video recording devices (including mobile phones); DVD, CD-ROM, and other interactive technologies; the Internet as a relatively democratic means of content distribution (issues of accessibility aside). It is perhaps telling that Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most prolific of the death-of-cinema crowd, has said that, in his opinion, cinema 'ends' with Abbas Kiarostami, one of the most prolific proponents of consumer-level digital video, though this is another provocative assertion that I'm not sure I completely agree with.

Kiarostami's cinema, at least insofar as I can see it, isn't really all that close to cinema's vanishing point at all, and it certainly shouldn't be considered the vanishing point itself. His work has benefited the cinema, aiding its formal development, but not that of the post-cinema that has been the focus of this essay. New technologies, not to mention the relative democratisation of the means of production, do not automatically ensure the development of new forms. In many cases, the so-called digital revolution has merely led to a number of filmmakers embracing digital technologies for purely economic reasons, and the resultant films, more often than not, have subsequently failed to do anything new or interesting with the medium. In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably cite myself as an example of this, having often used softcopy tools to distribute my essentially hardcopy film work online. The same can be said of most videobloggers. Similarly, the vast majority of filmmakers who work with digital video are essentially making and distributing cinema with post-cinematic technologies.

This is not a bad thing in and of itself, of course. More people are making movies. Kiarostami's work with digital video may be more valuable to cinema than it is to post-cinema, but it also proves that virtually anyone with a camera can contribute to the art form in ways that were previously impossible. But it must also be conceded that these technologies have a far greater formal potential than our traditional understanding of time-based media allows. One of the major problems with the increasingly redundant film-versus-digital debate is that it's essentially an argument between two parties whose films are virtually indistinguishable on a formal level about budgets, ease of use, distribution, and so-called image quality, when what it should really be about is whether or not the dominant aesthetic forms of our times should remain static or evolve and about the unique qualities and merits of the individual media. Says Kiarostami himself:

I have somewhat lost my enthusiasm [for digital video] in the last four or five years. Mainly because film students using digital video these days have not really produced anything which is more than superficial or simplistic; so I have my doubts. Despite the great advantages of digital video and the great ease of using the medium, still those who use it have first to understand the sensitivities of how to best use the medium. [13]


I am by no means a hypermedia theorist and by no means wish to pose as one. I have ignorantly, if not always intentionally, avoided talking about videogames and video art—two of the more obvious and fruitful pillars in the post-cinematic landscape—and the pressing matter of the philosophical implications of aesthetic forms in perpetual flux—not to mention the potentially democratic and thereby inherently political nature of forms that rely so heavily on audience interactivity—will simply have to wait for another essay.

What I do know about though—or rather what I like to think I know about—is the urgent, vital, and eternal necessity for formal exploration and innovation. We are forever in need of new formal models—new ways of seeing images, hearing sounds, and of being in the world—and the post-cinematic landscape is rife with possibilities. Most of these have not yet been fully or adequately tapped, however, and with post-cinematic technologies necessarily demanding the parallel development of post-cinematic aesthetic forms, the medium's practitioners, from mainstream DVD authors to practicing academics, must now make formal experimentation one of their most central and pressing concerns.

Clearly, I would argue that we are now closer than ever before to the hypothetical explosion of cinema, even though I sincerely doubt that cinema as we know it will ever really disappear. If we are to privilege my earlier foetal gestation analogy, we may well say that recently, after a twenty-five year labour, cinema's waters have finally broken, and post-cinema is about to be born. The results, I feel, will have been well worth the wait. Coexisting with cinema as we know it, they can only be a breath of fresh air.






[1] Greenaway, Peter. 'Toward a re-invention of cinema'. Variety Cinema Militans Lecture. The Netherlands, 2003.

[2] For more on the Memento DVD see Rombes, Nicholas. 'Interface as Narrative'. Digital Poetics. (April 18, 2005).

[3] http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/B/bodysong/website.html

[4] www.softcinema.net

[5] Miles, Adrian. 'Softvideography'. Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003. Eds. Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa. Vol. 77. Jyväskylän: Research Center for Contemporary Culture, 2003. 218-36..

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/10.2002/corpse.html.

[9] Burch, Nöel. Theory of Film Practice. Trans. Lane, Helen. Secker & Warburg, London, 1974. 108.

[10] Ibid. 108-9.

[11] Ibid. 108.

[12] Ibid.

[13] 'Guardian/NFT Interview: Abbas Kiarostami'. The National Film Theatre, 2005.



Matthew Clayfield is an independent filmmaker and freelance writer currently based in Queensland, Australia. His work can be seen at www.esotericrabbit.com.


above copied from: http://www.braintrustdv.com/essays/cinema-exploded.html

Abstract Cinema, Bruno Corra

1912

It could be said that the only display of the art of colors currently in use is the painting. A painting is a medley of colors placed in reciprocal relationships in order to represent an idea. (You will note that I have defined painting as the art of color. For brevity’s sake, I will not concern myself with line, an element taken from another art.) A new and more rudimentary form of pictorial art can be created by placing masses of color harmoniously arranged in relationship to each other over a surface, so as to give pleasure to the eye without representing any image. This would correspond to what in music is known as harmony, and we can therefore call it chromatic harmony. These two forms of art, chromatic harmony and the painting, are spatial; music tells us of the existence of something essentially different, the mingling of chromatic tones presented to the eye successively, a motif of colors, a chromatic theme. I shall not, since it is not yet necessary, go on to speak of a fourth form of art, corresponding to musical drama, which would give rise to chromatic drama.

Consequently, two years ago, after the entire theory had been minutely established, we decided to make a serious attempt to create a music of colors. We immediately began to think of the instruments, which perhaps did not exist, and which we would have to have made to order, to enable us to realize these theories. We traveled untrodden roads, letting intuition guide us for the most part, but always proceeding concurrently, in order not to be led astray, with our study of the physics of light and sound, the works of Tyndall and of many others.

Naturally we applied and exploited the laws of parallelism between the arts which had already been determined. For two months each studied on his own without communicating his results—afterwards we presented, discussed and amalgamated our observations. This confirmed our idea, which had anyway preceded our study of physics, of adhering to music and transferring the tempered scale of music into the field of color. We knew, however, that the chromatic scale consists of only one octave, and that, on the other hand, the eye, unlike the ear, does not possess the power of resolution (although, rethinking this point, I realize that one must have reservations). Yet we felt the obvious need of a subdivision of the solar spectrum, even an artificial and arbitrary one (since the effect stems principally from the relationships between the colors that impress the eye). Consequently we selected four equally distanced gradations in each color. We had four reds chosen at equal distances in the spectrum, four greens, four violets, etc. In this way we managed to extend the seven colors in four octaves. After the violet of the first octave came the red of the second, and so on. To translate all this into practice we naturally used a series of twenty-eight colored electric light bulbs, corresponding to twenty-eight keys. Each bulb was fitted with an oblong reflector: the first experiments were done with direct light, and in the subsequent ones a sheet of ground glass was placed in front of the light bulb. The keyboard was exactly like that of a piano (but was less extensive). When an octave was played, for example, the two colors were mingled, as are two sounds on the piano

This chromatic piano, when it was tried out, gave quite good results, so much so that at first we were under the illusion that we had resolved the problem definitively. We amused ourselves by finding all sorts of chromatic mixtures, we composed a few color sonatinas—notturni in violet and mattinate in green. We translated, with a few necessary modifications, a Venetian barcarolle by Mendelssohn, a rondo by Chopin, a Mozart sonata. But at last, after three months of experimentation, we had to confess that with these means no further progress could be made. We obtained the most graceful effects, it is true, but never to the extent that we felt fully gripped. We had at our disposition only twenty-eight tones, the fusions did not work well, the sources of light were not strong enough, if we used powerful bulbs the excessive heat made them discolor in a few days, and then we had to recolor them exactly, with considerable loss of time. We felt very clearly that, in order to obtain the large orchestral effects which alone can convince the masses, we needed to have a truly stupefying intensity of light at our disposition—only then could we emerge from the restricted field of scientific experiment to enter directly into its practice.

We turned our thoughts to cinematography, and it seemed to us that this medium, slightly modified, would give excellent results, since its light potency was the strongest one could desire. The other problem concerning the need to have hundreds of colors at our disposition was also resolved, since, by exploiting the phenomenon of the persistence of an image on the retina, we would indeed have been able to make many colors merge, in our eye, into a single hue. To achieve this it was sufficient to pass all the component colors in front of the lens in less than a tenth of a second. In this way with a simple cinematographic instrument, with a machine of small dimensions, we would have obtained the innumerable and extremely powerful effects of large musical orchestras, the true chromatic symphony. This was the theory. In practice, the results, after we had acquired the camera, procured many hundreds of meters of film, removed the gelatin and applied the color were, as always, mixed. To achieve a harmonious, gradual and uniform sequence of chromatic themes we had removed the rotating switch and had managed to get rid of the shutter action, too; but this was exactly the reason for the failure of the experiment, and meant that in place of the expected marvelous harmony there exploded over the screen a cataclysm of incomprehensible colors. It was only subsequently that we understood the reason. We replaced all the parts we had removed, and decided to consider the film to be colored as divided into bars, each one as long as the space between four perforations, which corresponds at least in films of the Pathe gauge, to one complete rotation of the switch. We prepared another length of film and tried again. The fusion of the colors was perfect, and that was the important factor. As for the effect, it was not all that good, but we had already realized that where this was concerned we could not reasonably expect much, unless one had the ability, acquired only by long experience, to mentally project on to the screen the development of a motive as it is gradually applied with the brush on to the celluloid. This ability implies the mental fusion of many colors into one single color, and the dissection of a hue into all its components.

At this point, seeing that our experiences had got us positively on a solid road, we felt it necessary to pause to effect every possible improvement on the machine we were using. The projector remained unchanged. We merely replaced the arc lamp we had used until then with another arc lamp three times as strong. We made repeated experiments with the screen, using a simple white canvas, a white canvas soaked in glycerin a tinfoil surface, a canvas covered with an impasto that resulted, by reflection, in a sort of phosphorescence, an approximately cubical cage of very fine gauze penetrable by the light rays, which gave a fluctuating effect of clouds of white smoke. At last we returned to a white canvas stretched over a wall. All furniture was removed and the entire room, walls, ceiling and floor, painted white. During the rehearsals we wore white shrouding drapes (incidentally: once chromatic music is established, be it our works or those of others, a fashion will follow encouraging the well-dressed spectator to go to the theater of color dressed in white. Tailors can get to work on it now). To date we have not been able to achieve better results, and we have continued to work in our white room, which, in any case, serves us quite adequately.

Before describing, since I cannot do otherwise, the most recent successful color symphonies, I will attempt to give the reader some idea of this, though it will be far from the effect of the encounter of colors extended in time. I will place under the reader’s eyes a few sketches (here to hand) for a film planned long since. This will precede public performances, accompanied by suitable explanations. (It will consist of fifteen or so extremely simple chromatic motives, each about a minute long and each divided from the next. These will serve to communicate to the public the legitimacy of chromatic music, to help it grasp its mechanisms and put it in the right frame of mind to enjoy the color symphony which will follow, simple at first, then little by little more complex.) To hand I have three chromatic themes sketched in on strips of celluloid. The first is the simplest one could imagine. It has two colors only, complementaries, red and green. To begin with the whole screen is green, then in the center a small red six-pointed star appears. This rotates on itself, the points vibrating like tentacles and enlarges, enlarges until it fills the whole screen. The entire screen is red, and then unexpectedly a nervous rash of green spots breaks out all over it. These grow until they absorb all the red and the entire canvas is green. This lasts a minute. The second theme has three colors—pale blue, white and yellow. In a blue field two lines, one yellow, one white, move, bend together, detach themselves and curl up. Then they undulate towards each other and intertwine. This is an example of a linear, as well as chromatic, theme. The third is composed of seven colors, the seven colors of the solar spectrum in the form of small cubes arranged initially on a horizontal line at the bottom of the screen against a black background. These move in small jerks, grouping together, crashing against each other, shattering and reforming, diminishing and enlarging, forming columns and lines, interpenetrating, deforming, etc.

And now it only remains for me to inform the reader of our most recent experiments. These are two films, both of about two hundred meters. The first is entitled The Rainbow. The colors of the rainbow constitute the dominant theme, which appears occasionally in different forms and with ever-increasing intensity until it finally explodes with dazzling violence. The screen is initially grey, then in this grey background there gradually appears a very slight agitation of radiant tremors which seem to rise out of the grey depths, like bubbles in a spring, and when they reach the surface they explode and disappear. The entire symphony is based on this effect of contrast between the cloudy grey of the background and the rainbow, and the struggle between them. The struggle increases, the spectrum, suffocated beneath the ever blacker vortices which roll from background to foreground, manages to free itself, flashes, then disappears again to reappear more intensely close to the frame. Finally, in an unexpected dusty disintegration, the grey crumbles and the spectrum triumphs in a whirling of catherine-wheels which disappear in their turn, buried under an avalanche of colors. The second is called The Dance, the predominant colors being carmine, violet and yellow, which are continually united, separated and hurled upwards in an agile pirouetting of spinning tops.

I have done. There is no point in writing any more, since I could never succeed in giving more than the vaguest idea of color. One can only imagine it for oneself.

All one can do is open the way and I think I have done this, a little. I would like to add some comments about chromatic drama, with which we have made some interesting experiments, but this would be going too far. Perhaps I will deal with them in another article on the music of colors which I hope, together with this, will prepare the public to judge serenely the sonatas they will soon see in the theater.

Are there people in Italy who are seriously interested in these things? If so, let them write to me and I will have great pleasure in communicating to them all (and it is a great deal) that I have not been able to write and which will smooth the path.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/brunocorra_abstractcinema.htm

Technical Arts & Reality by Helen Petrovsky

Original Publication: Tympanum. 4. 15 July 2000.

Technical Arts and Reality : Status of the Referent in Photography and Cinema

Helen Petrovsky

It is quite obvious that both photography and cinema produce the strongest documentary effect: hence their most intimate, as is presumed, contact with reality. Of course, the greater part of films is deliberately and overtly fictitious, but their verisimilitude is of the highest degree – having to do with the nature of filmic representation. What is less obvious, however, is that the two media are linked to time, affecting the mode of human perception. It is in connection with time that we will be treating the so-called referent of photography and cinema, trying to delineate distinctions and bring out similarities. Hopefully this will result in a better understanding of the essence of both arts which have become a part of our daily existence.

Let us begin again: we have mentioned the documentary effect produced by photography and cinema. Indeed, both arts are also means of communication, but their communicative power derives from an "additional" quality inherent in both – something we may call the maximum of realism. To be sure, no other art can imitate reality with such perfection. Yet, one should keep in mind that this maximum of realism is by the same token a crux of illusion, since however closely people or objects in a technical representation may resemble their actual prototypes, they are never the same people or objects. (To facilitate things we shall focus on documentary photography and film for the moment.) This implies that there is an irreducible dissimilarity, or unlikeness, between a technical representation and what is reproduced, i.e. its referent, no matter how tightly the referent fits into the representational frame (and even is incorporated in it, as we shall see a bit later, discussing the specific status of reference in photography). Of course, this can be easily explained by the fact that there is no identity between an object and its representation. There never was. But does this hold true of an art that has developed out of an institutional need to establish or affirm one's identity, as was the case of photography? And, on a more general level, is it not somewhat disturbing to postulate dissimilarity there where the very means of reproduction guarantee a striking and unquestionable resemblance? And, finally, where exactly does the dissimilarity occur, given that we are ready to accept it?

But let us not be too hasty. Twice have we alluded to the documentary – it is high time to clarify this point. Even being removed from theoretical concerns we may notice that the photographic referent, unlike all other forms of representation, is virtually inseparable from the image: without being too specific about the chemical and physical processes involved in the technique we understand that what is reproduced are rays of light of various intensity emitted by the object. Which leads the famous French semiologist Roland Barthes to two related observations in "Camera Lucida" (1980): the photograph belongs to the "class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both" and it is quite literally "an emanation of the referent".¹ In an earlier work, "The Photographic Message" (1961), the same idea is expressed in different words: a perfect analogon of reality – something that in fact defines the photograph to common sense, – it is essentially a non-coded message, or the (analogical) plenitude of the visual as an autonomous structure (what is implied is precisely the sense of "objectivity" inspired by a photograph that never transforms but only reduces – proportions, color, perspective, etc.).² Summing it up we may say that the referent is caught up in the photograph. Which also affects the workings of perception: to argue, as does Barthes, that a specific photograph is not immediately distinguished from its referent is in a way to switch analytical perspectives – the description of the photograph as object is replaced (or rather augmented) by an interest in the way photographs are generally "read", that is, perceived. What Barthes calls the "stubbornness of the Referent" may be seen as integrated in the very intention of reading.

What has been said so far does not exactly reveal any methodological preferences with respect to photography (despite the semiotic tint of Barthes' vocabulary): we have been dealing with the apparent (so it seems). In what sense then are we entitled to speak of a rupture, if what is manifest is unequivocal unity instead? How can it be that the clearest document ever, certifying a concrete presence, should lie by way of an implied dissimilarity? Or is it the referent that suddenly fails us? Let us somewhat complicate matters. In speaking of the referent as the photographed (the reproduced) we have perhaps already noticed that it is posed in relation to the image – the photograph (or reproduction). This sense of relationship will help us situate our problem. In relation to a living person a photograph seems simultaneously insufficient and redundant. It is insufficient compared to the field of possibilities a living "self" carries with it. This "self", as Barthes remarks, never coincides with its image, since a photograph immobilizes that which is by essence "light, divided, dispersed".³ On the other hand, the photograph is redundant in that it creates a total image and in so doing equates its living referent and death. For only the corpse, according to Maurice Blanchot, is finally its proper image. The German thinker Siegfried Kracauer makes a similar point in his important essay on photography written way back in the 30s. Photography's "inhuman" powers are revealed in opposition to memory. If memory images focus on the personally significant and in the long run tend to be reduced to the so-called "last image" which preserves the unforgettable, or a person's actual history (a monogram of remembered life), photographic representation, devoid of meaning, is simply the "spatial continuum" as it is grasped by the camera. What abolishes the "truth content" of the original is in fact the very likeness between the image and the object.⁴ Which means, among other things, that the exactness of photography is a lie in terms of the singular (in this case placed in a historical, or biographical, perspective). Be it insufficient or redundant, the photograph, as we can see, paradoxically opens the site of the non-identical, pointing to difference there where unity was first assumed. Perhaps, it is because the referent enters the very texture of a photograph that its non-presence to the photograph (and the spectator) is so dramatic. Hence, the "objective" may have a literal interpretation: without quite knowing it, we deem documentary that which is turned into an object, i.e. reduced from the transitoriness and plenitude of being to the tranquil stillness of the dead. Such are the ways of identification in general: society deals with what it can master (including photography itself).

Besides this petrifying aspect of the photographic image linked to the nature of image as such we would like to single out what may be called its affective aspect – a different way of probing into the tension between the photograph and the photographed. Again we will be alluding to Barthes' "Camera Lucida" which elaborates a special affective phenomenology as a means of uncovering the essence of photography. Barthes holds that besides the overwhelming majority of photographs that provoke a kind of "polite interest" (they belong to the culturally approved order of what one likes or doesn't like) there are those that virtually attack the spectator, producing in him or her a profound emotional disturbance. The first type of images demonstrates what Barthes calls the studium ("application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment but without special acuity"), whereas the second exemplifies the punctum (an element "which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me", the punctum also being "sting, speck, cut, little hole – and a cast of the dice"⁵). Despite the fact the Barthes begins by associating the punctum with the "detail", one should be careful not to endow it with a separate existence: both the studium and punctum are complementary ways of "reading" photographs, pertaining to a "structural rule" rather than an independent essence. This becomes all the more evident when Barthes introduces time as the photographic punctum having to do with a reality that is always-already-in-the-past. It is at this point that the problem of the photographic referent is restated. We may say that photography's essence is eventually defined at the intersection of referentiality and time: there is no denying that what I see has of necessity been there, momentarily transformed into the past by virtue of a surviving photographic image. Barthes' laconic formula "That-has-been" expressing the noeme of photography contains in it the idea of an absolute and ever deferred presence.⁶

However, this discovery is not a purely speculative one. There is one important condition which makes it possible. Photography's essence hidden in most of the snapshots becomes evident only when an image lends itself to "recognition". What is implied is something beyond the photograph, in fact another essence: for Barthes it is the truth of a vanished person – his mother whom he desperately seeks to rediscover. Only one photograph from a host of representations offers him his mother's being, only one photograph, in other words, is the "site" of his punctum. But this is enough for him to proceed with his affective phenomenology or, to be more exact, to give it a start, since the Winter Garden Photograph (the only one which is deliberately omitted from the illustrations) is undoubtedly constitutive for the whole undertaking – it underlies and validates Barthes' entire photographic investigation. It should be understood, though, that an impalpable essence (the mother's being) is from now on inscribed in a palpable image. Hence the greatest paradox: never do we "see" the punctum (if only because an essence remains by definition unseen), yet there is no punctum outside the photograph. This is accounted for by the very mechanism of "recognition", the latter referring clearly to a state of affect. When one "recognizes", propelled by emotion, one seems to be experiencing two things at once: a sudden blindness and a sudden insight. Blindness occurs with respect to the image, while the insight (an internally directed vision, i.e. literally "inner sight") concerns the "essence" of affect (in Barthes' case it is love forever deprived of its object). Or, putting it differently: affective recognition provoked by the photograph is a kind of combination of two types of vision – one that contents itself with the sensuous (the surface of the photograph) and the other that is the "mind's eye" preoccupied with the intelligible (the photographic punctum). The photograph is that very bindless bind that unites the two, pointing to where they intersect by way of a rupture.

The two visions, however, are actually one, retaining in itself the mentioned tension. Such is indeed the photographic punctum. As "detail" it is "in" the photograph – but where exactly? Not even Barthes seems to know, hence his reflections on the latency of the punctum, its power of expansion, its supplementary nature and the like (at the limit stands an astounding, though logical, avowal: "in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes"⁷). Perhaps, it is most adequately understood in terms of a "co-presence" (the studium and punctum) and even in musical terms (two "themes" in photography not unlike a classical sonata – to speak again of the studium and punctum). The punctum thus is clearly relational including its very singularity: it tends to turn into the studium under another spectator's gaze (no use displaying the Winter Garden Photograph: the reader will never see what Barthes himself sees in the image). We may suggest that the punctum is an affective transformation of the photographic referent to the extent that one can no longer distinguish between the referent as "outer" reality and the referent as it becomes part of the material substance of the photograph. As if influenced by its own power, the punctum, we remember, gradually spreads to encompass the whole of the photograph along with its hidden essence: from now on a function of intensity (unlike that of form), it becomes a "pure representation" of the noeme "That-has-been".⁸ Once again a paradox is stated: that which cannot be seen (in this case time) is given only in its visually ratified exactness. The "pure representation" of Time appears as an "unexpected flash" that crosses the field of cultural interest known as the studium. In order to "see" the punctum one surely has to practice a cognitive effort different from the habitual procedures of naming: "What I can name", says Barthes, "cannot really prick me".⁹ Resolutely situated outside language and interpretation, the punctum becomes a distinct trace of time's latent materiality. Or, it is that litmus paper that makes time visible in an instant flash of recognition. What is recognized is not only a lost being (a being, so to say, lost in time), but one's own temporality as finite and therefore the undeniable fact that "I am the reference of every photograph".¹⁰ I am the reference of every photograph because it makes me ask myself the fundamental questions concerning life and death (like "why is it that I am alive here and now?"¹¹). Which is to say that photography is an all too human practice.

But what kind of time is thus rendered visible? Definitely it is not "objective" time, belonging, properly speaking, to physics. The photograph is an essentially temporal structure that opens onto affective time, or, if you will, the time of biography (if, in Kracauer's words, the latter implies the truly "significant"). It does so where it is disruptive. To be more exact: photography holds in it the possibility of recapturing personal time, even if most of the snapshots today are simply so many coded messages. There where photography dissociates, where it creates nothing other than breaks and ruptures – tearing apart image and reference, splitting and interlacing types of affective vision, complicating the discontinuous exchange between reality and representation, – there a discourse of the singular (of the unique, according to Barthes) may actually take place. For structurally photography problematizes what is traditionally known as subjectivity. It is this "hiatus" at the heart of photography that allows to read it in terms of a "withdrawal"¹², which ultimately points to recent theories focusing on the "failure" of the subject, i.e. on a constitutive differentiating mechanism underlying (and undermining) its surface identity (the best example being Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's philosophy of the "desisting" subject¹³). But an inquiry into this intricate problematic lies beyond the tasks set in the present paper.

There is, perhaps, a more radical way of bringing together the photograph's petrifying and disjunctive powers. Once again this touches on the question of the photographic referent. According to a recent reading of Walter Benjamin, a reading, it should be noted, that accredits photography with the role of scheme, or model, for the understanding of a unique conception of history, the "truth" of the photo is from the outset seen as a basic absence of relation between the photograph and what is photographed. It is not quite clear, though, to what extent the German theorist himself was explicit on the matter, save for the telling remark: "Man withdraws from the photographic image".¹⁴ (Benjamin did write on photography and showed a constant interest in it; however, photography in him is rather inferred from the major problem of mechanical reproducibility than makes a theoretical appearance of its own, and is of course connected to his entire thinking. On the other hand, the interpreter Eduardo Cadava displays a heavy conceptual "bias": his reading of photography is thoroughly deconstructive, which means that the "model" he proposes is already "modeled" after the influential philosophical orientation. We do not mean to say that such a reading is untrue to Walter Benjamin – simply one should keep in mind the scholar's source of inspiration.) There are certain presuppositions that attest to the quoted statement and prove it. They are (to put it in a nutshell): Benjamin's theory of mimesis (or, rather, of "nonsensuous similarity"), his understanding of allegory along with (historical) time and, last but not least, his groundbreaking formulation of mechanical reproducibility and its consequences for the modern work of art. Let us try to single out some of the basic theses.

Similarity in Benjamin concerns the relation between the like and the unlike and is exemplified in the perception/birth of a star constellation. The "perception of similarity" comes about as a flash of lightning. Offering itself to the eye "as fleetingly, transitorily as a star constellation" it requires a third instance added to the "conjunction of two stars" so that similarity could be held fast. This third instance is the "astrologer" who, coinciding with the flash, both completes the constellation and is assimilated in it. Such exactly is the position of the "historical materialist" who comes to know history – a flash-like constellation of the past and present – in a moment of arrest (corresponding to the "caesura in the movement of thought"). This constellation is for Benjamin an image which calls for an allegorical interpretation, i.e. a reading of transience based on the examination of ruins: "Whatever is struck by the allegorical intention is severed from the contexts of life: it is at once destroyed and conserved. <...> It [allegory] offers the image of petrified unrest". Allegory, in other words, "signifies precisely the nonbeing of what it presents".¹⁵ Finally (if only too briefly), the "content" of modern reproducibility seems to be shifting towards reproduction as such (instead of its possible object), engendering in the process new forms of reality. Within this context it will be easier to conceive of a photograph in terms of "bereaved allegory" as is suggested by Cadava, the photographic event reproducing no less than "the posthumous character of our lived experience". The absence of relation between the photograph and its referent is therefore an announcement of our own absence – already in our lifetime, – assuming the peculiar form of the "survival of the dead" in the photographic image. According to Cadava, the conjunction of death and the photographed (something we spoke of earlier) is central to Benjamin's understanding of the referent's withdrawal, it is in fact "the very principle of photographic certitude". Inflamed by "the instantaneous flash of death", immobilizing and banishing the passage between the image and its referent, the photograph which is the medium of likeness "speaks only of what is unlike" – a gaping crevasse easily forgotten. It is out of this very forgetting that history (as history of a "posthumous shock") emerges in the outcome.¹⁶

What lies behind this treatment of the photographic referent – both Benjaminian and exceeding Benjamin (at least regarding the interpretive vocabulary involved) – is the idea about the end of representation along with the corresponding notion that the photograph is a temporal structure, i.e. time made visible by becoming space (which is exactly the formulation of the famous "spacing" elaborated by Jacques Derrida¹⁷). By stating the photograph's inability to represent one actually dematerializes the image, turns it into something other than itself. This "other" of the image is its condition of possibility (in the Kantian language) or, otherwise, eventuality (to use a more recent notion). The focus is switched onto the way the image "happens" – including our very thought about it as "image" (to be more precise: how and when is photography translated into an independent problematic, which presupposes a metaphorical use of its language, the transformation of image into the central category of modernity and so on?). Another important theoretical implication is the latency of experience in general – a point Cadava openly makes by uniting Benjamin, Freud and Bloch: what we experience is never experienced directly, the absence from experience being inscribed in the experience itself. Applied to and even derived from photography all this places the photograph "before" the photograph, so that the problem of the photographic referent, if only potentially, acquires a metaphysical dimension. And now, to summarize the various perspectives that we have been exploring so far: when tackled from the viewpoint of the referent photography contains the germ of a revised theory of knowledge enveloped in the notion of the "flash" (of recognition). It is precisely here that Barthes and Benjamin meet, both of them offering a structural framework for the "reading" of the ineffable. For what else is a wound opened by a photograph or an (historical) image-constellation if not that which is at odds with language and yet incessantly calls for expression? This "reading" is of necessity relativistic, which means that the examiner is integrated in the conditions of examination. However, "objectivity" is not diminished – simply it depends henceforth on the reconsideration of the question "How do we come to know?".

Before proceeding with an analysis of the cinematic referent let us insert some general remarks. The problem of the referent, as we have seen, is crucial for the very definition of photography despite the difference in approaches (they are indeed only separate avenues leading to one and the same point – their final crossing is inevitable). Though implicitly we have been dealing with "ordinary" photographs and not those considered artistic, this distinction is not of primary importance as far as the essence of photography is concerned (one may rather say that artistic photography in the strict sense simply digresses from this essence by way of numerous tricks and devices, all of them belonging to the studium, or the field of cultural meanings). In examining cinema we will likewise not be concentrating on a similar distinction (though when we talk of cinema what is implied is cinema as fiction and not documentary films – perhaps because in both cases we are unconsciously referring to the commonest of our experience – amateur, i.e. anonymous, snapshots and motion pictures signed by authors' names). There is something that immediately sets apart cinema productions, an object of extensive theorizing: cinema is marked by movement. But there is also something else that places film in the same horizon as photography – based on technological reproducibility both photography and cinema create the strongest "illusion of reality".¹⁸ Despite the fact that the notion of authenticity is attributed to different objects in the course of historical time (before the advent of photography the "truest" were newspaper chronicles regarded as impassive descriptions of actual events), photography's unprecedented certifying power can hardly be denied. It is this evidence (in the double sense of factuality and what is further indivisible) that is the starting point of any possible analysis. If we remain within the semiotic framework (proposed by Barthes), photography's evidence can be designated in terms of the iconic sign, the latter presupposing that a meaning has only one "naturally inherent" way of being expressed (whereas its opposite, the conventional sign, demonstrates a lack of necessary – i.e. "internally motivated" – connection between its expression and content.¹⁹ Icons are essentially pictures (pictograms), their pictorial aspect being welded into their content. Of all iconic signs photography is so highly imitative that it is easily identified with the very object it represents. Hence it is no longer perceived in its signifying function, but is seen as reality itself. The cinema, as we have indicated, shares the same characteristic and amounts to a dynamic combination of what Yuri Lotman – if only once – defines as "photosigns".²⁰ Therefore, both photography and cinema "produce such a feeling of authenticity in the spectator which is absolutely inaccessible to other arts and can be equaled only by emotions produced by the immediate impressions of life".²¹

This part of the argument, however semiotically "loaded", retains something that touches the "obvious" essence of both technical arts. What is implied is the primary evidence of evidence that makes the spectator believe and thus emotionally partake of the iconic (in motion). Perhaps, it is precisely this "illusion of reality", this bloating of the photographic referent (paradoxically coinciding with its retreat) that accounts for the special pleasure derived from cinema productions. Such pleasure, in our opinion, has much to do with the very essence of the filmic, since cinema contributes to new perceptual experiences and flows. Of course, pleasure does not necessarily mean a state of bliss: rather it is a verbal sign of the affective in general, of its independent lines of movement in and across the film. The allegedly trivial acknowledgement of pleasure attested to by crowds of movie-goers may be the site of the greatest theoretical concern: besides being simply narcotic or numbing, in short "distracting"²², cinema may reflect, in the words of G.Deleuze, the "invention of new cerebral circuits".²³ However, traditional semiotics remains indifferent to affect. The latter is translated into an element of the complex information structure that is formed by every film. Films here in fact are stories told by means of pictures, they are narratives consisting of discrete photosigns. This seemingly simple formula contains the deepest contradiction that, according to semiotics, lies at the heart of the filmic itself: iconic signs whose function is that of naming are employed as units of storytelling, i.e. conventional signs. For a film to be a story (to emit a message, as the theory of information goes), icons, or images, should against their very nature be transformed into abstract "signs of grammatical categories".²⁴ Illusion of reality versus language – such is the constitutive tension known as film. According to Lotman, it is resolved in the creation of "something third typical of cinematic narration". We would define this third instance in terms of a special distance characterizing film perception as a whole: it is that point at which the "naively realistic" (= "naively illusory") vision of the cinema is left behind, whereas formal and grammatical categories remain submerged into the "visually material" element of cinematic language.²⁵ Such perceptive distance is produced by montage – a universal technique of juxtaposing heterogeneous units.²⁶

The expose suggests that cinema is a grammatical reorganization of separate photos achieved through montage. In this process the essence of photography is replaced with the "illusion of reality", a pure photographic effect. Likewise cinema incorporates the effect of narration. We may, therefore, say that it is illusory by its very nature, offering, in Lotman's definition, a "purely cinematographic [layer] that one can visually reconstruct but not retell in words".²⁷ The independent structure of this layer (something that Lotman readily acknowledges, though in the final outcome associating it with narrative unfolding) is not exactly that of the iconic sign. It may be treated as the material "jacket" of the message emitted by a concrete film. It may be said to carry such "information" whose content is "emotional". But one should keep in mind that the very model of sender and receiver, in other words, the model of a subjectivity in total control of the informational and communicative field of culture – and such is the underlying theoretical basis of "ordinary" semiotics – refuses to give the "filmic" a second thought. Yet it is the discontinuous movement of this "purely cinematographic layer" that allows to approach the essence of film. The problem may further be elucidated if we return to the concept of sign. Traditional semiotics conceives of the sign (= structure) in static terms. It gives priority to communication understood as a universal exchange of such signs. But signs themselves are closed indivisible entities, and, generally speaking, semiotics prefers to stop short at phonemes, the latter being simple building blocks for distinct words. However, there is a different conception of the sign and its functioning. If the sign, and hence structure, is treated dynamically, i.e. in terms of its (self)generation (an idea put forward by the French theorist Julia Kristeva), then the mentioned linguistic unit, becoming "a new space of reversible and combinative sites"²⁸, loses its artificial integrity by dissociating the signifier from the signified. This allows to concentrate: 1) on signification as an open process (in opposition to the always already existing signs), 2) on the independent movement of the signifier freed from its connection with the signified. Which has tremendously important consequences for the understanding of film.

In a rare text on the cinema ("The Third Meaning. Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills", 1970) Roland Barthes concentrates on that which in Eisenstein's films appears as being completely "outside (articulated) language".²⁹ This something belongs to neither the informational nor the symbolic level of representation both of which are richly displayed in Eisenstein's films. A signifier whose signified remains unnamed, it belongs to the very "imagistic" of the image, to the filmic of the film: an asymmetry in the courtiers' make-up? The join and simultaneously disjoin of the czar's perpendicularly raised beard? A single bun of hair expressing grief with its excessive mass? Grief in another derisory disguise, derision being supplemental to the idea of grief and its expression? Or that "heavy, ugly flatness" of Euphrosyne's face unrelated to any meaning the character may carry? All this is what we merely agree upon while carefully examining Eisenstein's stills. However, no language, indeed no metalanguage, no critical discourse is capable of reproducing, that is, objectifying this independent flow of signifiers deprived of any given meaning. What is implied is rather meaning in the making, or the becoming of meaning as such – that space (of time) when the signifier is left adrift, seemingly clinging to a detail, just like the photographic punctum, and yet being constantly displaced within the deigetic horizon of the movie. Barthes chooses to designate this "permutational play" of the cinematic signifier as obtuse (or third) meaning.

What is important about the latter concerning our own problematic is that, being discontinuous, it "has a de-naturing or at least a distancing effect with regard to the referent (to "reality" as nature, the realist instance)".³⁰ Secondly, the obtuse meaning inaugurates a different time. As opposed to the "logical" time of narrative communication (coinciding with the irreplaceable "movement" of film) its temporality is "counter-logical": allowing for a syntagmatic disjunction of images, the third meaning "calls for a vertical reading of the articulation".³¹ What we then have is a film within a film, the obtuse meaning "collecting" separate facial traits or bodily positions in the rhythm of their appearance–disappearance outside any possible (horizontal) continuity, be it deigetic or symbolic (the character disintegrating into "a simple nub of facets"³²). Or, turning it otherwise: it is from now on that the story becomes the signifier's "field of displacement"³³, a sort of background alternating with the peculiar pulsating figure itself. This results in a radical reconsideration of movement normally seen as the essence of film. Movement is no longer mobility or "life" (the notorious "illusion of reality"), but instead "the framework of a permutational unfolding"³⁴, in other words, the story dismantled and recast as a space of traces, or, rather, as the setting for this space. Movement then is primarily a theoretical concern, nothing other than a different type of reading, involving an intercitatory (palimpsest) relationship between film and still. In short, as soon as we start talking of the cinema in terms of the obtuse meaning related to the still, we are in fact discussing the conditions of possibility of the filmic as well as its perception. We are simultaneously without and within the film, touching upon its "purely cinematographic layer" (Lotman). And last but not least: the obtuse meaning, claims Barthes, carries a certain emotion: "such emotion is never sticky", he goes on to say, "it is an emotion which simply designates what one loves, what one wants to defend: an emotion value, an evaluation".³⁵ Therefore, there is an affective structure at the very heart of film perception, and precisely this structure, in our opinion, defines the pleasure (or displeasure) that initially marks our experience as spectators of films. Inscribed in the evasive signifier, this emotion is mostly unconscious, and it takes a great deal of scrutiny and deliberation to account for its presence.

We shall not discuss to what extent Eisenstein's cinema fits into any of its definitions. Rather, by way of conclusion, we would like to emphasize its problematic nature. It is true that Eisenstein's work easily lends itself to a semiotic interpretation, the more so as the filmmaker himself treated art in terms of language.³⁶ But it is no less true that regarding shots as signs rather than pictorial representations, trying to "sublate" the purely photographic basis of the cinema by transforming flat illusion into a "symbol in the making", that is, a true hieroglyph, he was equally obsessed by the sensuous and the "regressive", aiming at a special technique of "effectiveness" or "ecstasy" to be induced in the spectator. Everything is done to denaturalize the cinema, to render it abstract: sound and image are dissociated so as to create a real counterpoint in opposition to a mere illustrative doubling of the one by the other (like the visual equivalent of an echo resounding in a suite of palace halls already in the silent film "October"). Color is freed from its connection with real objects. Conventional perspective gives way to disproportion and a multifaceted version of space reminiscent of cubism (the techniques are double exposure and depth). The actors' movements are split into layers and fragments in order to produce a truly dynamic image of movement according to biomechanical rules. Sequences are supposed to be read as ideas (suffice it to mention the series of idols and gods in "October"), and, generally speaking, montage cinema should model itself after the hieroglyph in which "the combination of two "representable" objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented".³⁷ It may be said that this program and practice are those of ousting the photographic referent, another by-product of the pejoratively "positivist" realism.³⁸

There is something, however, that interferes in the spontaneity of this semiotic drive. The hieroglyph in fact turns out to be a montage of (circus) attractions in disguise. Its "content", therefore, is not so much a result of abstraction but a "definite series of shocks", emotional effect and pressure "exerted on the audience's psyche".³⁹ Retaining nothing but the "sensuous component", the circus has its meaning in itself. For Eisenstein it is the prototype of art in general and at the same time its ultimate form. Liberated from any externally defined commitment, the circus is both the model and the actual form of sense perception. From which it follows that the montage of (film) attractions (of the spectators' "unconditioned reflexes", in Eisenstein's own words) in nothing other than a technique of ecstasy so carefully elaborated by the artist.⁴⁰ It appears that the story told by film dissolves in the reaction to it, or, rather, that the film itself (an "effective construction", according to the film director) is the dotted trace of affect. Expelled from the shot, reality comes back with a vengeance, only now it holds fast to that "plot-less actor-less form of exposition"⁴¹ which is the spectator's body transformed into a screen. Again we are on the threshold of a distinct theory of perception which, it should be added, is perhaps the lasting seal of each outstanding film.

NOTES

¹ Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Trans. by Richard Howard. London: Flamingo (Fontana Paperbacks), 1981 (1984), pp. 6, 80.
² See: Roland Barthes. The Photographic Message. In: Barthes: Selected Writings. Ed. and with an Introduction by Susan Sontag. London – New York: Fontana / Collins, 1982.
³ Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida, p. 12.
⁴ See: Siegfried Kracauer. "Photography," The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Trans., ed. and with an Introduction by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge – London: Harvard University Press, 1995.
⁵ Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida, pp. 26 – 27.
⁶ Ibid., p. 77.
⁷ Ibid., p. 53.
⁸ Ibid., p. 96.
⁹ Ibid., p. 51.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 84.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² A reading suggested first of all by Eduardo Cadava in his study of Walter Benjamin's conception of history. See: Eduardo Cadava. Words of Light. Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
¹³ See: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. With an Introduction by Jacques Derrida. Ed. by Christopher Fynsk. Cambridge – London: Harvard University Press, 1989.
¹⁴ Cited in: Eduardo Cadava. Words of Light, p. 8.
¹⁵ Ibid., p. 23.
¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 8, 10, 13, 15.
¹⁷ See: Jacques Derrida. "Differance," Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans., with an Introduction by David B. Allison, Preface by Newton Garver. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
¹⁸ This expression is the title of Chapter One in Yuri Lotman's one large piece written on the cinema ("Semiotics of the Cinema and Problems of Cinema Aesthetics"). See: Yu.M.Lotman. "Semiotika kino i problemy kinoestetiki," in Yu.M.Lotman. Ob iskusstve. St.-Petersburg ("Iskusstvo – St.-Petersburg"), 1998.
¹⁹ Ibid., p. 291.
²⁰ Ibid., p. 323.
²¹ Ibid., p. 347.
²² On film distraction and the radicalizing potential it carries see: Siegfried Kracauer. Cult of Distraction. In: Op. cit.
²³ Gilles Deleuze. Negotiations, 1972 – 1990. Trans. by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 60.
²⁴ Yu.M.Lotman. "Priroda kinopovestvovanija," in: Op. cit., p. 668.
²⁵ Ibid., p. 669.
²⁶ See: Yu.M.Lotman. Semiotika kino i problemy kinoestetiki, chapter seven.
²⁷ Yu.M.Lotman. "Priroda kinopovestvovanija," p. 671.
²⁸ Julia Kristeva. Semeiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse. P.: Editions du Seuil, 1969, p. 218.
²⁹ Roland Barthes. "The Third Meaning," in: Op. cit., p. 326.
³⁰ Ibid., p. 327.
³¹ Ibid., p. 332.
³² Ibid., p. 328.
³³ Ibid., p. 329.
³⁴ Ibid., p. 332.
³⁵ Ibid., p. 324.
³⁶ Vjach.Vs.Ivanov. "Estetika Eizenshteina," in Vjach.Vs.Ivanov. Izbrannyje trudy po semiotike i istorii kul'tury. Tom I. Moscow: Shkola, "Jazyki russkoi kul'tury", 1998.
³⁷ S.M.Eisenstein. "Beyond the Shot," in Selected Works. Volume I. Writings, 1922-34. Ed. and trans. by Richard Taylor. London – Bloomington and Indianapolis: BFI Publishing, Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 139.
³⁸ Ibid., p. 142.
³⁹ S.M.Eisenstein. "The Montage of Film Attractions," in Op. cit., p. 46.
⁴⁰ See especially his work "The Not Indifferent Nature".
⁴¹ S.M.Eisenstein. "The Montage of Film Attractions," p. 48.

Joseph Cornell, Filmmaker of "Rose Hobart"

Joseph Cornell (1913-1984)
Rose Hobart (1936 USA, 17 mins)

The first and greatest American Surrealist, Joseph Cornell is best known for his boxes. The best of his mysterious assemblages of dime-store tchochkes and paper ephemera in little hand-made cabinets perfectly realize the elusive sublime at the heart of Surrealism, while avoiding the juvenile theatrics of his European colleagues.

However, Cornell was also one of the most original and accomplished filmmakers to emerge from the Surrealist movement, and one of the most peculiar. Just as the ascetic and introverted Cornell himself held Surrealism at arms length, borrowing only those elements that suited his interests and temperament, his films superficially resemble those made by other Surrealists, they are in truth sui generis. Only a handful of his contemporaries understood the genius of films like his Rose Hobart — an unfortunate situation exacerbated by Cornell's own obstinate resistance to public screenings. No one made films even remotely similar to Cornell's for almost thirty years, and even now the perfect opacity of his montage remains unrivalled.

Rose Hobart consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn't feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.

While East of Borneo is a sound film, Rose Hobart must be projected at silent speed, accompanied by a tape of "Forte Allegre" and "Belem Bayonne" from Nestor Amaral's Holiday in Brazil, a kitschy record Cornell found in a Manhattan junk store. As a result, the characters move with a peculiar, lugubrious lassitude, as if mired deep in a dream. In addition, the film should be projected through a deep blue filter, unless the print is already tinted blue. The rich blue tint it imparts is the same hue universally used in the silent era to signify night.

Rose Hobart was only one of several mythologized actresses who populated Cornell's hermetic world. Many of his boxes were homages to the actresses that formed his pantheon: Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and Deanna Durbin, among others. In Rose Hobart, Cornell holds Hobart in a state of semi-suspension, turning the film itself into a sort of box. She moves her hands, shifts her gaze, gestures briefly, smiles enigmatically, perhaps steps slightly to the side, and little more. The world appears as a sort of strange theatre, staged for her alone.

But the root of Cornell's genius as a filmmaker is his singular version of montage. Cornell's version of continuity is the continuity of the dream. He does not juxtapose images so much as suggest unlikely — but still vaguely plausible — connections between them. Hobart's clothing may change suddenly between shots, but her gesture is continued or she remains at a similar point in the frame. Unlike most collage filmmakers, Cornell does not rely on cheap irony or non sequitur. His films are unsettling because their inexplicable strings of images are like reflections from the deep well of the subconscious. In fact, one of the most arresting images in Rose Hobart comes when a solar or lunar eclipse is paired with the image of an object falling into a circular pool of water. Hobart simply gazes bemusedly at this spectacle, as if it were little more than a parlour trick.

Rose Hobart premiered in December, 1936 at the Julian Levy Gallery. Cornell included it in a matinee program of short films from his collection, which Levy titled “Goofy Newsreels.” The first Surrealist exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art was about to open, and many of the artists were in town, including Salvador Dali, who attended Cornell's film program. During the screening of Rose Hobart, Dali became extremely agitated. Halfway through the film he began shouting "Salaud!" — bastard — and overturned the projector. Reportedly, Dali ruefully explained his actions to Levy, "My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made…. I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it (Solomon 89).” Some prefer an apocryphal — but far more poetic — explanation also attributed to Dali: “He stole it from my subconscious.”

© Brian Frye, November 2001
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/17/hobart.html
Senses of Cinema

The above copied from:
http://www.ubu.com/film/cornell.html

Interview with Hollis Frampton

Interview with Hollis Frampton
• Deke Dusinberre and Ian Christie

This interview took place on 8 September, 1976,
at the London Filmmakers’ Coop, Fitzroy Road,
London, and was intended for a future issue of
Afterimage. It followed Frampton’s participation
in the Edinburgh Film Festival’s International
Forum on Avant-Garde Film, where he took part
in panel discussions with fellow-North
Americans Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Yvonne
Rainer, Joyce Wieland and Annette Michelson;
and with European filmmakers including Chantal
Akerman, Willem and Birgit Hein, Malcolm Le
Grice and Willian Raban. Behind the Forum lay
the influential re-mapping of avant-garde
tradition proposed by Peter Wollen’s ‘Two
Avant-Gardes’ essay, first published in Studio
International in November 1975, and reprinted
in the Festival’s 1976 magazine. There was also
much talk of a new narrative tendency in avantgarde
film, signalled at the festival by Le Grice’s
After Manet and After Lumière, Raban’s After
Eight, Rainer’s Kristina Talking Pictures and
Wieland’s The Far Shore. Frampton already had
a reputation as one of the major theoristfilmmakers
of the contemporary avant-garde,
although his work was comparatively little
known in Britain at this time. An interview by
Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury had appeared in
Afterimage 4 (1972) and Zorns Lemma was
available for hire from the London Filmmakers’
Cooperative, while some of his essays appeared
in Artforum during the early 1970s. The films by
Frampton shown at Edinburgh were from the
on-going Magellan cycle: At the Gates of Death,
consisting of The Red Gate and The Green Gate,
each 52 minutes long.
Deke Dusinberre: I’m particularly interested in
learning what you’ve been up to over the last
four years – particularly since the Afterimage
interview of 1972 was so lucid and suggested
a number of possible directions – but perhaps
it might be better to start by simply asking
what you’re doing now.
Hollis Frampton: I’m probably becoming less
lucid than I was four years ago. At that time,
as I recall, I was finishing one thing and
starting another. I was finishing Hapax
Legomena (five parts of which I had with me
in London); in the midst of that visit to
England I went to the west and filmed
Stonehenge, which was incorporated into
another part of Hapax. The last of it was
finished in the fall, I guess. At the same time, I
had begun what I hoped would be a simple
project, as outlined in that interview: a
catalogue or compilation of films which were
limited to exactly one minute – 1,440 frames.
They were to be an homage not so much to
the early cinema of the Lumières as to an
aspect of film that I feel has been lost, to a
certain degree, in the period in which we now
find ourselves, and which began with the
Soviet cinema of the period – roughly speaking
– of montage culture (or of the edited or
spliced film). What is so difficult to explain
about the Lumières’ films and other singleshot
films made at that time – I’m thinking for
instance of the very earliest things done in the
U.S., starting with Fred Ott’s Sneeze:1 45-
frame cinema that at 40 frames-per-second
lasted a little over one second – is their
luminosity, by which I mean that they seem
impervious to analysis. Films made within
montage culture, on the other hand, invite
and even command a type of analysis that
proceeds during the extended moment of
watching the films.
DD: What’s the status of that project now?
HF : At a certain point, what has tended to
happen previously happened again: I set out
to make a simple inventory or catalogue of the
appearances of the world, which I imagined
might run to a few hundred short films, but as
I actually began to gather these film segments
they began to organise themselves – to my
discomfiture – in a manner that I suppose is
determined by my own immersion in
montage: one thing suggests another, and if
you have five things there seems to be some
best order in which they should be seen. The
bits of film, which were as opaque as an
isolated word, seemed somehow to be
demanding a more intricate organisation than
I had originally planned. At first I thought that
simply meant sorting them into more intricate
categories; I had originally imagined that there
would be four categories – ‘ordinary,
extraordinary, exotic, and erotic views’ – which
were the categories used by the Lumières. So I
attempted a more complex sorting, which led
to the question of an equilibrium among the
categories. I suppose I could give a very
detailed history of a series of insights and
decisions (though I can’t necessarily remember
the dates), but what basically evolved from
that proposed inventory – or catalogue, or
storehouse – is a work whose working title is
currently Magellan. This is composed of parts,
not all of which consist of one-minute
segments, not by any means. It’s not a work
that can be diagrammed in linear fashion,
since it uses the grid – among many others –
of the cycle of the solar year. In other words,
it’s a calendar. That is to say, it rotates like a
wheel, or rather like a series of wheels that
rotate within one another. I now expect, when
and if the whole thing is completed, that it will
be, very roughly, thirty-six hours long. Within
those thirty-six hours there are a series of
rough categories – well, the categories are
actually quite exact, but they name parts that
overlap each other on a kind of twodimensional
map of the work. Those
categories are ‘Straits’ and ‘Clouds’ [of
Magellan], and there’s a section which
corresponds to a ‘Birth of Magellan’ (itself
comprised of subsections), and there’s another
which relates to adolescence. Then there’s a
‘Death’ and even, heaven help us, a
‘Resurrection’.
DD: How much of Magellan do you have under
your belt now?
HF : Well, that’s also hard to say. I’ve now
finished and released the two parts of the
‘Gates of Death’, which together come to 110
minutes and represent, within the complete
work, a kind of dispersed zone between
‘Straits’ and ‘Clouds’. There’s also a cycle of
four films for the solstices and equinoxes that
could be collectively seen as an epicycle I call
‘Solaria Magellani’. (A solarium, by the way, is
not only a sunroom – as in a tuberculosis
sanitorium – it’s also a sundial.) Those four
parts together amount to two hours thirtyseven
minutes.
DD: Are they exterior to the ‘Straits’ and to
‘Clouds’?
HF : No, they’re inside the ‘Straits’. Embedded.
DD: But there’s more to be done on the
‘Straits’?
HF: There is very much more to be done. More,
indeed, has been done but hasn’t been
released: of the one-minute pieces – the
unmodified one-minute pieces – I have now
shot about 700. I don’t think I will ever use all
of them. There are now also one-minute
pieces which are edited – indeed some are
highly edited. There are even some that
involve performance and directed acting. That
is to say, the one-minute pieces alone are
stratified or separated out into clusters which
are distributed throughout the whole time of
the work, which are involved in a longer
temporal spectrum within the history of film
than simply the primitive cinema of the
1890s.
DD: Will those one-minute pieces form a
discrete part of Magellan, or will they be
distributed throughout the work? Will people
be expected to view all the parts in the same
relationship, or will they be allowed to pull out
any number of those parts in any of an infinite
series of permutations?
HF : Well, we come now to another aspect of the
problem – the problem of describing this thing
in linear speech. I will propose, then describe, I
think, a set of ways for deriving a canonic order
for seeing the whole thing. This is something
that on certain days of the year, let’s say, would
be pinned to this imaginary year, to specific
segments, while certain other days of the year
would be completely indeterminate (or at least
partly indeterminate). In particular, as I now see
it, there will be not one but two cycles of oneminute
pieces, which constitute the panopticon
of the ‘Straits of Magellan’. One of those
wheels – or series – is, as it were, a gear with
one more tooth, 366 teeth against 365, so that
if they were seen in a real, determined canonic
order – in fact, seen along a strictly calendrical
model in which there would be something to
see for every day of the calendar year – then it
would take 366 years to see all the
combinations.
In addition to which, there will be a piece of
sound – I use that phrase very deliberately: a
piece of sound – because I’m envisioning a
kind of inventory not only of kinds of sound
but of ways in which sound may be used
alongside the image attached to each piece.
But at any given screening, whether or not the
sound will actually be played or the track run
silent will be determined by other, local,
factors. So a great deal of it is very rigidly
structured in one sense, but very rigidly
structured in a direction which will tend to
place the principles upon which it is structured
on a kind of horizon, as it were, in the
perceiving of the work, rather than at the
centre of one’s attention in perceiving it.
DD: Although I expected the implications of the
question to be important, I was really asking a
simpler question. Which is: how do you expect
the 36-hour film Magellan to be experienced?
HF : In as many ways as possible, save one: I
would be horrified if anyone ever proposed to
show the whole thing in thirty-six consecutive
hours. It’s not at all my goal to subject anyone
– not even myself – to the kind of exhaustion,
the kind of phasing in and out of attention
(and the ordeal of wakefulness) that would
entail. I just don’t think it could be done.
I can imagine a situation in which it could
be seen in the course of a week. That’s still an
awful lot of film. Or, under absolutely ideal
circumstances – though I don’t care too much
if they’re ever achieved – over the actual
calendar year which the work imitates (but to
which it is not absolutely tied down: I mean,
one writes a diary, for instance, with daily
entries over the period of a year, but that does
not necessarily imply that the reader must read
the entries at the rate of one a day). It’s like a
library, let’s say, or a compendium, and also
like a mechanical analogue computer or
differential analyser, something in which the
parts can be taken out, put elsewhere, and so
forth. Film, after all, does come on reels in tin
cans, and these can be lined up on shelves like
books, so that one has random access to the
‘books’ on the shelf (if not instantaneously to
the pages within the books). Most of the
books on this shelf – or most of the cans, the
parts – would in fact be very small; they would
be little reels of film with 2 x 36 or 72 feet of
film. That would be the case on about 360
days of the year. Some of the reels would be
larger, and of course there are some days in
which there would be very much to watch.
Again with the proviso – or at least the
suggestion – that the very large segments
intended to be seen on one day are open at
certain points – open out, so that smaller
epicyclic digressions are inserted into them or
balloon out of them.
DD: I’d like to clarify precisely what that [library]
will catalogue, what that analytic machine will
analyse, to what particular cycle the calendar
refers. Two things that spring immediately to
my mind, knowing a bit about your work, are:
that Magellan will in the first instance be a
recapitulation of the history of cinematic
representation, and that secondly it will have a
strong autobiographical element, situating
yourself as protagonist within that
recapitulation.
HF : This is where I have to condition the likening
to a diary or to a journal. In a certain sense –
indeed, in many senses – my work has tended
to be autobiographical. That was certainly true
of Zorns Lemma and Hapax Legomena. In any
case, with any material filmed by a particular
person there’s a kind of kinesic
autobiographical inscription, is there not? Just
one’s physiological or motor state on a given
day will mark a shot with a gesture that on
another day it might not have. The hand-held
camera, at least, inscribes the presence of the
cameraperson on the invisible side of the
camera, and so forth. But to pursue me
through these mazes and corridors I think is
not what I would recommend to anyone.
DD: Would you recommend pursuing Magellan
himself? Have you in fact adopted him as a
persona? I know little about Magellan’s life
other than that he was the first to attempt to
circumnavigate the earth, but didn’t succeed.
Yet his conception – that is to say, the way he
conceived the expedition – was sufficient to
allow it to carry on beyond his own death.
HF : Well, at least some of his mortal part made
it all the way around the world. He was
dismembered, hacked to pieces in a local war
in the Philippines, where he had previously
been on an earlier voyage that took the Vasco
da Gama route around Africa, though of course
on this occasion he was coming back the other
way. So the few of his crew – plus his friend
Antonio Pigafetta who went along as a
passenger and kept a diary of the entire voyage
– gathered up what they could find and packed
him in a barrel of cloves. And so, aromatically
preserved, Magellan returned to Genoa.
Certainly there are specific things in the
voyage – the actual historic voyage – which
interest me and which I incorporate more or
less obliquely. One of the most interesting finds
its way into the work as a behavioural
parameter, a generated parameter rather than
an allusion: this of course concerns the dating
paradox, the time paradox that fell upon them
when they did get back. They had kept an
exact day-to-day log of the journey, as an aid to
navigation and so forth, and Pigafetta had kept
a day-to-day journal or diary, so they knew – or
they believed that they knew – the date upon
which they arrived home, and even the day of
the week. They were incorrect by one day. We
now know, of course, that they had crossed
what we would call the international date line.
Except that there was no international date line
at the time. They had simply preset – within the
cycle of the rotation of the earth – one
rotation, so that they had gained twenty-four
hours. It was extremely puzzling to them. It
was some years before all that got straightened
out. Although the Arabs had done a certain
amount of theoretical work on it in the high
Middle Ages, and understood what should
happen assuming that the world was round,
this knowledge was not available to the
Portuguese at the time.
Well, that paradox concerning the misfit of
actual experience – even enumerated,
modulated, kept careful account of – with one
aspect of the real astronomical calendar of the
world, is massively referred to in the phasing
misfit of cycles of material in the film. But as far
as specific episodes having the same kind of
relationship to my film as the specific episodes
in the Odyssey have to the episodes of Joyce’s
Ulysses, no, the relation is not the same.
DD: Why, then, Magellan?
HF : Why Magellan? OK, it’s a voyage, that is to
say it’s a vast picaresque which, like all
successful picaresques, takes the form of a
comedy. That means there’s a full resolution in
favour of the protagonist (which is getting
comedy melted down about as far as you can
go, making it about as abstract as you can). In
a manner of speaking, in the original voyage
there’s a resolution in favour of the
protagonist: he did establish the
‘spheroidalness’ (or what have you) of the
earth. He even, in a manner of speaking, got
back; because such a voyage is vastly inclusive
without there necessarily being a moment-tomoment
causal chain or transfer of energy
from one moment to the next. In the Odyssey,
for instance, there’s no particular reason why,
having escaped the enchantments of Circe,
Odysseus should then next come drifting
ashore and become Nausicaa’s lover. There’s
no direct causal link between that; it’s a model
of history which at least questions the notion
of causality. There may or may not be causal
links. What those links are – the nature of why,
say, one shot follows another, or one segment
follows another – is at all times under
construction, as is the nature of the passage of
the energy of attention from one segment,
one shot – one frame, even – to another.
DD: And you’re contrasting that with the
Odyssey?
HF : Well, the Odyssey is a vastly sophisticated
work, of course. No, I wasn’t so much
contrasting it, I was likening it: except for the
very beginning and the very end, which first
enunciate and then resolve a specific set of
problems, whether or not what happens in
episode ‘a’ is causing what happens in
episode ‘b’ remains problematical. In other
words, that relationship is at all times to be
constructed in the imagination of the
spectator. At the level of a kind of
metalanguage, if we can imagine Ulysses as a
critical essay about the Odyssey, and about
prior comic literature, there is a double
relationship that is at all times under
construction: the first is that from episode to
episode, the second is that between the
episodes which we are now reading and the
palimpsestic corresponding Homeric episode
that underlies it and the nature of the distance
between them, which at all times is extremely
fluid. It’s fluid in relation to one’s attention;
sometimes one feels oneself reading the
Odyssey through Joyce at the moment of
detecting a strong correspondence, at other
times the distance becomes very large so that
the Odyssey, as it were, disappears.
DD: So can we assume that’s the way you
envisage the relationship between your film
and the exploits of Magellan?
HF: For starters. Save, of course, that it’s a lot
looser. And I wonder if I haven’t started to
regret, first of all, referring to this filmic object
I’m working on by a name of any kind; and I
wonder, furthermore, if I don’t regret a little
bit referring to the subsections by names.
Because of course what this does – and, in a
way, it does it in advance of the very fact of
the thing – is to polarise examination of the
film around a kind of clue-hunting. It’s
possible, mind you, for me to take a certain
kind of pleasure in presenting that kind of
extremely intricate but conceivably open and
schematised form – I’m not immune to the
pleasures of pedantry. But at the same time,
the activity of detective work – in which the
work presents itself under the guise of
scholarship about itself – constitutes, I think, a
kind of fool’s gold. As time has passed (and
now six and a half years have elapsed since I
completed Zorns Lemma), I have been
increasingly disappointed at a kind of insistent
failure of examination of that work to get past
its participatory and mechanical selfgenerating
quality, self-exhausting quality.2
(Which are of course attractive: there has been
some expansion of the list of goodies that can
be mined out of Zorns Lemma and so forth.)
DD: What direction would you like to see
analysis of Zorns Lemma take?
HF : Shall I say ‘deeper’? I’m not sure –
DD: Analysis has tended to dwell on the images –
HF : Well, the images contain so many to the
n-th power bits of information per frame and
so forth. And the fact that there are words
within them that can be read, let’s say, is an
aspect of those images.3 At a certain point,
your question engages with all kinds of
problems of artists explaining their own work
– and whether they should or not.
DD: I didn’t say I was going to believe you, I was
just asking for your version.
HF : Good. You leave me free to spin all sorts of
fiction.
DD: Do you want to pursue that question about
Zorns Lemma?
HF : No, not too much. I just feel that there are
other dialogues which are being rehearsed in
that film that are not much touched upon by
the kind of empirical retrieval of its scheme,
about which, needless to say, I know a very
great deal. Mercifully, I’m starting to forget
some of it.
DD: But you raised that in the context of being
afraid that Magellan would just amplify,
because of the conceit . . .
HF : I just utter it as a kind of caution. I certainly
know that all these Ptolomaic and post-
Ptolomaic wheels with wheels are there [in
Magellan]; indeed, I talk about them all the
time, and exhibit them at considerable length
in the work. At the same time, I would offer
simply that they do also constitute a highly
ornate façade – or smokescreen – behind
which the meaning of the work is contained, as
it were, in camera. But, for me, the meaning of
the work is in the process of making it,
precisely what is under construction, and not
the scaffold. And the meaning of the work is
what it has always been. To put it as generally
as possible, it is an essay – in this case, a
particularly massive and inclusive one – about
what meaning is or may be, or various things it
is or may be in film (that is to say, in the
mechanical joining of images together in space
and time). An essay, if you like, on how the
notion of meaning itself is constituted. Which,
if the work is eventually clear to anyone, should
build the substance of that essay from within –
from an experience of the work – rather than
diagramming it from without.
Ian Christie: I recently read your ‘Notes on
Composing in Film’ in October, which is the
one piece of yours that seems to engage with
some of the current modes of descriptive and
analytic terminology, but actually doesn’t.4 You
say that denotation is one of the privileged
areas of connotation, which seems like a
sideswipe at various forms of semiotic analysis,
and I realise that you’ve tended to avoid
speaking about filmic signification.
HF : That’s true – I try not to. That particular
text was written for a conference about
researching composition and it turned out
that those who organised it understood the
word composition to be, of all things,
writing. There were no musicians there. I was,
of course, the only filmmaker. I don’t know
whether painters would take very happily to
the word composition anymore, because it
has come to mean things like triangles and
receding diangles and so forth – fixed stencils
to be applied to the picture plane. So it’s a
dead word for painting. I felt I was under
some constraint to be a little more specific, a
little less belle-lettristic, than I usually tend to
be. Which led to two results. One was that
things became rather severely schematised;
the other was that, having gone through
examples of four kinds of axiomatic change
derived from reading and one from misreading,
they were all drawn from literature
and music. To produce the scientific
postscript to that text with respect to film is,
of course, exactly what we are about – but
we are not, I think, very close. No, that’s not
true: we may be a little closer than we were a
while ago, to the point of being able to give
examples from film of any given category or
any operative principle that we can discern as
applying to the making of other works of art.
If we are at the incipience of a period of
precision, then we are at its very first
moments. So it would have taken me, let’s
say, ten years to write the other part of that
essay. No one knows enough to write a book
in three parts, the name of that book being
Principia Cinematica. Part One is called
‘Definitions’, Part Two is called ‘Principles of
Sequence’, Part Three is called ‘Principles of
Simultaneity’ –
IC: A rationalist approach, which identifies your
operation as an attempt at a modern mathesis
universalis – the kind of enterprise that would
have been entirely comprehensible to
Descartes, or to any of the philosophers of the
Encyclopédie period.5 That would seem to be
your working model?
HF: Right on the button. At the same time, of
course, I know very much more than they did,
because they are precisely what I know. What
interests me among all those interactive, closed
rational systems is the particular manner – the
particular point in their operation – where they
most begin to resemble the universe. And that
is the point where, after they have been in
operation for some time, they begin to
generate discrepancies, irrational values,
accumulations of error. Where the operations
begin to interfere with themselves or with each
other to such an extent that what is generated
appears not to permute but to be absolutely
smooth and continuous, becoming – if we
believe in causality – causally seamless, but at
such a level that it seems incessantly to just fail
to dis-intricate the lines of self-interference
from the system –
IC: That recalls a point you made about building
errors into Zorns Lemma; and it leads on to a
possibly irrelevant speculation about how one
builds free will into a rationalist system . . .
HF: The last person to deal with that problem
was God, by the way.
IC: There’s a point you make in the October
essay about Pound’s notion of reading and
writing being intimately connected. Doesn’t
this also connect with the current idea of
reading film as a text?
HF: It comes not only from Pound but also from
Eisenstein, who likens a film to a text, and
shots to words. He speaks of reading the shots
as though they were words, hence Zorns
Lemma’s very obvious debt to Eisenstein,
which somebody did finally remark. The film
tends, at that very frontal level, to take
Eisenstein at his word. Literally. And to act out
his suggestion, his insight, even while turning
it about, re-directing that energy back into the
enterprise of filmmaking – into practice. Pound
simply was handy at that point of
introduction, because he came right out and
said it. There are other, notable praxes that
intimately connect reading to writing, or
connect an understanding of the detailed
textural and textual history of the enterprise of
film, painting, or what have you on the one
hand, to practice on the other.
I think as we look at modernism it tends to
seem, to a great extent, as though on one
level or another most artists have done that.
The action painters, after all, were incorrigible
museum hounds; they were, in fact, a
generation of art historians. I think their
rhetoric of silence tended to camouflage – as it
was intended to – that historicisation, to
deliberately sink it to a deep layer. It’s clear,
again and again, that – how to put it – they
were not making those paintings because
those were the kinds of paintings they
personally found pleasant or interesting or
wanted to see, they were making those
paintings out of some version of what they
perceived to be historical necessity. For a
certain amount of time, that current in
painting persisted. Now, it’s not always a
simple path – this notion of perceived
necessity – but it’s one that does look into the
tradition of the art (or that part of it which is
available and known), re-evaluating it,
discerning within it what seem to be operative
principles that can be of use (or, on the other
hand, should be argued with, engaged with).
IC: One implication of Pound’s idea is that we’re
not so much reading the mind of a text’s
producer as tracing the history of the
production of that text, and what its agent, as
it were, encapsulates because of his historical
location. But the reading of Magellan that the
spectator is capable of seems to be history sub
specie aeternitatis. Not history viewed critically
or dialectically, but as if from God’s point of
view, if you follow me?
HF : I follow you, but I wonder if you’re right – I
don’t know.
DD: That’s an interesting contradiction, because
clearly the adventurousness of the Magellan
project re-foregrounds that act of making or
reading. I don’t know what sort of time-scale
you envisage devoting to the project; but can I
infer that it follows in a line from Pound’s
Cantos through Zukovsky’s A and Brakhage’s
Songs, in terms of being a work that is
conceived over such a long period of time that
it inscribes into its own making a history of its
permutation and change? Which would
undermine the idea of a perfect holistic work,
challenging its own hermeticism.
HF: Absolutely. I suppose I would like for them
both to be there, for them both to be present:
at once the hermeticism that you detect –
which is widely detectable, too – and the
simple fact that in undertaking something very
large one does not know how to do it. What
marks all projects of a certain size is the
‘learning how’ to do the thing as you go
along. Now, characteristically there are serious
problems with this. I suppose the Cantos are
something of a case in point, though there are
other cases. On the side of both the signifier
and the signified, the Cantos are heavily
dependent on what Pound happens to find
out, or run across, or get interested in at any
given time. The circumstances of his own life
constitute a kind of aleatory control voltage or
something.
IC: I suppose it’s the scale and also the
complexity of the framework, or the
reassurance of the massiveness of the work,
that enables a structure such as the Cantos to
take on so much empirical material?
HF: Yes, Pound said that an epic was a poem
including history. He tended, rather selectively,
to shove history in wholesale. He is
furthermore supremely open to the criticism
that he merely included history without
having, as it were, a theory of history.
Finnegans Wake, after all, is also an extended
work of art in a language that includes history,
though Joyce appears not to have a theory of
history but to maintain every theory of history
that he knows equidistant from the fusion
point at which the prose is being generated.
IC: Vico stands to Finnegans Wake like
Copernicus to Magellan?
HF : Yes. There’s also obviously a psychological,
or psychoanalytic, theory of history which
stands ready at all times to inflect or deflect
not only the shape of an episode but the very
choice of words in that case. The Cantos have,
of course – well, I shouldn’t say ‘of course’ –
but they have always been a particular kind of
thorn in my side because there is, it seems to
me, a real disparity – well, the work is not
rigorous. It has a certain kind of architecture;
it’s possible, let us say, to separate it out into
massive blocks. In due course, one way or
another, Pound even manages to inform us
that there is a kind of subtext to the Cantos, as
there is to Ulysses, and that subtext is the
Divine Comedy in a general sort of way. But it
doesn’t wash too well to have spent two
Cantos on the Inferno, separated by a very
short distance in the poem from the first
incursion of Pound’s orientalism (at that point
in an almost pre-Raphaelite or Swinburnian
form); it is, without being very detailed about
it, a hell of a long way from the use Ulysses
made of the sub-text of the Odyssey, to keep
returning to those examples. The Cantos, of
course, stands in ruins, repudiated by its
author for reasons that one can only guess.6 I
suspect, in fact, that one of the reasons it was
repudiated was that Pound perceived in one
way or another that the very thing the poem
needed, since it was and is an essay about
history, was some controlling view of what
history is. Pound seems, literally, to subscribe
to the view that history is just one goddam
thing after another; that there is not, say, a
vector within it (or that the vector is relatively
simple, not multiple, and has a downward
direction), but that there is a bugbear – so to
speak – in the works, and the identity of the
bugbear changes from time to time. And at a
certain point the poem, for all its extraordinary
local inventiveness, begins to teeter.
Okay, I’d like to make something that is
simply not in pieces, one after another, in the
order that I happen to be able to make them.
Which, again, is Pound’s problem. Joyce, as he
worked on the text of Finnegans Wake, of
course, did not write it from beginning to end.
He wrote at the whole book, as it were, until
the whole book was written. That seems to be
a more useful model. On the other hand, we
seem to be spending an awfully long time on
the literary.
IC: We’re guilty of encouraging that. Where
would you like to go next?
HF: Maybe a swoop back to music, or more
particularly the theory and practice of serial
music in this century, in which stereoscopic
enterprise has developed in an exemplary
manner.
DD: I’m not sure what you mean by
‘stereoscopic’.
HF: I was simply trying to develop a little
metaphor in passing, in which theory and
practice converged upon one another, each
inextricably informing the other. At the same
time, this is a music that has produced objects
which command a serious examination but do
not require any critical salivation in order to
sustain themselves. One can listen to and be
moved by Wozzeck long before one has the
benefit even of the score – in which, as I point
out with some relish, the various sections of
the work are developed musically with extreme
rigour.7 I have a predeliction for that work of
Schönberg, Berg and Webern, and that which
their successors have continued. We
understand a non-serial composer differently
than we would have before. I like things that
are as tense as a soap bubble, that account for
themselves completely. At the same time, I
don’t like things that give out their favours too
freely, that can be had, as it were, for a nod
and a knowing wink.
IC: Am I right in thinking that there is no
objective summary of Magellan laid out in
writing anywhere?
HF : There are various pieces on various tapes – I
don’t really know what to do about it. I’m
beginning to suspect something that I might
do about it. I have tried on various occasions –
I may or may not try this evening – to situate a
segment shown on a given occasion within
larger and larger sets of schemes and so forth.
I don’t know why I should want to do that
beyond the fact that I’m excited about it, like
someone bound to a Catherine Wheel that is
likely to turn for some years. On one occasion,
I spent two and a half hours spinning this
gossamer out into space, in order to situate
about two and a half hours of real film
somewhere within it. And everybody seemed
to find it just a puzzling as if I had said
nothing – which suited me fine. On the other
hand, on that occasion I felt as though I had
shot my wad. Now, what to do?
IC: It’s a matter of ‘local interest’, as you have
said a propos the Cantos. An expectation is
created as the scale of the whole work
becomes known. So the problem of
maintaining interest in its parts becomes
crucial; there is a real pull in an intellectual as
well as a perceptual sense, for a viewer who is
scurrying around trying to see parts within a
developing sense of the whole.
HF: At the possible cost of having to
theatricalise the production of the work, it is
exactly the pleasures and terrors of that
experience . . .
IC: . . . which you have knowingly evoked for
us all?
HF: One thing that Joyce did that has caused me
second thoughts was that he never did reveal
the name of the thing, but would draw people
out by the hour, like Molly Bloom talking
about heavy petting, as to what they thought
the title might be. If anyone got too close to it,
he would blanche and withdraw. Pound, of
course, pulled somewhat the same thing and
died, presumably with the name of his poem
in pectora, as John XXIII did.9 There are three
cardinals in the world who don’t know who
they are.
IC: Given that we are in that situation, can we
look at the local and structural aspects within a
section that is now available?
DD: For instance, by comparing Gates of Death
with Solarium Magelani?
HF: If we’re going to compare Solarium and the
Gates of Death, then I think the first thing we
notice is that they seem to behave pretty much
in the same way, except that Gates of Death
seems to be even more complicated. I think it’s
virtually impossible to retrieve or determine
what shot goes where in any of the five or six
films – or film segments – under discussion. At
the same time, it becomes clearer all the time
that there is some set of rules, some set of
operating principles, at work ever more clearly
and powerfully, hovering just beyond the point
where they can be retrieved.
DD: I was hoping to address that. After one
viewing, I was struck by the fact that the
structure of Gates of Death seems so eminently
graspable – even though I never managed to
grasp it – whereas Solarium gives me a much
greater feeling of an organicism that is harder
to assimilate, which I think pertains to all the
parts. Is there, in fact, a significant difference
in terms of the conception of the way those
films are ordered?
HF : As it happens, the rules become somewhat
more complex. That is to say, if we use serial
music as an analogy, the ways in which the
row can be modified or inflected increase in
number. What seems to change the issue is
that one of the rules in Gates of Death allows
the material to be redoubled; that is to say,
each image is seen twice. Another concerns its
more overt dispersion into strophes (or stanzas
or what have you), each of which carries a
refrain. So there’s a kind of lap dissolve in the
progress of this double group of films in which
they are at once more complexly rigorous and
rule-bound, and at the same time the quotient
of shape-markers on the surface increases,
which tends to make the formal structure of
Gates of Death look clearer than it is.
IC: The shape-marker frequently takes the form
of repetition. This is the problem of seeing the
nature of the structure, but not being able to
grasp it at the time, since a lot depends on
repetition which can only be appreciated
retrospectively. Towards the end, you see the
shape, how it’s working, by which time you
have, of course, lost –
HF : – what is shaped.
IC: It does create a curious interplay between
the realisation that comes at the end and the
recollection. Can we assume for the moment
that this is a form of filmic serialism, like serial
procedures in music after Schönberg?
HF : Let’s say it bears analogies. All the charts and
graphs that precede the editing of a film like
this are a kind of ‘lost wax’, if you understand
me.10 Actually they hang around, but I have
never exhibited them, as Sharits does.11 Let’s
just go back to a slightly different aspect of
this double group of films, one that becomes
more vehement as you pass through them, not
in the order of their making, but, let’s say,
from ‘Autumnal Equinox’ to ‘Winter Solstice’.
Or we could start with ‘Summer Solstice’ and
go to ‘Autumn’, to ‘Winter’, to ‘Spring’, and to
the ‘Red Gate’ and ‘Green Gate’. In all of
them, there is a punctuation between
individual shots; that punctuation tends, first
of all, to force the shots apart. It certainly
forces them out of immediate juxtaposition
with each other. In the case of the first three, it
is a brief flash of a colour field in one of the
Maxwellian primaries;12 in the case of the film
that I’m still calling ‘Vernal Equinox’ – although
I may have to contribute a massive footnote on
that – it’s a dotted line, the trembling dotted
line that outlines the frame.
In the Gates of Death, the punctuation –
the diaeresis, if you like – is even longer and
even more vehement: a superimposed pattern
of moving hexagons. The moment between
the ending of one film strip of photographic or
illusionist material and the beginning of the
next one is marked by a very abrupt return of
the pictorial space to frontality. It’s a flat field
of red or blue or green, or an interference of
two patterns of geometric figures, the flatness
of which tends to make even more pointed –
even more disjunctive – at the moment when
one shot encounters another shot. In fact, they
don’t encounter each other; that is to say,
there’s no direct collisional montage anywhere
in any of these films. This, it seems to me,
begins to place them in dialogue with the very
notion of collisional montage itself, which at a
certain point, as we know, degenerated – or
was degraded – into a set of rules about
something called ‘continuity’.
IC: One way leads to the disguised montage of
continuity, the other way to the theory of
enhanced emphasis, dramatic intensification.
HF : Very well. What I’m doing, in a way, is just
describing these.
IC: But are you not also implying a move – a
change of compositional principle – from the
neo-Eisensteinianism of Zorns Lemma, to
something which actually abandons the
principle of montage?
DD: Not so much abandoning it as opening up a
space between it and . . .
IC: What’s montage if you open up the spaces?
HF: You see, one of the pleasures of the pursuit
of the design is to find out whether all of the
large design is going to behave like this. Quite
simply, the answer is: no, it is not. What is
always at issue in this particular group of films
– or this particular bunch of pieces – to which
I have now put an end, is what I take to be an
opening up of the pathway to meaning from
one shot to the next shot. If you can imagine
all the shots – all the film pieces – that make
up a film as a grid or chess board, then on
that chess board there is for the knight, let us
say, a particular tour: there is a way to see all
of the shots in that as at least united by a rule;
there is a way to visit all the squares that is
united by the manner in which a knight can
move. In fact, there are a very large number of
knight’s tours; so there are presumably a very
large number of pathways through a body of
illusionist material. We have tended toward
the view that there is some one pathway
through that material, understood to be the
most meaningful, the one that the artist
chooses. First, I’d like to call into question the
concept that seems to lie behind the phrase
‘most meaningful’; and second, of course, I’d
like to call into question the notion of choice –
the artist’s choice – in that situation. I think
these films do so by holding open, at all times,
the pathway through the set of all shots that
compose the film. That is to say, the nature of
the tour itself – or the manner in which one
constructs meaning (inventing it as the
spectator in the midst of witnessing the work)
– is under construction again.
IC: The spectator is certainly under construction,
or his perceptual processes are. The producer
of the text, or of the set, is presumably also
under construction by the text?
HF : That’s right. But I think, at least for the
time being, that in these parts of the overall
work, Solarium and the Gates of Death, I’ve
carried this way of expanding the field of
choices for a pathway about as far as I can.
Now, to get back to your ‘eye of God’ trope.
If there is announced or believed to be a
grand design, which seems to be the case for
this film, this is in anticipation of a kind of
hindsight, you understand. That eye is
something that changes its colours and its
configuration. I winced internally when you
said that, because there is a two dimensional
map or diagram of the whole thing which,
when seen from a distance with all its
construction on a hexagonal lattice and with
various kinds of coding marks (colours,
numbers and so forth), when seen from that
distance reduces it to a kind of pantheist
mush. That notation, or map, is a very large
rendering of the human eye. But at the local
level – and of course one sees the film locally
in time, and then invents the real, fictive
structure of the film with whatever
equipment and tools one has – one invents,
as it were, the actual concrete intellectual
space within which the film transpires. That
process is one of continuous dialogue, a
constant re-opening of as many questions as I
can cram into it, so to speak. And it is
precisely at the level of the self-interference of
operations, at the level of disjunction
between the signifying apparatus and what it
is perforce linked to, that that dialogue takes
place. I wonder if that was a complete
sentence? It may have been.
Notes
1 What Frampton knew as Fred Ott’s Sneeze is now
more formally catalogued as Edison Kinetoscope
Record of a Sneeze, and appears to hve been made
as a series of stills primarily intended for publication
in Harper’s Weekly in January 1894, to illustrate
Edison’s moving-picture achievements, and only
later printed as a ‘film’. See Charles Musser, Edison
Motion Pictures, 1890–1900, Smithsonian
Institution Press/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto,
1997: 87–88.
2 Zorns Lemma was first shown in 1970, and at 60
mins. was Frampton’s longest film to date. Almost
immediately, it attracted wide attention, mostly
influenced by P. Adams Sitney’s presentation of it as
typifying the ‘structural’ turn in avant-garde film
(Sitney, ‘Structural Film’, Film Culture: An
Anthology, ed. P. A. Sitney, Secker and Warburg,
1970). Much subsequent criticism took this as its
starting point, to Frampton’s despair. For a
discussion of the critical legacy, see Virginie
Guichard, An ABC of Film: Hollis Frampton and the
Cultural Tradition of Film, Unpublished Ph.D
dissertation, University of London, 2003.
3 All the initial images of Zorns Lemma’s central
section are of words or letters in alphabetical order,
many appearing as public signs, which are then
substituted with word-free images to form an
alternative alphabet.
4 ‘Notes on Composing in Film’ appeared in the first
issue of October, Spring 1976; and had originally
been given at a Conference on Research and
Composition at SUNY Buffalo in October 1975.
5 In his early Rules for the Direction of the Mind
(1628), Descartes spoke of a ‘universal
mathematics’ [mathesis universalis] to deal with all
matters causing ‘problems about order and
measurement’ (Philosophical Works of Descartes,
trans. E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, Cambridge,
1970: 13). The Encyclopédie (1751–78), edited by
Diderot and D’Alembert, aimed to provide a
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comprehensive, materialist account of the world
and human knowledge.
6 From 1961 until his death in 1972, Pound made
various despairing or dismissive remarks about the
Cantos – ‘I have lots of fragments. I can’t make
much sense of them’ (to Michael Alexander). ‘It’s a
botch. I knew too little about so many things . . . I
picked out this and that thing that interested me
and jumbled them into a bag’ (to Daniel Crory).
7 Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck was completed in
1922, following the serial method of Berg’s teacher
Arnold Schönberg, in which permutations of a basic
‘tone row’ determine all aspects of the work’s
musical structure.
8 From 1978 onwards, Frampton outlined and spoke
about the structure envisaged for Magellan with
increasing frequency. For a discussion of these
accounts, see Brian Henderson, ‘Propositions for the
Exploration of Frampton’s Magellan’, October 32,
Spring 1985: 129–50.
9 Pope John XXIII died in 1963 during the Second
Vatican Council which he had summoned, with
many of his reforms of the Catholic Church
unfinished – and later to be reversed by his
successor.
10 The ‘lost wax’ or cire perdue technique is used for
casting bronze sculpture. A model in wax is placed
within a clay and plaster casing, then heated until
the wax runs out, and is replaced by molten bronze
poured into the resultant mould.
11 Paul Sharits, another participant in the Edinburgh
Avant-Garde Forum of 1976, had been exhibiting
portions of film strip from some of his of his solidframe
‘flicker’ films, such as Ray Gun Virus.
12 The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell
(1831–79) laid the foundations of electrical and
optical theory, identifying the primary colours, red,
green and blue.
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118 • Film Studies • Issue 4 • Summer 2004
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