By chance, I had my first opportunity to experience Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) just as I was completing Dreaming of Cinema. The Clock is a remarkable twenty-four-hour film presented as an art installation, composed entirely of fragments culled from the history of cinema and television that refer to particular minutes in time. Marclay orchestrates these cinematic minutes to correspond exactly to the time the viewer watches The Clock. So when it is noon and you are watching The Clock, you are watching footage from films that take place at noon or mention the time 12:00 noon. Then 12:01. Then 12:02 …
The Clock struck me right away as intimately linked to the concerns of this book, without being obviously surrealist or flamboyantly digital at its core—although it is both surreal and digitized in certain significant ways that I will explain later. What I believe makes The Clock worth reflecting on here at the end of Dreaming of Cinema is its implications for theorizing cinematic spectatorship. To watch The Clock is to dream of cinema as a matter of marking time, and this book has endeavored to frame cinematic spectatorship as an experience that holds the potential to recast our relation to time. Whether stretching The Sweet Hereafter beyond its celluloid incarnation to include its literary and digital variants as one conjoined act of enlarged spectatorship; or blurring the lines between cinematic and gamic interactivity in Un chien andalou and eXistenZ; or tracking a mediated unconscious at work in the globalized exchanges between the Japanese Ring and its U.S. remake; or formulating notions of posthuman spectatorship between Los olvidados and the YouTube video “Christian the Lion”; or framing Rose Hobart’s invitations to collaboration with the viewer beside those issued by the YouTube channel Mrs. Rock Hudson; in all of these cases cinematic spectatorship has been theorized outside the bounds of cinema as a technologically delimited platform (film, projection, theater) and a temporally delimited experience (time spent viewing the film in a movie theater). By calling each of these instances an example of cinematic spectatorship, I am deliberately refiguring and expanding what we mean by cinema.
In order to imagine what cinematic spectatorship means in the age of new media, Dreaming of Cinema has juxtaposed the surrealist past and the digital present. The book’s guiding principle has been inspired by Walter Benjamin, who understood that staging strategic collisions between the past and present allows us to “blast open the continuum of history” and seize the past within the present “as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”1 Our sense of history, of what constitutes the past and present (along with what remains available to shape the future), can very easily fall under the sway of beliefs and habits that freeze the past, instrumentalize the present, and drain the future. Instead, Benjamin wished to keep the past alive for the struggles of the present and the promise of the future through a risky, disorienting, but ultimately illuminating “blast” or “flash.”
Benjamin, himself deeply affected by the spirit of surrealism, formulates his flash of historical consciousness along lines that recall the surrealist “spark,” a shocking union of two disparate images that come together at the crossroads of dream and reality. Dreaming of Cinema’s methodology has attempted to integrate Benjamin’s flash and surrealism’s spark by arguing that to see cinematic spectatorship as it exists now requires balancing two things: a sense of what cinema always was (a surrealist medium, not a realist one) and a sense of what cinema sometimes seems to be moving toward but may never become (an entirely digital domain). To strike this balance requires imagining cinema, as well as the history it influences and is influenced by, beyond linear, cause-effect logic (as Benjamin teaches) but without abandoning our critical responsibility to the aesthetic and cultural contexts of those objects that carry history within them (as Benjamin insists).
But how exactly do we, as cinematic spectators embedded in history, live with and through cinema? By marking time. That is the answer The Clock presents to us, because seeing The Clock invites an encounter with cinema’s special relation to the time in our lives. Even in a film that doggedly calls attention to each minute of its duration, watching The Clock was, at least for me, an almost hypnotically effortless experience. The time slips by quickly, easily, nearly without conscious recognition, as if I were, well, watching a good movie. And here the surrealist ghost in the machine that is The Clock reveals itself: this ultraliteral rationalization of the cinema, where cinematic time is yoked relentlessly to real time, ends up remystifying cinema rather than demystifying it. After a brief initial period spent trying to identify the film being sampled, or the actors appearing, or even the presence of the watch or clock that tells us the minute we are in (cinematically and live), I surrendered to a soothing familiarity with the language of cinema itself. All of those gestures, situations, actions, urgencies, and excesses that allow us to inhabit these images so immediately, pleasurably, and immersively turn out to have lives of their own, independent from knowing their source or larger narrative significance. The Clock is of course the product of digital video, even if its painstaking three-year assembly involved such analog technologies as hired teams of film buffs scouring their favorite genres for appropriate sequences to submit to Marclay for digital editing.2 But, more important, it is a digital dream of cinema made real—as if the entire history of the medium were made into a single searchable database. Yet the effect of this digital dream’s actualization on the spectator is not realist but surrealist. Converting cinematic time into real time does not boil down cinema to a realist substrate; rather, it highlights cinema’s surreal essence. I believe that watching The Clock drew me closer to, not further away from, what it must have felt like for André Breton to dart in and out of movie theaters at random in his quest for a surrealist charge from the cinematic image.
At least to a certain degree. The terms I have used to describe my impressions of The Clock, such as soothing and familiar, are not terms often used to describe surrealism, and for good reason. In this regard The Clock is no more of a surrealist film than The Sweet Hereafter.3 But as far as the experience of spectatorship is concerned, The Clock offers something well worth regarding alongside surrealism, just as seeing The Sweet Hereafter as a digital instance of surrealist enlargement does. At the heart of these two viewing experiences, like all the examples of spectatorship analyzed in this book, are shifts in our perception of cinematic time’s relation to lived time. I believe these shifts, although far from being identical in every case, can be usefully grouped under the category of the surreal. After all, it is not just clever marketing that has made Salvador Dalí’s melting watches, depicted most famously in his painting The Persistence of Memory (1931), one of the most iconic surrealist images (fig. A.1). Surrealism’s disorientations are not just about unhinging our sense of space but also our sense of time. The Persistence of Memory accomplishes this by turning the everyday instruments on which we depend for measuring time into soft, malleable forms rather than hard, precise ones. The Clock also accomplishes something like this by shackling cinematic time to lived time. But perhaps the greatest surrealist assault on our routine perceptions of time, especially as those perceptions are channeled through cinema, is the film Dalí collaborated on with Luis Buñuel shortly before painting The Persistence of Memory: L’âge d’or (1930). In fact, the stark mountainous landscape of Cap de Creus, the Catalan peninsula near where Dalí was born and where Buñuel shot the opening scenes of L’âge d’or, can be detected in the background of The Persistence of Memory.
L’âge d’or was a much more strained and distant act of collaboration between Buñuel and Dalí than Un chien andalou had been just one year earlier, but Paul Hammond has argued convincingly that Buñuel’s film displays evidence of significant input not only from Dalí but from a wide range of the surrealist movement’s members.4 Even more so than Un chien andalou, which was made under the influence of surrealism but prior to Buñuel and Dalí becoming members of the Surrealist Group, L’âge d’or functions as a cinematic statement of surrealist principles. And one principle that occupies the film’s forefront right from the start is a ferocious attack on linear time as the trustworthy keeper of social, historical, and moral order.
Rather than present us with the splendors of what the film’s title seems to promise, a “golden age” where a civilization stands at the apex of its achievements so that we can look back nostalgically or look forward idealistically, L’âge d’or begins with a sequence quite literally out of time. The film opens by detailing the fearsome biology and behavior of scorpions in the tone of a scientific documentary—which is exactly what it is. Buñuel lifted footage as well as intertitles from an existing popular science documentary, overlaid a classical music soundtrack, and then re-presented it as the opening of his own film.5 The scorpions come from the primordial time of the natural world, not some golden age of human invention, and their savage attacks on each other and a rat who falls victim to their poisonous sting suggests that we are far removed from any kind of ideally civilized era (the lush classical score, which accompanies much of L’âge d’or, only heightens the ironic clash between the film’s title and images). But the scorpions also come from cinematic time; they are already part of cinema’s inventory of images even before they are incorporated into L’âge d’or. Like The Clock, the opening of L’âge d’or defines cinematic time as a matter of recollected images, not original ones. Unlike The Clock, with its meticulously engineered structure, the beginning of L’âge d’or parades its determination to not fit in with the film as a whole—to remain an accident, a chance encounter, a dead end. Of course, this is not to say that aesthetic and thematic connections cannot be established between the scorpion sequence and the rest of the film (indeed, Hammond goes so far as to use an intertitle’s description of the scorpion’s tail as divided into six segments as a rationale for splitting the film into six sections).6 But as L’âge d’or continues, the film’s opening makes more and more “sense” as temporal nonsense—the first in a series of assaults on our conventional notions of time’s continuity.
“Some hours later” states the intertitle that bridges the scorpion sequence and L’âge d’or’s next section, a depiction of hopelessly beleaguered bandits set on attacking a group of Catholic bishops spotted near the seashore. One by one, the marching bandits collapse from old injuries and exhaustion before even reaching the bishops. Time as deadline—a key ingredient for narrative cinema that The Clock’s clips revisit again and again—is dismissed here as handily as time’s function as the reliable agent of chronology, when “some hours later” turns out to have no relevance whatsoever for the relationship between the scorpions and the bandits. Indeed, when the bandits disappear from the film shortly thereafter and a fleet of new characters land on the same craggy shoreline, the bishops have become desiccated, skeletal remains (fig. A.2). So even though nothing more explicit than a fade-out and fade-in indicate that any time at all has elapsed, apparently long stretches of time have passed.
Since the scorpion and bandit sequences offer no answer to the spectator’s question of “When are we?” (let alone specifying a particular golden age), it comes as a relief when these new visitors to the shoreline erect a plaque that names the year as 1930. So we are in the film’s present tense after all. The viewer relaxes a bit, finally provided with some temporal bearings to filter the film’s onslaught of violent, scatological, hilariously cruel, shockingly blasphemous images. But the relief proves illusory, since Buñuel then reveals that 1930 is the date a city was founded on this spot, and that city was called … imperial Rome. Accompanying aerial images place us in an emphatically modern Rome, not its ancient imperial version. And so it goes in L’âge d’or, right through the film’s final sequence, a tribute to Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom led by a Christ figure that leaves us somewhere between the crucifixion of Jesus and the eighteenth century. Not only does L’âge d’or refuse to locate or date the golden age promised by its title, but it scrambles our sense of linear time so feverishly that only cinematic time remains. In L’âge d’or linear time is subjected to endless surrealist disorientation so that cinematic time emerges poised at an angle of critical possibility to the lived time of the present. The undated golden age may well be that potential instant of Benjamin’s flash, when the imprisoning strictures of time and history loosen so that we might glimpse another time, another history, another possibility buried within our own present. L’âge d’or offers us that glimpse by conditioning our senses to the surreality of cinematic time.
The same can be said for the examples of cinematic spectatorship collected in Dreaming of Cinema. None of the films or digital media analyzed in this book may come close on their own to matching L’âge d’or’s stunning insistence on changing the way viewers see, but I hope I have demonstrated how, in the interstices between the surrealist past and the digital present, each of these objects carries the possibility for an expanded sense of cinematic spectatorship. Whether it’s a digital clock made of movies or a surrealist movie that melts clocks, cinema is, was, and always will be an experience for the spectator with a time of its own.
The afterlife of L’âge d’or underlines this point. Because it was an early sound film, many movie theaters in 1930 were not yet properly equipped to project it in its intended form. In fact, the film’s public premiere in Paris was marred by the malfunctioning of the theater’s sound system. A few days later, a group of right-wing demonstrators vandalized the theater that was screening L’âge d’or, including damaging an accompanying exhibition of surrealist art in the lobby. Soon the public scandal surrounding the film caused its prints to be impounded, its visa cancelled, and the film itself to nearly vanish from existence for decades.7 But today L’âge d’or is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and streaming video, accessible at a low price and with just a few clicks of a computerized device. Can the film possibly reach and transform viewers now in ways that it simply could not in 1930? Or is L’âge d’or condemned to languish as just another forgotten whisper in the digital din of new media?
Perhaps L’âge d’or’s golden age of cinematic spectatorship is now. Or yet to come. Or already past. Or all of the above, simultaneously.