This chapter revolves around ways in which the cinema, over the last decade or so, has been overtaken by change. The old celluloid medium has given way to the new, to the digital, so that many of the aesthetic and theoretical assumptions that characterise my thought, and presumably that of many of my generation, seem to have been displaced or lost their relevance. My long-standing involvement with cinema has, by and large, had two strands: that of specificity, invested in celluloid as a medium, within the tradition of Modernism and as a key concern of avant-garde film; secondly that of spectacle, within the tradition of modernity, invested in the cinema of industry, particularly Hollywood and the star system. Recently, especially in my 2006 book Death Twenty-four times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, I have been reflecting on ways in particular that new forms of moving image consumption have necessitated re-thinking my 1970s theories of spectacle and spectatorship. Here I want to focus more on the attributes traditionally associated with film as a medium and their paradoxical relationship with the new.
Furthermore, changes affecting the cinema have taken place within a wider context: another sense of an ‘end of an era’ that followed the decline of Modernism and the collapse of Socialism. It was during the watershed period, marked aesthetically by Postmodernism and politically/economically by neo-liberalism, that cinema fell back into a ‘then’ of a past based on celluloid recording and projection, in opposition to the ‘now’ of a present media proliferation into complex relations with other technologies. It is this division that has led certain theorists to pronounce the cinema ‘dead’. To my mind there is a political significance to these divisions between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ that emerges out of the strange moment in which conservative politics embrace the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ left has to try to keep the utopian aspirations of the past alive. We see here a reversal: the conservative has become radical and the radical now, I am suggesting, struggles to hold on to the past. Of course, there is a certain absurdity to this role reversal – but it is also logical. Those who hold onto dreams of progress now want to delay the forward movement of history and stretch out, horizontally as it were, the process of change for a dialogue between the old and the new – that might change both. If the figuration is re-worked, if the figure of opposition is woven into a more dialectical relationship rather than separated along binary lines, another picture might begin to emerge.
These two apparently separate and unrelated issues, the cinematic and the political, have come together in my mind and raised further questions about the representation of time. That is, the ways in which the human mind struggles to grasp this elusive concept and reorganise it into a comprehensible pattern or order. Moving from factors outside the cinema, that are influential, even determinate, on its history, to factors inside the cinema, specific to the properties of film as celluloid and their meeting with the properties of new technologies, in order to consider ways in which the cinema itself might enable thinking about time.
I. ‘THE END OF AN ERA’: CINEMA AND THE WIDER HISTORICAL CONJUNCTURE
The history of cinema has had close ties with the history of modernity and the utopian teleology that is associated with the left both aesthetically and politically. During the last years of the twentieth century a gap or gulf came to break up the continuities of both histories. The cinema has been profoundly affected by electronic and digital technologies, more than it had been either by the coming of synchronised sound or by television. At the same time, right-wing neo-liberalism and the collapse of Communism contributed to a perceived breakdown in continuity, however mythical it might have been, of modernity and, however fraught or fractured, of left aspiration. How is it possible to challenge this abrupt ‘end of an era’? Should those still committed to a progressive politics attempt to do so? How does the visualisation of time and history contribute to the process?
On a cultural level, left politics and cinephilia have had a close relation to modernity. Looking back to the avant-garde of the 1920s, Annette Michelson has pointed out:
The excitement, the exhilaration of artists and intellectuals not directly involved with [the cinema] was enormous. Indeed, a certain euphoria enveloped early film making and theory. For there was, ultimately, a very real sense in which the revolutionary aspirations of the modernist movement in literature and the arts, on the one hand, and of Marxist or Utopian tradition, on the other, could converge in the hopes and promises, yet undefined, of the new medium. (1979: 407)
In the second half of the twentieth century, the terms and context in which it was articulated shifted but the aspiration continued. The cinema came to be an important cultural site for liberation struggle and left politics during the de-colonisation period and its aftermath in the 60s. Furthermore, the great, radical cinemas emerging in Latin America during the same period clearly associated the politics of a film with its conceptual and aesthetic principles. In Europe, political cinema could mediate between modernity’s proliferation of imagery, the prevalence of the society of the spectacle, and Modernism’s commitment to questioning the transparency and authenticity of these images. Fluctuating across cinema’s history, varying from period to period, it is possible to find belief in cinema merging with belief in radical political change.
The decline of this ‘radical aspiration’ lies across the 1980s, confused and disorientated by economic and political changes on national and international scale. The 1980s mark out a gap between the fluctuating continuities of culture and politics that crossed the twentieth century and late twentieth century developments such as globalisation, post-Communism, post-Fordism, the export of industrialised production to parts of the developing world, the rise of religious fundamentalism and so on. These gaps or fissures have found a pattern in the image of historical time creating a ‘then’ and a ‘now’, a binary opposition that stagnates time into a quasi-spatial relationship. The changes are, of course, real and profound. But, as they harden into a pattern and image that divides history in ‘eras’, the problem of challenging the new and finding the means to articulate the aesthetic and political within a changing configuration becomes harder.
On the one hand, from the perspective of the cinema, new technologies are a key element in creating the ‘then’ and ‘now’, ‘before’ and ‘after’, effect. On the other, as they open up new forms of film consumption so that digital and electronic formats give new life to the old cinema of celluloid. In negotiating a relationship between the different media, some negotiation across the ‘great divide’ is also necessarily set in motion. While this attempt to break down the opposition between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ may only be figurative in the first instance, it also brings the aesthetics of cinematic temporality into visibility. Furthermore, without necessarily entailing its death, the cinema itself becomes history as a medium of celluloid with its privileged relation to the reality of the image recorded. As Jean-Luc Godard has definitively and characteristically illustrated in Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988–98), with the passing of time, the cinema’s own history becomes increasingly entwined with history as such.
II. ‘THE END OF AN ERA’: A NEW INTER-MEDIA CONJUNCTURE
In the first instance, the arrival of digital technologies brought to an end the longstanding aesthetic relation between celluloid and reality. Although easily subject to special effects and alteration, the image in front of the camera had been inscribed by light onto film. Digital technologies, with their capacity to create an illusory image of reality, broke that assumption forever, ending the short history of celluloid as a dominant medium soon before it celebrated its centenary. Might it be possible, however, to forge a new, critical or theoretical relationship between the celluloid cinema of the past and the new technologies of the present? Might this fusion of the old and the new create a means of avoiding the terminal nature of ‘the end of the era’ to forge new metaphors and ways of understanding time?
New technologies enable the spectator to vary the temporality of a film. Moments may be repeated or even slowed, the image may be stilled. These simple developments, that anyone may now easily employ, immediately affect the conventions and aesthetics of the cinema and bring to the fore questions about its relationship to narrative on the one hand and its own materiality on the other. To still the cinema’s movement is to question the effect for which it was invented, the illusion of movement, but also reiterates the challenge to its dominance that echoes down the whole history of the cinema. Avant-garde film looked on narrative film, generally, but not necessarily rightly, as having a phobic or paranoid attitude to cinema’s stillness and thus its materiality. For a cinematic story to be credible in its own terms, it had to assert the power of its own story time over the simple photographic time when it was actually filmed. Now, by stilling or slowing movie images, the time of the film’s original moment of registration suddenly bursts through its artificial, narrative, surface. Another moment of time, behind the fictional time of the story, emerges through this kind of fragmentation. Even in a Hollywood movie, beyond the story is the reality of the image: the set, the stars, the extras take on the immediacy and presence of a document and the fascination of time fossilised can overwhelm and halt the fascination of narrative progression. The now-ness of story time gives way to the then-ness of the movie’s own moment in history.
Although the avant-garde has had widely varying aesthetic preoccupations, making visible the cinema’s dependence on the still frame not only made visible its materiality but also, negatively, worked against the alliance between the illusion of movement and the mass of narrative film. Now, this old opposition can be broken down by any video tape or DVD, so that movies that have always been seen at a certain speed can be opened up to new temporality and unexpected detail. Stopping a film seems, at first glance, to disrupt narrative, breaking its continuity and the flow of movement that has closely linked cinema to story telling. But a pause, or a stop, in the flow of a story may also enable a return to narrative within a different perceptual framework and awareness of its formal structures and aesthetic properties. A movie’s linearity, its apparent dependence on a horizontal narrative structure, can mutate. As sequences are skipped or repeated different hierarchies of privilege are brought into being. In a digression from the story line, detail can become as, or more, significant, than the chain of meaning invested in cause and effect. Details, as they break loose from the whole, may also trigger the special affinity with reality that seems to belong to the accidental, the intrusion of chance into an overall design. Or, the changed pace, the slow motion, can transform one moving image object into another as happens, for instance, in Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993). And in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001) the hero describes his search for any trace of his mother lost in the SS run ghetto Theresienstadt and his attempt to find her image in the fragments of a Nazi propaganda film:
In the end the impossibility of seeing anything more closely in those pictures, which seemed to dissolve even as they appeared, said Austerlitz, gave me the idea of having a slow motion copy of this fragment from Theresienstadt made, one which would last a whole hour, and indeed once the fragment was extended to four times its original length, it did reveal previously hidden objects and people, creating, by default as it were, a different sort of film altogether, which I have since watched over and over again. (2001: 345)
An illustration across two pages shows how the damaged bits of the tape break up into illegible pixelation; a smaller ‘still’ shows:
…at the left-hand side, set a little way back and close to the upper edge of the frame, the face of a young woman appears, barely emerging from the black shadows around it, which is why I did not notice it at all at first. (Ibid.)
The process of slowing down, repeating or stilling the image allows hidden details to emerge within a film sequence or previously insignificant moment, once frozen, can generate the emotional impact of a still photograph. Out of the interaction between celluloid and new technologies, as the concealing mask of narrative falls away, the presence of the past inscribed onto film is enhanced. Not only does the dialectical relationship across old and new media challenge the ‘great divide’, creating an interweaving out of an opposition, but the ‘then-ness’ that appears within the old celluloid image brings the history that belongs to it palpably into the present, translated onto an easily accessible form. Once on video or DVD, film of the past can become the subject for reverie. Questions about time emerge both from the image, located in the past, and from the properties of film itself, able to contain movement and stillness within its formal structure.
III. BRINGING THE PAST INTO THE PRESENT: THE CINEMA’S IMAGING AND IMAGINING OF TIME
The transfer of film originally shot on celluloid onto electronic or digital carriers allows some properties of film to find greater visibility. The temporal has always had an extremely complex aesthetic and conceptual presence in any kind of cinema, fiction, avant-garde, documentary but often these different genres have been understood in terms of antagonism and incompatibility. Might the new forms of consumption of old film not only break down generic barriers but also bring cinema’s temporalities into new visibility? Does the present moment, both within the history of cinema and history more generally, invest particular interest and importance in the way the cinematic past is used and understood?
I began, in the first section, with the ‘great divide’ that separates the old from the new creating a binary opposition, an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ across technological and economic change. In the second section, I tried to suggest that the way that new technologies have given new life to old cinema could be seen figuratively as working against the old/new opposition in a mutually enhancing alliance. Even on an immediate level, as carriers, video and DVD keep the old cinema alive. More and more people, beyond the earlier world of buffs and cinephiles, are taken into its history, perhaps most especially in the case of DVD, as commentaries, interviews and documentation expand the consumption of film out of its traditional format into a new context of knowledge and critical self-awareness. But for the film historian and theorist, artist, and, in this context, those historians interested in reflecting on the representation of time, different kinds of temporality and relations between times become more clearly apparent as the indexicality of celluloid is translated onto and manipulated through new media.
However, the way that my argument has been formulated raises problems of its own. Having founded this paper on a critque of binary systems of thought, I seem to have built another aesthetic binary into my assumptions. The material and the indexical are found in opposition to narrative and illusion. This opposition resurrects the old opposition between avant-garde materialism and the illusion of fiction, with an implicit validation of avant-garde practice, stripping away the mask of narrative to reveal the material presence of celluloid and the cinematic apparatus. This approach was one that influenced my thinking about film during the 1970s. I would argue now that the relation between new and old technology offers, on the contrary, the opportunity to break down the opposition, most particularly through an investigation of the complex temporalities of film that are now becoming visible and available to theory.
Important for my thinking has been Raymond Bellour’s observation on the affect the appearance of a still image has on the moving image. His example is taken from Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) at the point when the narrative introduces a series of photographs:
As soon as you stop the film, you begin to find time to add to the image. You start to reflect differently on film, on cinema. You are led towards the photogram – which is itself a step further in the direction of the photograph. In the frozen film (or photogram), the presence of the photograph bursts forth, while other means exploited by the mise-en-scene to work against time tend to vanish. The photo thus becomes a stop within a stop, a freeze frame within a freeze frame; between it and the film from which it emerges, two kinds of time blend together, always inextricable but without becoming confused. In this the photograph enjoys a privilege over all other effects that make the spectator, this hurried spectator, a pensive one as well. (1987: 6–7)
Bellour is taking stillness within the moving image as the point at which the pensive spectator emerges into consciousness. This was indeed the case during the long history of film projected at 24 frames per second through a projector in the darkened auditorium. Now, not only is stillness available to the electronic spectator at the touch of a button but with its prolongation further effects can emerge for reflection. Bellour points to this greater complexity with the phrase: ‘between it [the photograph] and the film from which it emerges two kinds of time blend together, always inextricable but without being confused’ (ibid). Here, there is an opening towards rethinking the opposition between a concrete past of stillness and the illusion of narrative time associated with the illusion of movement itself. The two kinds of time are ‘entwined’ and the division between them simplifies the complexity of film. Although a film is a series of celluloid stills, it is only through a relationship with the continuities of movement, of sequence and serial that cinema comes into being. The cinematic representation of time cannot be pinned down exactly or stabilised. Even when I stop a favourite movie on a favourite moment, to think about the presence of the past inscribed there, it is also a moment to ‘reflect differently on film’ rather than to reduce it to the photograph.
This temporal ‘entwining’ has always been an aesthetic advantage for film and many of its greatest exponents, whether in Hollywood or in the avantgarde, have exploited it across cinema history. Now a further dimension of complexity emerges simply, perhaps, through the greater availability of its effects and more and more does the spectator confront the difficulty of conceptualising time preserved and its illusiveness. The time of movement and of narrative itself adds to this dimension as an essential part of the relationship rather than as mask or disguise. The index as a signifier of a fixed ‘then’ begins to float as it is detached from the still and attached to the moving image. Roland Barthes’ term ‘this was now’1 as applied to the still photograph evokes the difficulty of translating photographic temporality into ordinary language, giving rise to a feeling of giddiness, as though confronted with a trompe l’oeil effect. Out of this, the content of a specific image begins to recede and it’s replaced by the heavy weight of temporality itself materialised in all its uncertainty. This is, to my mind, a glimmering awareness that human consciousness creates history in order, not only to understand events that are in themselves important and determining of their successors, but to organise the unspeakable and intractable nature of time itself. This sensation is aggravated in film’s relation between stillness and movement, the interaction between fiction and the illusive reality of the past, between the present of spectatorship and consciousness of time passing and, ultimately, of death. The sequence essential to cinematic time stretches out into an irreversible duration that can be stilled or even reversed but, without that dimension cannot be cinema. Time persists, its forward movement becomes palpable and even harder to pin down than that of the still photograph.
I have tried to suggest that the cinema has always been a medium in which time plays a complex part, inextricably asserting the indexical presence of a single, preserved, moment alongside its inexorable materialisation of temporal duration. By a strange paradox, this essential quality of film becomes more readily visible when the medium is transferred onto its new carriers, more tractable and more easily manipulated by the viewer. The question of time itself can become the subject of imagination and reverie and, if only as a figuration or metaphor, leads to the question of historical time and its relation to the human imagination.
There is another, more substantial side to the cinema as its history is retrieved more and more thoroughly in the early twenty-first century. This is the period of the archive. New technologies both make the appearance of film’s history more practical but also represent the break with its indexical relation to the actuality it recorded. In this sense, the cinema has had a short history, one that is co-terminate with the aspirations of the twentieth century, particularly its radicalism. From this perspective, it is an essential means for thinking through the problems of the late twentieth century, the vanishing legacy of modernism and the ‘radical aspiration’. Perhaps, from this perspective it can help to establish some continuity from that past into the present and challenge the apparent inevitabilities represented by the ‘great divide’.
CODA: BEYOND THE OLD AND THE NEW.
I want to end by suggesting that, rather than seeing the present moment as one of an irreconcilable gap between eras, it is possible to reconfigure the visual imagery that lies behind it and shift the metaphor from one of opposition to one of flux. We are in the midst of a complicated period of change and it is the persistence of eras and their intermingling that gives this present period a particular interest. Although we are all aware of the impact of the new - politics or technologies - they are still in process, still mutating not yet indicating a future certainty. This threshold, a space of liminality (as anthropologists and narratologists might say), offers an opportunity for the old and the new to co-exist and mediate in relationship or dialogue between the past and the present. The perception of change shifts away from an imaginary pattern derived primarily from the register of time, a foreclosing of the past, a hastening towards the end of an era, into an imaginary pattern derived from space, of threshold, of holding past and future suspended in an uncertain present. Into this space, an aesthetic of delay can emerge.
A dialectical relationship between the old and new media can be summoned into existence creating an aesthetic of delay. In the first instance, the image itself is frozen or subjected to repetition or return. But as the new stillness is enhanced by the weight that the past acquires during such ‘threshold’ periods, its significance goes beyond the image itself towards the problem of time, its passing, and how it is represented or preserved. To stop and to reflect on the cinema and its history opens into a wider question: how time might be understood within wider, contested, patterns of history and mythology. Out of this pause, a delayed cinema gains a political dimension, potentially able to challenge patterns of time that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its ‘old’ and its ‘new’.
In this context, the cinema, rather than simply reaching the end of its era, can come to embody a new urgency to look backwards, to pause and to delay the combined forces of politics, economics and technology. The cinema’s recent slide backward into history can, indeed, enable this backward look at the twentieth century. In opposition to a simple determinism inherent in the image of a void between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ of an era that had suddenly ended, the cinema provides material for holding on to and reflecting on the last century’s achievements as well as learning from its catastrophes. To turn to the past through the detour of cinema has a political purpose. While the coincidence between the cinema’s centenary and the arrival of digital technology created an opposition between the old and the new, the convergence of the two media translated their literal chronological relation into a more complex dialectic. The dialectic between old and new produces innovative ways of thinking about the complex temporality of cinema and its significance for the present moment in history. As the flow of cinema is displaced by the process of delay, spectatorship is affected, re-configured and transformed so that old films can be seen with new eyes and digital technology, rather than killing the cinema, brings it new life and new dimensions. I have argued across a variety of attributes of the cinema to suggest that it has a privileged relation to time and also to the history of the twentieth century. If the cinema may now be turned back on itself, into means of looking backwards at history, at the cultures of modernity, the new life offered to old cinema by new technologies paradoxically maintains its presence within this threshold period of transition and uncertainty.
Banfield, A. (1990) ‘L’imparfait de l’objectif: The Imperfect of the Objective Glass’, Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory, 24, 65–87.
Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bellour, R. (1987) ‘The Pensive Spectator’, Wide Angle, 9, 1, 6–10.
Michelson, A. (1970) ‘Film and the radical aspiration’, in Sitney, P. A. (ed.) Film Culture Reader. New York: Praeger, pp. 404-42.
Mulvey, L. (2006) Death Twenty-four times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books.
Sebald, W. G. (2001) Austerlitz. New York: Random House.
FILMOGRAPHY
Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988–98) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [DVD]. London: Artificial Eye.
24 Hour Psycho (1993) Directed by Douglas Gordon [Video]. Glasgow/New York: Douglas Gordon
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) Directed by Max Ophuls [DVD]. Amazon. com: Dawoori Entertainment.
NOTES