Excerpted from Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Vol. 4, no. 1) 1979, pp. 1–21. Printed by permission of Taylor and Francis.
Imagine, for instance, if inspired by Warhol, I produce a film called “War and Peace,” based on the novel. It consists of eight hours of footage—a saga!—of the title page of Tolstoi’s novel. Or suppose an ill-advised avant-garde dramatist mounts a play consisting of an actor seated on the stage through three acts.
“Lessness” by Beckett has an immobile figure this way. Nothing happens either in the film or the play in the sense that what happens is nothing. But the contrast remains even so with a painting even of the most energetically displayed figures: for a person who stood before such a painting in anticipation, say, of an event—like the dancers in Breugel taking some step—would be mad, or hoping for a miracle of the sort which earned Pygmalion a place in mythology; whereas one has every right, however frustrated, to expect an event in the monotonous film or play just described. It would be a sardonic concession to the legitimacy of this expectation if the title page burned up to end the film, or the seated man scratched his ear in act three.
Film and drama seem essentially temporal in a way somewhat difficult to pin down directly, though perhaps one way to do it indirectly would be to mark the difference between projecting a slide of the title page for eight hours and running a film of the “title page” for eight hours. There is a considerable difference here in the circumstances of projection—none of which need be reflected as an element in the image projected on the screen—and we can imagine matters so arranged that there is no difference there, so one could not tell by patient visual scrutiny whether it were a slide or a film. Even so, though what they experience will be indiscernible as between the two cases, knowledge, however arrived at, that there is a difference, should make a difference. Although nothing happens in either case, the truth of this is logically determined in the case of the slide whereas it is only a matter of a perverse artistic intention in the case of the film, where something could happen if I wished it to. So a perfectly legitimate right is frustrated in the case of the film, whereas there is no legitimate expectation either to be frustrated or gratified in the case of the slide. Again, at the end of eight hours, the film will be over, but not the slide. Only the session of its dull projection will have come to an end—but not it—since slides logically lack, as do paintings, beginnings and endings. Our viewing of a painting may indeed have beginning and end, but we don’t view the beginning and endings of paintings.
The same contrived contrast may be drawn between a tableau vivant, in which living persons are frozen in certain positions, and a play, in which by artistic design the actors do not move. Again, though no difference may meet the eye, there is a difference conferred by the logical differences of the two genres. We have, in brief, to go outside what is merely viewed to the categories, which define the genre in question, in order to establish differences, and to understand what is philosophically distinctive of more natural artistic examples.
Finding the difference between pictures and moving pictures is very much like finding the differences between works of art and real objects, where we can imagine cases in which nothing except knowledge of their causes and of the categories which differentiate works of art from real things make the difference between the two, since they otherwise look exactly alike.
It is this initial foray into categorical analysis that has given us some justification for considering films together with plays, since both seem subject to descriptions which, though in fact false, are not logically ruled out as they are in the case of pictures. If in a film “bold lover” does not succeed in kissing “maiden loth” this will not be because the structure of the medium guarantees these works of art to be a joy forever in consequence of logical immobility.
Here, immobility has to be willed. …
Moving pictures are just that: pictures which move, not just (or necessarily at all) pictures of moving things. For we may have moving pictures of what are practically stolid objects, like the Himalayas and nonmoving pictures of such frenetically-motile objects as Breugel’s reeling peasants and Rosa Bonheurs’s rearing horses. Before the advent of moving pictures, it would not have been illuminating to characterize nonmoving pictures as nonmoving; there would have been no other sort. With statues, of course, because they already existed in a full three dimensions, the possibility of movement was an ancient option, with Daedelus being credited with the manufacture of animated statuary, and not just statuary of moving things. Any good carver was up to that (though possibly not Daedelus’s contemporaries, it being difficult to know how to characterize the content of archaic sculptures in terms of the presence or absence of overt kinesis). Calder introduced movement into sculptures as an artistic property of them, but it is not plain that his mobiles are of anything, even if they are so interpreted, it seems almost foreclosed that they would be of moving things: of branches in the wind or bodies in orbit or graceful spiders or whatever. Calder invented the striking predicate “stabile” to designate his non-moving statues, but I suppose all statues, even such dynamic Section IV representations of movement as Bernini’s David or Rodin’s Icarus would retrospectively be stabiles or at least nonkinetic as such. Keats’s observation holds true of these works. David remains eternally flexed in his gigantocidal posture in the Villa Borghese, though the slinger he represents could not have maintained that position, given the reality of gravity. He is represented at an instant in a gesture where a next and a preceding instant would have to be anatomically marked, in contrast with Donatello’s or even Michelangelo’s David, whose models could have held their pose: subjects for a daguerreotype, on which Bernini’s model would have registered a blur. But Keats’s observation would not have been logically true of sculptures or pictures as such, as mobiles and moving pictures demonstrate: things of beauty can be joys just for a moment.
In a philosophically stinging footnote to the First Critique, Kant observes that a representation of permanence need not be a permanent representation, and comparably a representation of motion need not be a moving representation—conspicuously in descriptions of motion, which do not swim about the page. But even with pictures, it had long been recognized that the properties of the thing represented need not also be properties of the representation itself. This was obviously so in one main triumph of representational art, the mechanism of perspective rendering where it would not have been the trivially present third dimension in a canvas which accounted for the depth in the painting. Though I suppose an artist could have introduced real depth as Calder introduced real movement; for example, by using boxes in which figures were deployed and one real space to represent another. But, in fact, it is not clear that this would have enhanced his powers of representation, and might have had in fact the opposite effect, just as animation of Bernini’s David might have reduced or severely altered its representational power, resulting in something more like a toy than a man, more like the fetish of Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address as misbegotten by Walt Disney. We are struck with the discrepancies between representation and subject which we have learned to overlook, unless technicians, in routine examples of representational art.
On the other hand, the first movies used moving pictures to represent motion, and despite Kant’s dictum, it is difficult to think that this is not a breakthrough of sorts of representation, much in the way in which it would have been a breakthrough to use colors to represent colored things, heretofore represented only in white and black (in contour drawings, for example) and perhaps the difference can be brought out this way. Chiang Yee told me of a celebrated Chinese painter of bamboo who, having repeatedly been importuned to make a drawing for a certain patron, decided to comply, but had at hand only the red ink normally used for seals. The patron thanked him, but asked where had he ever seen red bamboos, to which the artist replied by asking where the patron had ever seen black ones. Why infer from the fact that if the representation is red, the subject must be red, if we don’t infer from the fact that if the representation is black that the subject is black? In a way, it may be a matter merely of convention. We handle sanguine and grisaille drawings in our stride. However, there is more to the matter than that, since the shape of the image is the shape of the subject, and if the artist had painted his bamboos zigzag, he would hardly have been in position to counter the obvious question by asking where had the patron ever seen straight ones.
So some properties one feels must be shared by representation and subject; some structural parities must hold, for at least this class of representation.
So perhaps the difference is this. In describing our experience with David, we might say that we see he is in movement, but we don’t see him move. And with the bamboos, we see that they are yellow, but we don’t see their yellowness.
“Seeing that he moves,” or “seeing that they are yellow” are declarations of inference, supported by an initial identification of the subject and some knowledge of how such things in fact behave. To paint the bamboos in color reduces the inference, and there is always a serious question as to whether, say, the use of red ink is merely a physical fact about the medium, or if it is to have representational (or, today, expressional) properties in its own right. Obviously, we have to learn. An emperor was fond of a concubine and commissioned that her portrait be done by a Jesuit painter in China who was master of chiaroscuro. She, however, was horrified at the result, believing that the artist showed her with a face half-black, not able to see yet that he was representing shadows rather than hues and that the portrait showed solidity rather than coloration. But the problem remains and is as much a function of our antecedent knowledge of the world as of our mastery of pictorial convention: a painting of a tapir could appear, I suppose, to the zoologically ignorant as of a monocrome animal half in shadow, rather than a dichromatic animal in full illumination. In any case, with the movies, we do not just see that they move, we see them moving: and this is because the pictures themselves move, the way the pictures themselves must be colored when we would correctly describe ourselves as seeing the colors of what they show.
The earliest moving pictures, then, also showed things moving: not trains as such shown as moving, such as we see in Turner, but moving trains we see move: not just moving horses but horses moving, and the like. Of course, photography is not required for this, but a series of pictures moving past at a certain speed, which can be drawings, as in the Zoopraxinoscope, or for that matter the animated cartoon, where the several representations are synthesized into one, in a manner strikingly anticipated in the First and Second Analogies of the Critique of Pure Reason, and which requires the viewer to see these as pictures of the same thing in different stages of a movement, which the optical mechanisms we are born with spontaneously smooth out to continuity. That the matter is conceptual as well as perceptual is illustrated, I think, by the fact that if the pictures are of different things, or of the same thing but not at different stages of the same movement, we would simply register a quantized stream of images rather than a smooth motion—as we do in a way with some of Brakages’ films in which, though the pictures move, they do not show movement, since the discontinuities are so abrupt. So we have, as it were, to synthesize the images as of the same thing at different moments of the same motion or the optic nerve will not help us at all. As students of Descartes’s bit of wax would know, however ignorant they might be of the physiology of perception.
At the level of kineperception, I think, the distinction between photography and drawing comes to very little. Indeed, photography was originally less satisfactory in certain ways. The problem Leland Stanford’s cameraman had was how to make it look like the horse was moving when in fact what the eye registered was the background moving and the horse deployed statically before rushing trees, disconcerting in something like the way it ought to be to us that the wagon’s wheels turn backward as the wagon goes forward; we have learned to live with the eye and mind being in a conceptual antagonism.
Where photography opens up a new dimension is when, instead of objects moving past a fixed camera, the camera moves amongst objects fixed or moving. Now to a degree we could do the same thing with drawings. We could have a sequence of drawings, say, of the Tower of Pisa, displayed in increasing order of size; of the Cathedral of Rouen, seen from different angles. And we know as a matter of independent fact that buildings are not easily rotated or brought across a plain. Still, though we may describe our experience here in terms of seeing the Tower closer and closer up, or seeing the Cathedral from all sides, phenomenologically speaking is our experience of the Tower’s being brought closer to us or ourselves closer to the tower; of the Cathedral’s turning before us or ourselves circling the Cathedral? I tend to feel that when the camera moves the experience is of ourselves moving, which the phenomenon of Cinerama dramatically confirms. And on this I would like to say a few words which will bring us back to the semantical preoccupations of the last section.
An experience of kinesis need not be a kinetic experience. The experience itself based on rather natural Cartesian assumptions, is a-kinetic—neither kinetic nor static—but beyond motion and stasis, these being only the content of experience, like colors and shapes, and logically external to the having of the experiences as such. It would be wholly natural to treat the camera in essentially Cartesian terms, logically external to the sights recorded by it—detached and spectatorial. When the early cameraman strapped his apparatus to a gondola and rolled the film while riding through the canals of Venice, it was his philosophical achievement to thrust the mode of recording into the scenes recorded in a remarkable exercise of self-reference.
At this point cinema approaches the proper apprehension of architecture, which is not something merely to be looked at but moved through, and this, in turn, is something the architect will have built into his structure. I think, in a way, the kinetification of the camera goes some way toward explaining the internal impact films make upon us, for it seems to overcome, at least in principle, the distance between spectator and scene, thrusting us like movable ghosts into scenes which a-kinetic photography locates us outside of, like disembodied Cartesian spectators. We are within scenes which we also are outside of through the fact that we have no dramatic location, often, in the action which visually unfolds, having it both ways at once, which is not an option available to the audiences of stageplays. Or this at least happens to the degree that we are not conscious of the mediation of the camera, and transfer its motion to ourselves, inversely to our deep-seated geostatic prejudices. Whether, of course, the film actually achieves instillation of kinetic illusion—in contrast with the illusion of kinesis, which is the commonplace form of cinematic experience—is perhaps doubtful, especially if the film is in black and white and manifestly representational; e.g., in contrast with holographs in which it is difficult to believe we are not seeing three-dimensional objects, even if we know better.
Even so, I think the chief innovation the moving camera introduces is to make the mode of recording part of the record, and thus thrusts the art of cinema into the image in a singularly intimate way. This happens when, for instance, the swinging of the image through an abrupt angle is to be read as a movement not of it but of the camera, for instance in a mob scene where the camera is, as it were, “jostled,” or where, more archly, the camera literally climbs the stairway with an eye and a lubricity of its own, and pokes into one bedroom after another, in search of the lovers, as in one of Truffaut’s films. In such cases, the movement of the camera is not our movement, and this has precisely the effect of thrusting us outside the action and back into our metaphysical Cartesian hole. When this happens, however, the subject of the film changes; it no longer is the story of young lovers, but of their being observed and filmed which the movie is then about, as though the story itself were but an occasion for filming it, and the latter is what the film itself is about. Film becomes in a way its own subject, the consciousness that it is film is what the consciousness is of, and in this move to self-consciousness cinema marches together with the other arts of the twentieth century in the respect that art itself becomes the ultimate subject of art, a movement of thought which parallels philosophy in the respect that philosophy in the end is what philosophy is about. As though the director had become jealous of the characters who heretofore had absorbed our artistic attention to the point that we had forgotten if we ever thought about art as such, and at his ontological expense. Of course, we have to distinguish a film about the making of a film—which is merely another form of the Hollywood genre of films in which the making of a play is what the film is of—from films whose own making is what they are about, only the latter, I think graduating (if that is the term) from art to philosophy. But of course a price is paid, and a heavy one. When, instead of transforming real objects into artworks or parts of artworks, the transformation itself is what we are aware of, the film becomes a documentary with the special character of documenting the making of an artwork, and it is moot if this will be an artwork in its own right, however absorbing. For the artwork which is being made is not in the end what the film is about when the film is about its making, and if this were perfectly general there would be no artworks at all.
Or perhaps the model is wrong. Perhaps films are like consciousness is as described by Sartre with two distinct, but inseparable, dimensions, consciousness of something as its intentional object, and a kind of non-thetic consciousness of the consciousness itself: and it is with reference to the latter that the intermittent reminders of the cinematic processes as such are to be appreciated.
Then a film achieves something spectacular, not merely showing what it shows, but showing the fact that it is shown; giving us not merely an object but a perception of that object, a world and a way of seeing that world at once; the artist’s mode of vision being as importantly in his work as what it is a vision of. This is a deep subject, with which I end this paper, and I cannot hope to treat it here. I wonder, nevertheless, of the degree to which we are ever conscious of a vision of the world when it is ours. We are aware of the world and seldom aware, if at all, of the special way which we are aware of the world. Modes of awareness are themselves transparent to those whose they are. And when they become opaque then, I think, they no longer are ours.
Atget was recording the city of Paris. His photographs are precious for their documentary value, preserving a reality which has achingly dissipated, but they also reveal a way of seeing that reality which, I am certain, Atget was not aware of as a way of seeing. He simply saw, as do we all. What is precious in old films is often not the “gone” artifacts and the dated modes of costume and acting. The people who made those films did not see their dress as a “mode of costume” but merely as clothes, nor their gestures as modes of acting, but as acting, tout court. A way of viewing the world is revealed when it has jelled and thickened into a kind of spiritual artifact, and despite the philosophical reminders our self-conscious cineastes interpose between their stories and their audiences, their vision—perhaps in contrast with their style—will take a certain historical time before it becomes visible. In whatever way we are conscious of consciousness, consciousness is not an object for itself; and when it becomes an object, we are, as it were, beyond it and relating to the world in modes of consciousness, which are for the moment hopelessly transparent.