Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis

“No one goes to the movies anymore.” This is one of only a few lines of dialogue in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), a melancholy, visually arresting film about a large dilapidated movie theater in Taipei that is screening its last film (King Hu’s Dragon Inn [1967]).¹ The theater is eerily empty, although one feels the weight of the thousands of people who once populated it. (As one man tells another, “This theater is haunted. Ghosts.”) There are only a handful of individuals watching the King Hu film at any given moment, and while a few spectators seem genuinely engrossed, most of those present seem more interested in people watching, snacking, or cruising for gay sex. Near the end of Goodbye, Dragon Inn (after the film within the film is over), Tsai provides a prolonged static shot of the empty theater.² The shot is a nostalgic contemplation of how films used to be seen. In the modern era audiences are increasingly turning to home-viewing options (DVDs, movies on demand, streaming videos, YouTube, etc.) rather than theaters, and this significantly alters the cinematic experience. As I stared at Tsai’s empty seats, I reflected wistfully on my own experiences of going to the theater when I was younger, and how long it had been (about a year) since I attended a film screening at a movie theater. (I was watching Goodbye, Dragon Inn where I watch most films now—on my computer monitor. The contrast made the film even more poignant for me.)

It may seem strange to conclude a book on static avant-garde cinema with an evocation of Tsai’s magnum opus. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is not an experimental film but an art film. And in spite of its frequent stillness (with the exception of one shot, Tsai’s camera never moves), it is not a static film per se but a work of slow cinema.³ Nevertheless, I believe a brief discussion of Goodbye, Dragon Inn provides a fitting coda for this project. Not only does it foreground the continued centrality of stasis for many filmmakers in the modern era, even outside of the avant-garde, but it also draws attention to the decline of the movie theater and thus forces us to ponder the fate of the cinema of stasis (and cinema more broadly) in the “postcinematic” era.⁴

The “death” of cinema was perhaps inevitable, given the rise of VHS and DVD technology—not to mention pay-per-view, TiVo, Netflix streaming videos, and other similar technologies that enable home viewing. While it is easy to lament the way that such technological developments have displaced the ambience—perhaps even the aura—of the traditional movie theater, it should also be remembered that they offer unprecedented opportunities: at no time in history has it been easier to access any film that one is interested in seeing. One’s cinematic “diet” is no longer strictly determined by whatever the nearest cineplex happens to be screening at any given moment. For most of my life I had very little access to art films. (There were no art-house cinemas in my area, and many video rental shops carried only commercial films.) And while I was occasionally able to find well-known masterpieces like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) or Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), I had essentially no access at all to avant-garde cinema. Now I watch several experimental films per week. Some I obtain via DVD; most are only available through websites like UbuWeb, YouTube, and Vimeo. Indeed, many of the films I have discussed in this book—such as So Is This—are rarely screened and unavailable on DVD, and as a result they would be practically impossible to see if they had not been made available online.

The ontology of film, too, has been profoundly altered by the rise of the digital. Onscreen movement and stasis are no longer reliant on the movement of film stock but on the transfer of information. In spite of this fundamental shift, some theorists continue to see movement as essential to the ontology of film, even in its digital incarnation. In D. N. Rodowick’s theorization “the film projector produces movement by animating still images. But as presented on electronic displays, the image is movement or subject to continual change because the screened image is being constantly reconstituted, scanned, or refreshed.”⁵ Rodowick is certainly correct to point out that the technological basis of digital cinema demands that the images undergo constant permutations; however, I fail to see why this implies that “the image is movement.” It seems that Rodowick is problematically conflating movement and change. The digital image may be labile, but it is not movement itself; it simply engenders the perception of movement (or stasis) in a way quite distinct from the film projector. A similar confusion subtends Rodowick’s claim that “even a ‘photograph’ displayed on an electronic screen is not a still image. It may appear so, but its ontological structure is of a constantly shifting or self-refreshing display.”⁶ Again, Rodowick seems to use the word still synonymously with unchanging. A photograph displayed in a digital static film does undergo continual change, but in a sense it remains still. It neither relies on movement for its existence (as does the celluloid film, which must constantly move through the projector), nor does it produce the perception of movement.

Jon Jost’s digital film Muri Romani (Roman Walls) (1999–2000) provides a useful way to think through this distinction. The film begins with a static shot of a patch of decaying wall in Rome, scrawled with white graffiti that reads, “IL SOGNO E FINITO L’ILLUSIONE CONTINUO” (The dream is over; the illusion continues)⁷ (see figure 6.1). There is a slow dissolve to a similar patch of wall, which gradually gives way to still another wall, and so on. By the end of the eighty-minute film, a full 280 static shots of walls have been displayed (all of them shot with a digital video camera). Jost has claimed, “Editing decisions were based on the aesthetic commonality between images so that one does not ‘see’ a dissolve, but rather the image seems only to change in time.”⁸ The result of this approach is that it is generally very difficult for a viewer to know, at any given moment, if he is looking at a single wall, or if there are elements of the previous shot or the upcoming shot that are pervading the image. (All of this is complemented by the quotidian sounds of Rome’s streets, such as sirens, bells, and barely audible conversations.) The screen remains devoid of movement, even though it is constantly changing, and (contra Rodowick) the same could be said of the digital process that produces it.⁹

One of the ironies of Muri Romani is the fact that, while the walls are decaying, the film stock is not. No matter how many times the work is screened, its digital ontology ensures that each viewing will be identical—the film will not undergo the entropic degradation that Rome’s walls have clearly been the victim of. Absent are the discolorations and splotches that invariably intrude on the celluloid image (not to mention the specks of dust that so enthralled John Cage during his viewing of Zen for Film). The film has become visually “perfect.” This is not a value judgment. In fact, for many filmmakers and theorists, this perfection is precisely the problem with digital film. For example, Babette Mangolte finds digital cinema to be “too perfect,” even suggesting that “this perfection distracts from its credibility.”¹⁰ But as Nicholas Rombes has pointed out, this perfection has also prompted many digital filmmakers “to reassert imperfection, flaws, an aura of human mistakes to counterbalance the logic of perfection that pervades the digital.”¹¹ And this is the paradox at the core of Muri Romani. As the graffiti in the opening shot implies, the film is interested in exploring both termination and continuation. The dream of pure cinematic indexicality is over, but the illusions that this indexicality produced continue to assert their presence in digital form. The walls themselves are decrepit and decaying—they will eventually be torn down or replaced. But their representations in Muri Romani will live on; they will not decay, no matter how many times the film is screened or copied.¹²

I certainly sympathize with cinephiles like Mangolte who prefer the pulsations and imperfections of celluloid to the sanitized crispness of digital film—in much the way that I sympathize with audiophiles who eschew iPods and CD players in favor of vinyl records, in spite of (or perhaps because of) their “imperfect” scratches and pops. But there is also something tantalizing about digital cinema; its liberation from photographic indexicality creates a multiplicity of new aesthetic possibilities, and its “purity” of image is often absorbing, even sublime. Additionally, as a film like Muri Romani makes clear, digital film can make substantive and compelling contributions to the cinema of stasis. Film can now be stripped not only of the movement of the camera and elements within the mise-en-scène but even of the suggestion of movement provided by the emulsion of the film grain. For the first time it is possible for a static film to be perceptually indistinguishable from a photograph. Mangolte suggests that such advances have come at a price: she claims that, without the emulsion grain, without the shutter, without the rhythmic pulsations of the film stock, digital film is “unable to establish and construct an experiential sense of time passing.”¹³ But I would argue that digital film simply constructs an alternative experience of time passing, one that is free of the temporal signposts to which cineastes have become so accustomed. After all, it is not as if time no longer seems to pass when viewing a digital film—even one as static as Muri Romani. Rather, the movements that permit the experience of temporal flow are no longer those of the traditional cinematographic apparatus but those of consciousness itself. Barthesian duration continues to unfold; Bergson’s snowball continues to roll—and this is why a cinematic spectator always experiences the passing of time.