Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema

Michael Betancourt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367199197
• eBook ISBN: 9780429534300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book explores the question of realism in motion pictures. Specifically, it explores how understanding the role of realism in the history of title sequences in film can illuminate discussions raised by the advent of digital cinema.

Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema fills a critical and theoretical void in the existing literature on motion graphics. Developed from careful analysis of André Bazin, Stanley Cavell, and Giles Deleuze's approaches to cinematic realism, this analysis uses title sequences to engage the interface between narrative and non-narrative media to consider cinematic realism in depth through highly detailed close readings of the title sequences for Bullitt (1968), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), The Number 23 (2007), The Kingdom (2008), Blade Runner: 2049 (2017) and the James Bond films. From this critique, author Michael Betancourt develops a modal approach to cinematic realism where ontology is irrelevant to indexicality. His analysis shows the continuity between historical analogue film and contemporary digital motion pictures by developing a framework for rethinking how realism shapes interpretation.

Part 1
Subjectivity

‘Subjective realism’ in cinema is always a presentation of ambivalent stylization: the documentary ‘metaphysical reality’ depicts a reality “of the mind” that necessarily entails an indexical claim to being-factual, while the articulation of the fictional ‘unreal fantasy’ is understood as being purely artificial invention; these two modes demonstrate how metaphysics transforms the familiar appearances of the everyday world. Abandoning the superficial resemblance to everyday life gives ‘subjective realism’ its dual valence as a revelation of unseen realities and an uncanny critique of objectivity—unmasking the ideology of naturalism which conflates cinematic presentations with ontology and denies considerations of subjectivity except within a purely narrative framework.

1
Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974)

Realism is a perennial ideological question: deeply unfashionable, it directs attention to issues of mimesis and indexicality while inviting debates over the nature of the realities it appears to assert and assume. The role of indexicality for historical motion pictures and cinematic realism has been understood as a natural consequence of photography; questions of subjectivity and objectivity have stood apart from these elaborations, often conflated with explicitly narrative and narrational directives. The faith in cinema=narrative makes the organization of cinematic form linked to storytelling, fictive identification, and narrational progression the priority in analysis rather than the more basic questions of realism and ‘the real.’ But storytelling is a “red herring” for theories of realism, a tangent that diverges from the modal identifications that define its elaboration. This distinction gives the questions of realism in motion graphics, a typically non-narrative type of motion picture, the potential to illuminate realism in cinema itself, an application beyond its role in title sequences.

For digital media in particular, realism and the associated ontological claims of photographic indexicality pose simultaneous, immediate challenges: first, as an “old” idea whose irrelevance for digital technology seems obvious, second, as an arbitrary set of fixed codes whose manipulation and evocation make the entire consideration of mimetic forms simply an exercise in applied semantics and established, rote techniques; and finally as the rupture between the sampling of digital technology and the ontological link assumed to connect the photograph to reality. The issue is not to imagine or theorize ‘the real,’ but to consider the relationship between realism and the ideologies that seek to express reality. For motion graphics, this question of indexicality has always been problematic due to the fusion of typo/graphics with photography and the plastic deformations of animation that violate assumptions about filmic ontology in ways that presage the digital. The dominant historical theories of cinematic realism have a contextual relevancy when considering Jack Cole’s 1974 title sequence for the television program Kolchak: The Night Stalker that constructs a ‘realist fiction’ which critiques the indexicality of photography, undermining any ontological link. This Allegory Mode design¹ engenders a self-contained narrative employing the familiar conventions of naturalism to restate the narrative content of the program, while simultaneously offering its presentation within the established forms of cinematic realism that create a demonstrative reality on-screen. At no point does it deviate from this use of naturalism, even the concluding “uncanny moment” remains within these boundaries. The critical praxis this design offers for conceptualizing naturalism::stylization makes it immanent in the consideration and acknowledges its appearance is artificial. This double articulation resonates with the complexities of digital sampling and its problematic indexicality, allowing this particular title design to serve as a case study in the entanglement of realism and narrative with the complex relations of “objectivity” and “subjectivity” on-screen.

Concern with an immanent connection to an external referent—reality—informs the conception of the ‘long take’ (continuous camera run) as an exemplary revelation of ‘the real,’ not merely an ‘intertextual’ reference because, unlike quotations and allusions to other texts, indexing reality inherently makes a claim of being-factual (truth) that is also assumed in cinematic realism to be an assertion of ontology (empirical validity), apart from any conventional link to past experience. It is the issue of things being what they are: interpretations of perception are recursive, their limits cannot be identified in advance, as semiotician Umberto Eco explained in his book Kant and the Platypus about the problematics of understanding perception-as-semiosis without recognizing the difference that indexicality makes for the assessment of mimesis:

We speak of perceptual semiosis not when something stands for something else but when from something, by an inferential process, we come to pronounce a perceptual judgment on that same something and not on anything else.²

Semiotics does not resolve the ontological problem posed by indexicality. Recognizing things as being what they appear to be describes the perceptual process that separates and confuses reality from/with realism in cinema; however, for historical conceptions of cinematic realism, indexicality is simultaneously an ontological claim, not merely an issue of epistemology or semiosis. While debates over the “purity” of media (their ontological nature) are common in Modernist aesthetics, and critiques of it frequently appear in Post-Modern theory,³ these arguments over what constitutes valid examples of being-factual are tangential to the indexical identification itself; it is the assertion that matters in differentiating between the realism in a work that is fictional and one that is documentary. The validity of any ontological claim is subject to challenges as representing a particular hierarchy or dominant power structure whose appropriateness, accuracy, and validity may be questioned. What matters in apprehending the work is the role of this connection to an “external” authority—‘the real’—in the relationships developing around indexicality, subjectivity, narrative, and realism.

Theories about photographic indexicality prompted a specific realist aesthetic based on not disputing that ontology, classically framed in the link of cinematic and filmic reality proposed by the French film critic André Bazin (and expanded upon by American philosopher Stanley Cavell).⁴ Bazin’s arguments for the use of the continuous camera run known as the ‘long take’ renders any rupture of the internal progression of the duration held within the shot, or the manipulation of its imagery, as a violation of an integral, ontological unity that links the ‘image object’ to an assumptive profilmic source (‘the real’) leading to his famous prohibition on continuity editing and the montage disintegration of on-screen ‘events.’ Theorizing this ontology (indexicality) as essential to realism and definitional for the long take dictated that violations of that unitary duration are violations of the essential “purity” of the photograph as an indexical document.⁵ These aesthetics have a pervasive influence on theorists and filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s; his ideas are central to the dominant cinematic realism of this era, thus warranting a careful analysis in the discussion found in the first section entitled “The Long Take” in Jack Cole’s Kolchak: The Night Stalker title design. This initial appearance of a long take in this section is countered by montage in the second section entitled “The Analytic Montage,” and a series of frame holds made with an optical printer in the third section entitled “The Kinestasis.” This progression from Bazin’s ontology into the self-reference of the avant-garde provides an exemplary model for considering the role of indexicality for cinematic realism in motion graphics, its assertions about reality and realism, and the role of narrative in maintaining its coherence within the pseudo-independence of the title sequence. This initial analysis lays the foundations for the other close readings in this study that depart from and develop in counterpoint to photographic indexicality. What unites the three approaches to realism in Kolchak: The Night Stalker is their reliance on the audience’s acceptance of cinema as equivalent to what it appears to show: the realist portrayal (what happens on-screen) in/for each ‘shot’ becomes Eco’s direct identification of reality (ontology).

The long take encapsulates a limited duration of time as/into a singular shot that presents a sequence of actions while avoiding editing: this connection of contiguity in the ‘event’ on-screen to ‘the real’ is both well-known and firmly established in realist theory. Bazin championed this particular formal element whose status as the demonstrator of reality on-screen is central to theories of cinematic realism by the 1960s.⁶ Simultaneously a technological feature of celluloid film and an aesthetic arising from the conjunction of Modernist essentialism with machinic function, each aspect renders the other apparently natural and incontestable. This transparency of mimetic effect enables the realist form for all three sections of Cole’s design. The belief in a relationship of ‘image object’ to profilmic subjects asserts the reality of what appears on-screen, a familiar proposition famously developed by Bazin’s aesthetics, but shared by other similar historian/theorists of film, and acting to programmatically direct the young generation of critics (and later filmmakers including Truffaut and Godard) directly associated with Bazin in France; these theoretical convergences are commonplace, a set of positions whose moot validity and problematics are well known.

Technological distinctions between digital motion pictures and photochemical motion pictures have implications for the long take (and its realist theorization). A consideration of its history illuminates this development. Although the earliest motion pictures produced in the 1890s were all single, seemingly continuous camera-runs filmed from a single vantage point with a stationary camera, they did not employ ‘long takes’ as such. In the films made by Louis and Auguste Lumière, on-screen ‘events’ develop in front of this motionless viewpoint, often organized to create a similar effect to figures standing on a stage—the actions shown are continuous and resemble live theater in their presentation, a reflection of the conditions of their exhibition, suggesting a conception of these films as a type of “canned theater” [Figure 1.1]. The function of these shots is simultaneously technical (as requisite backdrop) and aesthetic (suggestive of realist conceptions of media), as well as performing specifically narrative functions. However, the proposal of the ‘long take’ as an aesthetic choice does not directly emerge until there was an alternative—the various systems of continuity editing and montage that became the dominant modes of theatrical production in the 1920s; by the 1930s, Hollywood productions were commonly

Figure 1.1 Stills from the long take in La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, Lumière Vue no. 91.3 [“Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon,” also known as “Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory” or “Exiting the Factory,”] (third version, August 1896), directed by Louis Lumière.

using ‘long takes’ only as a background for their superimposed titles at the start or end of the film. Consequently, title sequences offer an opportunity to consider the issue of the ‘long take’ in relation to realism, but apart from its narrative uses. The separation of these paratexts—they are pseudo-independent openings, produced as a separate section from the rest of the film, yet integral to it—reveals realism as an explicit construction for the ‘long take’ that informs the interpretation of what might otherwise appear to be natural, inevitable arrangements. Once the causal organization provided by story has been excluded, cinematic realism as a specific set of modal articulations becomes apparent. The complexity of articulating realism provides the material organization and “subject” of the Kolchak: The Night Stalker main title which begins as an objective, ‘realist fiction’ and changes by degrees into what suggests an ‘unreal fantasy,’ but is instead a demonstration of the ‘metaphysical reality’ of cinema. This trajectory through subjectivity defines each of the three sections and their construction of the problematics of realism that becomes apparent as the sequence progresses: it demonstrates several distinct and mutually exclusive approaches to the “reality” on-screen, unmasking the present, but always hidden stillness at the foundation of all motion pictures. It is a unique opportunity to consider the role of realism in motion graphics through...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1 Subjectivity
• PART 2 Objectivity
• PART 3 Ideologies
• Afterword: Digital Movies
• Index