Cinematic Interfaces

Film Theory After New Media

Seung-hoon Jeong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138843639
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135053499
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In this book, Seung-hoon Jeong introduces the cinematic interface as a contact surface that mediates between image and subject, proposing that this mediation be understood not simply as transparent and efficient but rather as asymmetrical, ambivalent, immanent, and multidirectional. Jeong enlists the new media term "interface" to bring to film theory a synthetic notion of interfaciality as underlying the multifaceted nature of both the image and subjectivity. Drawing on a range of films, Jeong examines cinematic interfaces seen on screen and the spectator's experience of them, including: the direct appearance of a camera/filmstrip/screen, the character's bodily contact with such a medium-interface, the object's surface and the subject's face as "quasi-interface," and the image itself. Each of these case studies serves as a platform for remapping and revamping major concepts in film studies such as suture, embodiment, illusion, signification, and indexicality. Looking to such theories as the ontology of the image and the phenomenology of the body, this original theorization of the cinematic interface not only offers a conceptual framework for rethinking and re-linking film and media studies, but also suggests a general theory of the interface.

1
The Medium Interface

Why Interface on Screen?

Georges, the host of a highbrow literary talk show, receives suspicious videotapes that display the peaceful façade of his upper-middle-class house. It is not clear from the CCTV-like footage, in which nothing ostensibly happens, who has been watching his family and why. Subsequent tapes, however, lead Georges first to his provincial childhood home and then to an unknown suburban apartment, which turns out to be the dingy living space of his adopted, then abandoned, Algerian brother, Majid. This forgotten ‘other’ confronts Georges with an uncomfortable truth from the past: young Georges’s jealousy forced Majid to be sent off to an orphanage, whereafter Majid had to survive without the educational and social benefits given to Georges. The nature of the video thus changes from provocation to evocation, from surveillance to reminiscence. Michael Haneke’s Caché [Hidden] (2005) uncannily uncovers this hidden trauma that resurfaces in the present. But my primary question is simple: Why video? That is, why interface?

That such a cinematic interface appears onscreen might not merit discussion in many cases, but it can play a central role by thwarting or destabilizing the unity or stability of the narrative. The subjectivity of characters or spectators can also be shaped or shaken through their encounters with the interface within the film. A diegetic interface may then affect the ‘perception’ and ‘memory’ chain that interconnects ‘image’ and ‘subjectivity,’ while also potentially drawing attention to the film’s apparatus made up of extradiegetic material interfaces: camera, filmstrip, screen. Therefore a cinematic Möbius band, a reflective loop, is formed between two levels: interface as image and interface as machine, that is, represented onscreen interfaces and representing offscreen interfaces, the latter enabling the former that can refer back to the latter. These two levels coincide with the classical semiotic concepts of ‘utterance’ (‘story’/‘speech’) as narrative instance and ‘enunciation’ (‘discourse’/‘speech act’) as generating process. Yet, as I will show through the concept of suture—the term for the very dynamics between these levels— what follows reexamines the classical psychoanalytic model of spectatorship and rewrites suture theory in light of its own evolution, which may lead to our conclusion: the interfaciality inherent in image and subjectivity.

The Hidden Camera between Offscreen and Onscreen Space

As a starting point, Caché seems ideal not only because of its video insertions, but because of the consequent revelation of perceptual and mnemonic mechanisms. Among many significant scenes, I take Georges’s second visit to Majid’s flat as a kernel of the film’s structure. Its impressiveness, of course, bursts out of Majid’s sudden suicide; Majid lets Georges in, talks for a second, takes out a knife with Georges slightly faltering, and slits his own throat, leaving no room for anticipation (fig. 1.1). The abruptness of this action marks the abruption of Majid’s emotion: a remarkable calmness and gentleness not usually found in revenge suspects. It is rather Georges, the white Parisian intellectual, who has always lost his temper in front of his lower-class, dark-skinned brother (and later in front of Majid’s son, too); Majid, this Algerian outcast, has reversed the standard image of the brutal invader of the bourgeois family like Max Cady in Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962; Martin Scorsese, 1991). By killing himself, Majid releases something repressed beneath his tranquil face and fractures the peace of both his banlieue home and Georges’s bourgeois life. The flash of his blood sprayed onto the wall visualizes this fracture like an unstitched slash; the blood slowly exuding from his throat onto the floor implies that this trauma will only grow like a nightmare in Georges’s memory.

In view of other scenes, Majid’s bloodstain on the wall triggers a déjà vu that allows us retroactively to recognize the drawings sent to Georges (of a child vomiting blood) as forewarnings of this suicide. And through the same logic of Freudian ‘deferred action,’ this bloody event serves to repeat and

Figure 1.1

recall the film’s first flashback of young Majid coughing tubercular blood by a window, and the childhood trauma staged in Georges’s nightmare: young Majid kills a cockerel, which also leaves a sharp blood mark, and he approaches Georges with the bloody hatchet. This killing was in fact orchestrated by Georges, but he told his parents that Majid had wanted to scare him, a joking lie that, along with Majid’s tuberculosis, ultimately resulted in Majid’s expulsion. However, only through recurrent visual traces after the fact does that original scene manifest its latent meaning as Georges’s original sin. The question would be how guilty and responsible the child and/or adult Georges is for that tiny ‘twisted joke’ that had lifelong repercussions/consequences for Majid. One may conclude: “Georges’s refusal as an adult to acknowledge the effects of his earlier actions suggests a parallel with the postcolonial metropolitan who is neither wholly responsible for, nor wholly untainted by, past events from which he or she has benefited” (Ezra and Sil-lars 2007, 219).¹ Or Majid’s suicide might bring a deep, if guilty, pleasure to a deeply ‘twisted’ xenophobe European: “the comforting idea that the colonial native can be made to disappear in an instant through the auto-combustive agency of their own violence” (Gilroy 2007, 234).

Rather than relying on these interpretations, I call attention to the fundamental cinematic mechanism that causes this hermeneutic turmoil around the colonial legacy. The first element that even formalist reviewers miss is the apparently insignificant dialogue. After entering the flat, Georges asks what Majid wants, and hears: “I truly had no idea about the tapes.” Georges asks again: “Is that all?” Then Majid utters his last words: “I called you because I wanted you to be present.” Georges is required to be a witness, a living index, to Majid’s death, just as Majid’s blood leaves its physical trace on the wall like a gigantic fingerprint. Indexicality marks the ontological essence of this Bazinian sequence shot with two antagonistic figures, and furthermore, triggers another deferred action. This time, however, the event does not signal the past but the future, wherein Majid seems to call out from beyond the grave: ‘Look at me dying like the cockerel, and suffer from your presence at my death when this moment haunts you like a ghost.’ How could this present moment appear in the future as the return of the past, but with a hidden camera? Surely, this static long take, framed in long shot, hints at a surveillant gaze that seems to offer the true meaning of Majid’s will: ‘I actually wanted you to be present in front of the camera that will send you a tape showing your very presence at my death.’ Thus Georges is not the witnessing subject, but the object witnessed by a faceless subject, not an index maker but an index image itself.

Nonetheless, we remain unsure of the hidden camera not only because of Majid’s strong denial of its presence, but because of the fact that his supposedly recorded suicide is not actually delivered to Georges until the end of the film. The circumstances of this video’s delivery are opposite to those surrounding a previous ‘surprise’ video sent to him directly after his first visit to Majid’s apartment. This first video, which depicts Georges’s visit as well as Majid’s sobbing after Georges’s departure, has the same static, surveillant setup as the suicide video. But Haneke makes it clear to us during that first visit that there is/was no camera(man) present, since all sides of Majid’s flat could be seen in the background through shot/reverse-shot exchanges (figs. 1.2 – 1.3). One could imagine a tiny unrecognizable camera,

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

but the opening scene video was shot from the position of someone who must have stood on the street and fixed a conventional camera firmly on a tripod (though this cameraman is also improbably invisible).

Undoubtedly, this improbable gaze is the aesthetic target of many debates surrounding the film. Libby Saxton, for instance, takes a Deleuzian approach to the offscreen space incubating this hidden gaze. What Deleuze defines as the ‘virtual’ out of field is a disturbing presence that can be said to “insist” or “subsist” rather than to exist, “a radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time” (1986, 17).² In Caché, we experience this radical invisible field as irreducibly present through its visible counterpart, that is, the video, while this “interface” between offscreen and onscreen space becomes “the locus of concerns about personal and collective trauma, guilt and responsibility” (Saxton 2007, 6). At this point, however, what matters seems to be this interface’s real meaning. A more specific exploration of the term interface may also help elaborate offscreen space and its function. For this task, I will take my cue from Žižek’s usage of interface in his remodeling of suture theory—a remodeling that I wish to in turn reconceptualize. The concept that needs an archeological detour is not offscreen space so much as suture, for suture relates to both offscreen and onscreen space.

Suture as Meta-Suture or De-Suture

The concept of suture was crucial in the heyday of 1970s Screen theory (Silverman 1984, 193–236; Rodowick 1995, 180–220). Semiotically, as Žižek says, suture is defined as the process by which “the ‘absent one’ is transferred from the level of enunciation to the level of diegetic fiction” (2001, 32). Enunciation means the process of producing diegesis in which its producer, the enunciator, is not seen, but this absence does not unsettle the spectator because almost every shot appears to be taken from a certain character’s perspective as if he or she were the very enunciator of the previous or following shot. Georges’s first visit to Majid replays such a classical example of suture (figs. 1.2–1.3): the objective shot of Georges raises the question ‘from whose subjective point of view is this filmic enunciation given?’, which is smoothly and swiftly answered through its reverse shot showing Majid (the ‘absent enunciator’ turns into a diegetic figure). Suture designates this turning point through which the fundamental difference between image and its absence is mapped onto the intra-pictorial difference between two shots. In semiotic-psychoanalytic terms, every different shot—not only in the shot/reverse-shot exchange but also in the editing process as a whole—results from the suture of the invisible externality into the chain of visible shots as ‘symbolic’ signifiers; it thereby keeps stable and seamless the diegesis as an ‘imaginary’ world so that spectators, for the most part, hardly recognize this mechanism in the middle of identification with characters and immersion into narrative space. It is ultimately the spectator’s subjectivity that is unconsciously sutured into this unified imaginary reality, the subjectively signifying world woven through objective audiovisual signifiers. Suture is nothing but this perpetual operation of signifiers constructing the imaginary, that is, of what Metz called “the imaginary signifier” in plural.

Žižek’s intervention occurred when, after its hegemony had declined, ‘suture’ became vague jargon synonymous with ‘closure’ that yields the totality of a structure. To reinvigorate this outmoded buzzword, he brings to light the initial radical difference between the onscreen image and the offscreen void. For the threatening intrusion of the latter, the decentering Other, the Absent Cause, can leave its trace onscreen as if not completely sutured. An apparently objective shot turns out to be a subjective one or vice versa in the suturing process, but, as often seen in Hitchcock, we can encounter an inhuman gaze or a monstrous evil that embodies “the impossible/traumatic subjectivity of the Thing itself” (38). The burning Bodega Bay with birds gliding over it in The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) appears to be shot neither objectively nor subjectively, but semi-subjectively.³ The invisible Thing can also intrude into a shot, leaving “a blot of the Real” like a bird’s attack on Melanie (note the confusion of terminologies: the semiotic “absence/void” is rephrased as or replaced by the psychoanalytic “Thing/the Real,” which is not a visible object but the nonsymbolic ground of all beings). If standard suture creates a seamless illusionist narrative space and illusory reality, Žižek’s late Lacanian version reveals that the Imaginary-Symbolic conjunction cannot always efface the seam, leaving the trace of the unsymbolized Real that abruptly emerges like a Lacanian stain. Suture thus no longer functions as the undetectable mechanism of signifying representation, but as the unconcealed symptom of its own failure. It is the onscreen appearance of the Real itself, the visualization of the rupture of the suture as such. Conversely, those birds look like a sutured form of the Real, as it were, a ‘slashing’ suture within the ‘slick’ suture.

What Žižek calls “interface” concerns a more specific case of suture. It indicates a screen within the screen serving as the direct stand-in for the “absent one,” mostly appearing in the form of “a simple condensation of shot and reverse-shot within the same shot” (2001, 52). His typical examples include the beginning of Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993), when the object of Julie’s look, a doctor, appears as a reflection in her own eye, and a scene from The Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1996), where Peter encounters Alice both in front of him and as her pornographic image on a big screen. I have to say that the latter is not a rigorous shot/reverse-shot mixture, but a first shot followed by a second, more symptomatic shot that slides over Alice and her porn image without cutting. Such reflected images then lose their sense of reality, as if to visualize the spectral, fantastic Real. That is, an interface is a ‘meta-suturing’ or, I would say, ‘de-suturing’ image surface within a shot that self-reflexively visualizes the imperfection of classical suture by ‘directly’ suturing the Real. Claiming that an interface-artificial moment must suture-stitch the Real, Žižek in effect resutures the notion of suture into film theory in terms of ‘meta-suture’ or ‘de-suture’ that divulges and thereby thwarts the traditional suture itself. Hence, there is what he calls the ‘short-circuit’ that, I argue, operates on two levels: (1) as a semiotic short circuit between the Imaginary-Symbolic coalition producing reality effects and the external Real inaccessible to the subject; (2) as a psychoanalytic short circuit between objective reality constituted from our subjective viewpoint and the traumatic Real outside this ordinary reality.

Neither subjective nor objective...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Medium Interface
• 2 The Body Interface
• 3 The Surface of the Object
• 4 The Face of the Subject
• 5 Image and Subjectivity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index