Cinemachines

An Essay on Media and Method

Garrett Stewart

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226656878
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

The hero stands on stage in high-definition 3-D while doubled on a crude pixel screen in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Alien ships leave Earth by dissolving at the conclusion of Arrival. An illusory death spiral in Vertigo transitions abruptly to a studio set, jolting the spectator. These are a few of the startling visual moments that Garrett Stewart examines in Cinemachines, a compelling, powerful, and witty book about the cultural and mechanical apparatuses that underlie modern cinema.
Engaging in fresh ways with revelatory special effects in the history of cinematic storytelling—from Buster Keaton's breaching of the film screen in Sherlock Jr. to the pixel disintegration of a remotely projected hologram in Blade Runner 2049 —Stewart's book puts unprecedented emphasis on technique in moving image narrative. Complicating and revising the discourse on historical screen processes, Cinemachines will be crucial reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the movies from a celluloid to a digital medium.

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PAST THE APPARATUS?

That much said about my promptings to begin again, let me now actually do so with two delayed “epigraphs”: tandem machinic maxims three decades apart in the postwar screen era, yet each still on the near side of the digital turn in mainstream film production. It is between these formulations that the work of this essay is to unfold—and partly in order to move beyond them into the digital realm of cinema’s new postfilmic condition.

The cinematograph merely possesses the mandatory faculty to realize—to render real—the combination of space and time, providing the product of space and time variables, which means that cinematographic reality is therefore essentially the idea of a complete mode of location. Yet it is only an idea, an artificial idea, of which we can only affirm an ideological and artificial existence—a kind of trick or special effect. Nonetheless, this trick [truquage] is extremely close to the process by which the human mind itself conjures up an ideal reality for itself.

—Jean Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine (emphasis added)1

Montage itself, at the base of all cinema, is already a perpetual trucage, without being reduced to the false in usual cases.

—Christian Metz, “Trucage and the Film”2

Two embedded epigraphs, that is, on the “world” of moving pictures as sheer illusion: including in the first case, by analogy, the exterior world of pictured motion itself as its own merely “idealized” real; and in the second, a distinction between overt deception and a general fabrication. Within the sphere of cinema per se, two variant French spellings of truc/qu/age, one striking idea: that any local “trick” is a synecdoche for the medium all told. The Epstein translation renders the single phrase “trick” (“of a sort”) by adding for clarification its more common English sense in “a kind of trick or special effect”—in any case, a faking of the real. The liberty of amplification is entirely apt, given Epstein’s broad argument. Identified there is an inherent rigging of vision—and not just as regards the screen world, but, more striking yet in Epstein, the world’s own cognitive screening: namely, the sensorial interface that always operates, well outside the movie theater, between us and those perceptions we accumulate in order to derive our sense of placedness—of space-time “location,” here in the now. Epstein’s radical point: we are only in the know about our whereabouts through mediation, necessary for the mind in “conjuring” a running image of what lies beyond it. Just as film is necessary for the screening of its world, or digitization since, so must the brain’s electric medium override intermittence in order to picture the continuum of our world.

The point is, in short, as much epistemological as cinematographic. For consciousness involves a sense of embodied locus that is, in Epstein’s view, as “artificial” as focalized continuity in the screen image: an experience of presence mentally constituted, indeed constructed, rather than directly received—in his terms “ideological” (idealized) rather than ontological. We are always taking the virtual for the actual. This is because only neural constructs make possible our access to any outside source of sensation. Movies replay this distance from immediacy at one further and absolute remove. In this sense, what filmic cinema tricks out on screen, by way of dissembled motion from its own celluloid movement, offers a screening of dubiety itself—and then, of course, its immersive undoing. This is a measure of the “intelligence” (Epstein’s title) that the celluloid cinemachine imparts as well as embodies.

And so a third delayed and embedded epigraph is in order here, where again the idealities of the screen are found cognate with those of the human mental apparatus in the framing of reality. The axis that will mostly concern us, as it does both Epstein and Metz, is the one perpendicular to the throw of light, both on strip and screen: the plane of kinesis itself rather than the orthogonal axis of the reflected beam. But the latter illuminates its own field of artifice in the focus and resolution of the image itself. Here from prose fiction—complementing a book-length battery of narrational analogs on Salman Rushdie’s part drawn explicitly from montage, camera angles, and zoom lenses to account for his shifting choice of focalization—is a sense of that other inherent illusionism of the screen image as image. And this is as much the case for the photomechanical grain of filmic cinema as for the pixelated texture of more recent projection. Such is the trucage of resolution itself, the distance-policed illusion of so-called optical fidelity.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality.

—Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children3

In sum, for Rushdie as well as for both Epstein and Metz, cinema is, at base, a magic realism in its own right. What Epstein, as we’ll see, means in part by the “mosaics” (10) of the film image are just those shuffled surfaces whose overall serial cogency risks disintegration in another way, as Rushdie suggests, when its exhibition protocols are breached. Look too closely—at life in the present, at the image in presentation—and its “dancing grain” is as much a demystification of inhabited reality as is the photogram chain or the digital file. One might say that cinema’s fantastic “realism” exposes the world’s own.

In the very broadest terms, then, concerning both human vision and its prosthetic machines, and to answer the triggering question of this chapter: one never gets past the apparatus. Worth remembering, too, in an earlier literary vein than Rushdie’s magic realities, and concerning a debunked screen experience nearer to the origin of the new optic medium, how a character in Frank Norris’s 1899 McTeague resists a debut experience of the “kinetoscope” with a Swiss-accented English that insinuates a pun on the dubious screen grain as well as its illusion of presence—insisting how “dot’s nothun but a drick”4: a falsification of movement itself, with all those shimmering “dots” of light as lurking proof of the deception. Including a horse “that can move its head” (in reprise of Eadweard Muybridge’s precinematic motion studies), the kinetic shadow play remains for this one skeptical viewer an inherent trucage, a “nothun” pretending to be something, “dricked” through and through.

Tricked Out / Space Doubt

Apart from the tropes of a philosophical prose fiction like Rushdie’s, the thread of skeptical inference and critique in film-philosophy circles has a clear early touchstone in Epstein. According to just this epistemic premise in the passage on “truquage” above—arriving in the second-to-last paragraph of Epstein’s final chapter, titled “Irrealism”—we find lodged a central concession about the “special effect” of recorded reality when manifested on theater screens. Duping is constitutive. The point bears repeating, since it is just this tricking of world coherence that can instruct us in “those processes by which the human mind itself conjures up an ideal reality for itself.” Indeed, to pick up on Epstein’s heavy iteration there, this is how consciousness fashions its “irreal” (its virtual) notions of the “itself” per se. Bearing down on this manifestation of the “virtual” can contribute to a theoretical machinics of cinematic projection that is better calculated to engage with those later electronic transforms that none of the major philosophical thinkers we’ll be engaging with alongside Epstein—Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Stanley Cavell—were, of course, historically positioned to write about.

Yet Epstein came weirdly near—in what we might call his reciprocal deconstruction of mind and motion picture, with substance and duration each a “special effect” of perception on and off the screen. By the tenets of “irrealism,” all screen presence is never more than intermittence and probability. In this light, “the cinematograph brings us back to Pythagorean and Platonic poetry: reality is but the harmony of Ideas and Numbers” (105). Nor does Epstein stop there with his backcast to a mathematical idealism at the basis of physical science and screen mechanics alike. Written on the postwar eve of the computer revolution, his book’s closing note seems sounded in full theoretical anticipation of virtual reality—a terminology, for him, quite the opposite of paradoxical. Since physics admits that it “can only know reality” in “the form of numerical rules prescribing the conditions under which reality is ultimately allowed to produce itself” (105), then it is only these formulas that “create a specific and fictive zone in space that is the locus of this extreme reality—and no one knows how to get any closer to it” (105). The real is always, we may say, screened from us by probabilities rather than met with present confirmation.

Film looms large as a new cognitive model. The “artificial” continuities and coordinates thrown up by celluloid projection might thus be construed as a mode of recognizing—and reckoning with, not numerically but imaginatively—the fact of our epistemological remove from the world. Such is a mode of thinking—with and through, and finally beyond—the automatized intellection of une machine. Rather than merely represented by projection, the world’s ingrained virtuality is revealed in synchromesh with it. Arriving decades later in screen production, the algorithmic basis of the computer image offers the same potential analog for perception (or, in pixel breakup, its travesty) but gets us no closer, in Epstein’s sense, to the receding abstraction of the real—just, perhaps, more algebraically (if invisibly) attuned to the world’s infinitesimally flickering field of intermittence. When Deleuze ended his career wondering whether the coming “numeric” basis of cinema would change everything in our conception of the time-image,5 Epstein’s proleptic answer might well have been: not “really.”

Machination: Between Axioms and Praxis

Epstein: arguably the greatest theorist-practitioner of the cinema after Eisenstein. But always, in Epstein’s case, on arguable grounds, even for his enthusiasts. His is a nest of propositions where theory and practice can seem to rub each other the wrong way—under the shadow of special pleading—in their seeming attempt at rapprochement. I thus turn to his newly translated work in light of a current “revival” that, even in the fullest endorsements, tends to minimize the strenuousness of Epstein’s insight in one founding respect. Commentary has always tended to downplay in his writing, in favor of its more colorful and elusive ideas (especially photogenie), what Epstein stresses as the fundamental cinematic underlay: the malleable plasticity of the photogram band. Nor is it always recognized how this stress is pursued for its leverage, as well, on human perception more broadly. Operable discontinuity is the case not only for the motion picture (as the discontinuous moving of separate pictures) but, as we saw above, for the more fundamental intermittence, rather than unity, of material space and time in the physical universe—with the human body’s own disparate molecular makeup, in addition to its periodic cognition, included.

When such respectively medial and countermetaphysical claims are eased to the side in commentary, Epstein’s theory of cinema is sometimes discredited, or at least discounted, as the tendentious philosophical cover for a private aesthetic credo. The experimental director whose most famous film, for instance, fuses two Poe stories, “The Oval Portrait” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (together assimilated both to the title of the latter and to a heady surrealist amalgam), can seem boxed in as the philosophe of his own visual initiatives—not least when the opening chapter of Intelligence identifies human bodies on screen, by subsection title, as “Uncanny Portraits” (1). His theoretical writing risks being quarantined in this way as the prose of a deft poet-polemicist seen to be privileging a uniquely cinematic lyricism steeped in the features of aberrant motion and composite imagery dear to his own directorial vision—rather than excavating thereby the true status of screen mediation. Yet his guiding claims are more pointedly technological than that—even before being tied to human vision and consciousness at large. This is why Epstein insists from the start on the graphic aggregates of the cinematograph: the photo-frames through which, in their very plasticity, indexical documentation can alone be transformed to mentation. And from there to the rethought poetry of motion.

Granted, when his theoretical pronouncements are lifted out of context, it is easy, with his signature film style in mind’s eye, to put them down to his own visual proclivities—and thus partially to write them off. When in La chute de la maison Usher (1928) the painter protagonist touches up a canvas at brush tip only to inflict a telepathic sting on the cheek of his model, it is the kind of moment that would make skeptics doubt Epstein’s more sweeping argument: his proposal not just about “uncanny portraits” but, almost by allegory, about the almost tele-tactile convergence of secondary visual representation and physical reality in the processing of the human eye. That the on-screen portrait has the same filmic status as the painter before it in this localized “truquage” may indeed seem more a mere trick than a medium-deep demonstration. And yet the double terminological sense of “frame”—both definitive and bedeviling for film studies—operates here precisely when Poe’s oval, once squared off into an admittedly wavy and internally rippling specular bracket, may serve to remind us of that other work with, rather than within, frames whose mechanics, rather than manual brushpoint, engineers the temporality of screen image.

Whether or not all this may seem seeded in this one shot, it is by some such overassociation of theory with practice that the force of the former is easily lost in Epstein’s approach. This is to say, again, that Epstein’s pronouncements on the shared mediatory functions of mind and screen alike in L’Intelligence d’une machine can (too readily) seem a self-interested extrapolation from selective magic, singled out for promotion and overread as the fundamental mechanics of perceptual intelligence.

The actual case isn’t just otherwise, however, but rigorously so. And the framed portrait—submitting to the serial strokes of composition; made move only by physical as well as visual increments—makes this hard to miss. Epstein’s sense of film’s defining rudiments—slow motion, acceleration, close-up, and montage—is scarcely to be found compromised by his own maximal and eccentric use of them, but only if the horizons of his argument are kept in clear focus. With the Poe film still in mind, for instance, when Madeleine Usher’s feverish hysteria is figured by tripled images of her face orbiting a vertiginous empty center, in a layered hallucinatory translucency in which one close-up exceeds the others slightly in scale, the medium certainly shows through in its conjuring mechanics: shows forth, that is, as too many frames at once for a singular image—the medium’s sine qua non converted to aberration.

Figuring clearly enough a nonplastic spasm of psychic distress, nonetheless what we see imploded in a single framed space are the multiple images ordinarily strung out on the strip to project any and all motion. Film is showing its own hand in such an abandoned norm. But we needn’t call this self-exposure definitive. No need to tie principle too tightly, as Epstein never himself does, to his own experiments. His pervasive claims for cinema as the dissolution and remolding of the recorded world and its mobile agents—a world whose own optical fungibility and intermittent signaling is only answered by the manipulable frames of celluloid itself—needn’t appear selective and tactical, driven by agenda rather than genuine medial apprehension. Yet the claims bear interrogation, to be sure. This is the case, most famously, with variable speed, as distilled in the Usher film by a distended loop of the sister’s decelerated physical collapse, in slower and slower descent: her falling body perceived as if from inside her own lost grip on consciousness. How can this anomaly be constitutive? Or ask: what are its tacitly obtruded mechanics meant to be thinking out, thinking through, for us in this event of mechanized “intelligence”?

Considering Epstein’s stress on cinema’s distinctive features, we may wonder why montage and the close-up (those definitive elements traced back through Griffith to Dickens by Eisenstein) wouldn’t be more definitive, as ingredient features of cinema, than the anomalies of slowed or accelerated motion. What in the case of Madeleine Usher’s fall, for instance, makes retardation quintessential, its effect an intrinsic trick? The answer is implicitly approached by Epstein only through interrogating the celluloid medium (or means) in particular, not the screen experience as normally managed by shot and montage. Slow motion is a second-order function of serial arrest on the strip. If the lock-step chain of photograms can be routinely overcome by split-second pauses matched to flickering disappearances—so as to produce the looks of a hug, a lunge, a gallop, you name it—it is through just that staggered seriality, by further internal duplication and thus prolongation, that the image can be slowed, say, to a float in descent. Or by sheer iteration stopped dead in its track(s)—so that the micropause that alone permits a resolution of the image on screen (rather than just a spooling blur) is recapitulated at the scale of the action itself in arrest.

Cinema, because it is first of all film (its image units discrete, variable, plastic) can thereby study, whether by stalling or skimming, the effects it produces. So far, Epstein. His point is that only film can think this for us, imagine what it would look like to hover in freefall—as well as to commute instantaneously between places, or for the eye to zoom in upon the speaking countenance. Only film has this qua...