Forms of the Cinematic

Architecture, Science and the Arts

Mark Breeze, Mark Breeze

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501361449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

This interdisciplinary collection explores how cinema calls into question its own frame of reference and, at the same time, how its form becomes the matter of its thought. Building on the axiom (cherished by philosophers of cinema from Epstein to Deleuze) that cinema is a medium that thinks in conjunction with its spectators, this book examines how various forms of the cinematic rethink and redraw the terrain of traditional disciplines, thereby enabling different modes of thought and practice. Areas under consideration by a range of leading academics and practitioners include architecture, science, writing in a visual field, event-theory and historiography.

Part One

Rethinking: from Idea to Structure

1

Idea and image

D. N. Rodowick

Compare a concept with a style in painting.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Whether classic or modern, the great philosophers are often inventive stylists. It takes only a slight direction of attention to recognize suddenly that Plato or Wittgenstein are poets of philosophy, no less than Emerson, Nietzsche, Cavell, Deleuze and indeed many others. How is it possible to separate their art of thinking from the writerly composition of concepts in a space and time whose weaving of voice, rhythm, polyphony and counterpoint seem so close to musical creation? In fact, one cannot. Thinking and the expressive line are inextricably intertwined in the great philosophical stylists.

Deleuze himself beautifully voiced this perspective in a lecture entitled ‘What is the Creative Act?’, presented at La Fémis in 1991, which opens with the question, ‘What does it mean to have an idea in cinema?’ Deleuze notes an experience all too familiar to every creative mind – having an idea is an event worth celebrating because its occurrence is rare and unpredictable. To think, one must prepare a terrain and a context where an idea can germinate and unfold because, as Deleuze says,

No one has an idea in general. An idea – like the one who has the idea – is already dedicated to a particular field. . . . Ideas have to be treated like potentials already engaged in one mode of expression or another and inseparable from the mode of expression, such that I cannot say that I have an idea in general. Depending on the techniques I am familiar with, I can have an idea in a certain domain, an idea in cinema or an idea in philosophy. (Deleuze 2006: 312)

One of the principal lessons expressed here is that there is no difference between theory and practice. I have often been asked to explain how I understand the relationship between my philosophical work and my creative practice. For many years, my habitual response was simple though perhaps not very clear or revealing: I am thinking, and these are two media or practices wherein or through which I feel compelled to think. Or, as Deleuze might say, I am thinking but in the two different domains of concept and image.¹

The inescapable impulse to create experimental images and to write what is sometimes called ‘theory’ has for me always arisen simultaneously, as if springing from the same barely conscious point of origin. Many years later, I discovered that Henri Bergson named this experience as ‘intuition’ and made it the source of his creative philosophy. There is nothing mysterious or occult about intuition: it is a concrete philosophical practice where thinking deeply engages with the matter and time of human and inhuman life; its modes of attention are open to everyone, whether artist or philosopher. What Bergson calls intuition is a way of engaging thoughtfully with the world – and all the complexities of spatial and temporal experience of being in a world – with the fullness of your combined mental, perceptual and bodily attention. In its deepest sense, philosophical intuition involves thinking directly in and through sensory experience both perceptually and mentally, where body and mind resonate in their multiple relations with the world’s forces, energies and matters of sensation. Thoughtful investigation through intuition may lead to philosophy (conceptual expression) or unfold itself in perceptual experience (say, images or percepts), but somewhere their borders always touch and interpenetrate, flowing into and out of one another in a domain whose point of departure may be mental experience (thinking as philosophy) or a perceptual experience (thinking through the image).

The scandal remains but must be directly confronted: What would it mean to propose seriously that creative work is a philosophical practice? Take as one point of departure the relation between problems and ideas as related to intuition. Here, the philosophical question one might ask of any given creative work is: How does an intuition give rise to an idea that is formulated in response to a problem?

If there is any unifying thread to my creative practice – and I believe there is – it arises in intuiting ways of making movement and time ‘problematic’ in relation to perception and thought as discovering new forms of the cinematic. Investigating critically the mediation of temporal experience by technicity – the logical design of cameras, lenses and recording media, whether analogue or digital – is another special concern. All of my moving image works may be read as posing new questions or problems about temporal and sensory experience by experimentally testing the normative design of recording devices and programmes with respect to the capture of light, space, colour, movement, duration and time. In this respect, I have a continuing interest in amateur or consumer recording technologies and programmes because these are machines designed to reproduce automatically a restricted set of perceptual norms of space and time. The question then arises: How can one creatively extract or produce different dimensions of sensation by experimentally testing these technologies in ways that push them beyond their design parameters and thus submit them to an internal critique?

Take for example two of my own short film works made thirty years apart: Southcote Road: Frame Displacement (1982, 16 mm silent film, colour, three minutes) and Waterloo (2012, HD video, colour, sound, three minutes fifty-eight seconds).² One obvious commonality between the two works is their internal time structure and the fact that they are made through improvised performative actions that are territorially delimited in space and duration. The basis of both works is circular walks in defined locations: Southcote Road documents the street where I lived in London on the last day of a seven-week stay in the summer of 1981; Waterloo documents an urban any-space-whatever in contemporary London. The brevity and temporal discipline of the second walk is inspired by the first. Editing plays no role in either work apart from starting and stopping a process.

Like many of my earlier films, Southcote Road is structured by a gestural performance, a dialogue or dance between a hand-held camera and a shaving mirror, improvised within an automated protocol: in this instance, programming the camera with an intervalometer to capture one frame per second until, after three minutes, the film runs out. Unlike digital capture, which is limited in duration only by the memory capacity of digital devices, here time is a finite resource that expires in a fixed interval. In Waterloo and my other digital ‘walking’ works, I apply this durational constraint as an abstract discipline in order to restore the value and density of time to a digital domain where time is in principle unlimited and thus increasingly devalued.

Absent from the projected space of Southcote Road is evidence of the physical exhaustion and actual duration of the performance, which took nearly one hour to record. In Waterloo, however, the time of the work is the time of the walk. Just under four minutes long, Waterloo captures in ‘real-time’ a thoroughly mundane location and situation: two circular trajectories through an underground passageway connecting the London Imax theatre to Waterloo station. Using an iPhone on a hand-manipulated monopod, I follow a figurative line drawn by the electrical conduit running along the top of the tunnel walls. Of course, this is not what one sees in the image. Similar to Southcote Road, Waterloo is recorded in a single take using a capture rate of one interval per second. As I move through the space, focus, exposure and effective shutter speed are allowed to float. The initial images begin as almost-abstract colour fields that are blurred, textured and fluid before resolving into a new series of volumes that emerge as if roughly extracted from the electrical conduit: jagged tubular shapes expand, contract and torque while dissolving and reshaping themselves unpredictably against the varying and textured colour fields. These tonalities emerge in response to the shifts in colour temperature and luminance produced by the tunnel’s sources of artificial illumination. The sound is captured in real time along with these images – distant traffic, rumblings, footsteps, drunken laughter and snippets of animated conversation. The off-screen presence of real-time synchronized audio is an important temporal marker, for the rhythmic succession of (only) apparently still images are shaped by a duration every bit as real as the sound.

Despite other similarities, I think of these two works as experiments aimed at extracting novel dimensions or varieties of time from a given duration by exploring how spatial intervals produce tensions between stillness and movement. There is also something like an ‘epistemological’ difference between the two works as defined by their improvised, gestural performances in the analogue and digital domains. Southcote Road’s compositional gestures are photographic and ‘reflexive’ while Waterloo’s are immersive and sensory.

The automated operations of the intervalometer in Southcote Road compress time and duration so as to unveil the materiality of the filmstrip in a stuttering series of sequential images that shape a perceptual mise en abyme where the camera hand works to frame the mirror hand – there is a constant doubling of frame and screen as rotations of the mirror produce a cascade of reflected images from off-screen space. This is a reflexive gesture where the image sees itself seeing itself. Alternatively, in Waterloo the gestural hand paints a digital space where the interval is stilled, and space is stretched and blurred because the algorithms for maintaining focus, exposure and colour rendering lag behind the movements of the hand in this low light environment. On top of – or alongside – the uninterrupted duration of the soundtrack, there unfolds in the replacement of one image by another a digital domain whose framing of movement has a different phenomenological status than an analogue photogram – it is more a phase space of fluid and abstract transitions where time is suspended than a series of animated stills. Call this a digital time that appears in the image because the automated and algorithmic functions built into the camera continually fail to maintain the representational norms for which they were designed. Nevertheless, everything presented onscreen in Waterloo is data drawn from the actual environment – volumes, movements, surfaces, light intensities, colour temperatures and so forth. This is the prosaic world in which we situate ourselves, but it is not the world of the so-called natural perception, which is still apparent in Southcote Road’s staccato series of images.

These first two examples demonstrate the central formal and philosophical thread of my creative practice: with one or two exceptions, none of my works present movement in what is conventionally called ‘real time’. Almost all devices for recording moving images, especially consumer devices, are designed to capture and present time as if it were a homogenous medium that unfolds through linear and chronological movements presented as uniform and continuous changes in space: either uninterrupted duration or the quantitative addition of continuous spatial sections (long take or continuity editing). How can one imagine creatively other forms of temporal experience?

Taichung (2012, HD video, colour, sound, four minutes fifty seconds) is one work that seems to be an exception to my investigation of alternative...