Photography

The Virtual Life of Film by D.N. Rodowick

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The Wachowski’s The Matrix

Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007.

Rodowick’s philosophical musings on the curious circumstances at the beginning of the 21st century which saw the physical nature of the cinematographic medium changing from real film to digital capture, processing, and projection. Full of asides that feel just as valuable as his main ideas, which follow Stanley Cavell’s notions of the automatisms of media as their defining features, the book is dense and a little difficult to navigate. Luckily, in his preface he provides a succinct overview of his argument and its progress.

In his first section, he argues that even though the physical film is changing, the concepts and ways of understanding visual media propagated by film throughout the 20th century still retain a tight grasp on the current technology such that we can still use many of the ways of understanding images derived from film theory and our narrative practices still largely spring from classical Hollywood narrative structures.

In his second section, he spends a lot of pages working through understanding what the film medium provided artists and audiences in its automatism, or those elements that were central to the operation of the medium itself. Largely agreeing with and expanding upon Cavell’s ideas, Rodowick suggests that film (and photography before it), are isomorphic in their capturing of reality. That is, a photograph captures the shape and time of the physical world as it existed in the moment of capture. A film does the same thing but over the course of time itself, an additional automatism Rodowick names as “succession.” Rodowick argues that the automatisms of automatic isomorphic capture has been largely understood via its spatial representative powers, the idea that the photograph contains evidence of a place, while Rodowick argues that the temporal element is more important, it contains evidence of a place from the past. The photograph (and film) therefore brings evidence of the past to us in the present and creates an uneasy mixture of the two, a mixture that never fully coalesces into one thing but remains separate via the screen. Up there is the past, here in the present. Because of these automatisms, the physical nature of the cinematographic medium is crucial to understanding the way film effects us as audience members. When it disappears, Rodowick argues, something of great value is lost.

Part three is focused on that loss, and its digital replacement. Rodowick essentially argues that because digital capture is non-isomorphic because the light inputs are separated from the numerical outputs (that can be infinitely manipulated), it loses that sense of pastness that film once had and brought to the culture. In its place, Rodowick argues, the digital image creates a kind of ever-presentness (and interactive past) through its automatisms of constantly-refreshing, pixel-based “montage.” Basically, if every pixel is the smallest discrete unit of a digital image, Rodowick sees the digital image as already composed of the juxtaposition of those pixels in a way that creates a montage effect even in the still image. The fact that motion (or the simulation of it) is created by changing each of those pixels individually extremely quickly rather than the succession of images means that there is no longer such a thing as a shot, at least not without some modification. Rodowick proposes this drastic reconsideration of what the digital image is and how it works to reassert the value of film theory and terms to understand what’s happening, at least right now.

He astutely argues that the conventions of film and film theory still hold sway over the digital, even if the digital is fundamentally different from the filmic. Since artists, technology developers and engineers, and audiences still crave the sense of “perceptual realism” defined by the century of filmic history which says that what we see is a real record of the past as it was, modern digital images must still follow the rules of that perceptual realism, which asserts the physical reality of the image through the single-point perspective and laws of physics. It’s no wonder that digital images recreate these elements to claim a grounding in reality when their automatisms do not assert it themselves.

It’s a fascinating book, full of dialogue with film theorists like Metz and Bazin and Barthes and, of course, Cavell. On the digital side, Lev Manovich and Bolter and Grusin get their due as well. Film philosophy isn’t strictly my thing, and it usually takes me much longer to get through, but I also find it intensely fascinating. I noticed I was watching a movie after reading Rodowick’s breakdown of the digital image and I felt like I could see the pixels shifting, fundamentally changing the way I looked at digital images. That’s powerful stuff.

The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell

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Citation: Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed. Enlarged Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
  • Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?
    • Cavell is undertaking an attempt at defining what film is, ontologically speaking, and exploring the ramifications and implications of that definition. Cavell first writes as the field of Film Studies is beginning to develop in universities (1971), and so this falls into the category of trying to set base terms for discussion and only infrequently addresses other film theorists. The World Viewed remains important in understanding some of the history of the field as well as for having developed a “theory of everything” within the film world. He addresses actors, screens, cameras, directors, sound, color, and more in trying to figure out what film affords its artists as a medium.
  • Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?
    • Cavell’s interlocutors come from two areas of study. First, his film theory predecessors, primarily Andre Bazin and Erwin Panofsky, provide Cavell with at least a few jumping off points, primarily in the areas of film’s relationship with reality. Otherwise, his interlocutors are primarily the continental philosophers that you’re used to seeing in these kinds of things: Hegel and Nietzsche, and so on. These two kinds of interlocutors make sense for his project as they come from different angles to the same question of what film is. I’ve seen Cavell referenced in other works, here and there, so his musings remain at least somewhat relevant for film theorists of today.
    • As a book written just after the collapse of the Hollywood studio system in the 1960s, there’s an interesting thread of Cavell mourning the loss of what was once great in that system while being wary of what the new way of making movies in America was starting to bring. He writes of the loss of stars like Bogart, noting that the actors of his era at the start of the 70s were less memorable or noticeable as those of the past. This historical positioning also, necessarily, limits the text. The most “modern” movie he writes about is 2001: A Space Odyessey, which means that he was writing about the movies that predated the blockbusters that are my particular area of interest.

  • Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?
    • Cavell primarily pays attention to Hollywood produced films, with reliable standards like Vertigo, Rosemary’s Baby, and Breathless getting extended analysis and smaller works like The Mortal Storm popping up here and there. These analyses are provided in support of the attempts at writing an exploration of the ontology of film. Occasionally, Cavell will take inspiration from other philosophers of art in order to explain how their theories apply (or not) to film, and in order to distinguish film from other arts.
  • Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?
    • Cavell develops his theories in what seems like fits and starts. Each chapter is relatively short, and what starts as a chapter on, say, color in film might end up as a musing about time and futurity. This makes Cavell’s overall motive and progression of ideas somewhat difficult to parse. Luckily, he provides a pretty solid rundown in his final chapter. Cavell states that film is both of and outside the world, reality, and it is because film presents a viewing of reality (as constructed as it may be) without us in it that we are drawn to it. He claims several times that films waken us from our own subjectivities by showing us something that is outside that subjectivity, and in this way it reveals reality to us, even if that reality is not a full or complete reality because it is necessarily limited by the frame and time.
  • Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?
    • While this text is a little more philosophical than where my usual areas of interest lie in the mechanics and mechanisms of films themselves, I always appreciate reading through another person’s developed perspectives on a medium that I love so much. I found in it many passages that spoke to things I’ve only thought in nascent ways, and that’s often a helpful thing for me. I also appreciate it as a way of understanding “reality” as separate from a naturalistic, Bazinian understanding of filmic “realism.” Here reality doesn’t need to be quotidian or only natural in origin, but is understood as being infinite in its permutations.
    • It is a bit difficult to get through and parse, and Cavell could have been more cognizant of the differences that inflect audience response to films (race, gender, class, so on). He’s got a major case of the universal audience member, one that he pretty directly says is himself. I’m always wary of that.
  • Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?
    • Key terms: realism, automatism, fantasies, subjective, photography, stars
  • Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation–a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another. (21)

After The Maltese Falcon we know a new star, only distantly a person. “Bogart” means “the figure created in a given set of films.” His presence in those films is who he is, not merely in the sense in which a photograph of an event is that event; but in the sense that if those films did not exist, Bogart would not exist, the name “Bogart” would not mean what it does. The figure it names is not only in our presence, we are in his, in the only sense we could ever be. That is all the “presence” he has. (28)

Works that do provide me with pleasure or a knowledge of the way things are equally provide me with a sense of the artist’s position toward this revelation – a position, say, of complete conviction, of compassion, of delight or ironic amusement, of longing or scorn or rage or loss. The fact is, an artist, because a human being, does have a position and does have his reasons for calling his events to our attention. What entitles him to our attention is precisely his responsibility to this condition. (98)

Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibility for it out of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality. Not because they are escapes into fantasy, but because they are reliefs from private fantasy and its responsibilities; from the fact that the world is already drawn by fantasy. And not because they are dreams, but because they permit the self to be wakened, so that we may stop withdrawing our longings further inside ourselves. Movies convince us of the world’s reality in the only way we have to be convinced, without learning to bring the world closer to the heart’s desire (which in practice now means learning to stop altering it illegitimately, against itself): by taking views of it. (102)

Reproducing the world is the only thing film does automatically. (103)

Film takes our very distance and powerlessness over the world as the condition of the world’s natural appearance. It promises the exhibition of the world in itself. This is its promise of candor: that what it reveals is entirely what is revealed to it, that nothing revealed by the world in its presence is lost. (119)