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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.

Death 24x a Second by Laura Mulvey

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via GIPHY Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock

Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books.

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?

Mulvey’s project in this book is to rethink spectatorship through the lens of the new possibilities opened by home video technologies like DVD and so on, which she argues returns the notion of stillness to the otherwise moving image. Because the spectator now has control over pausing, rewinding, and revisiting only certain scenes of a film, Mulvey argues, the spectator is made more undeniably aware of the cinema’s inherent stillness (in the material form of being composed of still images played in quick sequence to simulate motion). That stillness, she continues, opens the spectator’s potential line of engagement with a film not only as a story but also as a historical document of the indexical (or, broadly, real) aspects of the film image that are usually hidden behind the story’s iconographic impulses. In other words, recognizing that film is basically made up of photographs via technological manipulation of the film image enables both what Mulvey calls a “possessive” and a “pensive” spectator.

The possessive spectator is one who uses their ability to pause, rewind, and repeat images to sadistically, in Mulvey’s terms, control the object of their spectatorship. They develop a fetishistic attachment to the image that was once only possible with the help of extratextual aids like production stills or calendar images. Interestingly, she points out that this new control over the image basically negates the strong masculine voyeuristic tendency she saw in Hollywood films in her formative “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay. Or, if not outright negating the voyeuristic part, it demasculinizes the gaze and turns it towards a more individualized and therefore less-gendered form. This happens for women as well as men, she claims. She also notes that the possessive spectator is one who is attuned to the star persona’s complicated balance of energy/motion (which drives the action of the film and the gaze of the camera) and stillness, which is embodied in the pose which is either captured in still images like the production photos or in the span of time when a star pauses on screen, or when a spectator pauses the action at their own whim.

The pensive spectator is less interested in control and more interested in observing how the stillness they create in a film reflects back within the film when it is played in its normal capacity. What attention does the pensive spectator bring to the film during their pauses, delays, and repititions? It is similar to the attention a film scholar brings to films, and Mulvey convincingly argues that the ability to manipulate the time of a film has turned anybody who wants to be into a film scholar who can almost automatically understand the strange play of tenses that occurs when one watches an older film. The old film plays out in what Barthes calls a time of “this was now” where the index (again, reality, kinda) is captured at a particular moment in time. He had argued that this only works with the singular photograph, while the film tends to blur that indexicality into nothingness. Mulvey rescues his assertion for film by claiming that the ability to pause it and so on snaps spectators into a position where they can recognize the indexicality of the image and the historical nature of it. This, she argues, is crucial for political readings and uses of films to bridge the gap between the present and the past in a world which tends to want to insist on the immediacy of the moment.

Crucially for Mulvey, these ways of seeing films as containing stills was not only excavated via video control. It was always hidden, from the very early experiements of the Lumière and Méliès films, in the moments of slow motion and “still” frames achieved by the repetition of cells in sequence to create the illusion of stillness within a technically still moving medium, a phenomenon she calls “delayed cinema.” These traditional filmic techniques opened opportunities to see stillness on film and recognize the importance of stillness to the medium of film. Mulvey ties this to the narrative death drive she notes motivates many films. Hence the trope of ending on a static shot to, symbolically at least, represent the death of the story being told. With this association between stillness and death, Mulvey continues to pull at the cinema’s relationship between time passing, which is inherently captured on film but now can be paused by spectators and even reversed given the right technological tools, and the ability to see beyond death. When we see old movie stars on our home screens, we are not only watching old movies, we are conjuring ghosts and that is yet another reminder that time passes and the present always comes from the past.

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?

Mulvey is in closest conversation with the twin pillars of Bazin and Barthes, each of which form a crucial part of her argument about stillness via their writings on photography and its properties. In addition to the two of them, Mulvey also engages with Miriam Hansen’s augmentations of her ideas from “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which Mulvey also engages with several times. Of course, Freud and various readings of his ideas form the foundations of Mulvey’s fundamentally psychoanalytic approach to spectatorship. I tend to bristle at psychoanalysis, but I was able to dig around in Mulvey’s version of it and find what seemed to be most crucial so I didn’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater there.

The other bit of crucial contextual info is Mulvey’s writing at the dawn of the 21st century. She uses this temporality to position her argument within conversations about the cinema’s centenary and the nearly concomitant discussions around the “death” of cinema thanks to the invention and propagation of digital filming and projection technologies. Mulvey largely dismisses this later idea, noting that the loss of the direct materiality of film’s imprint of light and shadow is retained in all but a literal sense when what happens is instead a numerical translation of the same data. The indexicality is not fundamentally lost, she claims, and I tend to agree. Otherwise, her arguments tend to rest on the affordances of the DVD, which was picked up and expanded upon by Benson-Allott less than a decade later.

via GIPHY Journey to Italy by Roberto Rossellini

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Mulvey’s is a largey theoretical text, working mostly with other theorists who wrote on similar subjects to develop her own thoughts. She does, however, spend three chapters dedicated primarily to close readings of Psycho, Journey to Italy, and the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Here she draws out the ideas developed in the first half of her book about the role of stillness in cinema and how it connects or doesn’t to the death drive/passage of time inherent in cinema and narrative. She also delves into some smaller close readings in several of the other chapters, but those are used mostly to demonstrate ideas rather than as the primary purpose of her text.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Mulvey devleops her points by first talking about how the video spectator’s ability to pause a film is an extension of the filmmaker’s ability to maniuplate the flow of time in their film. After showing that the spectator’s manipulation is related to the filmmaker’s manipulation, she traces how filmmakers used the manipulation of time to their own ends in metaphorical expressions of death and connects it to the uncanny of both Freud and Jentsch. She goes on to connect these ideas to narrative theories of death as a metaphorical ending to stories. After exploring this idea in her three close reading chapters, she comes back to develop a theory of spectatorship based on the ability to pause, rewind, and reorder a film via technology, which she claims creates a two new kinds of spectators, the possessive and the pensive.

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?

Though I don’t buy most psychoanalytic theories, Mulvey was still quite convincing in her explanation of the way that home video opens new possibilites in recognizing the stillness at the center of film as a medium, and in the implications thereof. She also inspired a new way of thinking about the legacyquel that I’ll have to ponder on. Ultimately, her work is not only salvageable from the psychoanalysis but likely crucial to some of my upcoming work.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

stillness, movement, death, uncanny, spectatorship, pensive spectator, possessive spectator, fetish, voyeur, the death drive, narrative, video, delayed cinema, aesthetic of delay, automata, cinephilia, star, star system, pose, control, power

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Delayed cinema works on two levels: first of all it refers to the actual act of slowing down the flow of film. Secondly it refers to the delay in time during which some detail has lain dormant, as it were, waiting to be noticed. There is a loose parallel here with Freud’s concept of deferred action, the way the unconscious preserves a specific experience, while its traumatic effect might only be realized by another, later but associated, event. (8)

A dialectical relationship between the old and new media can be summoned into existence, creating an aesthetic of delay. In the first instance, the image itself is frozen or subjected to repetition or return. But as the new stillness is enhanced by the weight that the cinema’s past has acquired with passing time, its significance goes beyond the image itself towards the problem of time, its passing, and how it is represented or preserved. At a time when new technologies seem to hurry ideas and their representations at full tilt towards the future, to stop and to reflect on the cinema and its history also offers the opportunity to think about how time might be understood within wider, contested, patterns of history and mythology. Out of this pause, a delayed cinema gains a political dimension, potentially able to challenge patterns of time that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its ‘before’ and its ‘after’. The delayed cinema gains further significance as outside events hasten the disappearance of the past and strengthen the political appropriation of time. (22-3)

The dialectic between old and new produces innovative ways of thinking about the complex temporality of cinema and its significance for the present moment in history. As the flow of cinema is displaced by the process of delay, spectatorship is affected, reconfigured and transformed so that old films can be seen with new eyes and digital technology, rather than killing the cinema, brings it new life and new dimensions. The process of delay not only bring stillness into visibility but also alters the traditionally linear structure of narrative, fragmenting its continuities. (26)

To look back into the reality of that lost world [of the early 1900s] by means of the cinema is to have the sensation of looking into a time machine. However cliched the concept, the presence of that reality, of the past preserved, becomes increasingly magical and uncanny. Furthermore, as electronic and digital technologies have overtaken the cinema and, as a new ‘new’ arrives, the old ‘new’ becomes relegated to ‘the old’. Paradoxically and incidentally, the new technologies have contributed further to bringing the uncanny back to the cinema. The ease with which the moving image can now be halted exposes the cinema’s mechanisms and the illusion of its movement, as though the beautiful automaton had become stuck in a particular pose. (52)

Cinema’s forward movement, the successive order of film, merges easily into the order of narrative. Linearity, causality and the linking figure of metonymy, all crucial elements in story-telling, find a correspondence in the unfolding, forward-moving direction of film. […] But at the end, the aesthetics of stillness returns to both narrative and the cinema. Death as a trope that embodies the narrative’s stillness, its return to an inanimate form, extends to the cinema, as though the still frame’s association with death fuses into the death of the story, as though the beautiful automaton was to wind down into its inanimate, uncanny, form. In this sense, endings present different kind of aesthetic exchange between narrative and cinema. Freud’s concept of ‘the death drive’ negotiates between the two, including, as it does, movement towards an end as the desire to return to an ‘earlier’ state. (69-70)

While the flow of the image at 24 frames a second tends to assert a ‘now-ness’ to the picture, stillness allows access to the time of the film’s registration, its ‘then-ness’. This is the point, essentially located in the single frame, where the cinema meets the still photograph, both registering a moment of time frozen and thus fossilized. (102)

As people and history recede into the past, the traces they leave on the world mark their absence, the impossibility of regaining time, but also bear witness to the reality of their once-upon-a-time presence. With the cinema, the past is preserved in the full appearance of reality. In the Pompeii sequence [of Journey to Italy], filmed in 1952, with the living presence of the anonymous workmen as well as Hollywood stars, another layer of fossilized history is superimposed on the ruins of the city. Those alive in the scene, then, are now as fossilized in their screen image as the plaster casts of the Pompeiian couple. (107)

The discovery of a particular sequence or segment that responds to textual analysis necessarily leads to questions of film form both in terms of material and language. To halt, to return and to repeat these images is to see cinematic meaning coming into being as an ordinary object becomes detached from its surroundings, taking on added cinematic and semiotic value. But delaying the image, extracting it from its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deferred meaning, to the story’s narration. (150-1)

New ways of consuming old movies on electronic and digital technologies should bring about a reinvention of textual analysis and a new wave of cinephilia. But the cinema is deeply affected by the passing of time itself. Now, to look at films such as those made by Douglas Sirk is to have the impression of looking into history. Even studio sets and stars take on the status of document, and close readings inevitably lead to questions of context as well as text. But reflection on film now leads not only to its surrounding history. To see Imitation of Life now, after Lana Turner’s death and, no doubt, the death of many of the extras surrounding her on the set, is to see time itself caught and fossilized into the illusion of movement. Now, as Lana Turner runs down the steps onto the Coney Island set, conjuring up the meanings inscribed into Sirk’s film and her performance, she also shifts between the ghostly and the living. Her presence brings with it the cinema’s unique ability to return and repeat the past, which becomes both more real and more mysterious as the film’s fragment is itself subject to repetition and return. (160)

When a film industry streamlines its star system, instantly recognizable, iconic screen actors produce a highly stylized performance, enhanced by an equally highly stylized star-focused cinema. Start performance is, not inevitably but very often, the source of screen movement, concentrating the spectator’s eye, localizing the development of the story and providing its latent energy. But the great achievement of star performance is an ability to maintain a fundamental contradiction in balance: the fusion of energy with a stillness of display. However energetic a star’s movement might seem to be, behind it lies an intensely controlled stillness and an ability to pose for the camera. Reminiscent, figuratively, of the way that the illusion of movement is derived from still frames, so star performance depends on pose, moments of almost invisible stillness, in which the body is displayed for the spectator’s visual pleasure through the mediation of the camera. (162)

Watching Hollywood films delayed both reinforces and breaks down these oppositions. The narrative drive tends to weaken if the spectator is able to control its flow, to repeat and return to certain sequences while skipping others. The smooth linearity and forward movement of the story become jagged and uneven, undermining the male protagonist’s command over the action. The process of identification, usually kept in place by the relation between plot and character, suspense and transcendence, loses its hold over the spectator. And the loss of ego and self-consciousness that has been, for so long, one of the pleasures of the movies gives way to an alert scrutiny and scanning of the screen, lying in wait, as it were, to capture a favorite or hitherto unseen detail. With the weakening of narrative and its effects, the aesthetic of the film begins to become ‘feminized’, with the shift in spectatorial power relations dwelling on pose, stillness, lighting and the choreography of character and camera. Or, rather, within the terms of the ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ model, the aesthetic of pleasure of delayed cinema moves towards fetishistic scopophilia that, I suggested, characterized the films of Josef Von Sternberg. These films, most particularly the Dietrich cycle, elevate the spectator’s look over that of the male protagonist and privilege the beauty of the screen and mystery of situation over suspense, conflict or linear development. The ‘fetishistic spectator’ becomes more fascinated by image than plot, returning compulsively to privileged moments, investing emotion and ‘visual pleasure’ in any slight gesture, a particular look or exchange taking place on the screen. Above all, as these privileged moments are paused or repeated, the cinema itself finds a new visibility that renders them special, meaningful and pleasurable, once again confusing photogénie and fetishism. (165)

The possessive spectator commits an act of violence against the cohesion of a story, the aesthetic integrity that holds it together, and the vision of its creator. But, more specifically, the sadistic instinct is expressed through the possessive spectator’s desire for mastery and will to power. In the role reversal between the look of the spectator and the diegetic look of the male protagonist, the figure that had been all powerful both on and off the screen is now subordinated to manipulation and possession. Film performance is transformed by repetition and actions begin to resemble mechanical, compulsive gestures. The cinema’s mechanisms take possession of the actor or star and, as their precise, repeated gestures become those of automata, the cinema’s uncanny fusion between the living and the dead merges with the uncanny fusion between the organic and the inorganic, the human body and the machine. (171)

Bellour makes the crucial point that a moment of stillness within the moving image and its narrative creates a ‘pensive spectator’ who can reflect ‘on the cinema’. Not only can the ‘pensive’ spectator experience the kind of reverie that Barthes associated with the photograph alone, but this reverie reaches out to the nature of cinema itself. This pause for the spectator, usually ‘hurried’ by the movement of both film and narrative, opens a space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image. Similarly, the pensive spectator who pauses the image with new technologies may bring to the cinema the resonance of the still photograph, the association with death usually concealed by the film’s movement, its particularly strong inscription of the index. These reflections are not lost when the film is returned to movement. On the contrary, they continue and inflect the film’s sense of ‘past-ness’. And the ‘pensive’ spectator ultimately returns to the inseparability of stillness from movement and flow; in Bellour’s words, ‘two kinds of time blend together’. (186)

Sometime after writing ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, I tried to evolve an alternative spectator, who was driven, not by voyeurism, but by curiosity and the desire to decipher the screen, informed by feminism and responding to the new cinema of the avant-garde. Curiosity, a drive to see, but also to know, still marked a utopian space for a political, demanding visual culture, but also one in which the process of deciphering might respond to the human minds long standing interest and pleasure in solving puzzles and riddles. This curious spectator may be the ancestor of the pensive spectator and the cinema of delay unlocks the pleasure of decipherment, not only for an elite but also for anyone who has access to the new technologies of consumption. Of particular interest is the relation between the old and the new, that is, the effect of new technologies on cinema that has now aged. Consciousness of the passing of time affects what is seen on the screen: that sense of a ‘sea-change’ as death overwhelms the photographed subject affects the moving as well as the still image. There is, perhaps, a different kind of voyeurism at stake when the future looks back with greedy fascination at the past and details suddenly lose their marginal status and acquire the aura that passing time bequeaths to the most ordinary objects. (191-2)

The tape creates a dialogue between the cinema of the past and video, between the special insights of a 1960s critic and the new technology that makes critics as of us all. This exchange creates a dialectical relation between the old and the new, breaking down the separation from the past from which nostalgia is derived. But at the same time, it is elegiac: there is no escape from passing time and death itself. (194)