Delayed Rays of a Star (or Supplementary Notes on Indexicality)

The indexical properties of the photographic/cinematographic image are discussed by a number of key twentieth century theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and André Bazin (who, by the way, is the greatest film critic in the history of cinema). Each of these writers accepts as a starting point the uniqueness of the photographic image – that which makes photography genetically distinct from the images found in literature, on the one hand, and painting and drawing, on the other.

What interests Benjamin is the potential excess contained in each photograph that evades the artistic intentions of the photographer. While paintings testify mainly (or exclusively) to the skill of the painter, a photograph testifies to something else or something more, “something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art.” This something else is the object “captured” by the camera and made immortal in the photograph. What is captured are “meaningful yet covert” details. Benjamin writes, “For it is another nature that speaks to the camera rather than the eye; ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to one informed by the unconscious.” This is because what we see in a photograph is never simply a duplication of the perspective or point of view of the photographer, no matter how deliberate or pain-staking his or her deliberations. The camera sees alongside the photographer, but it also sees in its own way. It has the ability to see more (and even, to see less) than the photographer. And the result is a work that can show us something unplanned, something unintended. Benjamin will coin the phrase “optical unconscious” to refer to the hidden reserves of meaning discoverable in every photographic document, regardless of who took the photograph, or for what reason. And this “optical unconscious” proliferates with advances in photographic technology. Benjamin: “The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms of the beholder.” (For more on this see Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” published in 1931.)

It is precisely this “shock effect” produced by the photograph on its beholder that is the subject of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980). Barthes renames the “optical unconscious” the punctum: the punctum is not something we search out and discover using our skills as intrepid media analysts; it is something that “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces [the viewer]” – it is an accident “which pricks me” and me alone. The punctum is non-generalizable: what affects me, doesn’t necessarily affect you. This take on photography is a volte face for Barthes. Having made his reputation as a semiotician – analyzing the signs of culture to show his readers how they work to manufacture the beliefs and ideals of a given society – Barthes, in his final book, makes a very different claim about the photograph. Yes, there is still this element of the photograph that is open to semiotic analysis; he calls this the studium. Here we can talk about authorial intention, market manipulation, etc. Here too we can attempt to quantify the actual effects produced by an image on the consumer and so on. But there is also another level to the photographic image that evades this kind of ideological critique. This is the topic of Camera Lucida. What he wishes to communicate, most of all, is the “shock effect” of certain photographs; those elements of a photograph that speak to the (unconscious) desire of the beholder – the remnants of another time, of another place, left behind as deposits (as indices) on the medium of film and animated time and again by the solitary viewer. (In this case, Barthes himself, who writes his monograph while consumed by grief over the death of his beloved mother. He would die shortly after its publication.) Barthes: “From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here” – here, in this room, looking at this photograph. “[T]he missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”

(Note: A future post will address the significance of indexicality for Bazin’s film theory.)

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Film Panel Discussion at The New School

The first of a series of film events co-sponsored by the Tribeca Film Institute and the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School will take place on Tuesday, September 22 at 7 PM.

Here is the description: "Contemporary filmmakers tell their stories using the latest tools, including everything from digital cameras to computer animation. The way they tell their stories has been shaped by the rise of short-form and user-generated content, video games, and virtual worlds that invite audience participation. At the same time, audiences are expanding their role by making films that are just one piece of a larger project. Come hear a panel discussion exploring storytelling in film today. The panel is part of “New Visions for Film and Media Arts,” a new series that presents leaders from film and digital media production, financing, and distribution.Panelists include Thomas Allen Harris, filmmaker and founder of Chimpanzee Productions, a company dedicated to producing unique videos on the human condition; Jay Randolph, activist and video blogger aka Jay Smooth; Nina Paley, filmmaker and former cartoonist and Kenneth Hung, socially conscious, multi-media artist. Moderated by Kelly DeVine, Artistic Director of the Global Peace Film Festival and consultant to Tribeca Film Institute’s web-based initiative Reframe."

This panel discussion will take place in Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street). Admission is free. No tickets required. Seating is first-come, first serve.

New York Film Festival 2009

Tickets for this year’s NYFF went on sale to the public yesterday, Sunday, September 13. For a list of this year’s films visit http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.html. You can also purchase tickets at the aforementioned website. The description of each film also indicates, at the end of the paragraph, whether the work currently has a US distributor or not. (FYI some films shown at the NYFF never get distributed, which means that the NYFF screening may be a once-in-lifetime theatrical event. Others pick up distributors a year or so down the line, or later. Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun, which I saw at the NYFF in 2005 will have its first theatrical run at Film Forum this fall – four years later!) This year’s selection includes new films by Pedro Costa, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Harmony Korine, Manoel de Oliveira (who recently celebrated his 100th birthday!!!), Todd Solondz, and Lars von Trier, as well as the two top prize winners at this year’s Cannes Film Festival: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (which won the top prize, the Palme d’Or) and Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (which won the Prix Un Certain Regard).

The tickets for the NYFF are not cheap ($20) but the prints they show are typically pristine and the audio quality is exceptional (as it should be, since the auditorium where the films are screened is also a concert hall). The filmmaker and actors often, but not always, appear to do post-screening Q&A sessions. Note: even if a film is listed as sold out you will have a very good chance of getting into a screening if you show up early that day and either 1) buy a ticket off a person on the street trying to unload tickets or 2) queue up in the standby line. There are also sidebar events that you might look into, including the “Views from the Avant-Garde” program. These works are shown at another venue at Lincoln Center, and the ticket prices are more reasonable ($11).

Everyone should attend a screening at the NYFF at least once in their life.

"Headless Woman" at Film Forum

Lucretia Martel's Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) is one of the best films of the year. It is Martel's third feature and she has developed a remarkably expressive and fluid style, making films that are both precise and ambiguous, rigorous and enigmatic. Anyone interested in discovering new narrative forms in cinema should see her work. I hope to say more about this film and this filmmaker at another time. If you haven't seen the film yet, you have until September 15 to do so. Visit the Film Forum website for more info. The website also includes an excellent interview with Martel where she talks about her experiments with "working in layers". (Note: the frame grab is from a key early scene in the film. It was with this image – the deliberate choice made by the filmmaker for how to frame it, and how long to hold the shot before the cut – that I realized I was watching the work of a real filmmaker: someone working with and through the medium to realize a vision. Someone who knows why they are making a film, and not something else.)

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Defamiliarization (II): Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko was an artist, photographer, graphic designer, and close associate of Dziga Vertov's in the early 1920s. His photographs – with their emphasis on unusual angles (high, low, overhead) – are striking examples of art-as-defamiliarization. By saying this though we should not mistake the strategies at work in Rodchenko, or Vertov, as universal or a-historical modes of defamiliarization. The truth is that as we become accustomed to certain styles of art – including Rodchenko's use of unexpected angles or Vertov's hyper-montage – they too can become another convention, another stereotype. So the artist today cannot simply imitate previous models, however striking or memorable. Each artist must work with and against the conventions of his or her day and discover new ways of making the world less familiar or predictable. (This, it seems to me, is exactly what we find in a modern filmmaker like Michael Haneke who uses long takes and sequence shots to create a "resistant-image", an image that resists the spectator's desire to quickly consume images as little bits of knowable – and disposable – information. Haneke wants instead to create an image that gives one pause, to become less certain we understand what has been placed in front of us. Instead of moving on to the next image, we are made to return to this one and, by doing so, seeing something else in it. In contemporary cinema, the long take becomes one mode of "making strange.")

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Defamiliarization (I)

In the 1920s, the Russian Formalists argued that the purpose of art is to de-familiarize the world. Art is not meant merely to affirm our habituated perceptions of the world (our pre-formed beliefs or prejudices), but to make us discover the world anew. In our everyday encounter with the world we typically filter out those elements of the environment that are irrelevant to our immediate needs. For example, when we are walking down the street to the tube station on our way to work or school, we learn over time to filter out images and sounds that are irrelevant to this immediate activity. So the myriad of sensations of the world – the sensorial assault – that we could experience is gradually filtered out, eliminated. In our everyday life, there is thus a “deadening of experience”. As the world around us becomes more and more familiar, we see less and less of it. But art – precisely because it allows us to be contemplative, to be absorbed in what is in front of us – can allow us to “see” the world in a different way. As Victor Shklovsky states, “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things as they are perceived, and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." Art allows us to perceive the world anew, by de-familiarizing our perceptions.

This is true of all arts but perhaps particularly so of film since it is not made up of images drawn purely from the filmmaker’s imagination (as it is in writing or painting) but of images drawn from the world, and captured by a camera. The filmmaker makes a film through an encounter with the world. As the Italian film scholar Francesco Casetti recently observed, ""[in the cinema] reality appears on the screen in all its richness and density, liberated from the habit and indifference that has obscured our normal view”; “to film means to capture and reactivate the world" (quotes from Casetti's excellent new book, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity).

Cinema is a means of jolting us out of our apathy, our indifference, to the world and the things of the world. Unfortunately, most people seem to have the view that the purpose of cinema is to serve as an respite from the grind of existence; a place to flee from responsibility and the duty to engage with one another. Proponents of such an argument don't want to be re-introduced to the world in which they live, in all its complexity and beauty, but want somehow to escape the world. Cinema as a mode of defamiliarization would have a very different goal: to have us re-discover reasons to believe in this world.

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Three Stills from Marília Albornoz, "The Art of Losing Things"

Marília submitted her final "Media Practice: Film Form" tech project to the San Francisco Video Festival 2009 and won the top prize for Best Experimental Film! Congratulations! (Note: Marília has since returned to São Paulo where she is hard at work completing a documentary project that she has been involved in for a number of years.)

A Script Is Not A Film

(As students get ready to take "Visual Systems" and "Production Studio", and as I develop a new class – tentatively titled "Experiments in Cinematic Narrative" – a few comments about scripts and filmmaking.) 

A script is a starting point. It is where one begins to work out one's ideas, where one begins to organize one's thoughts. It is where one begins to plot out a movement or trajectory. Because it is language based, because it consists of what Peirce would call symbolic signs (in this case, words written/typed on a page, on a computer screen), it should not be mistaken for the "content" of the film. A film consists of images drawn from the world; images of people, places, and things. Thus, the filmmaker's job is to translate the script into a film, to translate the ideas/emotions expressed in words into ideas/emotions expressed in images and sounds. The revision of a script as one moves into the production phase should thus involve a parring away of all that is inessential to the expression of cinematic ideas/emotions, so that the themes once signified through words can now be experienced through images.  Everything important that one wants to say should be said through the idiom of film. (Of course, this doesn't mean that a scriptwriter shouldn't approach writing a script as though it were the film. It is the filmmaker who must understand the difference, and especially so when the filmmaker also happens to be the scriptwriter: understand what is called for at each stage, and proceed accordingly.)

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If the early stages of pre-production are concerned primarily with the what – what is the film about? – the production stage shifts its focus more to the how: how to realize the film (its primary content) in a series of images. As Michelangelo Antonioni once said, each line of dialogue in a script will "take on a different meaning" according to the location and according to the position of the actor in relation to the camera: "a line spoken by an actor in profile doesn't have the same meaning as one given full-face." The decision to shoot a line of dialogue in a medium-long shot, instead of a close-up, or, say, against a brick wall, instead of in a car traveling down a road, will all impact the viewer's understanding of the scene as well as its emotional resonance (which in cinema may be one and the same thing). These are the types of decisions that the filmmaker must make – alone, or in consultation with his/her DP, etc. Where should the camera be placed, and what perspective on events should it take? How should the camera see the things it shows us? 

It is the accumulation of all these choices that becomes the viewer's experience of the film.

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Bolex Tech Lab Spring 2009