Out of Field

Abstract

While every discipline in the humanities worries about its future, film studies is caught in the thrall of a particular anxiety, namely the possibility that it lacks a consistent object and a compelling reason. Behind the question of film studies looms the question of cinema itself, an aging technē that seems to have hung around in the midst of new(er) media that lay claim to the image as their province. Why cinema? Against so many digital incursions, more traditionally minded critics have defended film on the basis of its indexical powers, but this article envisions an entirely different reason to return to the cinema. Where both the return to the index and the recourse to the digital effect tend to regard the cinema as a matter of visibility, I suggest that we might reclaim our faith in the cinema by virtue of what remains unseen and off-screen. Hence, this essay undertakes a brief history of the out of frame in order to induce a conceptualization of the cinema (pace Deleuze) as the art of the “Outside.” Turning to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the essay concludes by analyzing how an ostensibly older sense of images nevertheless augurs the critical and philosophical developments with which we can learn to believe in the cinema once more.

Keywords:

• digital
• index
• off-screen
• the “outside”
• real (realism)

Notes

Notes

The Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project scheme (DP1092889) supported the author's research for this essay. The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the ARC.

1 André Bazin, What is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009) 3.

2 Ibid. 5, 6.

3 Ibid. 6.

4 Ibid. 8.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Where classical criticism defended the cinema, a mass medium, as an art, we could say that the formative discourses of film theory – semiotics, psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism – confirmed the cinema “negatively,” which is to say, insofar as the cinema organized perception and encoded images that film theory made its task to critique and decode. Of course, a whole theory of “counter-cinema” also emerged in this period, especially in light of Godard's political cinema, but, as the name suggests, cinema like theory was affirmed on the basis of its capacity to oppose or counter the dominant (or “first”) cinema and its corresponding ideology. Refusing to indulge in appraisal or appreciation, insisting on critique and demystification, film theory no doubt seems a long way from classical criticism, but my point is that, like its predecessor, film theory possessed more than sufficient reason to believe in the cinema. This is no longer obviously the case.

8 Even where digital cameras and digital editing have not yet displaced “cinematography,” we are more likely than not to see these images on phones, iPads, computers, home theaters, or the new generation projectors at the multiplex – in other words, to see those images in a digital format.

9 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001) 302.

10 The introduction of the full-blown elements of computer-generated imagery (CGI) is typically dated to Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1992) and the immediate adoption of the technology tended toward big-budget science fiction (or fantasy) and the creation of special, or spectacular, effects. For a solid accounting of the emergence of digital cinema, see the first chapter of D.N. Rodowick's The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007).

11 The Language of New Media 302.

12 The Virtual Life of Film 9.

13 D.N. Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” October 122 (fall 2007) 93.

14 In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” as we know, Bazin suggests placing the visual arts under psychoanalysis, and in the same humorous spirit we might imagine what would come of putting film studies on the couch. After all, it hardly seems inappropriate to aver that the discipline suffers from the loss of the object – the film object – and that the index constitutes the ontological rejoinder to our angst. In other words, we could say that this renewed ontology is no less a symptomatology, the expression of anxiety. Freud himself described anxiety as affect in the absence of an object, and can we imagine a better definition for the plight of film studies or, concomitantly, a better injunction to redeem the film object? At the very least, this suggestion underwrites my contention that, far from being a response to the question of cinema, the reclamation of the real is a kind of reaction-formation, as if anxiety had precipitated the film-object anew.

15 What is Cinema? 9.

16 For a clear expression of this sentiment, see Bruce Kawin's “Three Endings” in Film Quarterly 65.1 (2011), available <http://www.filmquarterly.org/2011/10/three-endings/>. “The time of the pre-digital image is ending, thanks to a major shift in technology of which both filmmakers and audiences are entirely aware,” Bruce Kawin characteristically admits, only to declare: “Even if it had its share of effects shots and fakery, of make-up and lighting, and generated worlds that were often paradoxically both real and artificial, pre-digital cinema could shoot sheer reality if it wanted to […]”

17 The irony of this impulse is that it threatens to transform the question of cinema, which Bazin made the point of departure for endless excursions and speculations, into a kind of Platonic mission to “track down” the digital simulacrum and anoint the real cinema. See Gilles Deleuze's discussion of sophist in the first appendix to The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Leister and Charles Stivale; ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) 253. Also see my own discussion of Platonism in “Deleuze among the Sophists” in Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy: Powers of the False, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011).

18 Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (London: Blackwell, 2010) xxv.

19 Ibid. xx.

20 Space doesn’t permit me to analyze this moment in Truffaut's film in greater detail, but suffice to say, based on the discussion to follow, I would contend that the power of the image consists as much in construction of off-screen space as it does in the image itself. No doubt, Andrew has this in mind when he describes the “world” that the boy confronts – but I would want to push this point further still. We don’t see this boy's face in profile, nor do we see him look out to sea; rather, having reached what might as well be the end of the earth, he turns his face (visage) to the country (paysage) that has chewed him up and spat him out, thereby implicating us – we who have watched, borne witness – in the space of his stare.

21 Of course, the most notable document in the literary history of the concept is Freud's essay on “The Uncanny.” As to the problem of the “uncanny valley,” see Masahiro Mori's The Buddha in the Robot (New York: Kosei, 1989). In terms of the “uncanny valley” in Avatar, see “How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Tech Created Avatar,” Popular Mechanics, available <http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/visual-effects/4339455>.

22 Of the programming needed to replicate muscles under Na’vi skin, Cameron recalls: “[w]e didn’t have the equipment when we started this. It took nine months to build the computer model and get it right.” See “The Man of Extremes: The Return of James Cameron,” The New Yorker 26 Oct. 2009, available <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_goodyear>.

23 See Cameron's interview in Digital Acting, 8 Feb. 2010, available <http://www.digitalacting.com/2010/02/08/james-cameron-performance-capture-re-invented-avatar/>.

24 Above all, see Sean Cubitt's The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2005). While I have deep disagreements with Cubitt, I think that, like Dudley Andrew, he represents the most rigorous formulation of his respective side of the argument.

25 The Language of New Media 95.

26 Ibid. 96. Manovich regards the computer screen as both the consummation and liberation of the format: the screen has passed from a state of “passive” contemplation (painting) to “dynamic” spectatorship (cinema) and finally to “active” operation (computer). In short, computers effectively release the spectator and give rise to a user. Is it any wonder that media studies levels out the historical variations of the cinematic off-screen when we understand that the discipline writes from the perspective of its imminent erasure?

27 For a discussion of what this phrase means in Deleuze's philosophy, see Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia UP, 1995) 29, 44–45.

28 See especially the first chapter of Fried's The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010), where the subject of self-portraiture raises the question of the off-picture. The importance of the self-portrait, one could argue, is that it establishes what I call the longitudinal vector as the dominant vector of off-screen space, where other genres – say, the historia, the architectural representation, the landscape – tend to render the latitudinal vector dominant.

29 Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), especially 17–30. While I do not have time to analyze the six segments of off-screen space at length, I would argue that Burch's account does not yet go far enough in establishing the heterogeneity of these dimensions. No doubt, as Burch suggests, the longitudinal vector – ranging from the space in front of the camera to the vanishing point – is distinct from the other vectors of off-screen space, but I would argue that there are significant differences between the latitudinal and vertical vectors as well. This, however, is grist for a longer work on off-screen space.

30 See the “Theoretical Presuppositions” to Kittler's Optical Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).

31 As to the critical relationship between painting and architecture, see Hubert Damisch's The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995).

32 See the second book of Alberti's, On Painting, ed. and trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011) 44ff. For a concise and mathematically accurate treatment of perspective, see Samuel Edgerton's The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic, 1975).

33 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 16.

34 The film screen, once so dominant, has ceded its pride of place to the profusion of digital screens, and these same screens have in turn transformed the cinema. In this respect, it's interesting to note that, in the 1950s, at the very point when we tend to mark the moment of the modern cinema and a full-fledged exploitation of the off-screen in European cinema, Hollywood cinema was already in the midst of a crisis that would precipitate the gradual diminishment of off-screen space. The depression of post-war ticket sales inspired a turn toward technological advances – wide-screen formats, Technicolor, and 3D – as the means of luring moviegoers back to theaters.

35 The Language of New Media 97.

36 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) 266.

37 Ibid. 265.

38 Notably, Cameron had already begun to experiment with high-definition 3D as early as 2003: in his documentary on the wreck of the Titanic, Ghosts of the Abyss, he fused two Sony HDC-F9590 HD cameras together, two and a half inches apart, in order to create stereoscopic images. Avatar uses a modified version of the Fusion camera, but as Cameron has explained, he was less concerned with typical 3D effects (images hurling at the audience from the screen) than he was in extending and amplifying the image.

39 “The Man of Extremes” 4.

40 What is Cinema? 21.

41 This myth has effectively accompanied all of the director's films. Cameron recalls that his first autonomous movie, The Terminator, “came to him in a dream,” but the myth continued thereafter, as the director embarked on projects whose previsions augured the development of cinematic technology. The morphing techniques of Terminator 2, the scope of Titanic's CGI, and now the immersive 3D landscapes of Pandora were all duly attributed by the director to something between delusion and revelation.

42 What is Cinema? 20. Speculatively speaking, the eventuality of a total cinema, whereby we inhabit a cinematic world, would (ironically) reinscribe our own phenomenological limits.

43 “How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Tech Created Avatar.”

44 Ibid.

45 In a sense, animation dissolves the sense of contiguity that formerly characterized off-screen space. But if events consist in their own digitally created environment rather than being deterritorialized from the world, this explains Avatar's adherence, despite its technological innovations, to the most conventional brand of continuity editing, as if it had to assure us that the world outside the image we see still (cinematically speaking) exists.

46 See Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi (New York: Zone, 1989); and Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992). See also Deleuze's Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). In the cinema, Deleuze's most profound meditation on the Outside can be found in the chapter “Thought and Cinema” in The Time-Image.

47 The Time-Image 168.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 “We will start with very simple definitions, even though they may have to be corrected later” (The Movement-Image 12).

51 Ibid. 17ff.

52 Ibid. 16.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid. It's in this context that Deleuze draws upon Bergson's example of a glass of sugared water, which is caught or framed in its own duration, but which always implies a thread to link it to “the solar system, and any set whatever to a larger set” (16).

55 The Time-Image 236.

56 The Movement-Image 17.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 Foucault 87.

60 The Movement-Image 17.

61 See Deleuze's chapter on “The Image of Thought” in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).

62 Deleuze, Negotiations 60.

63 Foucault 89.