It no longer makes sense, wrote Anne-Marie Duguet (2009), to search for the absolute essence of cinema, since all its original aspects have become mutable, i.e., those aspects that had defined it in the past. With the hyper-aceleration of the co-evolution of cinematographic techniques, most of the essentialist demarcations about the nature of cinema do not fall anymore under descriptive categories – “what cinema is” – but under prescriptive ones – “what we think cinema should be”. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes (1982: 174-175) would say that the will to define is already a sub-product of a bourgeois morality based on enumerating, computing and weighing, which “invents its goods, embalms them, injects into the real a purifying essence that interrupts the transformation and the escape to other forms of existence”.[1] No, we can’t define cinema, under penalty of losing it in the very act of definition; however, it is still possible – we’d say: desirable – to draw a topography of the ways of making cinema today, finding cracks, ruptures, gaps to fill, patch and reconcile.
If, for Borges, poetry is the creation of the disposition to read a poem (that is, everything that makes the reader feel like they are, in fact, reading a poem), we can, before anything else, present our “dispositives” or “devices” under that light: as conjunctures for the production of a specific disposition. Cinematographic devices would serve, therefore, for the creation of a cinematographic disposition. In this context, unattached to concept, form and content, everything that makes the spectator feel as if they are watching a cinematographic work can be put under “cinema” as an umbrella-term, and we can avoid essentialisms. But it happens that – this is our thesis, as we shall see – the cinematographic disposition predated all of the classically imagined cinematographic devices. It seems that, on the contrary, cinematographic devices only reveal, in a retrograde twist, the cinematography of existence, which already is, or is already there, inscribed in reality itself. And “before being a device for spectacle, independently of the technical equipment that supports it, film is a mode of thinking images” (Michaud, 2014: 11).
We shall speak of “image”, in this case, in its Bergsonian (and later Deleuzian) aception, as a broad way of enunciating the situation of the interfacial matter against which we put ourselves in dialogue in our condition of presence. In Bergson’s theory, all matter is image, and our perceptive apparatus – the body – is a central and centralizing image that opens and closes, deliberately or not, according to our need to perceive or de-perceive. “Image” is, then, a reality that shows itself, and “body” is the axis around which “all other images vary” (2011: 46). In the same way, some theorists that study the characterization of cinema have already said that cinema is any movement that implies the body in a “state of video” (Baudry, 1983), or, even more generally, in a “state of image” (Dubois, 2004).
For these thinkers, cinematic affect preceded cinema in its conventional sense – a single channel screen in a dark, cold and quiet room where padded chairs are strategically positioned, etc. For them, this affect could be a result of any craftship of virtuality. “Image is a product of an operation of which filming is an instrument, and not a precondition”, writes Michaud (2014: 84), and we could say something similar about cinema. Because it is a metamorphic machine of exposing cosmologies, more than a mere codifying of colors and contours, or a mere embossing of visuals into the recording tape, or a mere mobilizing of photographs through a series of meticulous procedures of decoupage. There may be cinema even in the paramnesic attention a child gives to his glass of chocolate milk or in the genuine contemplation of a teenager who caresses his girlfriend’s hair. There is cinematicity, in short, whenever there is a repositioning of human perception to an external production of displacement and luminosity (Virilio, 2015), even if this is not done through a concrete work of art and is not done intentionally.
That’s why, since the 1990s, we can openly discuss the idea of a “cinema-world”, or “the world as cinema” (Pelbart, 1998), and that’s why it is arbitrary to define cinema, as well as, for example, to determine a specific and extraordinary moment when it was created (Munsterbeg apud Kittler, 1999). On the contrary, the constitution of the set of practices and experiences that would soon be called “cinema” happens slowly, first through the accumulation of scientific discoveries and technological inventions on the end of the nineteenth century (chemical fixation, optical toys, photographic sequencing, roll projection, etc.), and then through the stratification of the human condition itself in this historical moment (with the terror of the Great War, the appearance of ridiculous-totalitarian public figures and the imagetic saturation of mass media). Little by little, the cinematographic experience that had been revealed by these new technical and social devices would be restricted to them, as if it was just an effect of theirs, a mere result of machinic processes of input-output painting archetypal narratives over nothingness, like pendular ornaments.
With time, then, a single model of cinema will end up associated with the experience of the cinematic, and alternative models will succumb. One of Benjamin’s (2017: 18-19) main ideas about the cinema of his time, in the early twentieth century, was that the foundations of the cinematic work were becoming the cinematic ritual itself (“the reproduction of a work oriented to its reproduction”); Michaud (2014) states that films have become a function of their projection, more than of their recording. Cinema as we know it today – the “cinema-form” (Parente, 2009) – wins in the arena of audiovisual installations, in the dispute with other devices of revealing the cinematic (maybe by circumstance) to solidify its supposed supremacy for more than a hundred years. Regarding this solidification, Arlindo Machado notes, not without irony, that it is “surprising that during this time everyone, everywhere, got out of their houses to see the same installation everyday” (2008: 69). Every film really depends on the repetition of this same installation, even though it displays different images each time.
The installation Machado refers to, cinema as a form, is based mainly on the configuration of classical theater’s cavea (and, therefore, on the perspective of Renaissance paintings), because it will be supported by a place in which “the frame is the condition of the unification of space”, an arch that “delimits the representation and draws a clear division between the stage and the space reserved for the spectators” (Michaud, 2014: 19). Strictly divided between room and screen, spectator and work, real and virtual, the cinema-form is conceived as an open window to another world, just as in Shakespeare’s plays or Rafael’s canvases. And the similarities do not stop there: in conventional cinema-form, there should always be a properly theatrical fiction, where actors move and dialogue to construct heroic arcs with beginnings, middles and ends, in presentations of similar duration (between one and four hours) which generally ignore the inconspicuous presence of witnesses, who, in their turn, are prevented from interacting with the images.
Even when, after World War II, experimental filmmakers around the world invented the “image-time”, as Deleuze (1985) conceptualized it, they were not invalidating this ritualistic facet of cinema, of a device that divides real and virtual. The irrational cuts and time lags of this new way of producing cinema ejected from the interstices of the composition original aspects of the camera, yes. Nonetheless, they marked a properly theatrical place, where the viewer is subjected to an opaque machinery that makes it docile, psychically numb, inside the stomach of a black box that projects the film under certain conditions of control. And they kept reproducing stories; they continued structurally mimicking hypothetical relationships between beings, just like in theatrical plays.
In the 1950s, with the appropriation of the language of video by structural cinema, another type of movie emerged, no longer attached to bio-theatricality, but to the pure image and whatever it is that pulses in it. From the performatic cinema of Fluxus in the 1960s and Hélio Oiticica’s Quasi-cinema (1974) onwards, but more robustly after the 1980s and 1990s, such appropriations became even more significant, often supported by curatorial institutions. This resulted in an uptake in experimental film auteurs’ creative vigor and stamina, with cinema poised as the result of a highly personal catharsis and even a life project – as if it could be high art. Thus, what would be named the “post-media condition” (Machado, 2008) of contemporary cinema establishes itself, following the emergence of an installation-based cinema that uses synthetic images, augmented reality, holography, pixel rendering and sensory mapping, among other methods, to conceive a metaphysics of Outerness, of the ontological exteriority of the image. The viewer can now enter the image, inhabit it and modify it from core to shell. It’s a bit like a Wagnerean dream, as Wagner conceiver of opera as an immersive experience beyond any support (Kittler, 1999), or like a feverish delirium out of the mind of Artaud (2006), who did not differentiate between actor and audience, and sought a “total theater” in which the uninterrupted performances of everyday life could be reinstated to their condition of art (life as the “aesthetic of existence”).
Above all, this “artistic cinema” raises questions about “the variety of possible cinemas in relation to ‘cinema alone’”, in an attempt to “better capture the mental dimension proper to all imaging devices” (Bellour, 2008: 9). The cinemas we find in museums always evoke alternative devices to the consolidated cinema-form, widening our ways of watching cinema (hence Michaud’s homologous term, “expanded cinema”). They also escape the order of representation and consist of an “art of presence” (Michaud, 2014: 25) rather than of representation. It is in this sense that experimental cinema “sketches a return to the initial anarchy of the first cinema, when a unique industrial model had not yet been crystallized” (Machado, 2008: 67). And that’s why it repeats, at various times, the effects of pre-cinematographic experiments, such as the bifacial image or the zootropic loop, which reappears in texture simulators and heat maps, in magnetic resonance and imaging, in technologies of animation, robotics, and so on.
Authors such as Crary (1992) and Krauss (2002) praise the pioneering spirit of the thaumatrope, the fenacystoscope and the stereoscope, among others, with these finding their way into contemporary installations. The latter device, for example, has the ability to make the human eye move quickly across multiple depths, producing staggered kinesthetic micro-forces. The kaleidoscope, one of the most celebrated optical toys ever, which used mirrors to produce infinitely multiplied fractal images, is reminiscent of Michael Snow’s visual productions (as in La Région Centrale [1971], where a camera strapped to a robotic arm is guided through pre-programmed gestures for 24 hours, generating pluriform, fragmentary visions). We might also mention the diorama and the panorama, which are constantly taken up by works based on immersion and virtual modeling technologies, such as André Parente’s Figures in the Landscape or Edmond Couchot’s Les Pissenlits ; in the panorama, “it is as if we were swallowed up by the image, which somewhat anticipates the effects of the virtual image” (Parente, 1999: 18).
But the most interesting thing here is that there is a “protohistory” of cinematic devices (Krauss, 2002), and that this does not necessarily mean that there has been progress towards the cinema-form, as if it were more advanced than the other models of visualization and revelation of the cinematic. The proof for this is precisely the return contemporary art makes to techniques that precede the cinema-form: here, “pre” and “post” chaotically penetrate each other. There is a link between cinema and these machines of the 1830s, but it usually prevails a dialectical relationship in which features of these earlier devices were simply negated (Crary, 1992). That is, the cinema-form did not amass aspects of these other devices gradually and “resolved” them by hybridizing, compiling and coupling a winning machine out of purely techno-scientific confrontations, but instead rejected some of their distinctive features in the name of popularization and institutionalization.
The main difference between the cinema-form and optical toys (generically speaking) is the former conceals its functions. What Crary (Ibid.) calls the “visibility” of optical devices can be opposed to the “phantasmagoria” of cinema-form’s (or, rather, of camara obscura ’s) operations. The opacity of its means of inscription and consummation would give the cinema-form (as it gave most of other traditional arts) the aspect of magic, and give the optical toy the aspect of a simple machine – an arbitrary differentiation, as we know, but, in any case, an effective one. “It was not easy for the user to ignore or forget the engineering of the fenacystoscope itself,” write Bolter & Grusin (2000: 37) when referring to devices that simultaneously evoke transparent immediacy and meta-referential hypermediation. According to them, the fenacystoscope, just like other optical toys, “made the user aware of the desire for immediacy it tried to satisfy” (Ibid.).
Moreover, pre-cinema apparatuses failed to put into play “the teleological unification of montage” (Virilio, 2015) brought to light by the Lumiére brothers and which were crucial for the operationalization of the cinema-form (the cinema as an installation) by what could be called “cinema-situation” (cinema as a work). There was no time to uncover the true potential of other apparatuses, nor the confidence of the curatorial institutions encourage creation, in the face of directors like D.W. Griffith and their commercial success. But if the process of assembling cinema is largely subverted and erased in the twentieth century by the image-time, as we put it earlier, and as Deleuze (1985) explains to exhaustion, it’s exactly because those cinemas (Hitchcock, Italian neorealism, Nouvelle Vague) “reopened” cinema-form to the adventures of pre-cinema by modifying the perception of the linear continuity of the image in the body’s sensorimotor apparatus.
In this sense, we could even say that electronic images and contemporary experimental cinema allow a new unfolding of the image-time, not necessarily intra-cinematographic, but bypassing methods of experimenting cinema themselves, the very exogenous arrangement in which one can prove it. “Museum cinema” recreates the passage from image-movement to image-time in a new, even more technical and even more totalizing way (exploring the in-betweens of photography and cinema, just to cite one of the more obvious paths). “Electronic images will be based on another will of art, or on unfamiliar aspects of the image-time,” summarizes Deleuze (Ibid: 316) in a speculation that would prove, years later, entirely correct.
This is why, today, it is impossible to say “cinema” without either totally relativizing this category, dissolving it, or, on the other hand, imposing a prescriptive definition (that of the cinema-form, usually) over all other plausible descriptive definitions. Instead, then, we’d better ask ourselves: If cinema is being decomposed and dethroned, what is the new official visual regime? What organization of the visible has taken a leading role in contemporary times, embodying the vacuum left by cinema? Or are we still, as some utopians think, in a transitory state, in which every desired change is possible and swarms, vanishing lines, divergence patterns, proliferate? This is a question which, among others, Crary (2014) poses us: what could be the dominant or paradigmatic device of our time, if there’s any at all.
What is a GIF in relation to cinema, for example? And what if this GIF is happening on an advertising banner on the back of a newsstand? What if, right after you see it, you lower your head to direct your mind to a smartphone’s display, which features other, multiple, syncopated, animated images? What if the bus from which you are gazing accelerates, suspending you for a moment and forcing upon your cognition an ephemeral effect of traveling, for in the window are reflected, one over another, your face, streetlights and the stars? Is all of this “cinema” If not, what is it, then?
“Today, therefore, the question is no longer whether cinema can be without space, but whether spaces can still be without cinema. (…) henceforth, architecture is cinema; to the city’s habits follows an unusual motricity, (…) where the light of vehicular speed (audiovisual and automobile) renews the brightness of sunlight. The city is (…) the cinema of city lights” (Virilio, 2015: 69-70).
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Notes
[1]Every direct citation was translated into English by me for this specific publication. Sometimes the citation is translated from the original text and sometimes it is translated from the most up-to-date Portuguese version of that text. For more information, c.f. bibliography.