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Film-Philosophy International
Salon-Journal (ISSN 1466-4615) Vol. 9 No. 29, May 2005 |
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Richard Misek Analogue Film, Digital Discourse: Sean Cubitt's _The Cinema Effect_ Sean Cubitt Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004 ISBN 0-262-03312-7 456 pp. The last several years have witnessed the mass transfer
of old (pre-digital) films onto digital formats. Re-mastered versions of
classic movies are released on DVD every week. Though the exhibition of
feature films on 35mm continues, the day when all but a handful of archive
cinemas will have switched to digital projection cannot be far away. When
that finally happens, virtually every time a pre-digital film is seen, it
will be in a digitally mediated manner. The incursion of digital technology
into analogue film will be complete. In the light of this physical
digitization of cinema, it is not surprising that someone should try to
effect an analogous conceptual digitization. Sean Cubitt's brilliant,
infuriating new book, _The Cinema Effect_, attempts just this. It looks at
the (largely analogue) history of cinema through the filter of the (digital)
present. As the fly-leaf puts it, 'Cubitt proposes a history of images in
motion from a digital perspective, for a digital audience.' In this review, I
explore what this entails. Cubitt's scope is, of necessity, as broad as cinema
itself. The subjects that he discusses 'from a digital perspective' are
accordingly diverse. He traces the development of mise-en-scene in the Lumieres'
first films, from the haphazard framing of _Workers Leaving the Factory_ to
the spatialized narrative of _L'Arroseur arrose_. He explores the use of line
in early animation and looks for coherence in the apparently diverse output
of the RKO studio in the 1930s. He suggests interpretations for the
slow-motion deaths in Peckinpah's westerns and accounts for the pleasures of
the long-duration steadicam shot. He discusses the aesthetics of CGI and
places the hermetic digital environments of modern Hollywood effects films
into a political context. If _The Cinema Effect_ has a dominant theme, it is
that of film's increasingly complex delineation of space and time over its
eleven decade history. But in the end it is down to Cubitt's 'digital
perspective' to make the book cohere. How is it possible to look at analogue art from a
digital perspective? The most obvious way is by singling out elements of
digitality in individual pre-digital works. The pointilism of Seurat and Pissaro
can be seen as anticipating the pixel. The visual loops in Zbigniew
Rybczynski's animations can be seen as anticipating the repeat button. An
example of such criticism is a recent article by Marsha Kinder which
highlights digital aspects of Luis Bunuel's films. For example, the multiple
entrances in _The Exterminating Angel_ are seen as a form of database
narrative. [1] Instead of following the convention of using one take from
each slate, Bunuel used multiple takes. The resulting repetition and variation
draws attention to the database of shots from which the film was constructed,
and to the existence of the multiple options that prefigure each narrative
choice. Kinder's article is a lively piece, faultlessly argued. However,
finding evidence of digitality in pre-digital films almost inevitably leads
critics towards the same, somewhat obvious conclusion that the artists behind
these works were ahead of their time. Pre-digital digitality is seen as an
anomaly, restricted to occasional works by visionaries like Bunuel. So the
conceptual separation between analogue and digital remains intact. Cubitt goes further. He attempts to break down this
separation and apply digital terminology to cinema itself. He summarizes his
intention in the following way: 'I want to supplant the metaphors of film as
language pursued by Metz . . . and film as psychology pursued by Bordwell . .
. with a more digital analysis of the mathematical bases of motion' (7-8).
For example, Cubitt refers to cinema as a pixellation of reality, dividing
the continuum of time into individually imperceptible frames just as a
scanner transforms a photograph into individually imperceptible dots. Early
one-shot films are the analogue cinematic embodiment of the pixel. Within the
filmstrip as well as in the history of film as art, the pixel is followed by
the cut: 'Cutting literally puts an end to the eternal now of the
non-identical . . . Terminal (but not final) the cut defines the term and the
terms of objection, transforming raw perception into an object for
consciousness, establishing the object as a perception of which an 'I' is
conscious' (71). Formally, the cut replaces one group of still images with
another, while historically it gave audiences their first inkling of film
form, in both cases initiating a new trajectory towards an open-ended future.
Cubitt refers to this new line of movement as the vector. Cubitt's metaphors are elegant. The fact that they are
rooted in the filmstrip, the lowest common denominator of film production, is
particularly satisfying. But are they enough to reconfigure the language of
cinematic discourse? The simple answer is no. Unlike Metz and Bordwell,
Cubitt does not provide a metaphor for cinema as a whole but a collection of
metaphors for specific aspects of cinema. His various uses of digital
terminology -- 'pixel', 'vector', 'keyframe', 'parse', 'rasterize' -- all
imply the presence of a governing metaphor, but that metaphor is never
stated. It is not stated, one has to assume, because it does not exist. Metz's
individual linguistic metaphors (for example, that of the shot as sentence)
are extensions of a governing metaphor of cinema as language. Cubitt has no
equivalent governing metaphor to offer the world. In fact, on closer
examination, what his digital terms are metaphors for is constantly shifting.
As mentioned above, his use of the term 'cut' is both historical and
aesthetic. Cubitt's vector is even more multi-faceted. It is variously a line
in an animation (80), a long-duration shot (110, 228), a label for the period
in cinema history that corresponds to 'the Lacanian Symbolic' (70), and more
generally 'the becoming of something as yet unseen' (72). The way in which he
uses the term depends on its context. From a distance, Cubitt's uses of
digital terminology appear to fit together within a larger structure. Seen up
close, often their only connection is their digital origin. The amorphous nature of Cubitt's metaphors reflects the
fact that he provides no new theory of cinema to underpin them. Metz and Bordwell
did more than just develop a (linguistic) metaphor -- they provided a new
(conceptual) perspective. Bordwell's view of films as an accumulation of
sense data and his exploration of how viewers process information
revolutionized the study of narrative. His new psychological metaphors became
established because they were the linguistic expression of a new way of
analyzing film. Cubitt's new metaphors are not accompanied by any equivalent
conceptual reconfiguration. They do not force the reader to reassess what
film is. For example, his metaphor of the filmstrip as temporal pixellation
may provoke in the reader many worthwhile strands of thought: about what is
analogue and what is digital, about the interdependence of time and space,
about the structures that underpin images of reality as well as reality
itself. But for all its power, it remains just a metaphor. Perhaps, despite his initial statement of intent, Cubitt
is not actually trying to provide a new digital language for analogue film.
It is telling that he never provides a complete explanation for why analogue
film should be analyzed 'from a digital perspective' at all. Early in the
book he explains that his pixel metaphor has come about because 'we look back
from an age in which images are encoded mathematically, and because in a
digital age the humanities can no longer afford to remain innumerate' (33).
Cubitt here comes dangerously close to suggesting that digital discourse
should be used (and to implying that he himself uses digital discourse) in
order to appear cutting edge. Two chapters later, he provides a more
mythologically-tinged explanation when he justifies his use of the term 'vector'
by invoking cinema's 'digital destiny' (70). Considering the intensity with
which, later in the book, he critiques the fatalism of 'neobaroque' and 'technological'
cinema for its refusal to acknowledge the moral responsibility of the
individual to help shape humanity's future, his use of the word 'destiny' is
clearly rhetorical. Perhaps Cubitt's project of digitizing the language of
cinema studies is also rhetorical. Rhetoric plays a pivotal role in _The Cinema Effect_.
Cubitt's mixture of academic terminology, technological metaphor, and
elaborate syntax contains frequent evidence of rhetorical technique. For
example, he describes the repetitive patterns implied by _Workers Leaving the
Factory_ in the following way: 'Not only is the film always already a
repetition of a profilmic event; not only is it ready to be shown over and
over; not only is it a series of very nearly identical frames; but the event
it records takes place daily, and though every day in a unique manner,
nonetheless also in some degree the same' (21). The way in which he uses
repetitive patterns to discuss repetitive patterns is almost literary. Cubitt
provides his reader with a double pleasure -- that of cogent ideas,
eloquently phrased. However, one sometimes feels he is so much in thrall to
the power of words that the he is more interested in his words than the
images described by them. When a chicken in _Felix the Cat_ is referred to as
'burglarious' (78), one can almost visualize Cubitt's delight at having just
conjured up such a word. And does he really need to use such words as 'anthropophagy'
(284)? Often Cubitt's theoretical and linguistic rhetoric merge
-- he often skips a few logical steps or avoids the prosaic task of defining
his terms, thereby achieving a sentence that sounds just right and carries a
meaning that cannot be precisely pinpointed. For example, he says that: 'Digital
film proposes a mode of communication in which the central purpose is to
create subjects for the object of communication, subjects that exist only to
be subsumed into the object, and thus to achieve a plenitude in which no
further communication is desired or necessary.' (270) There is a fundamental
truth here, but doesn't Cubitt mean 'recent medium to high budget Hollywood
spectacle' rather than 'digital film'? The term would look clumsy in his
highly polished prose, but through the partial abstraction of 'recent medium
to high budget Hollywood spectacle' into the undefined concept of 'digital
film' Cubitt weakens an otherwise persuasive argument. The book's structural unity is also rhetorical. It
comprises twelve chapters, plus introduction and conclusion, separated into
three sections -- 'Pioneer Cinema', 'Normative Cinema', and 'Post Cinema'.
The chapters have titles such as 'Graphical Film', 'Classical Film', and 'Technological
Film'. Each chapter, by implication, appears to refer to a distinct class of
film. The implication is also that together these twelve categories encompass
the entirety of film history. In fact, neither is the case. For example, _The
Matrix_ is used as an example of both neobaroque film and technological film.
So too, many types of films are not covered by any of Cubitt's analyses. His
chapter on 'Classical Film' in fact focuses only on a specific subset of
classical film -- the RKO films in the 1930s, and even more specifically on
their use of dialogue. What does this illusion of theoretical and structural
coherence conceal? The answer can be gleaned from the book's
acknowledgements. These reveal that _The Cinema Effect_ is derived from two
published articles and over twenty talks, lectures, and conference papers.
Cubitt has clearly spent much time and ingenuity reworking his source
material, but there is no escaping the book's fragmentary genesis. In this,
_The Cinema Effect_ is typical of the recent academic trend of creating books
out of pre-fabricated units. However, the fragmentary structure of Cubitt's
book is far more deeply rooted than that of most concealed anthologies. It is
almost post-structuralist. Not only is each chapter on a different subject,
but even within chapters, Cubitt's arguments move lightly from subject to
subject. Sometimes an argument is sustained for several pages, and sometimes
it barely lasts a paragraph before a new connection is made, and Cubitt's
focus shifts to follow a new vector. Sometimes this new line of argument
loops back to reference previous lines of argument, sometimes it doesn't.
Even within sentences, Cubitt frequently slips in quick parentheses when he
has an idea that cannot wait. In fact, many of his most brilliant flashes of
inspiration occur parenthetically. For example, in the middle of a line
discussing photography and film, he interjects, 'in England we still use the
plural form when going to the pictures' (23); in his analysis of _La Regle du
jeu_ he refers to 'the film -- which I have been calling 'Renoir'' (145);
when discussing global markets he observes 'from 'Have you seen X?' to 'Have
you seen X yet?' -- the hallmark of the event movie' (269). The book
comprises dense matrices of ideas rather than clear, linear arguments. The
result, in short, is a database narrative. So, though it fails in its (apparent) goal of providing
a digital language for analogue film, _The Cinema Effect_ can be seen as an
authentically digital artifact after all. Not only is it a database of
articles, arguments and asides by Cubitt himself, it is also a database of
others' writings, as the awe-inspiringly long bibliography demonstrates. The
book provides an almost hypertextual network of references. Phrases such as: 'As
Benjamin (1969) suggested, Zielinski (1999) argues, and Crafton (1997)
demonstrates' (162) are commonplace throughout its 400-odd pages. (Indeed,
the paragraphs are so dense with references that it is sometimes quite
difficult to unpick which are Cubitt's ideas and which are not.) Through
those most digital of tools, the cut and paste commands, Cubitt creates an
astonishingly complex intellectual database. So it is as a database narrative that this book should
be read. Freed from looking for sustained arguments, and of feeling the need
to understand every word of every sentence, it is possible to enjoy the book's
brilliant fragments without the accompanying frustration of having been made
to work so hard for so little theoretical result. Approached this way, Cubitt's
use of the same words for various metaphorical ends also ceases to be a
problem -- each new usage can be seen within a different conceptual context.
One meaning gives way to multiple meanings, as in Bunuel's alternate takes.
But even taking its database nature as a given, _The Cinema Effect_ remains a
slippery work. If Cubitt is indeed rejecting determinate meaning and
deliberately avoiding meta-narrative, why does he conceal this fact? Why does
he organize his material chronologically, divide it into seemingly schematic
chapters, and even occasionally utilize conjunctions ('but', 'therefore', 'so',
etc.) to provide the appearance of causal connections when none exist? _The
Cinema Effect_ is a contradictory work. It feels like the progeny of both
Habermas and Lyotard. This contradiction begs the question -- what is Cubitt
actually doing here? Why did he write the book in the way he did? Why such
complex language and such a schematic structure? What is his primary
intellectual objective? Having lived with the book for the last two months, I
still don't understand. University of
Melbourne, Australia Note 1. Marsha Kinder, 'Hot Spots, Avatars,
and Narrative Fields Forever: Bunuel's Legacy for New Digital Media and
Interactive Database Narrative', _Film Quarterly_, vol. 55 no. 4, Summer
2002, p. 12. Copyright İ Film-Philosophy 2005 Richard Misek, 'Analogue Film, Digital Discourse: Sean
Cubitt's _The Cinema Effect_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 9 no. 29, May 2005
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol9-2005/n29misek>. |
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