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Anarchival
Cinemas
Link #1: David
Lynch doesn't want to watch movies on his cell phone http://www.youtube.com/watch? In part this essay
comes from a set of speculations inspired by this clip, an instance
of a contemporary mobile media in several ways. That was David
Lynch, in an interview ripped and remixed into a cheeky commercial for
the iPhone from the “bonus” material on the two disc set of Inland
Empire (2006). Beyond Lynch’s impassioned rejection of cell
phone cinema, the clip alone raises the question, where exactly is the
event of cinema today? In what way, for example, does such extra-theatrical
bonus material count as part of the “eventness” of a film like Inland Empire? How does the circulation of this clip on YouTube
cannibalize and reanimate a conceptual persona like Lynch who stands
in for a very specific type of cinematic experience? In some ways,
it is a surprising outburst coming from an artist increasingly experimenting
with the mutability of contemporary cinematic forms, as with his move
to digital images with Inland Empire or the important place of
DavidLynch.com as a site of experimentation and content distribution.
The same mutability is evident in the baroque foldings of media architectures
in Lynch’s recent Hollywood trilogy (Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire), in
which Hollywood as real place becomes a topological site of incommensurable
yet indistinguishable relations between the acted and the lived, onscreen
and off, dream and waking life, studio and location, and film and video.
His tirade emerges from the discomfiting friction between the divergent
series of a notion of a properly cinematic experience and the host of
new technologies implicated in a new media and the mutant reproduction
of cinema. As cinema stutteringly incorporates and is excorporated by
digital technologies, these divergent series extend our own corporealities
via intensity, what Anna Munster describes as an extension that is not
itself corporeal (as with, for instance, prosthetics) but “comprising
an intensive capacity for being affected by the diverse speeds, rhythms
and flows of information” (2006, 19). The effect
of this, she notes, is an “extensive vector that draws embodiment
away from its historical capture within a notion that the body is a
bounded interiority” (33). While Lynch’s words resonate deeply with
me, I am not sure I want to so easily dismiss a new mode of embodiment
that the small screen of portable media might produce as a cinematic
architecture. What happens when we re-imagine the event of cinema
as no longer characterized by a spatially discrete and immersive place,
but in terms of the relationality of bodies moving in space-time?
Another, more practical question might be: will we ever be able to navigate
mobility while immersing our eyes in the ways that we do now easily
with the disjunctive ears of headphone listening? Imagining this
I thought, there is only one way that this could end: roadkill. The image of navigating
a visual world around this blank spot in environmental perception might
be a silly one, but it suggests an immersive mobility in extension that
is a hallmark of contemporary media experience, and simultaneously a
conceptual blank spot that either collapses or overstates the distinction
between mental and environmental ecologies. A silly image, to
be sure, but one drawn from the archive of the media of the contemporary
technobody and the supposedly dangerous forms of its new mobilities
and strange new cartographies, the threat that seems to underpin the
dangers of mobile immersive media. Actually, strolling around
the city, immersed in choosing the screen and choosing a song on my
iPod, I’ve somehow managed to survive, largely by a cross-purpose
sampling of the screen and surroundings as my eyes assessingly flicker
back and forth. Such sampling is indeed characteristic of contemporary
cinema, its disjunctive database exploited in museum installations and
the remix culture of live cinema, two prominent examples of a newly
mobile contemporary cinema.1 [1] We should remember
that the “violent threat” to the body in its incorporation of media
technologies is not merely the stuff of media fantasy but also of disciplinary
control, and we might ask instead, what else is possible from this disjunctive
articulation of sensing body and reproductive media? Why think
of this as a blind spot, or if we do, how might we think of other cross
modal sensory perceptions that might be re-attuned in creative compensation? Walter Benjamin’s
cautious proposition in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” for the radical possibilities of the distraction of
cinema is re-emerging as mobile screens mutate out of portable listening
and communications devices and re-orient our attention away from the
exclusive immersion of face to face encounter (both with other people
and also with the screen). A mobile cinema might
not be a simple extension of the atomization of crowds immersed in private
worlds of media and communication, but can provide a critique of “interfaciality”
as interactivity that dominates contemporary ideas about active spectatorship.
Lynch’s outburst shows that the question of where is cinema today
is one of affective urgency and its counterpart, uncertainty.
Affect is a sign of a hesitation of habitual response, the embodied
engagement before information. Cinema today is out of place, or
rather, it is multiply positioned in a vertiginous explosion of possibilities.
My question is not how can we fix the place of cinema today, but what
is the potential of a cinema out of scale, one whose contemporary expansion
and contraction produces a becoming–cinematic in unanticipated ways. If screen size
is taken as synecdoche for the cinema, we can observe fluctuating mutations
in our contemporary world, where miniaturization accompanies the maximalization
of the home cinema, where the interface with gaming technologies is
rewriting and reintegrating the immersive world of the “virtual window”,
to borrow Anne Friedberg’s term, as a cliché for characterizing visions
of the future. As the place of
cinema mutates out of its familiar forms, however, we need to pay attention
to the multiple places, actual and virtual, where it makes it presence
felt. As Will Straw argues:
He describes this
as producing an “enchantment effect” on these material supports
of images, where a multitude of everyday objects serve as attractors
for audiovisual imagery, giving such artifacts an expanded life and
not simply as a multiplication of the same concept (screen). Such
enchantment could be understood as a space made felt in its relationality,
or cinema as an “emergent experience”. If mutating screens
lend themselves so well to futurity, it may be because one aspect of
an emergent event is the folding of multiple temporalities. So
if an earlier, strictly aural, headphone walking might have trained
us to navigate visually today while watching a screen, we can also ask,
was cinema, with its bright screen dimming though not eliminating the
rest of the visual field and with its effect of virtual mobility, a
training ground for the split sensory mobility of (in particular) mobile
headphones? Does contemporary headphone mobility and its new cinema
at once refold a past media history and make new cinematic corporealities
possible? As I attempt to
sketch a few affective cartographies of the place of cinema today, I
want to draw on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the diagram, in particular
as he develops it in relation to the work of Michel Foucault, to suggest
that today we are we experiencing a topological relation to cinema.
A topological relation is one defined by folding; it is one of multiple
folds. Thus one way we could think about the place of cinema today
is to move away from the concrete actualizations of multiplexes, characterized
by a division into units that can be multiplied, a disciplinary simultaneity
that restricts cross-movie sampling and relationality, and a historical
separation of cinema from the flows of urban space, towards a virtualization
of the multiplex, as the reanimation of its Latin root in the word “to
fold”, a multiplicity of perspectives. How, where and when might
we sense such multiplex cinematic foldings? To think about the
place of cinema now is also to think about the potential for cinematic
modes of subjectivation, modes that, like the cinematic medium itself,
may gain strange new possibilities in their attenuation from institutional
practices and habitual encounters. Too often cinema is thought
of as an escape from reality, a source of illusory experience, or even
a technique for cannibalizing the real. How can we think otherwise
about that strange doubling of immediate experience that we might have
in an experience of becoming-cinematic? A renewed perception of the cinematic medium exists today, even as the medium itself increasingly falls into obsolescence, with digital code displacing celluloid film, the glow of electronic screens pushing back against the projector’s beam. Rosalind Krauss (2006) has argued that we are now living in a “post-medium” age, where conditions of possibility, rather than material substrate, offer us ways to articulate the workings of aesthetic practices. Such conditions of possibility extend well beyond the new tools for creation and exhibition, and disrupt communication itself. As Brian Massumi has argued: “When the communicational medium ceases to be transparent and perforce stands out in its materiality, information blends into perception. Information then precedes its understanding: it is experienced as a dimension of the confound before being understood and used and perhaps lending itself to invention” (2001, 1082). Deleuze’s concept
of the diagram and his topological aesthetics offer us a way to articulate
such an experience of the twisting and folding of information into perception.
Our perceptions are not of a world, but immediately part of it, in a
space-time that changes as we move through it in an immanently relational
configuration. The diagram is deforming: if the archive
is a “history of forms”, as Deleuze writes in his study of Foucault,
it is “doubled by an evolution of forces”, or the diagram (43).
A diagram does not only map existing actualized forms nor what Deleuze
terms “possibility” or what we already know can occur based on what
is already there. The diagram is a topological transformation
of an existing social field, engaging both with possibility and also
with virtual potential, a reserve of newness and difference. Memory
is one name that Deleuze gives to such potential. As the space of
cinema becomes increasingly redistributed in part due to its in- and
ex-corporations of digital technology, we might think of this process
as a de-measuring of the place of cinema, no longer definable by a Cartesian
positioning, discrete subject/object relations, or the centered orientation
of a perceiving subject. This de-measuring includes the loss of
a space that provides a singular external orientation for a spectator.
Gilles Deleuze identifies such a loss of scale at work in a form of
cinema in which there is no longer any “out of field”, that is to
say the creation of a contiguous space that continues outside of the
frame of the shot. “The organization of space here loses its
privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical
which the position of the screen still displays, in favour of an omni-directional
space which constantly varies its angles and coordinates, to exchange
the vertical and the horizontal” (Deleuze 1989, 265). Link #2: Pedestrian http://openendedgroup.com/ In Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser’s 2002 digital installation Pedestrian, originally created as an homage to New York city following the 9/11 attacks, synthespians (digitally created actors) produced through motion capture technology move through a city space projected from above onto a sidewalk or gallery floor. In this work of digital projection as public sculpture, these de-measured characters reanimate walking in the city via a vertiginous compression of perspectives and orientations. The piece folds the horizontal and vertical axis, creating a moving sidewalk that brings the view from above to street level. This digital embodiment of the synthespians is thus doubled for the viewer, their pedestrian movement that negotiates an immediate perception of the actual situation interfacing and interfering with a memory image sampled from the modern archive, the iconic
image of the city from a skyscraper and the tiny people down below. Link #3: Pedestrian
Clip 2 http://www.dailymotion.com/ In the first clip,
an audience hovers at the edge of space as if unsure how to enter into
the flow of movement of the city sidewalk, something that we are generally
very good at, as if they are witnesses at a crime scene. It is
a new articulation of stop-motion animation. In this second clip,
the best parts are when the child goes to kick the figures like so many
soccer balls, as much for its evocation of play as for the disjunctive
confusion between the proprioceptive (our ability to orient ourselves
in space) and the visual register that the piece enables. This
incursion of cinematic space of projection and animation into everyday
movement, for these kids, provokes a spirit of play. Discussing
his own work articulating human movement from the virtuoso movement
of dance of Bill T. Jones to the anonymous choreography of urban flows,
Kaiser describes this effect as producing a vertiginous “double vision”.
For Kaiser, the
key problem and potential he worries over in mediated movement lies
in what he understands as technology’s ability to abstract motion
from the body, an excorporative theft. If we imagine the abstraction
he describes less as an excorporative theft, and more as the generative
action of the diagram (which Deleuze also calls the abstract machine),
we can better understand the way that Kaiser’s words turn in on themselves
as the marker of change. In Foucault, Deleuze argues that
diagrams “never function in order to represent a persisting world
but produce a new kind of reality, a new model of truth…It makes history
by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds
of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable
continuums. It doubles history with a sense of continual evolution”
(35). In other words, the diagram or abstract machine provokes
new articulations in an existing social field by abstracting virtual
potential, creating new assemblages. As Deleuze and Guattari write
in A Thousand Plateaus: “There is a diagram whenever a singular
abstract machine functions directly in a matter” (142). The
diagram is the inseparability of body and milieu; in other words, we
no longer have the relation of subject and object, but only a relation
of forces, differential intensities and our propensity for assemblage
that allows for an intensive experience of an actualization and of the
virtual elements of an assemblage, the swarming mass not individuated
but made visible in its multiple, heterogeneous compositions (cells,
ant, memory, matter, movement, technology). The “double vision”
that Kaiser describes is itself always a part of what the movement of
the body entails. Pedestrian produces a super-positionality
of walkers not simply by projecting images into real spaces, but by
making forces felt in that space through a confounding of perceptive
strategies (proprioceptive and visual) and a doubling of the everyday
via memory, the memory of the feeling of walking in the city as you
hang back on the edge of the screen, the memory of a multitude of viewing
positions compressed and overlaid, and the memory of a horizontal relation
to a vertical screen: the memory of the familiar made strange.
In redeploying all of these cinematic tools, Kaiser and Eshkar make
a machine for living cinematically that reroutes the mournful response
to September 11, an event all too often described as “like a film”,
into the problem of how now to act and move, the “yet to come”. From Pedestrian’s machine for remaking urban mobility, I turn to another configuration
of contemporary media embodiment, the mobile écouteur, or from the
interior monologue to an interior sonologue. In his books on the
cinema, Gilles Deleuze claims that modern cinema is constituted of images
of “the free indirect”: through which speech, thought and vision
become disconnected from a stable and centered point of view which would
organize space into rationalized and measurable zones of sensory-motor
action. Deleuze describes modern cinema as characterized by a
“sliding of ground”, breaking the uniformity of internal monologue
to replace it by the diversity, the deformity and the otherness of free
indirect discourse, what Foucault describes as the anonymous murmur
of discourse. Deleuze characterizes such discourse as that of
the spiritual automaton, a film that thinks the unthought. The
spiritual automaton is a topological relation of viewer and images,
where interiority is nothing more than a fold of the exterior.
Here, instead of the speaking subject I, “one speaks”, and in the
topological relation that this implies, we have a means for reimaging
headphone listening not as a atomistic isolation of individual “choice”,
a management of our affective geography through soundtrack creation,
but rather as a resonant perception. A resonant perception is
one that immediately redoubles the discretion of what is perceived with
an intensive awareness of the shadings and modulations of an immersive
environment. Our engagements
with media allow us to experience our corporeality via an intensive
extension. By this, I mean an extension of the body that is not
simply spatial, but one that works via the resonance of affective encounter
on the incorporeal dimension of the body, allowing us to sense the body’s
ongoing becoming. This intensive extension doubles our sense of
immediate perception, introducing a perceptible delay into experience,
a minor gap. No longer a question of a perceiving subject and
a perceived object, this intensive extension makes relation felt as
a resonant reserve of potential. Link #4: Richard
Serra and Nancy Holt's 1974 video 'Boomerang' http://www.youtube.com/watch? In Richard Serra
and Nancy Holt’s 1974 video Boomerang, Nancy Holt witnesses
her own affective sensation of hearing her words rebounding in their
sense and sensibility within an evidently affective and temporal delay.
As Holt is filmed in medium close-up, listening to herself describe
her experience of hearing her own description through headphones, the
audio track plays the words in their tinny and disjunctive echo, a slight
auditive gap transmuted in the visuals not via a visible double but
in Holt’s visible disengagement from her surroundings. Holt
fluctuates between a fascinated perception of the echo effect and a
dutiful attempt to describe an experience of intimate strangeness, what
she calls the distinction between immediate perception versus mirror
perception. More than anything, her experience is of an involution
of the self, feeling the fold of the world that is interiority:
“I am surrounded by me and my mind is surrounded by me”, and “my
mind goes out in the world and then comes back inside of me”.
That this is not a closed circuit, or an opening of a bounded interiority,
comes across in her statement that “sometimes I say the first part
and my mind is stimulated by a new direction”. Both the video
and Holt share a sensory derangement; Holt describes her audition, here
reduced and minimized to a world held in the embrace of the headphones,
as a feeling of “eat(ing) words”, a synaesthetic serialization of
incorporation, an indistinction of the aural and alimentary canals,
or better yet, a mutation of their functionality. Holt and Serra’s
video intensifies and isolates one sense in order to intensify synaesthetic
confounding. In “Anxious Loves”, Sean Cubitt writes, “Cinema
prefers the closure of sound into an inward-directed stereophony which
imitates not the world as soundspace through which one moves altering
the sound, but the imaginary fullness of a consciousness at the assured
centre of its world” (1998). How might we imagine a different
cinematic effect that asks us to think carefully about cinematic hearing--a
technological audition? More importantly, what would this tell
us about cinema’s demeasured place in the world? This video,
itself an example of the non-newness of cinema’s ambiguous place,
stages through headphones a different kind of audio-visuality than the
one Cubitt describes as characteristic of institutionalized cinema. In reimagining
modern media space, Thomas Elsaesser suggests that: “Rather than continue
to think about the cinema as an ocular-specular phenomenon whose indexical
realism we either celebrated or whose illusionism we excoriated….
scholars now tend to regard the cinema as an immersive perceptual event.
Body and sound-space, somatic, kinetic and affective sensations have
become its default values, and not the eye, the look and ocular verification”
(2003, 120). He concludes: “no wonder film theory is attempting
to draw level with the multi-vocal sense-surround immersion in space
that is increasingly our everyday experience” (122). Elsaesser
links this contemporary shift to the ubiquity of the mobile telephone,
and in particular its function in relation to media events such as the
coverage of the 9/11 attacks, but I wonder about the model of bi-directional
and successful communication that phone implies, and the dimming of
attention to surroundings as well. Instead, I’d like to think
about that ubiquitous mobile media device, the portable headphone, and
what it suggests for a transversal cinema that replaces a strictly immersive
ideal of perceptual experience with one that makes felt the affective
gap of emergent alterfication. In relation to cinema, the headphone
is interesting for several reasons. It can reconfigure the perceptual,
especially the visual field, by sparking an awareness of, as Simondon
might describe this, the “background as harbour of dynamisms”; it
“de-syncs” sound from image, a cinematic legacy. It makes
us reimagine clichés of cinematic movement outside of the terms of
a sampling of the real and allows this creative gap to occur elsewhere
(1980, 53). The selective punch of the filmstrip and the blink
of the shutter as equivalent of the eye demand a different model of
the differential gap when confronted with the fact that as Murray Scheffer
has said, there are no earlids (2003, 25). As a mobile écouteur,
how else could we reimagine the “inward directed” soundscape Cubbitt
describes, to account less for a paranoid fantasy of corporeal threat
and instead for the joyous mutations of felt becoming? Cubitt’s
description is adequate to certain institutionalized cinematic clichés
of headphone listening--the murder victim whose pop soundtrack makes
her oblivious to an impending threat, the use of pop music and lyrics
to represent a character’s emotional state by blurring the line between
diegetic and non-diegetic sound, but other modalities of headphone experience
exist which suggest a fluctuating convergence between headphones and
cinema around questions of virtual mobility and a distracted sensorium.
Of particular relevance for any study of medium is the distributed nature
of the cinematic medium itself, where certain elements (the camera,
for instance) are frequently privileged synecdoches for the whole.
Headphones are both an integral part of that medium, essential elements
of production that speak to the “untrained” or non-selective “ear”
of sound recording devices, and also tangential to the cinematic medium,
the immersive world of sound they offer at odds with the supporting
role sound often plays in popular and academic understandings of the
audio-visuality of cinema. With the emergence
of portable media devices like the Walkman and the iPod, we are granted
access to an immersive experience that promises subjective control in
terms of affective modulation over our surroundings--if not exactly
earlids, an aural environment. However, I’m less interested
in starting from the question of the subject than I am from the question
of sociality and social relations. To do so, it is crucial not
to understand immersive headphone listening as an act of disembodiment
or disengagement, but as a discontinuity that activates the potential
for producing new kinds of connection. The immersive listening
of headphones may reawaken us to elements of the visual field in all
their strangeness and the potential of delay. The affective mobility
of headphone listening reminds us of Bergson’s claim that “real
movement is rather the transference of a state than of a thing” (202). Anna Munster asks:
“what if we were to produce a different genealogy (non-Cartesian)
for digital embodiments with the machine, one that gave us room to take
body, sensation, movement and conditions such as place and duration
into account?” (2006, 3). In a brief aside, as an answer to
her own question, Munster draws on the figure of the “walk-man”
to displace the flâneur (that figure of the mobilized virtual gaze)
with what she terms the mobile écouteur as a concept more apt
for thinking our contemporary differential incorporations of media and
information. She writes:
Part of that inhumanity,
I would argue, stems not from the interface with technology, but from
the renewed sensitivity to environmental agents, and not just other
people. One reads here both the echo of Deleuze’s control society
of modulation, in which the doctrine of flexibility takes the guise
of agentic choice in order to produce a frequently brutal availability,
adaptation and alterfication, but also another potential in the absorption
of flows which sparks not a conservative flexibility but a monstrous
mutation. The double audition
of écouteur--both listener and headphones--refers to the double
articulation of a new mode of embodiment. Marcel Duchamp once
said that you can see seeing, but you cannot hear hearing. To
hear hearing, as we might in this double audition is to stretch open
the reconfiguration of the body that merely speaking puts into proximity.
When we speak, we do hear a double audition, both the vibration carried
through air to the ear but also our voice as conducted by bone and body
to the inner region of the ear, an intracranial sensation. As
Douglas Kahn describes this, a speaker hears one voice, but others hear
it deboned; thus “the presence produced by voice always entails
a degree of delusion” (2001, 7). What is if we are not simply
deluding ourselves, however, but engaging with what Deleuze calls the
powers of the false, a double audition that repeats the self, an auto-audition
as auto-affection of the self, that sense of becoming other to what
we have been?2 [2] In French, the
Walkman is a baladeur. In his books on cinema, Deleuze draws on
a double sense of bal(l)ade—both the song and to stroll, to propose
a certain type of detoured wandering that for him, characteristic of
a cinema coming unmoored from a spatial determination and habitual extension
of action.3 [3] I’d like to take such a detour now,
to explore how the mobile écouteur might reanimate a cinematic
archive and the synecdoche of the screen. In short, what happens
when we think the cinematic medium through headphones? In keeping with
Munster’s suggestion that the mobile écouteur might be the figure of new media aesthetics, I want to look briefly
at an event based on the MP3 player that for me, reanimated the cinematic
archive; the Other Theatre’s Spiral Jetty. Through its
use of the ambiguous embodiment of headphone listening and almost hallucinatory
evocation of what we might term a virtual ecology of the audio-visual
screen, my experience in the participatory event of Spiral Jetty powerfully
produced a new existential territory for thinking cinema. The Other Theatre
is a Montreal-based experimental performance company founded by Stacey
Christadoulou. For Spiral Jetty, she collaborated with
architect Enrique Enriquez and filmmaker Tamara Scherbak, producing
a piece which exploited the time lag characteristic of cinema to reanimate
the immediacy of live experience in such a way as to call attention
to expansive and intensive modes of embodiment. Inspired by Robert
Smithson and in particular his site-specific installation Spiral
Jetty (1970), the Other Theatre sought to develop a participatory
performance using MP3 players that would transform audio experience
“into both an internal and external cinema”. In April 2009,
I joined 19 strangers, in an abandoned church now converted to a contemporary
dance studio. We were each given an MP3 player and told
to follow the instructions. At first these were simple and even
banal--walk around the space, raise your right arm in the air, stand
in a circle around the jacket. In this clip, you can see and hear
some of what took place. Link #5: Spiral
Jetty I could see that some other people appeared to have the same set of instructions as me, albeit at a staggered time delay. At first I kept wondering if I should listen to the voice, whether it was reasonable to be so passive, but in fact, I did not feel passive at all. For one thing, I was clearly part of a choreography that was neither improvised nor rehearsed--a decidedly unusual experience and one with a distinct and distributed temporality. Secondly, the intimacy of the non-deboned voice in my head made my movements and my body into a resonant space; I became for the time being a hollow body with a distinct sense of standing apart from myself while being fully in control of my actions as well. This apartness was doubly resonant, both in the unfolding echoes of my movement alongside the other participants in the space and in the interior occupation of my body. In other words, I felt myself engaged in what Whitehead terms “prehension”, the activity before action. While the first half of the piece was active--do this, do that--eventually I was “shot” and instructed to crumple to the floor. After a while, some people came and dragged me to a different part of the room, and the sound changed from physical action to mental imagery via detailed descriptions of scenarios, inducing in me an almost hallucinatory state of virtual doing. As I lay there, I was dreaming the visuals of this strictly aural description into
being. This was my first experience in the piece of a becoming-cinematic. After the piece was over, walking home through the park, listening to my headphones, I was helplessly struck by an almost paranoid and passionate interest in what others were doing and hearing when I saw them with their headphones. What instructions were they receiving? The entire visual field seemed charged with a cinematic potential by this experience. Why characterize this as becoming cinematic? In part, because of the way it reactivated my embodied technological articulation, but also because it produced a sense of standing aside from myself, and recording without registering my engagement with the world. Such automated choreography, a guiding of perception and affective modulation, is deeply familiar from watching movies. Spiral Jetty made explicit the kind of directed attention that editing, framing and soundtrack do implicitly by pre-selecting which elements of a shots are crucial. However, by juxtaposing such explicit selection (imagine this, picture that) with a long sequence where we were left to dream our own guided imagery reveals that lie at the heart of apparatus theory, which sees cinema as a mechanical production of standardized effects, ignoring the haze of potential that every spectator brings on-scene. Instead, Spiral Jetty makes apparent this potential of a machinic producer of difference, where the machinic is the term for articulation. The active passivity of Spiral Jetty also shows the limits of a critique of cinema that posits its salvation only in “interactivity”, such as “choose your own adventure” models of fragmented narratives. I myself was the recording device in the piece, playing back my affective sensation at a delay as with Nancy Holt. What would it mean to understand a becoming-cinematic of space as a hallucinatory experience? Would this not simply return us to a simple sense of subjective experience? Where is the dissonant self that can become other than what it was? As a coda to these,
I want to come back to the scene of the screen and a different mode
of walking that, like the transversal experiments of the Other Theatre, Pedestrian and others, is an affective cartography of cinema today,
from a filmmaker best known as a memory worker. Link #6: Sleepwalkers http://www.youtube.com/user/ Guy Maddin is
notorious as a filmmaker who reanimates the archive of cinematic style,
making films that are dynamic pastiches of obsolete cinematic styles,
degrading the image to call loving attention to the celluloid medium
itself. In recent years, Maddin has produced an “autobiographical
trilogy” of works (2003’s Cowards Bend the Knee, 2006’s Brand Upon the Brain and 2007’s My Winnipeg), in which
his typical plundering of stylistic archives is mapped onto what he
calls “docu-fantasia” of his own life and milieu. Form and
expression become increasingly indistinct in his work, and it is ironically
through the cinematic self-portrait of “Guy Maddin” that he approaches
Foucault’s “anonymous murmur”, redistributing consistency and
heterogeneity. This trilogy is marked not only by an obsessive
attempt to explore the past of context but also through experiment with
cinematic forms from the early days of cinema culture, including live
orchestration and narration, installation of peephole cinemas. This following clip is from the delightful My Winnipeg, commissioned
by the Documentary channel, is a diagram of that city shot through at
every level with the uncanny liveliness of the media archive.
If Maddin’s films have often figured Winnipeg as the radiant heart
of a continent, as in his recent short Night Mayor (2009), My Winnipeg is an attempt to make sensible the virtualities underpinning,
intersecting and resonating amidst the affective and actual cartographies
he describes. Maddin has described
the film as a “walking film”, and the sleepwalker is a critical
figure here. Much of the film relies on uncomfortable juxtapositions
and a lack of authorized common spaces that are displaced of zones of
intimate exposure, neither public nor private: a relational network
of back alleys navigated by taxis, homeless rooftop shanties, afterhours
deviant occupations of governmental, sporting and shopping spaces.
Maddin explores that way that memory is a distributed event, at once
what is most intimate to ourselves, the ground of subjectivity, and
the name for what opens us to the world. Through media memories,
which are neither public nor private, we make unauthorized claims; they
give us an illicit purchase that is activated by duration. Such
is the figure of the sleepwalker in Maddin’s film. In this way,
the sleepwalker is the figure of a lived image. Unlike accounts
of media, which compare cinema to a dream, usually positing a distinction
between dream life and waking like, Maddin’s figure of the sleepwalker
is immediately doubled by the strange witness or witnessing stranger,
the proper occupant dispossessed of ownership and charged with the responsibility
of witnessing duration. In this doubling of dreaming and witness,
away from an interfacial encounter, Maddin reanimates the ethico-aesthetical
responsiveness that cinema can create. Sleepwalker and witness
share an immersive estrangement and eventness of relation. In describing
the diagram that doubles and disrupts the archive in Foucault, Deleuze
speaks of a return to an anonymous murmur underpinning an authorized
and determining relation between the seen and the said in the archive,
the basis of representation and interpretation. Such an anonymous
murmur emerges in the doubled resonance of Nancy Holt’s self-perception,
in the hesitation of pedestrian movement in Kaiser and Eshkar’s piece,
in the automatic cinema produced by the Other Theatre’s headphone
choreographies. In Maddin’s film, such a murmur emerges in the
superposed mappings of city and self via cinema. In the
multiplex strangeness of this encounter, we can perhaps see the place
of a spatially uncoordinated cinema dispossessed of a singular space,
and keys in hand, wandering errantly, making itself at home. Notes Bibliography Bergson, Henri.
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and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Translated and edited by Sean Hand. London: Athalone Press. Deleuze, Gilles.
1989. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Translated by Hugh
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2006. “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition”. October 116 (Spring 2006) 55-62. Massumi, Brian.
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New York: Berg. 25-40. Simondon, Gilbert. 1958. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne. Translated by Ninian Mellamphy with a Preface by John Hart. London, ON :University of Western Ontario, 1980. http://www.scribd.com/doc/ Straw, Will. 2000. “Proliferating Screens.” Screen. 41.1 (Spring): 118-119. |
>> Table of Contents edited by B. Mancini, J. Weirsman Healing Series Brian Knep 276-278 R.U.N.: A Short Statement on the Work Paul Gazzola 279-282 Castings: A Conversation Deborah Margo, Bianca Scliar Mancini and Janita Wiersma 283-308 Matter, Manner, Idea Sjoerd van Tuinen 309-334 On Critique Brian Massumi 335-338 Loco-Motion Andrew Murphie 339-341 An Emergent Tuning as Molecular Organizational Mode Heidi Fast 342-358 |
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