In regard to the materiality of the photograph’s authenticating power, it is instructive to recall one of a number of particularly relevant ironies in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), a science fiction film focusing on the ambiguous ontological status of a group of genetically manufactured “replicants.” At a certain moment, Rachel, the film’s putative heroine and the latest replicant prototype, disavows the revelation of her own manufactured status by pointing to a series of keepsake photographs that give “proof” to her mother’s existence, to her own existence as a little girl, to her subjective memory. Upon being told that both her memory and their material extroversion “belong to someone else,” she is both distraught and ontologically re-signed as someone with no “real” life, no “real” history–although she still remembers what she remembers and the photographs still sit on her piano. Indeed, the photographs are suddenly foregrounded (for the human spectator as well as the narrative’s replicant) as utterly suspect. That is, when interrogated, the photographs simultaneously both reveal and lose that great material and circulatory value they commonly hold for all of us as the “money of the ‘real.’”
The structures of objectification and material possession that constitute the photographic as both a “real” trace of personal experience and a concrete extroversion of experience that can “belong to someone else” give specific form to its temporal existence. In capturing aspects of “life itself” in a “real” object that can be possessed, copied, circulated, and saved as the “currency” of experience, the appropriable materiality and static form of photography accomplish a palpable intervention in what was popularly perceived in the mid-nineteenth century to be time’s linear, orderly, and teleological flow from past to present to future. The photograph freezes and preserves the homogeneous and irreversible momentum of this temporal stream into the abstracted, atomized, and secured space of a moment. But at a cost. A moment cannot be inhabited. It cannot entertain in the abstraction of its visible space, its single and static point of view, the presence of a lived-body–and so it does not really invite the spectator into the scene (although it may invite contemplation of the scene). In its conquest of time, the photographic constructs a space to hold and to look at, a “thin” insubstantial space that keeps the lived-body out even as it may imaginatively catalyze–in the parallel but temporalized space of memory or desire–an animated drama.
The radical difference between the transcendental, posited moment of the photograph and the existential momentum of the cinema, between the scene to be contemplated and the scene to be lived, is foregrounded in the remarkable short film La jet?e (Chris Marker, 1962).[20] A study of desire, memory, and time, La jet?e is presented completely through the use of still photographs–except for one extraordinarily brief but utterly compelling sequence in which the woman who is the object of the hero’s desire, lying in bed and looking toward the camera, blinks her eyes. The space between the camera’s (and the spectator’s) gaze becomes suddenly habitable, informed with the real possibility of bodily movement and engagement, informed with a lived temporality rather than an eternal timelessness. What, in the film, has previously been a mounting accumulation of nostalgic moments achieves substantial and present presence in its sudden accession to momentum and the consequent possibility of effective action.
As did Andr? Bazin (1967), we might think of photography, then, as primarily a form of mummification (although, unlike Bazin, I shall argue that cinema is not.)[21] While it testifies to and preserves a sense of the world and experience’s real “presence,” it does not preserve their present. The photographic–unlike the cinematic and the electronic–functions neither as a coming-into-being (a presence always presently constituting itself) nor as being-in-itself (an absolute presence). Rather, it functions to fix a being-that-has been (a presence in the present that is always past). Paradoxically, as it objectifies and preserves in its acts of possession, the photographic has something to do with loss, with pastness, and with death, its meanings and value intimately bound within the structure and investments of nostalgia.
Although dependent upon the photographic, the cinematic has something more to do with life, with the accumulation–not the loss–of experience. Cinematic technology animates the photographic and reconstitutes its visibility and verisimilitude in a difference not of degree but of kind. The moving picture is s a visible representation not of activity finished or past, but of activity coming-into-being–and its materiality comes to be in the 1890’s, the second of Jameson’s transformative moments of “technological revolution within capital itself.” During this moment, the combustion engine and electric power literally reenergized market capitalism into the highly controlled yet expansive structure of monopoly capitalism. Correlatively, the new cultural logic of “modernism” emerged, restructuring and eventually dominating the logic of realism to more adequately represent the new perceptual experience of an age marked by the strange autonomy and energetic fluidity of, among other mechanical phenomena, the motion picture. The motion picture, while photographically verisimilar, fragments, reorders, and synthesizes time and space as animation in a completely new “cinematic” mode that finds no necessity in the objective teleo-logic of realism. Thus, although modernism has found its most remarked expression in the painting and photography of the futurists (who attempted to represent motion and speed in a static form) and the cubists (who privileged multiple perspectives and simultaneity), and in the novels of James Joyce, we can see in the cinema modernism’s fullest representation.[22]
Philosopher Arthur Danto tells us, “with the movies, we do not just see that they move, we see them moving: and this is because the pictures themselves move.”[23] While still objectifying the subjectivity of the visual into the visible, the cinematic qualitatively transforms the photographic through a materiality that not only claims the world and others as objects for vision but also signifies its own bodily agency, intentionality, and subjectivity. Neither abstract nor static, the cinematic brings the existential activity of vision into visibility in what is phenomenologically experienced as an intentional stream of moving images–its continous and autonomous visual production and meaningful organization of these images testifying to the objective world and, further, to an anonymous, mobile, embodied, and ethically invested subject of worldly space. This subject (however physically anonymous) is able to inscribe visual and bodily changes of situation, to dream, hallucinate, imagine, and re-member its habitation and experience of the world. And, as is the case with human beings, this subject’s potential mobility and experience are both open-ended and bound by the existential finitude and bodily limits of its particular vision and historical coherence (that is, its narrative).
Here, again, La jet?e is exemplary. Despite the fact that the film is made up of what strikes us as a series of discrete and still photographs rather than the “live” and animated action of human actors, even as it foregrounds the transcendental and atemporal non-becoming of the photograph, La jet?e nonetheless phenomenologically projects as a temporal flow and an existential becoming. That is, as a whole, the film organizes, synthesizes. and enunciates the discrete photographic images into animated and intentional coherence and, indeed, makes this temporal synthesis and animation its explicit narrative theme. What La jet?e allegorizes in its explicit narrative, however, is the transformation of the moment to momentum that constitutes the ontology of the cinematic, and the latent background of every film.
While the technology of the cinematic is grounded, in part, in the technology of the photographic, we need to remember that “the essence of technology is nothing technological.” The fact that the technology of the cinematic necessarily depends upon the discrete and still photograph moving intermittently (rather than continuously) through the shutters of both camera and projector does not sufficiently account for the materiality of the cinematic as we experience it. Unlike the photograph, a film is semiotically engaged in experience not merely as a mechanical objectification–or material reproduction –that is, not merely as an object for vision. Rather, the moving picture, however mechanical and photographic its origin, is semiotically experienced as also subjective and intentional, as presenting representation of the objective world. Thus perceived as the subject of its own vision as well as an object for our vision, a moving picture is not precisely a thing that (like a photograph) can be easily controlled, contained, or materially possessed. Up until very recently in what has now become a dominantly electronic culture, the spectator could share in and thereby, to a degree, interpretively alter a film’s presentation and representation of embodied and enworlded experience, but could not control or contain its autonomous and ephemeral flow and rhythm, or materially possess its animated experience. Now, of course, with the advent of videotape and VCRs, the spectator can alter the film’s temporality and easily possess, at least, its inanimate “body.” However, the ability to control the autonomy and flow of the cinematic experience through “fast forwarding,” “replaying,” and “freezing” [24] and the ability to possess the film’s body and animate it at will at home are functions of the materiality and technological ontology of the electronic–a materiality that increasingly dominates, appropriates, and transforms the cinematic.
In its pre-electronic state and original materiality, however, the cinematic mechanically projects and makes visible for the very first time not just the objective world, but the very structure and process of subjective, embodied vision–hitherto only directly available to human beings as that invisible and private structure we each experience as “my own.” That is, the materiality of the cinematic gives us concrete and empirical insight and makes objectively visible the reversible, dialectical, and social nature of our own subjective vision. Speaking of human vision, Merleau-Ponty tells us: “As soon as we see other seers…henceforth, through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible…For the first time, the seeing that I am is for me really visible; for the first time I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes.”[25] The cinematic uniquely allows this philosophical turning, this objective insight into the subjective structure of vision, into oneself as both viewing subject and visible object, and, remarkably, into others as the same.
Again, the paradoxical status of the “more human than human” replicants in Blade Runner is instructive. Speaking to the biotechnologist who genetically produced and quite literally manufactured his eyes, replicant Roy Baty says with an ironic concreteness that resonates through the viewing audience even if its implications are not fully understood: “If you could only see what I’ve seen with your eyes.” The perceptive and expressive materiality of the cinematic through which we engage this ironic articulation of the “impossible” desire for intersubjectivity is the very materiality through which this desire is visibly and objectively fulfilled.[26] Thus, rather than merely replacing human vision with mechanical vision, the cinematic mechanically functions to bring to visibility the reversible structure of human vision (the system visual/visible)–a lived-system that necessarily entails not only an enworlded object but always also an embodied and perceiving subject.
Indeed, through its motor and organizational agency (achieved by the spatial immediacy of the mobile camera and the reflective and temporalizing editorial re-membering of that primary spatial experience), the cinematic inscribes and provokes a sense of existential “presence” that is as synthetically centered as it is also mobile, split, and decentering. The cinematic subject (both film and spectator) is perceived as at once introverted and extroverted, as existing in the world as both subject and object. Thus, the cinematic does not evoke the same sense of self-possession as that generated by the photographic. The cinematic subject is sensed as never completely self-possessed, for it is always partially and visibly given over to the vision of others at the same time that it visually appropriates only part of what it sees and, indeed, also cannot entirely see itself. Further, the very mobility of its vision structures the cinematic subject as always in the act of displacing itself in time, space, and the world–and thus, despite its existence as embodied and centered, always eluding its own (as well as our) containment.
The cinematic’s visible inscription of the dual, reversible, and animated structure of embodied and mobile vision radically transforms the temporal and spatial structure of the photographic. Consonant with what Jameson calls the “high-modernist thematics of time and temporality,” the cinematic thickens the photographic with “the elegaic mysteries of dur?e and of memory.”[27] While its visible structure of “unfolding” does not challenge the dominant realist perception of objective time as an irreversibly directed stream (even flashbacks are contained by the film’s vision in a forwardly directed momentum of experience), the cinematic makes time visibly heterogeneous. That is, we visibly perceive time as differently structured in its subjective and objective modes, and we understand that these two structures simultaneously exist in a demonstrable state of discontinuity as they are, nonetheless, actively and constantly synthesized in a specific lived-body experience (i.e., a personal, concrete, and spatialized history and a particularly temporalized narrative).
Cinema’s animated presentation of representation constitutes its “presence” as always presently engaged in the experiential process of signifying and coming-into-being. Thus the significant value of the “streaming forward” that informs the cinematic with its specific form of temporality (and differentiates it from the atemporality of the photographic) is intimately bound to a structure not of possession, loss, pastness, and nostalgia, but of accumulation, ephemerality, and anticipation–to a “presence” in the present informed by its connection to a collective past and to a future. Visually (and aurally) presenting the subjective temporality of memory, desire, and mood through flashbacks, flash forwards, freeze framing, pixilation, reverse motion, slow motion, and fast motion, and the editorial expansion and contraction of experience, the cinema’s visible (and audible) activity of retension and protension constructs a subjective temporality different from the irreversible direction and momentum of objective time, yet simultaneous with it. In so thickening the present, this temporal simultaneity also extends cinematic presence spatially–not only embracing a multiplicity of situations in such visual/visible cinematic articulations as double exposure, superimposition, montage, parallel editing, but also primally, expanding the space in every image between that Here where the enabling and embodied cinematic eye is situated and that There where its gaze locates itself in its object.
The cinema’s existence as simultaneously presentational and representational, viewing subject and visible object, present presence informed by both past and future, continuous becoming that synthesizes temporal heterogeneity as the conscious coherence of embodied experience, transforms the thin abstracted space of the photographic into a thickened and concrete world. We might remember here the animated blinking of a woman’s eyes in La jet?e and how this visible motion transforms the photographic into the cinematic, the flat surface of a picture into the lived space of a lover’s bedroom. In its capacity for movement, the cinema’s embodied agency (the camera) thus constitutes visual/visible space as always also motor and tactile space–a space that is deep and textural, that can be materially inhabited, that provides not merely a ground for the visual/visible, but also its particular situation. Indeed, although it is a favored term among film theorists, there is no such abstraction as point of view in the cinema. Rather, there are concrete situations of viewing –specific and mobile engagements of embodied, enworlded, and situated subjects/objects whose visual/visible activity prospects and articulates a shifting field of vision from a world whose horizons always exceed it. The space of the cinematic, in-formed by cinematic time, is also experienced as heterogeneous–both discontiguous and contiguous, lived from within and without. Cinematic presence is multiply located–simultaneously displacing itself in the There of past and future situations yet orienting these displacements from the Here where the body at present is. That is, as the multiplicity and discontinuity of time are synthesized and centered and cohere as the experience of a specific lived-body, so are multiple and discontiguous spaces synopsized and located in the spatial synthesis of a particular material body. Articulated as separate shots and scenes, discontiguous spaces and discontinuous times are synthetically gathered together in a coherence that is the cinematic lived-body: the camera its perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ, the screen its discrete and material center. In sum, the cinematic exists as a visible performance of the perceptive and expressive structure of lived-body experience.