What Was Cinema?

Rodowick begint met het einde van de film 1989: film wordt video

In the current time of rapid technological change, “film” as a photographic medium is disappearing as every element of cinema production is replaced by digital technologies.

By “cinema” I mean the projection of a photographically recorded filmstrip in a theatrical setting.

Rodowick begint met het einde van de film 1989: film wordt video

Twee belangrijke veranderingen:

• The decentring of the theatrical film experience, which already has profound consequences for the phenomenology of movie experiences

• The displacement of a medium wherein every phase of the film process is being replaced with digital technologies

The Death of CinemaAD2: wat betekent digitalisering?• Jurassic park: photographic

process (and its physical reality) as an obstacle to creativity

• Traditional film theory noemt dit ‘remediation’= hypermediacy en transparacy (Bolter and Grusin)

• Rodowick bevraagt dit: What we call ‘film’ is an unstable or variable object unanchored by familiar aesthetic criteria or self identity.

Hallelujah mountains versus Southern Sky mountains

Wat is dan film?

We moeten belangrijke filosofische vragen opnieuw stellen:

• What is a medium?• Is ‘film’ in the conventional

sense fundamentally tied to photography as a medium?

• When filmmaking and viewing become fully digital arts, will a certain experience of cinema be irretrievably lost?

Tegen het Formalisme: A Medium in All Things

Carroll zoekt naar definities van artistic media:– The criterion of self identity=medium specifiek

• Maar is een medium wel eenvormig en tijdloos?– Aesthetic a prioris= creative options

• Veronderstelt weer een gemeenschappelijk vertrekpunt– The injunctive argument= what artists should do

• Maar door allerlei externe factoren verandert de praktijk voortdurend

Carroll zoekt naar nonessentialistische ‘moving pictures’ maar is zuiver logisch, niet ecologisch, technisch consistent maar aesthetisch oninteressant. Het blijft essentialistisch, teleologisch en injunctief (voorschriften).

Automatism and ArtA medium is a terrain where works of art establish their modes of existence, and pose questions of existence to us.Hoe betekent dit een vernieuwen en uitbereiden van de artistieke automatismen? Ze zijn iteratief (herhalend). Dat alleen creert de identiteit van het medium. -they are transsubjective and perpetuate repetitiveness, similarity or continuity.-responding creatively is to create new styles (differences) (radicaler dan McLuhan)

Medium is expressive as potentiae, or powers, of thought, action, or creation… in exceeding or exhausting them we may in fact create a new medium and new powers of thought and creation. (45) (Denk aan Deleuze over ideeen)

Automatism and Photography• Bazin: photography is formed

automatically, without the creative intervention of man. (conversion of light into matter)

• Weer een poging dit automatische process te definieren voor fotografie: er zijn automatische procedures, er is een isomorphisme (constancy of form), foto’s zijn analoog (continuous and indivisable)

Succession and the Film StripIn film, the automated quality of succession means that, under normal conditions, depicted movement is homeomorphic with photographed movement. Animation, in the sense of reconstituting movement from a series of still images, is at the heart of all analogical moving-image practices.

Ways of Worldmaking

Photographs are of the world, but how do movies project a world?• Photographs confront us with conundrums (riddles) of being, of our place

in the world and of our perceptual relation to the world and the past. Barthes: only a qualitative self examination of what photographs provoke in us, can deepen our comprehension of this experience.

• Photographs as well as filmed images present a mode of existence split by qualities of presence and absence, present and past, now and then, a here before us now encompassing a there displaced in time. Paintings do not have such ontological splits.

Ways of Worldmaking

• Cavell: A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it; hence it is that it may be called a transcription.

• Fotografische portretten zijn dus geen representaties, maar documentaties van presences (and thus absences).

Paul Sharits Shutter Interface (1975)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcxGNAVasjU&feature=related

A painterly/filmic object. A cameraless articfact exploring the filmic automatism of ‘succession as the basis of automated movement

The ontological basis of film

Film=spatial recognition versus Fotografie=temporal perception

Ecologische conclusies:

Photographic perception is historical rather than actual: het toont ons history, en eist van ons die te herdenken in onze mode of existence:

“Films automatism is also our automatism; or, to reinvoke Spinoza, that in the modern era our spiritual automatisms have had a cinematic character” (65… think McLuhan)

Skeptic: to view the world anonymously and unseen. Zo weerspiegelt fotografie ons scepticisme in haar beelden en sluit ons op in onze wereld. Het toont ons hoe wij ‘world views’ als waarneming kunnen hebben.

An Ethics of Duration

• The virtual life of film is sustained by its relationships with time.

• It is an indexical trace (Rosen)

• “Virtual past in the present + Virtual time of memory”

• The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone by the possible is therefore ‘realisation’. By contrast, the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality in itself. The process it undergoes is actualization.Gilles Deleuze

Back to Rodowick’s cinema• The virtual is always overrunning the

actual: on the one hand there is the hallucinatory projection of events lost to the (virtual) past in the present perpetual image; on the other, the irreversible succession of passing presents where space in movement appears and disappears into the virtual time of memory. (78)

• All of film’s powers as an art of duration are indebted to this analogical causation through which we attribute a past (and passing) existence to the present image, an existence which is no longer actual nor visible, but which works through the image as a virtual force. (79)

Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914

Medium as potential and virtual

A medium, then, is nothing more nor less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may unfold. These potentialities, the powers of the medium as it were, are conditioned by multiple elements or components that can be material, instrumental, and/or formal. Moreover, these elements may vary, individually and in combination with one another… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZowK0NAvig

Medium as potential and virtual

The creative Idea, inspires the creation of automatisms that on the one level belong to these potentialities. On the second level the Idea becomes actually expressed in the unfolding of a form, a form expressed through the creation of automatisms… Through the idea one recognizes the unrealized powers of a medium, a virtual life lying within the horizons delimited by its constructive elements, whether simple or complex. In this the materialism of all art making is understood.