An Invention without a Future. James Naremore

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СКАЧАТЬ two possible explanations, neither having to do with the end of cinema. The first he dubs the “Person from Porlock” explanation, which takes its name from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s story about the composition of the fragmentary “Kubla Kahn.” Coleridge had been inspired by a drug-induced dream, but when he began writing the poem a man from the nearby town of Porlock knocked at his door and caused him to forget how the dream ended. The cinema, Frampton proposes, might be regarded as an incomplete dream vision (perhaps not unlike Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu, named for Kubla Kahn’s pleasure palace) that has yet to realize its full potential. His second possible explanation, which doesn’t contradict the first, is quoted in the epigraph above: the cinema didn’t have a future in Lumière’s day because it didn’t yet have a past. Whatever the cinema is, and whenever it began, it can be “invented” only by its ongoing history—or historie(s), as Godard might say.

      One of Frampton’s most admired films, the thirty-eight-minute Nostalgia (1971), can be related to some aspects of this argument. The film is structured by Frampton’s recollections of a group of still photographs he made before turning to cinema, plus one found photograph. We hear what seems to be his voice (actually the voice of Michael Snow reading Frampton’s words) commenting on the history of the photographs, which an offscreen hand holds up one by one and then drops onto the hot element of an electric stove. As each photograph incinerates, it leaves behind a unique pattern of carbon residue, a fragile ash that looks as if it would dissolve at the touch of a breath. Meanwhile, the offscreen voice grows increasingly out of synch with the images and we begin hearing descriptions of pictures that haven’t yet appeared.

      Nostalgia can be viewed as an experiment involving personal memory, real duration, and cinematic time, but it’s also a film about perishability and remediation. Unattractive as this last word might be, it’s the best way I know to describe such things as a live symphony hall concert broadcast on the radio, a novel transformed into an audio book, a classic-era movie shown on television, and so forth. (For a broad discussion of remediation in today’s world, see Grusin and Bolter.) Frampton’s still photographs are fragile mementos preserved in a motion picture, but if he kept the negatives the photographs could be reproduced; if he didn’t, we could attempt to restore them by making still photographs from individual frames of the film—a process at one remove from the source and inferior in resolution. Hence the film shows the destruction of photographs, but it also partly saves them. A further irony is that with the passage of time Nostalgia, too, has been “saved” by remediation. Good 16mm celluloid prints of the film are somewhat rare, and the most convenient ways to view it today are on the Internet or on a DVD produced by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986. (A similar irony can be found in the 2013 Blu-ray release of Bill Morrison’s “Decasia” [2002], an avant-garde film composed of decayed footage from old movies.)

      Frampton is correct that the history of cinema, understood as the history of moving images, transcends a particular technology (an argument similar to the one made by D. N. Rodowick in The Virtual Life of Film). There’s no way of saying when this history began: some trace it as far back as the twenty-six-thousand-year-old “animated” cave paintings in Altimira, Spain, and others say cinema’s oldest ancestor is the camera obscura, which was known to the ancient Chinese and Greeks as a means of studying light and was used in fifteenth-century Europe as an instrument for tracing images in perspective. It nevertheless seems safe to argue that the modern cinema’s so-called pre- and posthistory extends at least from the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century to the digital revolution of the present.

      The motion pictures of the Lumières and their contemporaries were the most spectacular invention of what is sometimes called the second industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. This was the beginning of “modern times,” characterized by the advent of the electric light, the typewriter, the linotype, the transoceanic cable, the telephone, the phonograph, and so forth. The same period was the beginning of large-scale advertising and leisure activities that would ultimately constitute the modern consumer society and a new kind of mass culture. Whoever the masses were, the products and modes of production associated with them seemed American rather than European in origin, and the emergence of a critical discourse about them had something to do with the intertwined forces of industrialization and capitalism. These forces are still with us; in a sense, they have a need for cinema, which repeatedly adapts to new technical forms.

      All this will seem cold comfort to those who love projected film on big screens. As I write, theatrical exhibition throughout the world is undergoing profound change, the ultimate consequences of which are unclear. The major Hollywood distributors have banded together and signed the Digital Cinema Initiatives, which, by the time this book appears, will make film prints unavailable for commercial theaters; projection will instead take the form of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP). Meanwhile, video notepads and computers are streaming motion pictures on demand, and people are watching movies on cell phones or the backs of airline seats.

      The digital era, like modernity in general, is both catastrophe and progress. As a university teacher of film history who spent many years threading 16mm prints into projectors and who once thought that showing film on video in the classroom was a sin, I’ve become acutely aware that projected DVD and Blu-ray not only make instruction easier but in most cases give superior resolution and life to old movies. I also have the good fortune to live in Bloomington, Indiana, where the state-of-the-art Indiana University Cinema and its remarkable director-programmer, Jon Vickers, enable me to compare a wide range of motion picture technologies projected according to the highest standards (most commercial movie theaters project badly, no matter whether you are watching 35mm or digital). In that facility I’ve seen fifty-year-old home movies in 8mm, silent masterpieces with a live orchestra, rare 16mm prints, archival 35mm prints, wide-screen spectaculars, low-tech digital features by visiting directors Pedro Costa and Joe Swanberg, and 2k and 4k digital “restorations.” My experience convinces me that cinema today has a variety of technical formats offering rich artistic possibilities, none of which is inherently superior to the others. It also demonstrates that remediation isn’t evil. On a visit to Bloomington in 2012, Werner Herzog, who had several of his features converted to DCPs by Indiana University Cinema, announced with evident pleasure that the new process had made Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) look to him as if it had been made anew. It was no longer quite like a film of the 1970s; it lacked the grain and haptic markings of a celluloid print, but in some ways it was more vivid and exciting than the original.

      Unfortunately, few of us have access to the kind of theater I’ve just described, and we’re entering a brave new world in which all movies, even when shot on film, will be viewed in the form of digital files. This change is more radical than any other in motion-picture history—quite different from the shift from silent pictures to sound, because in that case the photographic basis of the medium remained the same. Somebody once asked Mel Brooks what the most difficult aspect of making a film was, and Brooks said it was putting in all the little sprocket holes. The digital eliminates that problem; it’s a more convenient technology, and convenience trumps quality in the mass marketplace. The question then becomes whether celluloid (or Mylar) will survive at all; and if so, whether film projectors will have even as much future as vinyl record players and typewriters. I have no confident answer, but I recommend David Bordwell’s Pandora’s Digital Box (2012), available for digital download at www.davidbordwell.net, which offers a discussion of the changes we’re experiencing. As Bordwell points out, the DCP initiative consolidates the power of major distributors and threatens the survival of small theaters. It results in fired projectionists and junked projection equipment, and it will inevitably affect scholarship and formal analysis, making it nearly impossible, for example, to count frames on a film strip or choose an individual frame for reproduction.

      For me, the biggest problem isn’t the loss of the film strip but the degree to which predigital cinema can be saved by remediation—which, since the 1950s, has been the chief way of making older films widely available. I can recall the period of Cinemascope and 3-D, when theaters were trying to compete with television; as a СКАЧАТЬ