Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema 2019020408, 9780367199197, 9780429244094

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
PART 1 Subjectivity
1 Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974)
The Long Take
The Analytic Montage
The Kinestasis
Articulating Realisms
2 Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23 (2007)
Animation as Revelation
Performing Interpretation
3 Subjective Desire in Goldfinger (1964)
Unreal Fantasy,’ Representation, Ontology
Composite Realities
Seduction
PART 2 Objectivity
4 Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt (1968)
The Discovery Process
The ‘Reading-Image’
The ‘Perception-Image’
5 Persuasion in The Kingdom (2007)
Articulation and Enunciation in Collage
Intertextuality and Archive
6 Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Narrative Function’ and Indexicality
Editing Glitches
PART 3 Ideologies
7 The Medium
What was Cinema?
Modal Media
8 The Message
Active Engagement
9 Realist Articulation
Four Realist Modes
Afterword: Digital Movies
Index

Citation preview

Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema

This book explores the question of realism in motion pictures. Specifically, it explores how understanding the role of realism in the history of title sequences in film and television can illuminate discussions raised by the advent of digital cinema. Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema fills a critical and theoretical void in the existing literature on motion graphics. Developed from careful analysis of André Bazin, Stanley Cavell, and Giles Deleuze’s approaches to cinematic realism, this analysis uses title sequences to engage the interface between narrative and non-narrative media to consider cinematic realism in depth through highly detailed close readings of the title sequences for Bullitt (1968), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), The Number 23 (2007), The Kingdom (2008), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and the James Bond films. From this critique, author Michael Betancourt develops a modal approach to cinematic realism where ontology is irrelevant to indexicality. His analysis shows the continuity between historical analogue film and contemporary digital motion pictures by developing a framework for rethinking how realism shapes interpretation. Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist and research artist concerned with digital technology and capitalist ideology. His writing has been translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and published in journals such as The Atlantic, Make Magazine, CTheory, and Leonardo. He is the author of The ____________ Manifesto, and many books, including The History of Motion Graphics and The Critique of Digital Capitalism, as well as four books on the semiotics of motion graphics: Semiotics and Title Sequences, Synchronization and Title Sequences, Title Sequences as Paratexts, and Typography and Motion Graphics. These publications complement his movies, which have screened internationally at the Black Maria Film Festival, Art Basel Miami Beach, Contemporary Art Ruhr, Athens Video Art Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, the San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads, and Experiments in Cinema, among many others.

Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice

Semiotics and Title Sequences Text-Image Composites in Motion Graphics Authored by Michael Betancourt Synchronization and Title Sequences Audio-Visual Semiosis in Motion Graphics Authored by Michael Betancourt Title Sequences as Paratexts Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation Authored by Michael Betancourt The Screenwriters Taxonomy A Collaborative Approach to Creative Storytelling Authored by Eric R. Williams Open Space New Media Documentary A Toolkit for Theory and Practice Patricia R. Zimmermann and Helen De Michiel Film & TV Tax Incentives in the U.S. Courting Hollywood Authored by Glenda Cantrell and Daniel Wheatcroft Typography and Motion Graphics: The ‘Reading-Image’ Authored by Michael Betancourt Ideologies of the Real in Motion Graphics and Title Sequences Authored by Michael Betancourt

Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema Michael Betancourt

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Michael Betancourt The right of Michael Betancourt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Title: Ideologies of the real in motion graphics and title sequences / Michael Betancourt. Description: 1. | New York : Routledge 2020. | Series: Routledge studies in media theory & practice ; 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020408 | ISBN 9780367199197 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429244094 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Titling. | Credit titles (Motion pictures, television, etc.) | Graphic design (Typography) | Realism in motion pictures | Motion pictures— Production and direction—Technological innovations. Classification: LCC TR886.9 .B475 2020 | DDC 777/.55—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020408 ISBN: 978-0-367-19919-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-24409-4 (ebk) Typeset in Perpetua by Apex CoVantage, LLC Some parts of this book were adapted from previous publications produced in earlier stages of this analysis: “‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures,” AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, no. 16 (September, 2018). “Paranarrative, Postcinema, and the Unheimlich Glitch,” Utsangia.it, no. 15 (March 2018), ed. Francesco Aprile. “The Calligram and the Title Card,” Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, no. 204, 2015, pp. 239–252. “That Uncanny Moment: Jack Cole’s Design of the Kolchak:The Night Stalker Title Sequence,” Bright Lights Film Journal, January 16, 2014. “Pablo Ferro’s Title Montage for Bullitt (1968): The Criminality Beneath the Surface of Civil Society,” Bright Lights Film Journal, April 29, 2014.

for Leah

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Preface

ix xiii xv

Introduction

1

PART 1

Subjectivity 1

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974)

21 23

The Long Take 29 The Analytic Montage 36 The Kinestasis 41 Articulating Realisms 45

2

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23 (2007)

53

Animation as Revelation 65 Performing Interpretation 73

3

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger (1964)

81

‘Unreal Fantasy,’ Representation, Ontology 89 Composite Realities 92 Seduction 106 PART 2

Objectivity

117

4

119

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt (1968) The Discovery Process 124 The ‘Reading-Image’ 131 The ‘Perception-Image’ 139

viii Contents

5

Persuasion in The Kingdom (2007)

149

Articulation and Enunciation in Collage 158 Intertextuality and Archive 171

6

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

177

‘Narrative Function’ and Indexicality 191 Editing Glitches 199 PART 3

Ideologies

207

7

209

The Medium What was Cinema? 209 Modal Media 211

8

The Message

219

Active Engagement 222

9

Realist Articulation

229

Four Realist Modes 230

Afterword: Digital Movies

241

Index

243

Figures

Frontis

Cinématographe Lumière designed and illustrated by Henri Brispot. The earliest poster advertising motion pictures, for a screening on August 28, 1896.

0.1 All the title cards in Touch of Evil (1958), designed by Wayne Fitzgerald. 0.2 All the title cards in The Player (1992), designed by Dan Perri. 0.3 “James Bond Parody” main title opening from Deadpool 2 (2018), designed by John Likens. 0.4 All the title cards in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder. 0.5 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a product of its (ontological) direct connection to the real, while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not require this same link to reality for its significance. 1.1 Stills from the long take in La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, Lumière Vue no. 91.3 [“Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon,” also known as “Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory” or “Exiting the Factory,”] (third version, August 1896), directed by Louis Lumière. 1.2 Still frames showing the opening long take from Kolchak:The Night Stalker (1974), designed by Jack Cole. 1.3 Still frames showing the background long takes in title sequences for [Top] White Zombie (1931); [Bottom, Left] logo graphic in Dracula (1931); [Bottom, Right] a statue in The Maltese Falcon (1941). 1.4 All the title cards in Touch of Evil (1958), designed by Wayne Fitzgerald. 1.5 Still frames showing the montage from Kolchak:The Night Stalker (1974), designed by Jack Cole. 1.6 Stills showing the kinestasis in Kolchak:The Night Stalker (1974), designed by Jack Cole.

9 10 12 16

17

26 29 32 33 37 41

x Figures 2.1 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a claim about ‘the real,’ while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not address reality. 2.2 Stills from the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt. 2.3 [Left] Stills from the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt; [Right] Stills from the title sequence for Seven (1995), designed by Kyle Cooper. 2.4 Stills showing the letters in the main title card melting into a red stain in the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt. 2.5 Stills showing facts such as “William Jefferson Clinton has 23 letters” in the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt. 2.6 A selection of metamorphic postcards (1890–1910). 3.1 Selected stills from the James Bond title sequences: [1] From Russia With Love (1963), designed by Robert Brownjohn; [2] The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder; [3] AView to a Kill (1985), designed by Maurice Binder; [4] Goldeneye (1995), designed by Daniel Kleinman; [5] Skyfall (2011), designed by Daniel Kleinman; [6] Quantum of Solace (2008), designed by Ben Radatz. 3.2 Selected stills from Dr. No (1962), designed by Maurice Binder. 3.3 All the title cards from Goldfinger (1964), designed by Robert Brownjohn. 3.4 All the title cards from From Russia With Love (1963), designed by Robert Brownjohn. 3.5 All the title cards from Night of the Generals (1966), designed by Robert Brownjohn. 3.6 Selected stills from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), designed by Tim Miller. 3.7 Selected stills showing the distortions of Honor Blackman’s face in title card number 7 from the title sequence for Goldfinger (1964), designed by Robert Brownjohn. 3.8 All the title cards from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder. 3.9 Selected stills from The Incredible Hulk (2008), designed by Kyle Cooper. 4.1 Selected stills showing the relationship and kinesis of the text-mask for “Steve McQueen” in section [1] in the Bullitt (1968) title sequence designed by Pablo Ferro. 4.2 Selected stills from the “newsreel” in Citizen Kane (1941) showing the compositing of actor Orson Welles as the fictional “Charles Foster

54 59 63 71 73 76

85 93 94 97 99 100 102 103 108 121

Figures

4.3

4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

5.6

6.1

6.2 6.3 6.4

Kane” appearing with actual historical leaders: [Top] Teddy Roosevelt; [Middle] Francisco Franco; [Bottom] Adolf Hitler. Selected stills showing [Left] the integration of the typography into the realist space itself that transforms typography into an apparently physical presence that is a part of the diegesis in the Easy A (2010) title sequence produced by Christina Hwang; [Right] the articulation of typography as a material discourse that renders non-narrative concerns as a matryoshka-like penetration “deeper” into the découpage via the ‘reading-image’ in the Blow Up (1966) title sequence. [Left] Selected stills from the Hearst Metrotone News newsreel, “The News Parade of 1934,” vol. 6, no. 226 (December 19, 1934); [Right] Comparable stills from the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane (1941). Selected stills from the point-of-view pan searching the office at the start of section [2] in Bullitt (1968), designed by Pablo Ferro. Selected stills showing the sequence addressing the “Oil Crisis” in the 1970s in The Kingdom (2007), designed by Stephan Burle. Selected stills showing calligram mode title cards that connect footage of the actors with their names in the title sequence for The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936). Selected stills showing archival footage of Americans living in Saudi Arabia in The Kingdom (2007), designed by Stephan Burle. Selected stills from [Top] The Next Door Neighbors (1909), and [Bottom] The Mysterious Fine Arts (1910), both directed by Émile Cohl. Selected stills showing [Top] the shift from animation to still image to motion at the start of the sequence, and [Bottom] the combination of photographic imagery and graphics to create photo illustrations in the title sequence for The Kingdom (2007), designed by Stephan Burle. Selected stills from the film, La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, Lumière Vue no. 91.3 [“Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon,” also known as “Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory” or “Exiting the Factory,”] (third version, August 1896), directed by Louis Lumière. [Top] Encoding errors produce aberrations in the appearance of the image; [Bottom] Example of MPEG frame compression glitch, also known as “datamoshing,” © 2000 Michael Betancourt/Artists Rights Society (ARS). Stills of “archival footage” from the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane (1941); note the scratches and other dirt that suggests a ‘historical testimony’ to fictional past screenings. Selected stills showing the fade to white at the end of The Holy Mountain (1973). Selected stills from the titles for Blade Runner 2049 (2017), designed by Danny Yount: [Left] Showing the glitched opening studio logos; [Right] Showing the digital glitches in the main-on-end title sequence.

xi

128

132 143 144 154 156 159 160

170

174

182 184 190

192

xii Figures 6.5 Selected stills showing digital glitches from the title sequence to the cable television program Tosh.O (season 1, 2011), designed by Jonathan Gershon. 6.6 Selected stills showing glitches that represent a computer malfunction destroying records of financial data due to a “computer virus” in Inspector Morse (series 4, episode 4, “Masonic Mysteries,” 1990). 6.7 [Top] Selected stills from Danse Serpentine, LumièreVue no. 765 (1896) directed by Louis Lumière; [Middle] Selected stills from L’oeuf du Sorcier, Star Film no. 392 (1902), directed by Georges Méliès; [Bottom] Selected stills from Le Cerceau Magique (1908), directed by Émile Cohl. 7.1 Venn diagram showing three formal dimensions of cinema and their potential combinatory relationships: the spatial arrangement of projected imagery in space, whether on one screen or several; the temporal ordering of those images; and the continuity of motion within them. 7.2 Still frames showing multiple image juxtaposition in Suspense directed by Lois Weber (1913). 8.1 The four realist modes are defined by the relationships between naturalism::stylization and indexicality::artificiality. 9.1 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a product of its (ontological) direct connection to the real, while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not require this same link to reality for its significance. The examples discussed in Parts 1 and 2 are arranged according to the mode they employ. 9.2 Examples of text–image composites from title sequences for Paramount Pictures productions in the 1930s: [Top] Figure–ground mode crediting from Rumba (1935) that does not assert an indexical connection between text and image; both [Middle] selected calligram mode credits from The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936), and [Bottom] selected calligram mode credits from She Done Him Wrong (1933) involve an indexical claim about the identity of the actors.

194 195

200

213 214 220

231

235

Acknowledgments

Although motion graphics is generally held apart from cinema study, and the title sequence is rarely viewed as a central text or relevant for a theoretical consideration, in this study it is: only the title sequence provides a nexus that allows the consideration of the full range of cinema: fictional, documentary, and avant-garde. My analysis of cinematic realism began more than twenty years ago as a result of putting André Bazin and Stanley Cavell’s ontological proposals for cinema into a specifically Modernist context with the avant-garde film and art using Clement Greenberg’s formalist concept of “purity.” Without this initial choice to historicize these ontological claims about an essential “cinematic” nature, defying this connection would not have been possible. Cinematic realism is an implicit component of my earlier considerations of title sequences that articulated my discursive approach to motion graphics, and which made the need for this study apparent. This analysis reflects a personal concern with the impacts of digital technology that took shape in August 1990 when I read the article “Ask It No Questions; The Camera Can Lie” in the International Herald Tribune about the possibilities of digital photo collage. It was at that moment, looking at a fabricated photograph of the 1945 Malta conference where Groucho Marx replaced Joseph Stalin and Rambo was seamlessly added to the scene, that the importance of digital imaging for the future of cinema took shape for me: it would not just be an issue of CGI, but of photo-realism. In a project that germinated over such a long period of time, there are many people who contributed to its evolution, far more than I can recognize here: William Rothman, Ruth Perlmutter, Charles Recher, Anthony T. Allegro, and Timothy Inners; my colleagues John Colette, Dominique Elliott, James Gladman, Austin Shaw, Minho Shin, and Woon (“Duff ”)Yong had a helpful role in the final selection of ‘model works’ to consider. I also wish to thank my graduate students Noël Anderson, Dominica Jordan, and Matt Van Rys. Special thanks go to my brother, John Betancourt, for his assistance with locating the many title sequences that inform this study.

Frontis Cinématographe Lumière designed and illustrated by Henri Brispot.The earliest poster advertising motion pictures, for a screening on August 28, 1896.

Preface

Motion graphics is a hybrid media practice drawing from theory and concerns in multiple disciplines—some cinematic, others from graphic design, and still more derived from art history. This study proceeds from an interest in what realism, a powerful ideology in cinema, means for motion graphics, and how understanding its role in the history of title sequences can illuminate the emerging problems of “digital motion pictures.” Realism has been an omnipresent constraint on all commercial media, so although this analysis borrows concepts and theory from cinema studies, it is not about commercial film, nor is it a work of cinema studies. This issue is a central part of entertainment and informational media, equally a feature of fictive drama and documentary history: what appears can be analyzed, critiqued, challenged. Its philosophical concerns begin first as the basic question about [1] the nature of reality apart from our understanding, then as [2] the status of our understanding of ‘the real’ (reality) that is the subject of this discourse (realism).The initial question [1] determines the content of the claims being made (their ontology); the following [2] describes their form and presentation (their semiology).This analysis can be challenging because [1] and [2] are fundamentally incompatible, and their dissonance creates paradoxes, bedeviling attempts to resolve their conflicts: [a] as the ambivalence between a depiction and the depicted, in imitation of what might be seen if encountering the unmediated thing in the world rather than on-screen (as naturalism); [b] as a depiction which identifies the thing depicted in ways that are not immanent, but are revealed over time or upon examination, documenting causality (as illusionism); [c] as a depiction of a fictive world that corresponds to the rules and expectations known from our everyday experiences (as mimesis); [d] as a depiction that accounts for things in ways known only by their mental understanding (as metaphysics); [e] as a depiction of the unseen or impossible, a rendering-visible of what does not otherwise exist (as fantasy).1 Attempting to separate realist form into these specific depictive modes or types rapidly becomes a recursive and ever-finer series of divisions because these five ordinal dimensions intersect and converge, providing multiple layers for simultaneous interpretation, separate only in the degree of their immanence to everyday perceptions (aspirations to being ‘objective’). The range of naturalism::stylization2 these dimensions create is a constant in commercial narrative cinema, but it becomes ambivalent and contingent with motion graphics, an effect of how this field commercialized the avantgarde. This Modernist heritage3 shapes the role of realism in motion designs, and is the reason that the title sequence is of critical and theoretical interest, but their analysis is

xvi Preface more commonly considered in relation to either narrative functions or graphic design than in regard to cinematic discourse. Considering the realism inherent in the live action photographic component of title sequences changes the center of attention from text and motion typography to the articulation and progression in time of imagery, arenas more thoroughly examined in cinema study.4 Each chapter in this book develops a theoretical investigation of realism in motion graphics using a prime example chosen for its utility as a case study: the analysis proceeds via an extended close reading that connects these expressions of a subjective or objective order to the historical questions of cinematic ontology and photographic indexicality. They are not chronologically arranged; this analysis does not argue for a directed, teleological progression, nor propose a final answer to the problematics of realism in motion graphics, offering instead an analysis of the shifting semantics of indexicality, its claimed relationship to ‘the real,’ and the distinct interpretive modes this claim creates. The issue of cinematic ontology, raised by André Bazin’s arguments about cinema, haunts this analysis, continually returning in the relationship of artifice to index; however, questions about which claims are valid descriptions of ‘the real,’ and what is the “true” ontology of either analogue or digital images is not of concern to this discussion of how motion graphics deploys indexical claims to expressing/presenting a link with reality. What matters is the claim itself, not whether that claimed link to ‘the real’ is correct, appropriate, or defensible: it is an issue of encultured meaning, the articulation of the relationship to ‘the real,’ and the consequences of its enunciation on the modal presentation. Abandoning Bazin’s proposal of photographic ontology as articulating realism enables the continuity between analogue and digital motion pictures to become obvious.This modal approach to ‘cinematic realism’ is an en passant alternative to historical, ontological claims for indexicality, offering in their place an engagement where the Modernist concern with “purity”—the essential nature of the image—is tangential (if not entirely irrelevant) to cinematic indexicality and realism. The designs chosen for discussion play a discursive role. Their selection responds to the particular need for a clear example of the theoretical issues under consideration: the role of indexicality in developing “subjective” and “objective” modes that identify ‘the real.’ The resulting discussion is divided into three sections: Part 1 concerns the elaboration of subjectivity; Part 2 addresses the claims of objectivity; and Part 3 is summative, addressing their ideological significance. Jack Cole’s title sequence for the television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) begins the analysis in Part 1 because of its self-conscious invocation of the devices used in realist fiction while simultaneously challenging them, giving their role in this design the capacity to serve as an introduction to the issues of indexicality and realism that return throughout the analysis. This title sequence shifts from “objective realism” to “subjective illustration” by undermining the photographic indexicality common to commercial and avant-garde cinemas in the 1960s—thus producing its famous uncanny affect. The difference between the understanding of “uncanny” in the ‘realist fiction’ of Cole’s design and the ‘metaphysical reality’ that appears in the titles for The Number 23 by Peter Frankfurt (2007) distinguishes the subjective articulations of stylization from the more familiar objective articulations of naturalism. This role for indexicality separates Frankfurt’s subjective design from the dynamics of audience identification that constrain the ‘unreal fantasy’ portrayed

Preface

xvii

on-screen in the subjective allegory of sex shown in Robert Brownjohn’s title design for Goldfinger (1964). His design separates the indexical claim of being-factual in The Number 23 from the artificial claim of being-fictional through an ambivalent articulation of desire as subject and meaning. Part 2 explores how the separation of “subjective” and “objective” presentations allows for a clear distinction between documentary and fictional claims, a separation the audience makes easily, but which confounds ontological approaches to photographic indexicality. Digital media develop the separation of “subjective” and “objective” that emerge in motion graphics as an extension of how “objective” presentations converge on historical cinematic realism: Pablo Ferro’s fusion of title credits with montage in the ‘realist fiction’ of Bullitt (1968) distinguishes the narrative emphasis of Giles Deleuze’s analysis by marking the difference between the ‘reading-image’ and the implication of causality imposed by traditional continuity editing. This same objectivity follows a more familiar development in documentary realism in which the historical testimony presented by the collage of animation, typography, and archival photo illustrations in Stephan Burle’s opening design for The Kingdom (2007) separates objective realism from its correlation in photography. This self-contained documentary on United States–Saudi Arabia relations demonstrates the dependence of the ‘documentary effect’ on the audience’s past experiences. In direct contrast to the ‘objective realism’ in Bullitt and The Kingdom is the paradoxical ‘material function’ clearly on display in Danny Yount’s title sequence for Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The technical failures (glitches) in this design create a confusion between their indexical role as symptoms of a digital breakdown of the image, and their symbolic role as representations.While some of these objective title sequences are narrative, integrated with the storytelling’s elaboration of cause–effect, others are more concerned with how audiences relate the depiction they see on-screen to their own lived experiences, a response that highlights the ‘event’ nature of cinema: the mediation presented on-screen energizes the direct connection of depiction and depicted in ways that appear to turn the mediated denotation of a thing into that thing in itself, making it present for the audience, but mimesis is not a given.5 Part 3 articulates conclusions about these four realist modes. The two indexical modes, ‘documentary reality’ and ‘metaphysical reality,’ entail a distinction that is more clearly marked in the two artificial modes, ‘realist fiction’ and ‘unreal fantasy.’ All four realist modes deny any ontological assumptions about the imagery on-screen, countering the pervasive historical belief that photographic images are necessarily linked to reality. This limited group of designs allows a deeper consideration of how these dynamics inform the cinematic realism of motion graphics, and a recognition that the “idealized” spectrum of naturalism::stylization is modulated between indexicality::artificiality. The historical breadth of the six motion graphic designs considered in detail enables an exploration of realist problematics separate from the Modernist aesthetics of “purity,” thus bringing the ideological dimensions of the indexical claim into focus. The theories of cinematic realism and ‘filmic reality’6 considered in this analysis have two distinct, mutually exclusive approaches to understanding imagery on-screen: as a document related to ‘the real,’ or to conceive cinema as a contra-document (inherently unrelated to ‘the real’)—a division between theories of indexical realism, and theories of internal realism whose consistency the depends on adherence to established semiotic codes rather than an immanent link to ‘the real.’ The role of artificiality is to insist on

xviii Preface cinema’s constructed, fabricated nature—which those theories emphasizing cinema as an escapist illusion do only to criticize it for misrepresenting reality.Yet the issue is not the differences or incompatibility of theoretical proposals about cinematic realism made by André Bazin, Stanley Cavell, Siegfried Kracauer, Christian Metz, and Giles Deleuze, nor to deny or elevate the ideological critiques proposed by Peter Gidal, Peter Wollen, and Laura Mulvey, nor even focus on the synthetic analyses of historians such as Christopher Williams and Richard Rushton, but to consider their implicit similarity that appears in the proposition of what appears on-screen as resembling some aspect of lived experience, apparent in their consistent concern for and with narrative dramas, understanding them as either the epitome of realism or its antithesis.7 Their differences are ultimately about what qualifies as ‘the real’ being presented, not the semantic nature of the claims articulated on-screen. What is of interest in considering realism in title sequences is not the nature of any ontological connection to ‘the real,’ or its ideological basis in unquestioned encultured beliefs, but the ways that claims of indexicality informs and modulates the presentation on-screen. The goal of this study is not to present or critique a theory of realism, even if such a proposal might result, but to understand its ambivalent function in cinema and motion graphics. Negative associations with identifying cinema as illusion—mere fakery—inhabits all the theories of an ontological, indexical connection of photographic imagery to reality; they are evidence of a desire to make cinema into an agent in the world, capable of revealing hidden truths whose ramifications impact ‘the real.’ But what is most interesting critically about any motion picture is precisely the ways that it is not-real. Differences between actual experience and the mediated presentation on-screen are what gives these works their capacity to become commentary, challenges, or critiques; if cinema were indistinguishable from actual life, there would be nothing to gain from it. This “illusory nature,” artificial and constructed, opens the presentation into the realms of enunciation and articulation (whatever the contents might be). Acknowledging such an understanding challenges the established discourse of cinematic realism as only a narrow range of expressions. The reality effect of photographic indexicality itself becomes a point of contention: what all these historical theories of cinema take as a given, assumptions about the apparent ontology of the photographic image, is the product of an elaborate set of technical, aesthetic, and semiotic conventions which render its contents coherent. The difficulties of media production, its heuristic dimensions, remain tangential to the philosophical analysis of cinema, but its impacts are definitive in the actual works. There is no guarantee that the découpage which appears on-screen will reveal any profilmic reality at all, a fact that makes assertions of any innate ontological indexicality problematic. When representation is not an autonomous, guaranteed result, it cannot be an ontological demonstration of reality. Only when everything is arranged precisely the correct way that allows the mediating technology to entirely disappear from consideration does the familiar realism and photographic indexicality result.8 These complexities are not new: the act of watching a film entails a process that replaces a description or implication of something happening, familiar from theater and literature, with literally showing the action itself. This ‘event’ nature of cinema attracted audiences to early film shows and secured their commercial success as “magical illusions” offering pantomime and anarrative transformations. The plasticity of motion graphics

Preface

xix

derives from ‘trik films’’ use of composite and VFX photography produced before World War I, but their “magic” becomes increasingly rare as the taste and concerns of cinema shifted toward longer, more dramatically coherent stories told in “feature films.” The varied theories of realism in cinema came later, after these early productions had gone out of style, resulting in their initial irreal play being marginalized in cinema history. Title designs, ignored in theorizations of narrative cinema and the realism it creates, offer alternative approaches to realism than what is familiar from the indexicality of photography. The same technologies that make the material transformations and fluid manipulation of photographic images cost effective in digital cinema are a product of technical development and elaboration of those older, analogue mechanisms whose history starts with ‘trik films’ and continues through the invention of motion graphics and on, into digital cinema, making the historically rare composites of motion graphics that fuse graphics, typography, and photography become a mundane part of even the cheapest television commercials; in becoming a digital artifact, what was an intransigent analogue photograph has achieved a protean, metamorphic fluidity that forces an acknowledgment of the narratively supported artifice that is “realism” on-screen. The commercial nature of motion graphics ties them to the same realist demands of other popular media. Title sequences provide a unique resource for considering this heritage without the distractions of fabula (plot, story, and the elaborations of causality) that simultaneously develops and limits the opportunities to consider the role and significance of cinematic realism in dramatic forms. Historically expensive, technically difficult, labor-intensive manipulations of what appears on-screen (based in celluloid photography and the materiality of the film strip, intermittent projection and the whole technical, cultural, and aesthetic apparatus) are now common. Digital imaging easily simulates rarified and unusual photographic techniques to render all images it exhibits as part of the same imaginative range of naturalism::stylization, familiar from the fully synthetic imagery of historical arts such as painting, allowing their everyday incorporation into contemporary cinema. This reconception of motion pictures raises once-settled issues of denotation, morphology, and structure with increasing urgency as computer technology achieves freedom from the limits of analogue photography and offers to facilitate its plastic deformation,9 giving cinema a new autonomy from the traditional constraints of photographic sampling. This banal observation seems unfamiliar only when compared to the expectations informed by commercial narrative cinema—motion graphics and “vernacular video”10 descend from politico-aesthetic innovations of avant-garde film and video art. The changes wrought by the “digital convergence” of the 1990s11 have taken nearly two decades to become sufficiently inexpensive that they can shift from being marginal dimensions of production to familiar effects, completely mundane, thus banal. A theory derived from the historical role of realism in motion graphics has the potential to offer insights into the challenges confronting digital motion pictures.12 The uncanny, realism-challenging aesthetics of digital imaging are familiar from commercial title sequences, motion graphic logos, and other animations that accompany the narrative as various types of paratext. However, the changes wrought by digital cinema are most apparent in the democratization of access to what historically was the almost exclusive domain of major studios13—the everyday production of motion images, for example, in the omnipresence of “webvideo”—a shift that a variety of media critics

xx Preface and theorists including Lev Manovich, Richard Grusin, and Steven Shaviro have called “post-cinema.” Their proposal literally means a “cinema after cinema,” transformed and disrupted by digital technology. This historiographic use of post in post-cinema is still an apt designation for an ambivalent, metastable transition between two otherwise distinct and incompatible historical states. It comes into use precisely at moments of change and uncertainty prompted by an accelerating impact of processes already in use, an apparent freedom from the physical constrains of imaging pioneered in motion graphics due to their marginality and pseudo-independence from the main production. Disruption does not emerge suddenly with a bell tolling and everything abruptly assuming a new configuration, as art historian Matei Ca˘ linescu explained in his book Five Faces of Modernity: The prefix post is a common terminological instrument in the language of history, and it is quite often a neutral and convenient means of indicating the position in time of events by referring them to an outstanding previous moment. . . . What the prefix post implies, however, is an absence of positive periodizing criteria, an absence which in general is characteristic of transitional periods.14 As digital technology expands the varieties and means of motion picture production, and the barriers to entry drop, these shifts reveal challenges to established paradigms of cinema and the unambivalent conception of motion pictures that “cinema” historically has signified: an industrial, expensive, and technically esoteric cinematography. This broadening of cinema’s historical assumptions and heuristics is linked specifically to the emergence of issues familiar from in the avant-garde cinema15 that provides the basis for motion graphics,16 a further intersection that makes the title sequence of interest theoretically. All machineries are crystallizations of the ideologies that enable their use, form given to thought, making-instrumental the socio-political paradigms of their construction—a reflection of the interface between commercial production and technological innovation. Shaviro is an early advocate of the term post-cinema to describe these changed conditions and potentials of digital tools emergent from the intransience of analogue video and historical optical printing. His analysis connects the cultural-technological shift from film/television to networked digital media and algorithmic processing as revelatory of the emergent political and social system of digital capitalism.17 The issues that concern his analysis are not new; the challenges that have become commonplace in digital cinema are evident throughout the twentieth century in marginalized and ignored types of cinematic production, such as the title sequence and motion graphics in general. How digital technology meets commercial demands for lower cost, increased control, and greater efficiency in production and post-production makes what was historically rare and marginal into a commonplace part of production: Everything can be sampled, captured, and transcribed into a string of ones and zeroes. This string can then be manipulated and transformed, in various measures and controllable ways. Under such conditions, multiple differences ramify endlessly; but none of these differences actually makes a difference, since they are all completely interchangeable.18

Preface

xxi

The sampling protocol Shaviro describes is central to digital technology. It develops from motion pictures’ foundational use of high speed projection of discrete, independent frames—each of which is a sample of the motion that emerges on screen—increasing the discreteness of the controlled sample to offer greater flexibility in the presentation. Unlike the photographs of film, the digital imagery shown on-screen is composed from discrete samples that can be individually addressed, engaged, and altered. But this essential technological rendering is invisible, masked by its organization into shots; higher-level interpretations, such as narrative, are products of low-level, perceptual recognitions of denotation and motion.19 Abandoning the ‘shot’ for the (digital) composite as the foundational concept in the construction of cinema belongs to what Shaviro has termed “post-continuity,”20 where the independent containment of the ‘shot’ becomes a seamless progression: digital collage replaces cinematic montage. Digital compositing is typical of what has been called the “image-animation problem,”21 offering an alternative to montage and the unitary conception of the ‘shot’ that has its origins in early film, a ‘degree zero’ for cinema that predates digital technology and is obvious in all the complex mechanisms of optical printing and composite photography that developed before being supplanted by computers. The contemporary crisis for cinema arises because the ontological conceptions of cinematic realism continues to dominate in spite of being confronted with their own, internalized failings, as Shaviro explained in his conclusion to his book Post Cinematic Affect: It is easy enough to deplore this situation on moralistic or political ground, as highminded cultural theorists from Adorno to Baudrillard have long tended to do. And it is tempting to wax nostalgic, and mourn the passing of a more vital, and more temporally authentic, media regime, as film theorists as diverse as David Rodowick (2007) and Vivian Sobchack (2004) have recently done. They are too wrapped up in their own melancholic sense of loss to grasp the emergence of new relations of production, and of new media forms.22 Digital technology challenges earlier cinema because digital technologies enable lower costs, increased control, and greater efficiencies in precisely the types of post-production manipulations that were historically rare and whose challenges to beliefs in photographic ontology were thus ignored. The contemporary need to reassess the assumptions of cinematic realism emerges from the embrace of this digital facility to con/fuse live action, animation, graphics and text as a singular ‘material’ on-screen. Shaviro’s analysis did not develop this reconceptualization of realism; it is instead focused on a cultural critique which notes the changes without exploring their ramifications for the conception of realism. The continuous return of indexicality in arguments about cinematic realism is not, as he suggests, a nostalgic attempt to recapture a “more vital, and more temporally authentic, media regime” that has passed, but is instead a symptom of a dominant encultured order under existential threat. Shaviro’s emphasis on digital transformations—the animation of the samples—makes the viewer’s initial recognitions of realism central to the conception of digital cinema. At its most basic, this is the question of perceptional interpretation that film historians Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks develop in their article “Movies in the Mind’s Eye”

xxii Preface concerned with understanding the apparent movement of motion pictures as a mental process: the movement we see when watching a movie—whether in the form of a film, video, or digital file—is more than simply the illusion of motion, it is perceptually as real as any other visual motion because there can be no separation of ‘object seen’ from its interpretation. The difference between the motion picture and other perceptions of immanent motion-in-the-world resides in its empirical status independent of human observation, not in our subjective perception.23 The apparent motion of movies depends on these earlier encounters with real, empirically immanent motion. It gives the realism of cinema an experiential basis in audience perceptions, arguing for a cognitive basis independent of presentation technology—celluloid, analogue video or digital imaging. Their identification of virtual-but-perceptually-real motion suggests a shift implying not only the effacement of distinctions between animation and live action, but the importance of marginal cinemas that explored these dynamics. Shaviro’s analysis develops this continuity between the break up of frames in film that creates the potential for motion with the encoding of imagery as digital data that facilitates a proximate and exacting control over individual pixels to amplify historical potentials for realist manipulations already familiar from the history of motion graphics. Realism and its critical-theoretical organization in cinema are the subject of a film ontology realized in assumptions of the “photographic index and the dispositive of cinema”; film historians André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion have discussed the impacts of digital imaging on these historical conceptions of cinema as the “image-animation problem.” They recognized that digital imaging has revitalized what appeared to be settled issues about motion imagery and animation common to the beginnings of cinema at the start of the twentieth century.These developments entail a return to the problematic fusions that inform the praxis of early ‘trik films,’ motion graphics, and contemporary VFX sequences—all of which are united by their manipulation of realist form in dynamic and uncanny ways: The phase of cinema we are living through today, which we might call ‘post’institutional, is thus the site of a return of the repressed: animation is returning to take its place as the primary structuring principle, as it was at the time of optical toys, Plateau’s phenakistiscope and Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique.24 The “return” is the emergence of non-narrative motion imagery—the dynamic play of potential transformations and movements as being sui generis expressions unto themselves. These concerns are common features of avant-garde cinema and motion graphics throughout their history: the conception of motion pictures as a kinetic, visual art. Digital production enables this (re)emergence of animation as the central technical/ theoretical concern for motion pictures neither limited to any particular technology, distribution system, nor primarily focused on the elaboration of fictive narratives. The historical models of oft-neglected non-narrative avant-garde and contemporary motion graphics, (including music videos, infographics and VFX works) address this approach. Motion pictures that are different in design and construction from commercial narrative films are instructive of the innovations offered by digital animation in altering the sampled imagery of cinema. Analogue media has always manipulated its component

Preface

xxiii

animations, an indicator of the “return” Gaudreault and Marion describe, but the fact that photo compositing and manipulation are a historical feature of motion graphics (even before digital technology) does not diminish the importance of the digital convergence. The contemporary collapse of cinema into television and computer imaging in the “image-animation problem” is a product of Modernist theorization in the twentieth century that kept animation and live action apart—separate and unequal—but organized and structured them through a shared cultural construct, realism. The marginalized title sequence provides an opportunity to consider these historical contiguities between the emergence of Shaviro’s “post-cinema” and the developments of digital animation and motion graphics: neologisms such as “post-cinema” are a counterpart to the emergence of institutional crises of authority accompanying how digital convergence undermines received ontological traditions for cinema,25 as historians Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmaier suggest in their anthology, The State of Post-Cinema: The concept of post-cinema evolves around issues of medium specificity and ontology. If focuses on the two classical markers of cinema’s specificity, namely the photographic index and the dispositive of cinema, and designates a condition in which both the index and dispositive are in crisis.26 The “digital convergence” so celebrated in the 1980s and 1990s has become the problem— it undermines the conception of cinema’s “medium specificity and ontology” in ways that break down traditional media’s superficially secure historical parameters. The resulting hybridity was specifically anticipated in the title sequence. All conceptions of “purity” ultimately depend on the definitions employed: the results are homologous expansions of a priori conceptions ratified as axiomatic in ontological theories that put their problematics outside normative consideration.What “purity” ultimately demands is remaining faithful to an ontological essence—a specific claim about ‘the real’—reified as the medium-specificity of Modernism. As a result, this essentialism justifies its definition on the basis of what that definition claims about its subject. This circularity is why digital media causes established ontological paradigms to crumble by challenging their self-imposed demarcations between media—undermining their “purity.” Approaching its theoretical challenges unmasks the connections between historical motion graphics27 and Gaudreault and Marion’s “image-animation problem,” and reflects the continuity between digital motion pictures and historical cinema. The Modernist cinematic ontology supports a heterogeneous constellation of discourses, institutions, legal propositions, and philosophical arguments reified on-screen as realism.These same frameworks are unstable in motion graphics, distinguishing them from the rest of cinema, and giving particular forms such as title sequences a theoretical value for considering digital motion pictures: the crisis of established authority for cinema happens precisely because the concept of realism becomes questionable as theorizations of the “photographic index and the dispositive of cinema” adapt to a new, changed ontology that accompanies the “new media” of digital technology. The importance of these questions for motion graphics lies with their capacity to reveal connections between established cinema theory and its relevance for kinetic design. A specific set of relationships between audience, image, camera, and presentation are in the background to this historical “cinematic” that is being transformed by the

xxiv Preface convergence of immaterial and material processes that are increasingly obvious in everyday experience.28 Postdigital Aesthetics, an anthology edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, explains this shift: The historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly blurred, to the extent that to talk about the digital presupposed a disjuncture in our experience that makes less and less sense in the experience of the everyday. Computation becomes experiential, spatial and materialized in its implementation, embedded within the environment and embodied, part of the texture of life itself.29 Their term “postdigital” is concerned neither with cinema, nor with realism; however, this exclusion is superficial—the indistinction of on-line and off-line they describe is precisely the digital convergence that enables an on-demand, continuous availability of digital motion pictures (along with any other digital content) as a product of how these technologies re-construct the lived, social world according to the demands of immaterial capital and the autonomous instrumentalities that render it into a commodity via the database.30 The digital distribution and encounter with motion pictures that concerns The State of Post-Cinema depends on what Berry and Dieter term “postdigital,” even as the proposal of the term “post-cinema” demonstrates the interface between the cinema, its transformation, and the Modernist ideology of “purity.” This concern with an essential identity or value that is corrupted by coming into contact with alternatives leads to a fetishistic demand for the appearance of celluloid and analogue processes as a “proof ” of an essential nature—even if these ‘material markers’ are now rendered by digital filters—the evidence of film grain serves to assert a photographic nature for what is not photographic, subverting historical artifice by attempting to maintain it, an especially important development given the centrality of digital production tools to their continuation. Emphasizing “purity” converges the ideological construct, realism with its subject, ‘the real’: belief in an ontological link between the depiction and the subject of that depiction in photography assures a gravitational tendency toward their conflation. Considering computer technology as part of a technical, evolutional lineage offers a different conception of the digital capacity to alter and manipulate the realism that appears on-screen in motion graphics: this development becomes readily apparent via the oversimplification of “cinematic realism” as an instrumentality (ideology) for the representation of reality itself, but doing so also ignores the subtlety and complexity of the realist ontologies developed around the indexicality of photographs that complicates a direct connection to ‘the real’ by qualifying the types of relations possible and the role of the audience in making them. The contemporary fluidity of digital technology is not a rupture with this past, but a continuation of how that past was never as ‘fixed’ nor as ‘stable’ as might appear on-screen. These challenges are products of the function of digital technology as much as symptoms of its systemic operation; for historical cinema undergoing this technological shift, the uniformity of digitality and its ease of manipulation creates an identity crisis that leads to the proposal of correctives such as Shaviro’s “post-cinema,”31 but which obfuscate the dynamics of naturalism::stylization already in play in the design and production of motion graphics, as well as the irreal impacts of historical tools, such as optical printing. The shift to digital tools in contemporary works

Preface

xxv

is an automation that changes costly time- and labor-intensive processes into easily created and more precisely controlled operations. But the activities now performed with digital systems are an outgrowth of processes already apparent in motion graphic works such as the title sequence. That these problematics are familiar from how the development and role of optical printing in motion pictures makes these neglected parts of cinematic history sites of theoretical and analytic interest. Considering the role of realism in title sequences reveals the legacy of Modernist approaches in contemporary media is sustained by realism and its ideological claims to demonstrate ‘the real.’ These dynamics are visualized in the realist modulations of crediting versus narrative functions, and the self-consciously artificial combination of text—photography—music that makes the title sequence a pseudo-independent unit within the motion picture as a whole.

Notes 1 Nochlin, L. Realism (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 13–23. 2 The double colon /::/ designates positions of mutual exclusion that define the scope of a dynamic range that includes hybrid intermediaries and which exhibits a contingent, metastable flux within that range. 3 Golden, W. TheVisual Craft of William Golden (New York: George Braziller, 1962), p. 21. 4 Drucker, J. “Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation” Narrative vol. 16, no. 2 (May, 2008), pp. 121–125. 5 Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 198. 6 Rushton, R. The Reality of Film:Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2011), pp. 191–196. 7 Williams, C. Realism and the Cinema (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 17–86. 8 Fielding, R. The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography (Oxford: Focal Press, 1984), pp. 1–3. 9 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 40. 10 Sherman, T. “Vernacular Video” Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube ed. G. Lovink and S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), p. 162. 11 Negroponte, N. “Products and Services for Computer Networks” Scientific American Special Issue:The Computer in the 21st Century (September, 1991), pp. 102–109. 12 Hagener, M., Hediger,V. and Strohmaier, A. The State of Post-Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 4. 13 Denson, S. and Leyda, J. eds. Post-Cinema:Theorizing 21st Century Film (Sussex: Reframe Books, 2016). 14 Ca˘ linescu, M. Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 133. 15 Balsom, E. “Brakhage’s Sour Grapes, or Notes on Experimental Cinema in the Art World” Moving Image Review & Art Journal vol. 1, no. 1 (2012), pp. 13–25. 16 Betancourt, M. The History of Motion Graphics: From Avant-Garde to Industry in the United States (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2013). 17 Shaviro, S. Post Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), p. 2. 18 Shaviro, S. Post Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), pp. 132–133. 19 Arnheim, R. To The Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 36. 20 Shaviro, S. Post Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), pp. 126–127. 21 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 40. 22 Shaviro, S. Post Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), pp. 132–133. 23 Hochberg, J. and Brooks, V. “Movies in the Mind’s Eye” Post Theory ed. D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 368–369.

xxvi Preface 24 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 40. 25 Buden, B. “Criticism without Crisis: Crisis without Criticism” Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique ed. G. Raunig and G. Ray (London: May Fly, 2009), pp. 33–42. 26 Hagener, M., Hediger,V. and Strohmaier, A. The State of Post-Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 3. 27 Betancourt, M. The History of Motion Graphics: From Avant-Garde to Industry in the United States (Rockport: Wildside Press, 2013). 28 Pangrazio, L. and Bishop, C. “Art as Digital Counterpractice” CTheory May 24, 2017 http:// ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/art-as-digital-counterpractice/. 29 Berry, D. and Dieter, M. “Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design” Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design ed. D.M. Berry and M. Dieter (NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 2–3. 30 Betancourt, M. The Critique of Digital Capitalism (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2016), pp. 75–100. 31 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 39.

Introduction

“You know one when you see one,” a dictum that invokes realism, is a terrible way to define anything. For title sequences, the difficulty is specifically the inability to create a coherent definition that would work in all cases, even though the audience always knows how the titles remain apart from the main text, especially when they interpenetrate and coincide with its narrative exposition.1 This apparent paradox has not gone unnoticed by film historian Georg Stanitzek, who observes that it happens because the “real” film (the story) begins both in and after the titles have finished: As the beginning, the title sequence sets itself apart in a particular way; namely, insofar as it is endowed with its own beginning and end, it establishes itself as distinct and develops its own coherence. In turn, its own beginning might possibly be seen as set apart; as a rule, the title sequence starts with the studio’s or the distributor’s trademark logo, which itself acts as a kind of title to the title sequence proper as the title sequence does to the movie proper.2 The series logo–titles–movie sets up an automatic progression that narrows the scope from a general product (studio logo) to the increasingly particular identification of the movie itself, first in terms of names and production roles, than directly as the story. The audience’s knowledge of these separate but linked sequences renders them as thresholds whose critical and interpretive significance always lies with anticipating what follows, the “real” event that is of interest—the story in the “movie proper.” This approach to title sequences denies their complexity by focusing on how they match and meet clear demands for fictional stories. Stanitzek’s proposal assumes the titles are at the start of a motion picture, both the literal beginning of the “film” and separate from the actual story, serving as an opening whose rhetorical function establishes the start of what comes after. Stanitzek oversimplifies. This “classic” understanding of title sequences normalizes what follows as naturalistic revelations of ‘events’ on-screen, defined by their narrative functions. The simple title cards in use at the start of the twentieth century marked the start of a production by acting as a literal separation between one film and the next,3 but for sequences in later commercial feature films, this restriction to only being labels is rare, and rarer still in television. No matter how complex they are, the audience fluently separates the credits and narrative, without any acknowledgment of the modal shift in engagement that transition requires.

2 Introduction Title sequences (and motion graphics) are formed from a complex mixture of multiple cues: speech, music/noises, written language (texts), and visual imagery of various types. These hybrids occupy a unique position in commercial cinema—fusing the graphic conventions of typography and design with the kinetic and chronic modes of animation and live action photography, modulating otherwise assumptively incompatible concerns with experience and duration drawn from commercial design, avant-garde animation, and narrative cinema—thus providing a critical nexus immediately applicable to the challenges posed by digital technology. The use of live action and animation to form singular units called “title cards” cannot be understood as texts and images and narrative simultaneously,4 yet all these materials form the ‘image object,’ the denoted contents shown on-screen.5 The titles’ conception as a pseudo-independent unit, separate and separated from the “movie proper” provides a cliché threshold mediating between artifice and actuality that cultural critic Jonathan Gray noted in his study of cinematic paratexts, Show Sold Separately: Opening credit sequences, in short, serve an important ritual function. . . . In a sports game, it is the playing of the national anthem. And in television, it is the opening credit sequence. Opening credits help to transport us from the previous textual universe to a new one, or out of “real life” and into the life of the program (even if a growing number of shows are opting for cold starts to throw the viewer right into the action).6 Gray offers the classic conception of the title sequence as the definitional, but ambivalent, moment demarcating between “opening” and “narrative” that serves to move the audience into the world created by the story. It is a convention-laden process of demarcation. He evokes the “magic circle,” a proximate, traditional distinction between the fictional realm and the rest of life, mystifying what is a structural interpretation and functional invention of difference. The refusal is authorized by its tacit assertion of cinema=narrative. Precisely this “invisible” and overlooked nature, hidden from consideration by being obvious, justifies their analytic interest: the title sequence is an ideological construction whose dimensions are evident in their ambivalence and invisibility. Understood in these terms, the critical analysis and apprehension of the title sequence is an afterthought, interesting but not important, their marginalization an appropriate response to a minor form. The normative role of credits as a material separation between the narrative causality and whatever came first, before them—the logos, advertisements and other ephemera that is not part of the story—becomes the entirely of the sequence, justifying its marginal consideration as peripheral and insignificant.7 Such a view is a self-fulfilling prophecy where the title sequence can be ignored without consideration precisely because, a priori, it does not deserve consideration. This circularity has prevented and delayed theoretical analysis of titles as cinematic works. Although motion picture technology was invented during the nineteenth century, and narrative, dramatic films are a twentieth-century evolution of melodramatic theater from that same century,8 cinema is the Modern art form.9 Its development during the twentieth century aligns with Modernist aesthetics triumphantly becoming the dominant cultural mode at mid-century.10 Unlike the older arts, its novelty enabled it to avoid the challenges of engaging with the weight of received history that other arts seeking to

Introduction 3 become “modern” confronted, as composer Harry Partch explained in the opening to his book on composition in 1949: Perhaps the most hallowed of traditions among artists of creative vigor is this: traditions in the creative arts are per se suspect. For they exist on the patrimony of standardization, which means degeneration. They dominate because they are to the interest of some group that has the power to perpetuate them, and they cease to dominate when some equally powerful group undertakes to bend them to a new pattern.11 Partch’s understanding of tradition and aesthetic innovation is that of an avant-garde artist, opposed to entrenched standards and suspicious of received knowledge; while he does not discuss cinema, the received history he describes was notably absent from early film, leaving its theorization to invent it.12 His comments about the “weight of tradition” make the attraction of cinema for Modernism immediately apparent—what its traditions were had to be experimentally created in much the same way the technology itself was. Lacking a clear and indisputable foundation, the early decades of film theory were concerned with inventing “cinema art”:13 the proposition of “cinema” as a capturing and preserving of ‘the real’ that allowed it to become the idealized percept-proof of reality14 is closely ingrained in the understanding of “cinema” as a world-historical practice of significant art. The historical emergence of “cinema” is part of twentieth-century Modernism—a fact quickly recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork (established in 1929) which began collecting films in 1935.15 Literally an invention of the fin-de-siècle, the role of Modernist thought in cinema is structurally systemic, superficially invisible, and commonly ignored. This heritage should not be difficult to recognize or acknowledge because motion pictures arises sui generis as an art during the arrival of Modernism; by the 1920s, histories of cinema explicitly connected it to narrative storytelling, establishing the formula of cinema=narrative at the moment recording its birth as a serious art. This “traditional history” of cinematic development informs the discussion of Thomas Edison’s work with motion pictures in A Million and One Nights (1924) by Terry Ramsaye, who develops the transition to narrative as the teleological destiny of cinema.16 French historians Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach developed this same thesis in The History of Motion Pictures (1938) within a broader, international framework,17 and Lewis Jacobs’s two editions of The Rise of the American Film (1939/1948) make the connections between this narrative understanding and Modernism explicit, both in terms of works selected and the scope of his analysis.18 These histories contribute to the critical and analytic neglect of motion graphics (and title sequences) because its hybrid nature challenges the clarity of formalist Modern aesthetics,19 which have a subtle influence, hidden and expansive without becoming more inclusive. The persistence of this ideation remains apparent through the choices of works and artists for consideration and the marginalization of hybrids such as motion graphics: the definitional boundaries that separate commercial film, avant-garde film, and video art as autonomous, independent art forms, but which all paradoxically employ motion pictures, argues against their contextual influences, and denies any hybrid crossings between them aesthetic validity, thus critical apprehension.20 This division of motion pictures into separate, parallel, and independent categories establishes the commercial (typically narrative) film, the avant-garde film, television,

4 Introduction video art, and still later, the web video as independent arts, each with its own distribution, presentation, audience. This process of division reifies a Modernist demand for “purity” common in the 1950s and 1960s that makes the contemporary collapse of their boundaries in digital convergence into an ontological challenge, a violation of the aesthetic criteria that define these art forms. Each category has a different degree of critical appraisal and consideration as part of “art history,” thus demonstrating how persistent this Modernist heritage, value system, and influence remains.21 In being conceived as autonomous arts, each domain of moving image was assured significance as art through their separation from each other.22 Hybrids such as motion graphics that bridge the differences between design, animation, avant-garde film/video art, and commercial narratives were neglected and ignored, regarded as insignificant to the historical development of cinema for exactly the same reason that they become important in addressing the challenges posed by the digital: title sequences in particular reveal the common, shared features of articulation and enunciation in motion pictures. They allow a consideration of semantic, lexical ordering without the constraints of narrative—precisely a rejection of the central concern in historical cinema study.23 Occasionally, singular designers (most famously Saul Bass,24 but including Maurice Binder25 and Pablo Ferro26), would be acknowledged as serious or important—but the field of motion graphics would not be. Their contemporary critical and historical attention illustrates the challenges posed by emergence of digital technology and its convergence of media.27 Modernist distinctions, prescriptions, and definitions of cinema and other media come into question in digital production, not because of its dominance and ubiquity or as the result of an avant-garde assault on an entrenched, traditional paradigm, but because contemporary challenges to the limited, “pure” conception of cinema have emerged in media created by digital technologies; their role in the critical and theoretical evolution of cinema cannot be underestimated. The hybridity that was an issue in the past returns as an asset in the Contemporary as the ambivalences of animation::live action become an increasingly obvious dimension of the digital revolution. Film historian André Gaudreault describes this emergent acknowledgment as a self-consciousness of ideological constraints that argues against any teleological conception of historical inevitability: “Traditional” film history, which the new generation of film scholars began to dispute following the Brighton congress, was known for an idealist conception of cinema and a teleological vision of its history. In this vision, events are only stages at various degrees of distance from the ideal to be attained: so-called “classical” cinema. Because of this ideal standard of cinema yet to come, early cinema, for traditional film historians, could only be a “primitive” cinema whose sole goal was to strive towards cinematic potential.28 The emphasis on a canon of “great films” is teleologically justified by their role in defining a “pure” media.This recognition of its enframing reveals it as an idealization of the reductive aesthetics ascendant for the first half of the twentieth century. Historical fusions of live action into animation, a potential introduced by Émile Cohl before World War I, exploited by the Fleischer animation’s use of rotoscoping in the 1920s, and developed in the composites of graphics and live action common to motion graphics in the 1950s

Introduction 5 and 1960s, becomes in digital cinema the transformative technique of “motion capture” where a human actor becomes the live action puppeteer for CGI animation, used in productions such as The Polar Express (2004), Avatar (2009), and The Adventures of Tin-Tin (2011) with increasingly naturalistic affect.29 These digital motion pictures rupture the assumed link of photographic indexicality between what appears on-screen and a physical source in reality, a challenge to this assumed “truth claim”30 that violates cinema’s medium-specificity and photography’s ontology.31 Unlike the discrete series of unique photographs in celluloid motion pictures or the continuous electronic waveform of analogue video, digital motion pictures are samples that lack the same type of material relationship to their source. What defines historically analogue media as analogue, whether in film or in the electric charge produced by a charge-coupled device, is the resulting media recording “depends on a physical relation between the object photographed and the image,”32 with only constrained capacity to change form once it has been “set.” Although the direct mediation of optics, exposure, film stock, processing, and printing are ignored in ontological arguments for cinema as a demonstration of ‘the real,’ these elements do distinguish the photograph from the phonograph recording—as well as older media such as the book. However, all these entirely different analogue media become identical digital media—stored as data they are differentiated by their encoding, not by a material link to their “source” as is commonly assumed for photography, a factor that makes “photographic indexicality” an amorphous, slippery concept whose everyday use consistently escapes from attempts to delimit it precisely. Computational media are different than analogue technologies: one type of material, motion pictures, does not remain entirely different and separate from other types of material, books and sound recordings.The digital encoding of all these as binary information processed and electronically rendered into superficially different human-readable forms facilitates manipulations, transfers, and shifts between media in ways that were literally impossible historically: their immanence as “recording” is more directly truncated by technology than in analogue film. Digital cinema is fluid and transformable using computations in ways that do not directly link the result to a photographic source by replacing the photochemical trace with the database and its catalogue of pixels collected and stored as information. The expanded field of digital convergence is an ungrounding of accepted aesthetic foundations, not the repudiation or rupture with the technical lineage of earlier technologies, such as photography, that historically allowed smaller degrees of visual transformation anticipating the digital.33 Understanding motion graphics’ relationship to digital imaging first requires recognizing how they have been marginalized in historical conceptions of the “cinematic” linked to an aesthetics relying on the indexicality of photographic realism and articulated in/through the formulation of cinema=narrative and its specific canon of “great films.” Cinema’s “material manifestation of history” originates with specific and limited options—formal, interpretative, aesthetic, political—for the works accepted as significant enough for critical and theoretical consideration, constituting its dispositive (discourse).34 Philosopher Giles Deleuze’s twin studies on motion pictures are typical of this approach, revealing how these assumptions are common factors in the foundational theorizations of cinema, invisible and unquestionable. He develops an understanding of the internal (diegetic) structure of motion pictures as a realist presentation justified by

6 Introduction an assumption about the nature of that image’s production—origins, i.e., an ontological belief implied by the apparent reality shown on-screen. The cinematic subjects of his consideration are deliberately limited to the canonized “art cinema”: The great directors of cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts. One cannot object by pointing to the vast proportion of rubbish in cinematographic production—it is no worse than anywhere else, although it does have unparalleled economic and industrial consequences. The great cinema directors are hence merely more vulnerable—it is infinitely easier to prevent them from doing their work.35 These “movement-images” and “time-images” Deleuze identifies are irreducibly narrative: they function as presentations of “perception” connected to a character (dream, hallucination, subjective view), “affection” (the visible space as an arena for/awaiting action), or “action” (the continuity of cause–effect within/across a series of shots)—all interpreted ways to subjectivize ‘image objects’ as belonging to a particular narrative effect; within this framework, these constructs remain stoically realist, especially when they assume distorted and irregular appearances linked to the fantastic and hallucinatory. They propose a world-on-film corresponding to the familiar experiential reality of the audience, accounting for the differences from that everyday experience through the mediation of “subjective” dramatization. These understandings of cinematic imagery are narrative, but they are also derived from a concern with the formal expressiveness of the medium—an engagement with the “purity” of cinema=narrative where the capacity to dramatize narrative action visually becomes the sine qua non of “cinematic art” and its cinematography: The image of the cinema being, therefore, ‘automatic’ and presented primarily as movement-image, we have considered under what conditions it is specifically defined into different types.These types are, principally, the perception-image, the affection-image and the action-image. Their distribution certainly does determine a representation of time, but it must be noted that time remains the object of an indirect representation in so far as it depends on montage and derives from movement-images.36 Deleuze naturalizes this framework through his appeal to the automatic nature of live action production: that the photographic process seemingly proceeds without the need for human intermediation or direction. This belief in photographic automation is a fallacy. Every dimension of the cinematographic process is subject to highly specialized and precise controls for historical chemical photography (not to mention the more precise control over digital images) that determine not only what (if anything) appears on-screen, but what enables its recomposition and transformation in postproduction in dramatic ways through composite photography and optical printing, as well as in subtle ways through the developing and printing processes. The links between cinema and narrative forms makes them appear to be an inherent feature of motion pictures, rather than a historically specific outcome of the costs of production and distribution. Even something as basic as what appears on screen is subject to controls through such basic functions as the

Introduction 7 framing, lighting, and mise-en-scène deployed prior to exposing even one frame. When the animated motion picture is included within this cinematic framework, the Modernist preconceptions—the “purity” of photographic indexicality-ontology—reveal themselves. The aesthetics of cinema=narrative are an example of what art critic Clement Greenberg called “purity.” His theory depends on ascribing a specific definition to a particular medium in advance.Whether for painting or film, this a priori constraint then determines the logical progression of its self-critical revelation by excluding any work that develops in the marginal, hybrid overlaps between what are assumed to be “distinct” media: What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, though its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain. . . . The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific tasks of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.37 Reduction to “purity” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Realist ideology typically assumes that photographic representation is ontologically linked to real-world sources. This belief justifies the refusal of motion graphic hybrids that demonstrate the artificial and plastic capabilities of motion pictures. These developments were explicitly confined to the avant-garde film as a specific, independent variety of cinema;38 their presence in commercial work undermines that distinction in an implicit opposition to purist cinema: reductivism is the watchword for Greenberg’s Modernism.39 Digital media challenge the established order of cinema in a natural consequence of their leveling established hierarchies that separate media: any awareness of alternatives subverts Greenberg’s “purity” that isolated each field. It is logical to expect a multitude of Post-Cinemas as symptoms of the “corrective” pluralism and hybrid processes denied by Greenberg’s “guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence” that relies on the elimination of hybrids in the name of “purity.” American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s book on cinema, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (published 1971), establishes “cinema” as necessarily a reflection of the art theory Greenberg developed.40 The aspiration to becoming philosophical that he discerns in Greenberg’s account renders serious art as a reflection of this reduction. His analysis is also reductive, proceeding from a priori limits that justify his logic of selection: only those works typically shown in the black box theater are considered, but this limit does not include or overlap with the “avant-garde film,” or with the media of the “art world” shown in galleries or museums.41 This ratification of cinema in these terms denies hybrid forms validity, thus inherently rejecting the title sequence as insignificant: The requirement for a certain indiscriminateness in the accepting of movies (I don’t say you have to appreciate Singing Cowboy or Comedy Horror movies) has its

8 Introduction analogues in the past of the established arts: anyone who is too selective about the classical composers whose music he likes doesn’t really like music; whereas a distaste for various moments or figures in literature may be productive. But this requirement not merely is unlike the case of the other arts now [in 1971], it is the negation of their very condition: for it can be said that anyone who cultivates broadly the current instances of music or painting or theater does not appreciate, and does not know, the serious instances of those arts as they occur.This condition of modernist art has been described by [Clement Greenberg’s follower] Michael Fried as one in which an art leaves no room, or holds no promise, for the minor artist: it is a situation in which the work of the major artist condemns the work of others to artistic nonexistence, and in which his own work is condemned to seriousness, to further radical success or complete failure. . . . Art now exists in the condition of philosophy.42 Cavell makes the aesthetic theory proposed by Greenberg (via Michael Fried) an explicit part of his discussion, connecting formalist “purity” to “cinema.”43 The mediation of cinema is a transformative action that renders the ‘world on screen’ as an experiential reality for the audience—this encounter with reality (“photography’s objectivity”) is the essential nature of motion pictures whose adherence assures its validity as art: this Modernist narrowing of scope is the precondition for “important art.” The realist, narrative forms common to commercial cinema become the only possible “serious” cinema, since the works excluded are determined a priori to be irrelevant to analysis; a teleology apparent in the central role of narrative, dramatic fiction for Cavell’s analysis. “Historical progression” is necessarily a prescriptive reduction and exclusion. This approach is crucial to delineating cinema as a serious art, making the role of ‘purity’ and the exclusive, narrowed conception of cinema-as-narrative foundational to “cinema.” Cavell’s rejection of the animated film as cinema44 arises from how it is entirely constructed, an artificial creation that modulates the audience’s understanding of what happened in-between the frames shown on-screen belied by their embrace and acceptance by their audiences.The motion that arises cannot be a material trace of the apparent reality shown on-screen, thus also demonstrating the contingency of Deleuze’s framework and its reliance on a set of preconceptions about the nature of “great films” and their production: that they are products of a photographic process whose ontological link to reality is not open to question or consideration. It is precisely the lack of such a link that causes Cavell to reject animation; his ontological considerations of cinema necessarily conflict and reject motion graphics and title sequences a priori to their consideration.This understanding of the relationship between the moving image in live action films and its “source” in reality is central to the post-World War II aesthetic conception of cinematic form: the photographic foundations of film are the guiding principle in these realist aesthetics. Because celluloid films are composed from photographs, for both Cavell and André Bazin, their photography is evidence of a direct link between what appears onscreen and profilmic events.45 Especially for Bazin, realism depends on an “objective” presentation created by the “long take,” which enables the emergence of the ‘reality’ of the events shown—their narrative progression as ‘events’ (actualities) happening onscreen with a minimum of intrusion. Events correspond to what could happen for the audience if they were witnessing the events themselves without the cinematic mediation.

Introduction 9 Bazin’s realism discursively functions as a revelation of a socially defined reality.46 His claim about the long take, that “nature finally does more than imitate art: it imitates the artist,”47 identifies this narrative presentation with the framing of shots. The presentation on-screen thus serves as an articulation of this ontological reality for the audience, a revelation of a world that considers the “conditions of reality”—cinema as a reflection on ‘the real.’48 There is no place in either Bazin’s or Cavell’s realism for the hybridity that is motion graphics and the ambivalent complexity of title sequences, an expression of the Modernist bias against hybridity. Ironically, the long take, which is so important to Bazin’s aesthetics, is most commonly employed in Hollywood features as a background for the credits. This aesthetic constraint is internalized by the realist strictures of cinema to argue against the separation of credits from story to promote the integration of titles directly into the narrative itself; however, there is no confusion between what the titles state and how the story develops. Even when the crediting and narrative functions are mixed together, running simultaneously as in both Wayne Fitzgerald’s fusion of credits with Orson Welles’s iconic four-minute long take in Touch of Evil (1958) [Figure 0.1], or

Figure 0.1 All the title cards in Touch of Evil (1958), designed by Wayne Fitzgerald.

10 Introduction

Figure 0.2 All the title cards in The Player (1992), designed by Dan Perri.

the virtuoso orchestration of Robert Altman’s nine-minute long opening to The Player (1992) [Figure 0.2] where Dan Perri’s inserted credits neither confuse nor conflict with the self-referential discussion of Welles’s earlier long take and the need for a constant “cut, cut, cut.” What seems like an “obvious” separation between the title sequence and the main text breaks down in these designs as the actual identification of where the titles start and stop is ambivalent, an indication of their uncertain role that reinforces the title sequence’s traditional, marginal status at the initiation of the narrative. In the book Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design, film historian Jan-Christopher Horak noted the problematics of defining title sequences reveals their marginality.49 Their hybrid fusion of concerns from avant-garde film and graphic design complicates their critical and historical analysis, but audiences understand these same shifts in enunciation easily and often without recognizing them as happening at all. This fluidity and fusion of aesthetic sources anticipates the same instabilities in digital imaging; recognizing the pseudo-independence of a title sequence is a product of interpretation and expectation dictating the horizons of possibility. While the titles are not the story, their critical identification is fundamentally a grammatical view of interpretive functions. Their separation is traditionally marked by the role of theme music (which appears along with the credits in most designs): when the music stops, the titles are over. In his analysis of title sequences, Stanitzek noted that audiences understand the lexical-semiotic engagements of crediting and the experiential-dramatic interpretations of narrative as separate aspects of the same experience: Title sequences create a divided focus of attention, the separation of the inside from the outside, of what is the play of the narrative from what is documenting the

Introduction 11 production, cinematic narrative from film commentary, intradiegetic from extradiegetic information. The title sequence achieves this as a film within a film, in that it introduces, in that it—semi-autonomously—establishes itself as distinct from the main film.50 Audiences understand the separation of title sequences from the scenes that come both before and after without conscious effort, making the need for a definition of “title sequence” seem quite futile, redundant with what is plainly obvious about these sections in motion pictures. Their pre-conception as a separate part, definitionally distinct from the story that follows is critically problematic in cases such as Touch of Evil or The Player where the credits are superimposed onto an extended, virtuosic long take that begins the story—except there really is no problem in separating credits from actions. The role of both theme music and on-screen titling together provide a clear separation of the credit sequence from the rest of the story,51 and even in instances such as the opening to the television cartoon Scooby-Doo,Where AreYou? (1969) where there is only a title card identifying the show’s name, the sixty seconds of montage synchronized with the theme song still stands apart from the rest of the program.52 Making the distinction between titles and narrative requires a transition from one interpretive mode to another; the complexity arises when these modes happen simultaneously.53 Although paratexts are marginal productions, paradoxically autonomous and integrated-while-independent of narrative,54 film historian Garrett Stewart explains the separation of titles from story as a function of “causal logic,” the realist basis of narrative in familiar relationships the audience already knows from their everyday lives: We all know that, even though few films end effectively, most begin that way.This is because there is nothing to test the beginning against, nothing for it to fall short of. In David Bordwell’s formalist distinction, it is all syuzhet [actions or events] with no fabula [narrative or story] yet constructed—or not quite yet. At least for a second or two: pure structure without narrative. And structure without content is another name for a paradigm—after which the syntagmatic takes over, subordinated to the cause and effect chain of narrative linearity.55 Stewart’s recognition about separating the credits from narrative action necessarily links them to realism. For the titles to be labels that always identify externalities to the narrative requires that the narrative function reflect a familiar and established logic derived from past experience—i.e., create a naturalistic affect no matter how stylized its presentation. The exceptions to this rule are rare and atypical, immediately recognizable as exceptions to the standard progression of title sequences as labels rather than narrative: the “James Bond parody” opening to Deadpool 2 (2018) designed by John Likens employs what are normally composited, non-narrative texts to comment on the narrative action—the titular character’s apparent suicide at the beginning of the film [Figure 0.3]. Rather than providing the standard identifications of the actors and production, these titles criticize them, for example, by crediting the writers as “‘the real’ Villains Here” instead of providing their names. It makes the interruptive effects of the opening titles apparent, serving as an ellipsis between the opening events and the rest of the fabula. Nevertheless, this

12 Introduction

Figure 0.3 “James Bond Parody” main title opening from Deadpool 2 (2018), designed by John Likens.

title sequence is entirely self-contained. It does not resemble anything else in the rest of the film, including the actual credit sequence, a standard and unexceptional main-on-end presentation that comes after the conclusion of the story.The conversion of these parodic visuals into a narrative enunciation makes them into a specific part within the story, comparable to the dream sequence (Scottie’s Nightmare) designed by John Ferren for Vertigo (1958). In both sequences, their contents defy the organization of the story, yet are immediately understood as a subjective expression tied to the main character. Ferren’s dream sequence functions in precisely the same way as the parody credits in Deadpool 2: as an ellipsis between the first section and second section of the story. This montage describes the psychosis that “Scottie” (played by Jimmy Stewart) has—it is readily assimilated to the narrative. However, in Deadpool 2, this sequence is exactly disruptive of the progression, yet in shifting comprehension from crediting to narration, the parody sequence draws attention to its stylization as a rupture—a fugue—that avoids returning to the narrative consequences of the opening scene. The complex play between narrative and credits in this parodic design ultimately remain within the scope of the story—“Deadpool” (played by Ryan Reynolds) attempts suicide in an attempt to avoid the same consequences this eruption of credits also attempts to avoid by superficially “stopping” the narrative. Using the crediting function to define the title sequence is an instance of the tendency for essentialism. The “purity” of a title design lies with this most easily recognized element of their construction that understands the title sequence simply as “labels” identifying the production, but it is a minor concern compared with how their relationship to the narrative directs their comprehension.56 This differential counters the purist reduction of titles to a crediting, but also justifies their elimination entirely from the start of a movie.57 Interpreting the credits as an intratextual illustration of the story is the traditional view espoused by Stanitzek and Gray; the titles differentiate between the narrative and the not-narrative. Because the audience can always separate the titles from the story they describe, although being both a part of the narratives in commercial cinema and

Introduction 13 apart from it, they are always able to navigate complex mixtures of credits and narrative without difficulty. This commonplace view of credits has been repeated often enough to become their standard, uncritically considered “definition”; it is a view that Modernist title designer Saul Bass invokes in discussing his work with film historian Pamela Haskin shortly before his death in 1996: My initial thoughts about what a title could do was to set mood and to prime the underlying core of the film’s story; to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.58 Bass proposes “emotional resonance” as a way to link the pseudo-independence of his designs, such as the minimal graphic animation of The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), to the narrative as an abstracted allegory.When considered in this way, the title sequence is an anticipation of the events-yet-to-come in a way that only becomes a coherent account of them in retrospect. The myopic belief in the “purity” of a clear demarcation between crediting and narrative functions is the traditional of understanding titles; it also marginalizes their critical appraisal. The general neglect of title sequences and motion graphics throughout the 1950s and 1960s demonstrates this omission. The allegorical model that Bass’s title sequences offer is one where the design suggests expectations about the story, but withholds their details, a suggestion or teasing of what will come but does not engage with the narrative directly, thus assuring its distinction; in contrast, the narrative integration of Fitzgerald’s and Perri’s designs assumes the immediacy of difference between the credits and the story without explaining or considering what produces that distinction. The implicit separation of titles from narrative in Bass are demonstrations of its Modernism: the titles are titles, while the narrative stands apart as an entirely distinct articulation. Although some designers such as Bass became prominent for their title sequences, Modernism’s narrowed scope of consideration for cinema means that the majority of notable designs failed to achieve the prerequisite independence needed for their critical consideration as “important art,” and hybrids such as Touch of Evil would be denigrated for imposing titles over the narrative progression.This elimination of externalities leaves no allowance for hybridity or changes in media; the convergence specific to the digital is disallowed in advance of its proposition, making the contemporary crisis posed by digital technology inevitable: “post-cinema” recalls the “crisis of cultural authority” which defined the Post-Modern in the 1980s,59 and which is extended into the present in the book Modernity Without A Project by cultural critic C. B. Johnson.60 The abandonment of futurity in favor of an ongoing, interminable nowness transforms historical Modernism into “the Contemporary.” It accommodates the Modern to the particular recombinant strength of digital technology as an autonomous productive system: the convergence of motion picture technologies underway with the advent of digital technologies for production, distribution, and exhibition makes these restrictions appear antiquated and irrelevant while they are still actively shaping the present. This re/construction of history ossifies around the established paradigms of Modernity in ways that appear natural, masking their ideological basis and lineage. The eclipse of futurity, apparent in the

14 Introduction Contemporary, creates the illusion of severed links to the Modernist past, when in fact they are being transformed into axiomatic assumptions: This was modernity: a time that oversaw vastly different ideological movements all trying to bring their own visions for the future into being, however opposed, ghastly, or desirable. It was the last time that society really believed in a future that was grasped as better than the present. . . . Upon examination, “the contemporary” can be seen as elitist and rigid in its own way, often concealing order within “openness” and surface change. At its most mainstream or democratic, “the contemporary” appears more like the brutal past that Post-Modernists thought was outmoded than the future free from oppression that Modernists so dearly desired. It might be viewed in this sense as a weird or incoherent restoration of the experience of the high modern.61 The restrictions that define cinema remain evident in the collection of “great works” chosen for discussion—thus the assumption of cinema=narrative continues to constrain and direct the present.62 This transformation of Modernism into the Contemporary that Johnson identifies was part of the avant-garde from its inception: successful avant-gardes become the status quo—rebellion becomes the new dogma.63 Johnson’s proposal takes this analysis further, suggesting that the contemporary is the arrival of what the historical avant-gardes anticipated: it is easy to recognize the transformation of the early avantgardes into academic procedure, as dominance was the end-goal for all these movements; the Post-Modern comes as an attempt at a final shattering of all restrictive dogmas, the end-game beyond which the freedom promised by the Modernist project leaves no room for new dogmas to arise. Johnson’s analysis recognizes that the success of this project is aligned with the success of the avant-garde; the Contemporary arises when they have achieved their ideological goal of dominance. The problems posed by digital technology are implicit in this transformation: instead of challenging it, they serve to conclude these developments by erasing the final sets of traditional barriers the avant-garde opposed, the distinctions between media and the opposition of high and low culture. The role of realism in the title sequence occupies a useful, critical position in considering this transformation of indexicality in identifying the relationship to ‘the real.’ The position of the title sequence as a pseudo-independent unit gives it more than merely rhetorical value in considering the transformation of imagery effected by the emergence of digital technology. The historically marginal position of titles makes them uniquely suited to theorizing these changes because digital technologies are destabilizing in precisely the same boundary-breaking ways that motion graphics have been for their entire history. The continuity of new and old in motion graphics—those differences that don’t “make a difference”—render the heritage of cinema apparent in title sequences familiar enough to be recognizable, but allows those things that are different to become obvious and conclusive.These transformations are technological, they impact all media in related and interconnected ways. However, to ignore or deny the convergent nature of its point of address would be to deny the concerns raised by digital technology. Unlike the photographs of film, the digital imagery shown on-screen is composed from discrete samples that can be individually addressed, engaged, and altered. While the fact of compositing

Introduction 15 and manipulation has always been true of cinema even before digital technology, with the digital convergence of animation and live action, it achieves a new currency that film historians André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion identified as the “image-animation problem” in their book The Kinematic Turn. The fluidity between live action photography and generative animation depends on a technological fact about motion pictures that has been ignored and de-emphasized in twentieth-century theorizations of cinema—that it is not what it appears to be, but is instead masked by a cultural construct, realism, that denies the technological foundation of motion pictures in animation.64 The theoretical issues posed by digital technology are familiar from the history of animation in general, the avant-garde film in particular, and are obvious throughout the history of motion graphics. Contemporary digital production tools bring what appeared to be settled issues back into consciousness: the (re)emergence of animation as the central technical/theoretical concern for motion pictures (cinema), which was systematically developed and explored in motion graphics, and has become a commonplace part of the historical organization of title sequences. Maurice Binder’s fluid compositions using scale-independent design in openings such as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) [Figure 0.4] directly anticipate the dynamic, plastic construction of contemporary digital works that elide the separation of graphics, animation, and live action.These ambiguities and instabilities are commonplace in title designs, making them historically relevant models for considering the challenges offered by digital production making these processes commonplace. Digital technology merges animation with live action to achieve a new prominence and theoretical urgency that challenges the assumed “medium specificity and ontology” apparent as an indexical claim about between the ‘image object’ and its productive source. The banality of digital convergence reveals the critical concerns with the historical maintenance of “cinema” as field-specific insecurities created by these disruptions of categorical “purity” achieved in Modernist theory. Motion graphics and the title sequence connect digital cinema to the basis of motion pictures in photographic technology.The use of historical title sequences as paradigmatic exemplars of these connective relations reflects a conscious choice to challenge the ahistorical conception of digital technology as a rupture that exceeds the aesthetic developments it incorporates and instrumentalizes. The desire to demarcate digital animation as essentially different makes this proposition of continuity a polemical defiance of the historical instability of “pure” media inherited from Modernism. The digital only poses definitional and conceptual problems for those works primarily considered within a paradigm that insists on them as disruptive technologies supplanting earlier approaches—a claim that refuses to acknowledge that this replacement necessarily entails the simulation of that earlier technology; marginalized and neglected hybrid forms—readily apparent in the convergent role of animation, optical printing, avant-garde film and graphic design in the commercial title design—offer a tangential conception of cinema, one that is tied neither to the purist conception of cinema=narrative nor to a restrictive conception of technical determinism and ontological belief. In being sidelined in the historical conception of “cinema,” these works have a simultaneous historical presence and consequent contextuality with Modernist works, while at the same time exceeding and violating those demands, a position reflective of their marginal position within the discourse of cinema.

16 Introduction

Figure 0.4 All the title cards in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder.

Understanding “realism” in motion graphics as a series of indexical modes [Figure 0.5] enables the recognition of how title sequences modulate their relationships to reality by treating indexicality as distinct from the ontology of photography, thus separating their enunciation from the aesthetics of a “purity” that denies them validity. These dynamics

Introduction 17

Figure 0.5 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a product of its (ontological) direct connection to the real, while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not require this same link to reality for its significance.

will become more apparent in Part 1. The entanglement of ontology with indexicality makes the discussion of these realist modes problematic without first addressing the ontological theories of realism as applied to title sequences. Historically, both factors appear together, simultaneously, as interdependent approaches to realism focused on naturalism that gives the indexical claim of being-connected to ‘the real’ a central role, in contrast to the artificial identification of fictionality as the illegitimate ‘unreal’ when it does not correspond to this photographic ontology. Considering these relations using the distinction between subjective and objective instead of ontology enables the acknowledgment of a broader scope of realist applications than only those that act as an ontological demonstration for ‘the real.’That motion graphics, in exactly the same ways as fictional narrative drama, proposes its own reality is a banal observation: in offering statements about being-realistic, the fictional establishes itself as independent of any ontological concern. This distinction between subjective and objective enables the acknowledgment of a broader scope of realist applications in cinema and motion graphics, avoiding the logically necessary rejection of these hybrids as non- or anti-cinema. Contemporary digital challenges to the historical index of cinema are phantasmal, produced by theoretical demands and propositions whose “truth claims” are the source of the problems.The distinctions of “objective” and “subjective” modes emerges clearly from articulation by rejecting the link of indexicality-ontology. Unhindered by an ontological aesthetic of photography-as-indexical common to traditional conceptions of cinematic realism, motion graphics has been free to develop and explore a wider range of potentials, developing an alternative conception of cinematic realism as a set of modalities where the ontology of photography is irrelevant to the articulation of links to reality or the elaboration of fictional narratives. The dynamic range of naturalism::stylization that defines the variety of realist appearances in motion graphics distinguishes documentary, with its attendant claim of being-factual (indexical) from fantasy, with an equally important attendant claim of being-fictional (artificial): both

18 Introduction sets of claims being-factual/being-fictional are presented using the same modal realism shown in Figure 0.5. Stylization is no more a distinction of being-fictional than naturalism necessarily defines the being-factual of documentary. The complexity of this modal approach appears through the opposition of objective and subjective presentations that articulate the difference between “mere appearances” (‘documentary reality’) and the “reality of the mind” (‘metaphysical reality’); both presentations make an identical claim to describe ‘the real,’ split over the nature of the reality they describe. Separating the naturalism of everyday appearances, where cinema offers a demonstration of things that the audience might encounter if they looked for themselves (the superficial appearance of the world), from the stylized revelations of imaginary conceptions of the world, whether in the immanence of fantasy or as a normally hidden, metaphysical “truth” that does not correlate to the mere appearances of everyday reality, gives cinematic realism the capacity to express the same range of representation potentials familiar from other visual and performing arts that are not beholden to only demonstrate an “ontological truth” about the world. This approach to realism is not new; it has simply been denied to cinema and motion pictures generally.

Notes 1 Zagala, A. “The Edges of Film” Senses of Cinema no. 20 (May, 2002) http://sensesofcinema. com/2002/feature-articles/titles/ retrieved September 14, 2016. 2 Stanitzek, G. “Reading the Title Sequence (Vorspann, Génèrique)” Cinema Journal vol. 48, no. 4 (2009), p. 45. 3 Gaudreault, A. and Barnard, T. “Titles, Subtitles and Intertitles: Factors of Autonomy, Factors of Concatenation” Film History vol. 25, nos. 1–2 (2013), p. 83. 4 Zagala, A. “The Edges of Film” Senses of Cinema no. 20 (May, 2002) http://sensesofcinema. com/2002/feature-articles/titles/ retrieved September 14, 2016. 5 Wiesing, L. Artificial Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 35. 6 Gray, J. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), p. 75. 7 Re, V. “From Saul Bass to Participatory Culture: Opening Title Sequences in Contemporary Television Series” Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies (Spring, 2016) “Small Data” (published July 11, 2016) www.necsus-ejms.org/saul-bass-participatory-culture-opening-titlesequences-contemporary-tv-series/ retrieved March 22, 2017. 8 Vardac, A. Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949). 9 Metz, C. Film Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 10 Hatfield, J. “Expanded Cinema and Narrative” Millennium Film Journal nos. 39–40, “Hidden Currents” (Winter, 2003), pp. 63–64. 11 Partch, H. Genesis of a Music (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949). 12 Epstein, J. “The Cinema Continues” French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939:Volume 2, 1929–1939 ed. R. Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 13 Gaudreault, A. Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema trans. T. Barnard (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011), p. 9. 14 Epstein, J. “The Senses I (b)” French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939: Volume 1, 1907–1929 ed. R. Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 15 Wasson, H. Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 16 Ramsaye, T. A Million and One Nights (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924). 17 Bardèche, M. and Brasillach, R. The History of Motion Pictures (New York: Norton, 1938). 18 Jacobs, L. The Rise of the American Film (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939/1948).

Introduction 19 19 Kuspit, D. “The Abstract Self-Object” Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century ed. F. Colpitt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 129–140. 20 Sherman, T. “Vernacular Video” Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube ed. G. Lovink and S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), p. 162. 21 Keedy, J. “Zombie Modernism” Texts on Type: Critical Writings on Typography ed. S. Heller and P. B. Meggs (New York: Allworth Press, 2001), pp. 159–169. 22 Hatfield, J. “Expanded Cinema and Narrative” Millennium Film Journal nos. 39–40, “Hidden Currents” (Winter, 2003), pp. 63–64. 23 Christian Metz noted that critical and theoretical interest in cinematic narratives surged in the mid-1960s and continued into the 1970s; it has not ebbed in the fifty years since the publication of his book Film Language. 24 Brown, D. “The AIGA Medalist 1981: Saul Bass” The Annual of the American Institute of Graphics Arts (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981), pp. 13–44. 25 Binder, M. “Speech at the Museum of Modern Art-June 30, 1979” Bondage no. 10 (1981), pp. 23–24. 26 Pablo Ferro received an AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2009. 27 Berry, D. and Dieter, M. “Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation, Design” The State of Post-Cinema ed. D. Berry and M. Dieter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 2–3. 28 Gaudreault, A. Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema trans. T. Barnard (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011), p. 9. 29 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 39. 30 Gunning,T. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs” Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography ed. K. Breckman and J. Ma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 23–40. 31 Hagener, M., Hediger,V. and Strohmaier, A. The State of Post-Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 3. 32 Gunning,T. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs” Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography ed. K. Breckman and J. Ma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 23–24. 33 Gunning,T. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs” Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography ed. K. Breckman and J. Ma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 25–26. 34 Hagener, M., Hediger,V. and Strohmaier, A. The State of Post-Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 4. 35 Deleuze, G. Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiv. 36 Deleuze, G. Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. ix. 37 Greenberg, C. “Modernist Painting” Clement Greenberg:The Collected Essays and CriticismVol. 4 ed. J. O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 86. 38 Hatfield, J. “Expanded Cinema and Narrative” Millennium Film Journal nos. 39–40, “Hidden Currents” (Winter, 2003), pp. 63–64. 39 Poggioli, R. The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). 40 Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 68–73; 108–118. 41 Balsom, E. “Brakhage’s Sour Grapes, or Notes on Experimental Cinema in the Art World” Moving Image Review & Art Journal vol. 1, no. 1 (2012), pp. 13–25. 42 Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 13–14. 43 Hanhardt, J. “The Medium Viewed: The American Avant-Garde Film” A History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema (New York: The American Federation of the Arts, 1976), p. 22. 44 Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 168–171. 45 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. 46 Rushton, R. The Reality of Film:Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2011), pp. 44–47.

20 Introduction 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. Williams, C. Realism and the Cinema: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 36. Horak, J. Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2014). Stanitzek, G. “Reading the Title Sequence (Vorspann, Génèrique)” Cinema Journal vol. 48, no. 4 (2009), p. 45. Betancourt, M. Title Sequences as Paratexts: Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 122–124. Betancourt, M. Synchronization and Title Sequences: Audio-Visual Semiosis in Motion Graphics (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 113–119. Zagala, A. “The Edges of Film” Senses of Cinema no. 20 (May, 2002) http://sensesofcinema. com/2002/feature-articles/titles/ retrieved September 14, 2016. Picarelli, E. “Aspirational Paratexts: The Case of “Quality Openers” in TV Promotion” Frames Cinema Journal (2013) http://framescinemajournal.com/article/aspirational-paratexts-thecase-of-quality-openers-in-tv-promotion-2/ retrieved September 14, 2016. Stewart, G. “Crediting the Liminal: Text, Paratext, Metatext” Limina/le soglie del film: Film’s Thresholds ed. V. Innocenti and V. Re (Udine: Forum, 2004), p. 51. Stanitzek, G. “Texts and Paratexts in Media” Critical Inquiry vol. 32 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 27–42. Betancourt, M. Title Sequences as Paratexts: Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 125. Haskin, P. and Bass, S. “‘Saul, Can You Make Me a Title?’: Interview with Saul Bass” Film Quarterly vol. 50, no. 1 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 12–13. Owens, C. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Post-Modernism” The Anti-Aesthetic ed. H. Foster (Seattle: The Bay Press, 1983), p. 57. Johnson, C. B. ModernityWithout a Project (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2015). Johnson, C. B. ModernityWithout a Project (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2015), pp. 6–9. Keedy, J. “Zombie Modernism” Texts on Type: Critical Writings on Typography ed. S. Heller and P. B. Meggs (New York: Allworth Press, 2001), pp. 159–167. Poggioli, R. The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 56. Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 40.

Part 1

Subjectivity

‘Subjective realism’ in cinema is always a presentation of ambivalent stylization: the documentary ‘metaphysical reality’ depicts a reality “of the mind” that necessarily entails an indexical claim to being-factual, while the articulation of the fictional ‘unreal fantasy’ is understood as being purely artificial invention; these two modes demonstrate how metaphysics transforms the familiar appearances of the everyday world. Abandoning the superficial resemblance to everyday life gives ‘subjective realism’ its dual valence as a revelation of unseen realities and an uncanny critique of objectivity—unmasking the ideology of naturalism which conflates cinematic presentations with ontology and denies considerations of subjectivity except within a purely narrative framework.

1

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974)

Realism is a perennial ideological question: deeply unfashionable, it directs attention to issues of mimesis and indexicality while inviting debates over the nature of the realities it appears to assert and assume. The role of indexicality for historical motion pictures and cinematic realism has been understood as a natural consequence of photography; questions of subjectivity and objectivity have stood apart from these elaborations, often conflated with explicitly narrative and narrational directives.The faith in cinema=narrative makes the organization of cinematic form linked to storytelling, fictive identification, and narrational progression the priority in analysis rather than the more basic questions of realism and ‘the real.’ But storytelling is a “red herring” for theories of realism, a tangent that diverges from the modal identifications that define its elaboration. This distinction gives the questions of realism in motion graphics, a typically non-narrative type of motion picture, the potential to illuminate realism in cinema itself, an application beyond its role in title sequences. For digital media in particular, realism and the associated ontological claims of photographic indexicality pose simultaneous, immediate challenges: first, as an “old” idea whose irrelevance for digital technology seems obvious, second, as an arbitrary set of fixed codes whose manipulation and evocation make the entire consideration of mimetic forms simply an exercise in applied semantics and established, rote techniques; and finally as the rupture between the sampling of digital technology and the ontological link assumed to connect the photograph to reality. The issue is not to imagine or theorize ‘the real,’ but to consider the relationship between realism and the ideologies that seek to express reality. For motion graphics, this question of indexicality has always been problematic due to the fusion of typo/graphics with photography and the plastic deformations of animation that violate assumptions about filmic ontology in ways that presage the digital. The dominant historical theories of cinematic realism have a contextual relevancy when considering Jack Cole’s 1974 title sequence for the television program Kolchak:The Night Stalker that constructs a ‘realist fiction’ which critiques the indexicality of photography, undermining any ontological link.This Allegory Mode design1 engenders a self-contained narrative employing the familiar conventions of naturalism to restate the narrative content of the program, while simultaneously offering its presentation within the established forms of cinematic realism that create a demonstrative reality on-screen. At no point does it deviate from this use of naturalism, even the concluding “uncanny moment” remains within these boundaries.The critical praxis this design offers

24 Subjectivity for conceptualizing naturalism::stylization makes it immanent in the consideration and acknowledges its appearance is artificial. This double articulation resonates with the complexities of digital sampling and its problematic indexicality, allowing this particular title design to serve as a case study in the entanglement of realism and narrative with the complex relations of “objectivity” and “subjectivity” on-screen. Concern with an immanent connection to an external referent—reality—informs the conception of the ‘long take’ (continuous camera run) as an exemplary revelation of ‘the real,’ not merely an ‘intertextual’ reference because, unlike quotations and allusions to other texts, indexing reality inherently makes a claim of being-factual (truth) that is also assumed in cinematic realism to be an assertion of ontology (empirical validity), apart from any conventional link to past experience. It is the issue of things being what they are: interpretations of perception are recursive, their limits cannot be identified in advance, as semiotician Umberto Eco explained in his book Kant and the Platypus about the problematics of understanding perception-as-semiosis without recognizing the difference that indexicality makes for the assessment of mimesis: We speak of perceptual semiosis not when something stands for something else but when from something, by an inferential process, we come to pronounce a perceptual judgment on that same something and not on anything else.2 Semiotics does not resolve the ontological problem posed by indexicality. Recognizing things as being what they appear to be describes the perceptual process that separates and confuses reality from/with realism in cinema; however, for historical conceptions of cinematic realism, indexicality is simultaneously an ontological claim, not merely an issue of epistemology or semiosis. While debates over the “purity” of media (their ontological nature) are common in Modernist aesthetics, and critiques of it frequently appear in Post-Modern theory,3 these arguments over what constitutes valid examples of being-factual are tangential to the indexical identification itself; it is the assertion that matters in differentiating between the realism in a work that is fictional and one that is documentary. The validity of any ontological claim is subject to challenges as representing a particular hierarchy or dominant power structure whose appropriateness, accuracy, and validity may be questioned. What matters in apprehending the work is the role of this connection to an “external” authority—‘the real’—in the relationships developing around indexicality, subjectivity, narrative, and realism. Theories about photographic indexicality prompted a specific realist aesthetic based on not disputing that ontology, classically framed in the link of cinematic and filmic reality proposed by the French film critic André Bazin (and expanded upon by American philosopher Stanley Cavell).4 Bazin’s arguments for the use of the continuous camera run known as the ‘long take’ renders any rupture of the internal progression of the duration held within the shot, or the manipulation of its imagery, as a violation of an integral, ontological unity that links the ‘image object’ to an assumptive profilmic source (‘the real’) leading to his famous prohibition on continuity editing and the montage disintegration of on-screen ‘events.’ Theorizing this ontology (indexicality) as essential to realism and definitional for the long take dictated that violations of that unitary duration are violations of the essential “purity” of the photograph as an indexical document.5 These aesthetics have

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

25

a pervasive influence on theorists and filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s; his ideas are central to the dominant cinematic realism of this era, thus warranting a careful analysis in the discussion found in the first section entitled “The Long Take” in Jack Cole’s Kolchak:The Night Stalker title design. This initial appearance of a long take in this section is countered by montage in the second section entitled “The Analytic Montage,” and a series of frame holds made with an optical printer in the third section entitled “The Kinestasis.” This progression from Bazin’s ontology into the self-reference of the avant-garde provides an exemplary model for considering the role of indexicality for cinematic realism in motion graphics, its assertions about reality and realism, and the role of narrative in maintaining its coherence within the pseudo-independence of the title sequence. This initial analysis lays the foundations for the other close readings in this study that depart from and develop in counterpoint to photographic indexicality. What unites the three approaches to realism in Kolchak:The Night Stalker is their reliance on the audience’s acceptance of cinema as equivalent to what it appears to show: the realist portrayal (what happens on-screen) in/ for each ‘shot’ becomes Eco’s direct identification of reality (ontology). The long take encapsulates a limited duration of time as/into a singular shot that presents a sequence of actions while avoiding editing: this connection of contiguity in the ‘event’ on-screen to ‘the real’ is both well-known and firmly established in realist theory. Bazin championed this particular formal element whose status as the demonstrator of reality on-screen is central to theories of cinematic realism by the 1960s.6 Simultaneously a technological feature of celluloid film and an aesthetic arising from the conjunction of Modernist essentialism with machinic function, each aspect renders the other apparently natural and incontestable. This transparency of mimetic effect enables the realist form for all three sections of Cole’s design. The belief in a relationship of ‘image object’ to profilmic subjects asserts the reality of what appears on-screen, a familiar proposition famously developed by Bazin’s aesthetics, but shared by other similar historian/theorists of film, and acting to programmatically direct the young generation of critics (and later filmmakers including Truffaut and Godard) directly associated with Bazin in France; these theoretical convergences are commonplace, a set of positions whose moot validity and problematics are well known. Technological distinctions between digital motion pictures and photochemical motion pictures have implications for the long take (and its realist theorization). A consideration of its history illuminates this development. Although the earliest motion pictures produced in the 1890s were all single, seemingly continuous camera-runs filmed from a single vantage point with a stationary camera, they did not employ ‘long takes’ as such. In the films made by Louis and Auguste Lumière, on-screen ‘events’ develop in front of this motionless viewpoint, often organized to create a similar effect to figures standing on a stage—the actions shown are continuous and resemble live theater in their presentation, a reflection of the conditions of their exhibition, suggesting a conception of these films as a type of “canned theater” [Figure 1.1]. The function of these shots is simultaneously technical (as requisite backdrop) and aesthetic (suggestive of realist conceptions of media), as well as performing specifically narrative functions. However, the proposal of the ‘long take’ as an aesthetic choice does not directly emerge until there was an alternative—the various systems of continuity editing and montage that became the dominant modes of theatrical production in the 1920s; by the 1930s, Hollywood productions were commonly

26 Subjectivity

Figure 1.1 Stills from the long take in La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, Lumière Vue no. 91.3 [“Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon,” also known as “Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory” or “Exiting the Factory,”] (third version, August 1896), directed by Louis Lumière.

using ‘long takes’ only as a background for their superimposed titles at the start or end of the film. Consequently, title sequences offer an opportunity to consider the issue of the ‘long take’ in relation to realism, but apart from its narrative uses. The separation of these paratexts—they are pseudo-independent openings, produced as a separate section from the rest of the film, yet integral to it—reveals realism as an explicit construction for the ‘long take’ that informs the interpretation of what might otherwise appear to be natural, inevitable arrangements. Once the causal organization provided by story has been excluded, cinematic realism as a specific set of modal articulations becomes apparent. The complexity of articulating realism provides the material organization and “subject” of the Kolchak:The Night Stalker main title which begins as an objective, ‘realist fiction’ and changes by degrees into what suggests an ‘unreal fantasy,’ but is instead a demonstration of the ‘metaphysical reality’ of cinema.This trajectory through subjectivity defines each of the three sections and their construction of the problematics of realism that becomes apparent as the sequence progresses: it demonstrates several distinct and mutually exclusive approaches to the “reality” on-screen, unmasking the present, but always hidden stillness at the foundation of all motion pictures. It is a unique opportunity to consider the role of realism in motion graphics through its revelation of the unstable relationship between realism and reality that film historian Christopher Williams notes in Realism in the Cinema: The debate about realism can perhaps best be grasped through the opposition between ‘mere appearances,’ meaning the reality of things as we perceive them in

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

27

daily life and experience, and ‘true reality,’ meaning an essential truth, one which we cannot normally see or perceive, but which, in Hegel’s phrase is ‘born of the mind.’7 The “realism” concept imposes an encultured order on interpretation that is challenged by assumptions about not just the representation of ‘the real’ but the ontological status of things that might be called “reality.” This opposition of ‘mere appearances’ to the realism ‘born of the mind’ easily devolves into debates over which presentations are which, a question about the nature of reality rather than the indexical claims of the presentation or how they are expressively distinguished. Naturalism occupies one extreme in the range his comments suggest, a modeling upon everyday perceptions of reality, while at the other end of the same range lies the plastic mental reality, stylization, which does not necessarily resemble the world of visible objects and events at all. This apparently natural, inevitable consequence of photographs and motion pictures devolves from aesthetics into more basic questions about the status of things that might be called “real.” Systematic and formal protocols such as the ‘long take’ and continuity editing in live action films are well documented in contrast to the editing of animated, abstract, and “other” types of motion picture where there is no live action or its analogs—such as cartoon characters—an absence that itself suggests the dominance of concerns with the mimetic approaches common to realism in commercial cinema. These interpretive frameworks are specifically associated with particular depictive strategies that were wellknown frameworks by the 1960s, and in the 1970s had become standard techniques.The broad range of visual contents that may appear in “other” types of motion picture than the live action narrative/documentary film, such as graphic animations of kinetic patterns or motion typography common to motion graphics and visual music animations, have only a marginal place in standard considerations of realism, but their importance for realism emerges with the consideration of realist modalities divorced from narrative concerns. Bazin’s realist argument about the “long take,” so influential on later commercial productions, argues for minimal editing because of his assumption of a close association between on-screen denotation and the realist domain. The earliest celluloid (film) motion pictures produced in the 1890s were all staged as singular ‘shots,’ made from seemingly continuous camera-runs, recorded from a single vantage point. In the films made by the Georges Méliès, the events appearing on-screen played out in front of a stationary camera, giving them a direct resemblance to the performances of stage or theater show; for other directors, such as Émile Cohl, the découpage8 more closely resembled the framing of the comics he was producing before turning to cinema; for both Méliès and Cohl, découpage facilitated trick photography showing fusions of live action, superimposition, and animation. Events develop in front of this stationary vantage point that presents the actions as apparently continuous even when they are not. This connection to live theater anticipates their presentation and the conditions of exhibition. It energizes the combination of ‘event’ with the shot that contains it, a direct connection of naturalism to stylization that makes the particulars of depiction appear to turn denotation into the thing itself, an ontological link of cinema to reality.These connections are symptoms. This recourse is seemingly unavoidable in early cinema since the similitude between photography and unmediated visual perceptions appears ineluctable. Realism poses an

28 Subjectivity “error” only when ‘what is seen’ in photographs or motion pictures is confused with being more than simply identifying a representation. The photograph and, especially, the motion picture play at being the reality of the thing in such a way as to make one appear to be equivalent to the other; the mechanical processes of photography do not resolve these distinctions since it is not a duality based in empirical observation, but in the interpretation of the resulting cultural construct. This dynamic in motion pictures falls into the opposed organization of realist imagery as a dynamic of naturalism::stylization. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has discussed this relationship between empirical encounter and cultural significance: The very expression which is also a report of what is seen, is here a cry of recognition. What is the criterion of the visual experience?—The criterion? What do you suppose? The representation of ‘what is seen.’ The concept of a representation of what is seen, like that of a copy, is very elastic, and so together with it is the concept of what is seen. The two are intimately connected. (Which is not to say that they are alike.)9 Certainly there is nothing in the universe that does not serve as a stimulus to thought. Empirical and cultural values are connected, but remain distinct: the cultural derives from the empirical experience.Their entanglement appears to be a ‘natural’ result of the kinds of explanations for the ‘events’ shown by the photograph itself: their superficial indexing of ‘the real’ through familiar appearances.These conventions of realism simulates ‘the real’; however, acknowledging their contingency undermines the entire system— the apparent indexicality places them beyond questioning or identification. Even an empirical truth such as ‘historical films with synchronized soundtracks projected at 24 frames per second physically offset the optical soundtrack from its paired image, putting it ahead 26 frames to match the relative placements of projector gate and optical sound head’ that originates with the technology has a specific cultural basis in the commercial demand for cost savings. This projection speed is minimum physical speed required for an optical soundtrack to work properly. But its use is determined by economic demands and the cultural logic of capitalism. The empirical statement is always true, but only in a precisely limited way, demonstrating the distinction between empirical reality and the contingent claims of lexical (encultured) expertise that informs and constricts meaning.This unity of thought and material correlates mediated ‘events’ presented on-screen with their audience’s lived experience whose initial recognition directs higher levels of comprehension. The passive meaning of realism as a ‘natural’ ordering thus falls into question inside the critical frameworks of semiotic engagement where the audience’s existing expertise and knowledge determine meaning. In cinema, this assignment is often autonomous, a given, originating with the mimetic nature of individual photographs and developing through their articulation in a self-reinforcing progression that takes its denoted identity as established fact: the ‘image object’ conceived as what it appears to show, Eco’s index to ‘the real.’ The conventional interpretation (rendered in and as realism) we encounter in looking mediates

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

29

and modifies and reveals our desire to identify the image and its progression in time through even the most schematic stories (causality) we invent to account for what we see happening.This insistent effect links narrative to realism as an axiomatic assumption, justified only through context and convention.

The Long Take The role of the opening ‘long take’ [Figure 1.2] in the Kolchak: The Night Stalker title sequence is markedly different than in historical title sequence designs; it has a narrative function separate from the presentation of credits (in fact, no credits appear during the ‘long take’). The indexicality of this continuous camera run serves to establish the reality of the newsroom and its physicality as an actual ‘location’ rather than as a studio set or other construct. Because this extended long take is not a used as a technical support for text, it allows the audience to focus their attention on the ‘events’ it presents; this continuous evidentiary progression without interruption is precisely the demand that Bazin’s realist theory makes, and defines the role this ‘long take’ plays in these credits. The initial assertion of the actuality of this space—that the actions performed are “real,” rather than artificial choices or ‘acting’—invites an interpretation of this ‘long take’ as being documentary in nature, rather than an elaborately staged fabrication. The simplicity of the tracking shot following Kolchak as he comes in to the office reinforces its apparently unmediated indexicality that authorizes this ontological fantasy. The whole title sequence runs fifty-five seconds in length, but contains only eighteen shots; as with the program’s stories, it employs an unusually high degree of realism for television in the 1970s. However, this realism as a formal procedure comes into question during the progression of this title sequence, giving it a peculiar character distinct from

Figure 1.2 Still frames showing the opening long take from Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), designed by Jack Cole.

30 Subjectivity other title designs. The ‘long take’ begins an exploration of the limits and parameters of realism through its capacity to undermine and reflexively challenge its own constructioninterpretation. The techniques on display in these credits encompass the full range of those available, either in animation or live action production: the long take, montage, and composite photography more familiar in the avant-garde film than commercial productions. The scope of this collection, as well as their mutual juxtaposition in a singular design, makes the Kolchak: The Night Stalker title sequence a unique opportunity to consider the dynamics of realist organization as naturalism::stylization. In addition, this opening reflects on the nature of the narratives it introduces, allowing a further consideration of the distinction between the contained realism of the pseudo-independent title sequence and that of conventional narrative cinema. The interrogation of “what is real” in this design emerges due to how realism is deployed and then undermined. Conventional methods for presenting realism on-screen in commercial media do not offer the flexibility of engagement created by this range of approaches. However, this unmasking relates to the narrative of the program: that the main character, “Carl Kolchak,” (played by Darren McGavin) is a newspaper reporter is thus especially significant—not just from within the framework of the narrative where being a reporter provides an excuse for him to investigate strange occurrences—his investigation authorizes the challenges to realism during the title sequence itself. The “accuracy” of events shown in a news story, on-screen, is an inherent part of the argument Bazin develops around the ‘long take’: ‘Whenever the essential aspect of an event depends upon the simultaneous presence of two or more agents, editing is prohibited.’ Editing recovers its rights whenever the meaning of the action no longer depends on physical contiguity, even when this is implied.10 Bazin’s objections to the productive fragmentation of materials falsely presented as continuous via editing emerges from their fabrication of relationships that did not actually exist during their filming. His conception of realism arises in the representation on-screen of what a viewer might have seen for themselves were they present in reality: the camera acts as a surrogate for original human experience, is interchangeable with it. The continuity of human sensory experience becomes the reference point for the ‘long take’ leading to Bazin’s prohibition on editing because it involves an assembly of materials that inevitably raises the question: how much is invention and how much is fact? The concept of a fair and balanced reportage that accurately presents events for its readers is an issue of indexicality (being-factual) versus artificiality (being-fictional), which also happens to be part of Bazin’s ontological argument for the inviolate continuity of the ‘long take.’ As a guarantor of “objectivity” without the intrusion of contingent arrangement (editing and montage), the ‘long take’ conflates the naturalistic appearance of the world with indexical claims about the events shown. This ontology suggested by photographic indexicality invalidates alternatives; the cinema=narrative relationship which conceives cinema as simultaneously realist and narrative avoids this confrontation with the technical nature of what appears on-screen through a priori definitions that make acknowledging the fact that the individual images are actually stills, and that photography involves a selective construction-process, impossible. These denied connections thus become the critical

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

31

focus of avant-garde “Structural Films”11 that provide the reference point for the optical printing in the third section “The Kinestasis.” The three sections of the Kolchak:The Night Stalker design each investigate a different approach to the indexicality of cinematic realism by contrasting each section with the others to form an argument that progresses away from Bazin and into an avant-gardist reflexivity: the first section shows a continuous long take, the second section is a rhythmic montage almost entirely composed from details of a manual typewriter filmed in extreme close-up and cut to the beat of the theme music, the third section returns to a standard medium close-up of McGavin while the lighting actively (and impossibly) changes from daytime to night, followed by other shots—a clock stopping, a spinning fan freezing in place, two shots of McGavin himself that become visibly still frames— revealing the actuality of motion pictures as composed from stills. The end of this third, final section creates an “uncanny moment” where the audience confronts the reality of cinematic stillness, a confrontation with the hidden reality of cinema. The discovery of the uncanny with/in the more recognizable and instantly understood realism of the first two sections has a metonymic relationship to the show’s contents—Kolchak’s encounter with another reality just under the surface of the world we think we recognize, unmasking ‘the real’—it is a reiteration of the show’s premise, and thus undoes the rupture it poses through this recognition that is an assertion of cinema=narrative. The realism of the sequence (and the show itself) belies the unreality of what appears in the episodes, yet its use here is appropriate for reasons connected to the show’s fictional world—Kolchak is a newspaper reporter who, like Woodward and Bernstein, documents “proof ” of a hidden truth; in his case, it is a “supernatural” world of vampires, killer computers, and homicidal monsters all of which have been suppressed by the police, the government, and Kolchak’s editor, “Tony Vincenzo” (played by Simon Oakland). The structure of this title transforms the everyday into the foreign—what is called the “uncanny”—its invocation at the end of the title sequence emerges from an unraveling of the cinematic realism carefully set up at the beginning: the continuous, seemingly natural flow of events, the world on-screen, the ‘transparency’ of the medium producing this illusory space on television. Unlike the exclusively narrative uses of long takes in Hollywood films, for title sequences, the realist presentation is of less concern than the shot’s immanent duration: it provides a technical solution to an aesthetic problem entirely distinct from narrative presentations.The ‘long take’ in a title sequence was initially a production method dictated by issues of cost and efficiency when superimposing text over a background image during the A-roll/B-roll conforming process to fabricate the release prints shown in movie theaters. The length of the shots that are being superimposed—the one to two minutes of time the credits appear on-screen—required a corresponding background image of greater length. Placing the two shots that will form text and background opposite each other at appropriate, corresponding points in the conformed negative (the A-roll/Broll pair) meant that a continuous camera run was preferable to multiple, individual shots which would increase the complexity and cost of the title sequence. The use of this “B-roll” superimposition for credits was common practice during the 1920s and 1930s due to its inexpensive and efficient result—text combined with a photographic background [Figure 1.3]. There are many films from this period that employ long takes

32 Subjectivity

Figure 1.3 Still frames showing the background long takes in title sequences for [Top] White Zombie (1931); [Bottom, Left] logo graphic in Dracula (1931); [Bottom, Right] a statue in The Maltese Falcon (1941).

in their titles and nowhere else in the production, including White Zombie (1931), where a live action long take of a funeral introduces the opening scene of the film, as well as in films such as Dracula (1930), where the long take is simple an extended shot of a graphic logo card that resembles the Batman logo (introduced in 1939), or The Maltese Falcon (1941), which uses the eponymous statue for the background. What was important in these otherwise very different title designs is the duration of the background shot, rather than its contents. In each case, the text is superimposed in the center of the frame, obscuring the background imagery: this continuous shot is simply a support for the text, a way of making the opening credits more interesting. Even when this background is important to the narrative, as in White Zombie, its presentation is secondary to the credits which visually dominate; the significance of the background actions in White Zombie are explained by the characters in the opening scene of the film, rendering the long take actually redundant to the dialogue by addressing the occlusion of details hidden behind the superimposed text.These connections tie the development of the long take in motion

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

33

graphics to its technical function, fostering an illusion of necessity distinct from its realist uses. Long takes continued in title backgrounds for decades after the A-roll/B-roll process had been replaced by optical printing. Even though composite photography meant there was no technical need for long takes, their use in titles had become “traditional”— for many films, the titles were the only place where a long take appears. This twenty-two-second opening shot does not belong to the tradition of using the long take as a support for superimposed typography; there is no possibility for typography to challenge the long take’s indexical connection to reality. Although of much more modest duration than the three-minute length of Orson Welles’s opening shot to Touch of Evil (1958) [Figure 1.4], its twenty-two-second run time should be considered in context within this title sequence: it lasts almost 50% of the total run time of the

Figure 1.4 All the title cards in Touch of Evil (1958), designed by Wayne Fitzgerald.

34 Subjectivity show opener. It is also composed in a manner more consistent with narrative long takes, than the animated backgrounds common in historical titles. As in Touch of Evil, it presents an elaborate mise-en-scène containing several discrete activities: [1] Kolchak entering in a medium-shot framed in black, [2] stopping at the coffee machine in medium-long shot, [3] a long shot of tossing his hat (and having it fall into the trash), and finally [4] a dolly-in to a second medium-shot of him sitting down to work at a manual typewriter. This progression matches what Bazin described in The Ontology of the Photographic Image as a (seemingly) uninterpreted reality that unfolds in real time on-screen, produced by “the impassive lens” of the camera.12 Bazin’s rejection of editing is an assertion of what appears on-screen as being coincident with the “ontological reality” of the actions shown—their sequence, spatial relations, and apparent interactions within individual shots. While the ‘long take’ is not a guarantee of realism, it is a standard aesthetic for motion pictures that asserts their factuality, and is a common part of documentary film. The influence of ‘long take’ editing practices designed for live action, but applied to animation and motion graphics, should not be underestimated: any appearance of protracted ‘long takes’ makes a specific indexical claim about the factuality and veracity of the visuals. It poses as Bazin’s record of events unfolding in front of a camera, suggesting itself as evidence for a direct linkage to profilmic events: Whatever the objections of our critical faculties, we are obliged to believe in the existence of the object represented: it is truly re-presented, made present in time and space. . . . Seen in this light, cinema appears to be the completion in time of photography’s objectivity. A film is no longer limited to preserving the object sheathed in its moment, like the intact bodies of insects from a bygone era preserved in amber. . . . Only the impassive lens, in stripping the object of habits and preconceived notions, of all the spiritual detritus that my perception has wrapped it in, can offer it up unsullied to my attention and thus to my love. In the photograph, a natural image of a world we no longer able to see, nature finally does more than imitate art: it imitates the artist.13 As a guarantor of realism objectively presented without the apparent intrusion of editing and montage, the long take enables the emergence of the ‘reality’ of the events shown. In constructing cinematic realism using Bazin’s logical model, what is of immediate interest is his focus on the apparently continuous action appearing on-screen without (visible) editing. His argument rejects the productive fragmentation of materials presented as continuous via editing. What matters in his construct is neither the actuality of events shown, nor their continuous appearance on-screen, but the formal semblance of such continuity: the representation on-screen can be considered an ontological demonstration of what a viewer might see for themselves were they present. His approach demands that the underlying nature of the motion in the frame remain constant, whatever the length of the shot in question. It is the semblance of unmodified action that is the central effect of denotation—the appearance of shots as ‘long takes’ remains constant, masking their assembled nature, since no ‘shot’ in any motion picture is ever a continuous, uninterrupted motion. At the most basic level of historical cinema, the ‘shot’ is composed from a series of samples—each presented in toto—whose cognitive reassembly in perception

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

35

produces continuous movement. The technical basis of cinema as animated stills unifies all the various categories of motion picture—live action, animation, graphical, VFX— making the digital convergence of what was historically restricted by both labor and cost for celluloid cinema less a revolution than an accentuation of the manipulative and plastic capacities implicit in the sampling protocol itself. Contra-Bazin, it is not a presumed ontological relationship preserved by the ‘long take,’ but rather the appearance of such that is the significant factor for its presentation of ‘reality’ on-screen. Bazin’s argument concerns not the link of photograph to subject, but rather the unmediated appearance that enables the viewer to have a fantasy that what they see on-screen corresponds to what they might see in person; ontology is a ‘red herring’ in this discussion. The realism created by the ‘long take’ relies on a semblance of perception that allows the audience to accept what they see as a continuous, unaltered record. The focus of Bazin’s argument is the naturalism arising from cinema’s apparently direct—in his words, ontological—convergence with our everyday perceptual experiences. As a guarantor of realism “objectively” presented without the apparent intrusion of editing and montage, the ‘long take’ enables the emergence of the ‘events’ shown. In constructing cinematic realism using this logical model, what is of immediate interest is the focus on the apparently continuous action appearing on-screen without (visible) editing. In constructing a cinematic realism using this logical model, what is of immediate interest is the focus on the apparently continuous action appearing on-screen without (visible) editing. The realism resulting from Bazin’s objections denies the re/ construction of events on-screen that did not, in fact, happen together: his realism is propositional, giving what appears in the film a claim to demonstrate (non-film) reality for the audience. The long take in Kolchak serves precisely this function: an assertion of reality that will then be challenged and revealed to be inaccurate and incomplete— that there is an unseen, formative dimension hidden within this apparently “ordinary” space. Understanding cinema (and all motion pictures) in these terms gives their visual appearance an innately documentary dimension—confusing the identification of fact and fiction—transforming even the “fictive constructions” of cinema into an “ontological proof ” of what might exist in the world.14 The realism resulting from Bazin’s objections to fragmentation is propositional: what appears in the film can be viewed as a proof of reality. Understanding cinema (and all motion pictures) in these terms gives their visual appearance an innately documentary dimension, confusing their indexical claims for an ontological encounter with the thing itself. What matters in Bazin’s construct is neither the actuality of events shown, nor their continuous appearance on-screen, but the formal semblance of such continuity in the depiction: the underlying nature of the motion in the frame remains constant whatever the length of the shots in question—their sequence, spatial relations, and apparent interactions within individual shots.15 That the focus of his argument is not the link of photograph to subject, but rather the unmediated appearance on-screen, what results is a theorization whose focus is actually on semblance (that the audience will accept what they see on-screen as a continuous, unaltered record), rather than reflecting an ontological connection. The ‘long take’ understood as an opposition to editing masks the contingency of its construction, thus allowing the presentation to be simultaneously unlike reality and be accepted as a proposition about aspects of reality: a contingent découpage presenting

36 Subjectivity itself objectively through the operation of the cinematic apparatus. Throughout the ‘long take’ in the Kolchak: The Night Stalker title sequence, the shot is in constant motion, producing several different views of the action—from lurking behind a bookshelf, to gliding across the office, before finally moving forward to meet Kolchak at his desk. The lighting remains low-key (everything is clearly visible in deep space) throughout this tracking shot.These actions establish this newsroom as a real, physical space and provides a counterpoint to the fragmentation of the montage sequence in section 2. It asserts the inviolate qualities we associate with real spaces—a coherent arena in which actions happen, in sequence, with a visible logic of cause and effect. “Kolchak” tosses his hat on the rack and it bounces off, falling into the trash. These elements enable the realism of the opening to assert the verisimilitude needed to accept this office as an actual place, not a set or other studio fabrication. This acceptance is essential to its realism. What Cole’s design initially poses is a common (in the 1970s) conception of cinematic realism based in the ‘long take’; however, this arrangement is undermined by the actions of the mise-en-scène that suggest an active interrogation of the long take’s apparent objectivity. Actions are also signs. Kolchak’s tossing his hat on the rack, but allowing it to fall into the trash and remain there, ignored, has a suggestive potential when considered in relation to the shift from low key to high key lighting during the montage in section 2. It is an action that implies an abandonment of convention—it falls into the trash and he does nothing to retrieve it—this act suggests Kolchak discarding his subservience to the established order of things. At the same time, it is an action that also suggests a misunderstanding of things (his hat lands in the trash because he misses the peg to hang it) as well as foreshadows the inevitable response his editor has to the news reports he files on supernatural events in every episode: it won’t be published (it is trashed). This ‘trashing’ of convention can also be seen as an inside ‘joke’ about the realism of the ‘long take’ as well: once he begins work, it is immediately replaced by a rhythmic montage that analytically dissects the act of using a manual typewriter—part of the ‘work’ in producing a film is, even with continuous camera runs, concerned with when and how to cut—i.e., “editing,” the literal meaning of “montage.”

The Analytic Montage Where the section entitled “The Long Take” corresponds to the superficially unmediated presentation of “what you might see for yourself,” once Kolchak begins to use the typewriter, the visual character and realism shifts to another, more immediately and obviously constructed, yet still objective, realism: the shots show the process for using this machine. The on-screen credits all appear during the montage in this section “The Analytic Montage,” creating an interplay between the appearance of text on-screen in the photography and the superimposed texts that identify the program’s title and stars [Figure 1.5]. The artificiality of the constructed sequence matches the artifice of texts. The allegorical relations of credits to typing, each an act of textual construction/ identification—typing words and reading credits—have a metonymic relationship since both engage the lexical process rather than only the visual recognition of imagery. What Kolchak types is equally suggestive and threatening: “victim” in one shot and, in the other, “monster,” accompanied by the already written words “down by the river. He came

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

37

Figure 1.5 Still frames showing the montage from Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), designed by Jack Cole.

at me” that scroll past on the line above.The text–image composite invites an interaction between the activity, reportage, and the audience’s discovery of what happens on-screen as they watch this sequence—masking the hierarchy of reading–seeing–hearing that organizes these materials, and which allows the integration of diegetic text typed by “Kolchak” and the non-diegetic credits superimposed over these shots. Taken together, these texts spell out a message “Darren McGavin as victim/Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” These words anticipate narrative events in the show itself in which “Kolchak’s reporting” puts him directly in the path of the monster-of-the-week. This narrative meaning is reflected in the same expressionist shift of lighting and change from major to minor key in the music.The development and audible character of the theme music that begins in a major key with Kolchak (McGavin) whistling as he walks into the office becomes increasingly complex after he gets the cup of coffee, the same theme is played by a flute; when he sits and loads the typewriter with paper, strings join the flute, and their definite beat is matched by the tempo of the edits as they reach a minor crescendo. This change from presentation (‘long take’) to interpretation (montage) is at the same time the organization of material into narrative and montage. This change corresponds to a reversal where stylization (montage) replaces naturalism (‘long take’) that shows each step for using a manual typewriter in a separate shot: loading the paper, putting the tension bar down, pressing the carriage return, the typing itself.Their duration is neither longer nor shorter than what is needed to demonstrate the act, giving the sequence a strongly rhythmic visual structure that synchronizes with the rhythms of the music. The second section offers an analytic-yet-objective presentation, an appropriate reflection of what Kolchak does as he types his report. The breaking-up into discrete actions mirrors the breakdown and recounting of events being rendered coherent by the process of his narrative. Bazin’s opposition to editing attempts to mask the contingency of mimesis in the dynamic of naturalism::stylization. The long take in the first

38 Subjectivity section allows the presentation to be simultaneously unlike reality and be accepted as a proposition about aspects of reality, while editing and montage in the second section intrude as modal relations, enabling the presentation of patently unreal events as natural and happening together, an anticipation of the third section. Bazin’s realist theory specifically addressed this aspect of editing in his essay “Montage Interdict”16 (“The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,”17 aka “Editing Forbidden”18), arguing that the artificial re/ construction of space–time relationships through editing should be avoided: ‘Whenever the essential aspect of an event depends upon the simultaneous presence of two or more agents, editing is prohibited.’ Editing recovers its rights whenever the meaning of the action no longer depends on physical contiguity, even when this is implied.19 The basis for his refusal arises in the demand that the apparent relationships presented in the film should simultaneously represent the physical reality of what happened: that the material presented on-screen and what would be seen by a viewer actually present at the scene depicted should be equivalent to each other. His rejection of “unnecessary” editing addresses ‘continuity editing’ that reconstructs scenes from multiple camera positions shot at different times and places, but then assembles them to form an apparently continuous time-space on-screen. Bazin’s proposal is an assertion of what appears on-screen as being coincident with the ontological reality of the events apparently shown—their sequence, spatial relations, and apparent interactions within individual shots. For Bazin, realism offers a discourse about the nature of the world we inhabit—an identification and development of things that might exist within it. It is not a denial of the constructed nature of cinema, but a demand that cinema not appear to be constructed; assembling shots made in different times and places is forbidden by Bazin’s rule which limits this constructive role of editing to an essential joining of disparate elements that are not otherwise linkable in a continuous space–time presentation. The analytic presentation of how to operate a manual typewriter in Cole’s design is thus acceptable and compatible with the realism of the ‘long take’ that asserts the Kolchak: The Night Stalker title sequence is unstaged, a claim that the montage and the expressionistic lighting of the second section contradicts. Montage asserts instead that the design, much like the material typed up on the typewriter, is actually composed from discrete units and has been assembled for the viewer—that the seemingly continuous reality of the shots is actually an illusion. Editing demonstrates its mediating role as an interpretation of events shown on-screen, a direction of attention and comprehension that dictates the meaning of what appears for the viewer, as Bazin explains in “Editing Prohibited”: We do not see editing, in its primordial simplicity, as artifice. But our familiarity with film has gradually made us more aware, to the point that a large proportion of a movie audience today, if asked to concentrate for a moment, would be able to distinguish ‘real’ scenes from those suggested by editing alone. . . . Editing, we are so often told, is the essence of cinema, but in this case it is a literary and anticinematic technique par excellence.The essence of cinema, rather, grasped for once in its pure state, is found in simple photographic respect for the unity of space.20

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

39

The assembly of discrete shots via editing—montage—creates artificial relationships and effects that distort the assumptive ontological basis of the photograph; Bazin’s objection to editing lies with its constructive capacities to invent relationships and actions that did not (cannot) actually exist together in way they appear on-screen. The collapse of time and action into the condensate form that appears in Kolchak:The Night Stalker thus does not violate his prescription—it remains within the realm of his realist concerns. The space on-screen has not been violated, merely arranged to create a portrait of an activity by summarizing the time of its performance. The unity of this space is significant for its development out of the opening ‘long take’: it is not a deconstruction of that realist presentation, but an accentuation of specific features already within it. Where the ‘long take’ unfolds in deep space as a sequence of actions inside a newsroom, the montage compresses that space into a distillation of an essential activity performed therein. Even though the analytic montage protocol is distinct from that of the ‘long take’ valorized by Bazin, it is compatible with his realist claims about what appears on-screen.This maintenance of photographic indexicality and ontology is important for how the third section dismantles these realist claims as an artifice, an action which creates its uncanny effect. Philosopher Stanley Cavell introduced a caveat into the prescriptions imposed by Bazin. Starting from similar (if more explicitly Modernist) precepts, Cavell elides the distinctions between edited/non-edited that are central to Bazin’s realist construction. What concerns Cavell is the proposition of a realist theory where editing and montage create the same naturalism through the ontological connection of photography to its originary source, ‘the real’ subject being photographed: Film takes our very distance and powerlessness over the world as the condition of the world’s natural appearance. It promises the exhibition of the world in itself.This is its promise of candor: that what it reveals is entirely what is revealed to it, that nothing revealed by the world in its presence is lost.21 What appears on-screen for this conception of cinema begins in reality and reflects its physical existence. For Cavell, the elaborations of editing and montage become a directing of attention to particular features of the world, their sequential arrangement becomes only a marginal intrusion since what appears in those series of shots remains an instance of “the exhibition of the world in itself.” This conception of the screen places it within the European tradition of conceiving of a painting as an imaginary window into a virtual world, but distinguishes the filmic image from the virtuality of painting due to the automatic functions of the camera as it operates. Cavell’s ontological realism assumes the integrity of that presentation as a coherent, internally consistent reality is autonomous, not something subject to control by the filmmaker, which is why his theory necessarily rejects animation and VFX as not-cinema, an escape from their challenge through the sophistry of a narrowed definition.22 The revelation of the world on-screen becomes an essential feature of his conception of motion photography. The documentary nature of the montage is a reinforcement of its exemplary status; for Cavell, what is of interest in such sequences is their capacity to make the actions shown into an immanent proof of what appeared in front of the camera.This analytic montage demonstrates the discrete steps to using a manual typewriter—feeding a blank page into the machine, pushing the carriage

40 Subjectivity return, typing the words onto it—each action contained in a separate extreme close-up shot creates a logical series: the realism on view is not the realism of lived experience, but of mental consideration. It not only abstracts the actions shown, but also compresses the time involved in operating the machine. The results, however, retain their apparent assertion of Cavell’s ontological claim. The montage produces a distinct, yet realist, presentation, creating a highly comprehensible sequence of actions, so that even though the editing elides a substantial amount of time—we only see fragments of the story he writes—what has been left out in this process is nevertheless fully comprehensible, if not contained, in the shots. The reality presented on-screen for Cavell is most precisely revealed through the control of lighting, framing, and editing—immediately apparent instances of the invisible ‘normalization’ that he uses to define cinema through a conception of realism as an autonomously emergent product of camera operation, rather than historically and culturally determinate. Several changes happen simultaneously as the montage begins. The starting point for this shift is easy to miss since it coincides with the first extreme close-up of his hand rolling the sheet of paper into the typewriter; the shot is less than one second long. Once he snaps the tension bar down, the different lighting is immediately apparent, and when he starts typing, the opening theme modulates from major to minor key with strings and drums providing momentum.The lighting changes from the high key (flat) lighting common to television sitcoms to a dramatic low key lighting that emphasizes the blackness of the typewriter and changes the tone of the title sequence as the drumming begins. These changes to the depiction are examples of Cavell’s proposal of “art” in cinema as being related to how the material presentation is intransigent: Artistry here must come to terms with this condition, exploit this new assertion of theatrical depth, explore the condition of capture itself—in order to discover what will register as candor and what instantaneousness can reveal of the character and of the relation of character to its locale.23 The expressionist transition that marks the second section is visually distinct from the ‘long take,’ marking a shift in emphasis from the observational model of Bazin to the shaped and directed approach suggested by Cavell. What this title sequence announces is a program of specifically cinematic terrors, an experience of horror specific and unique to what we find in motion pictures, something related to our everyday uncanny encounters, but at the same time utterly distinct from them. However, this shaping is captured by the material reality that provides the basis of photography: the manipulation created by montage which concerned Bazin becomes for Cavell the fabrication and manipulation of appearances—the assembly of shots in montage does not violate their foundation in the photographic appearance of the world—but the imposition of text and recomposition of imagery through processes (such as optical printing) do.These additions confront Cavell’s assumption of an ontological relationship between reality and the materiality of its presentation in motion pictures.This discovery of photography as material rather than transcendent revelation of what exists in the world violates Cavell’s “condition of capture itself.” The self-evidently constructed nature of the second section enables the integration of the title card texts with the activities performed in a way that subverts the definitional

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

41

separation between animation and live action in Cavell’s realism. “Animation” and “live action” have always been distinct positions within a singular range of possibilities, distinguished not by their innate difference, but by the speed of photography employed in their production.The facility to transfer and translate between these two extremes—apparent in the films of Émile Cohl made before 1910 that fuse live action and animation— challenges the “purity” central to Cavell’s realist aesthetics: the elaboration of events in a fashion that allows the conception of motion picture camera as a surrogate for the audience’s own capacity to witness events developing in front of the camera; thus his restriction on these manipulations lies with their interruption of this witnessing function, familiar from Bazin’s proposals for the ‘long take,’ and which Cavell raises into an axiom by refusing hybrid forms such as animation (not to mention motion graphics) that challenge this ontological conception of cinematic realism.

The Kinestasis This section entails a shift from artificial recognitions of ‘realist fiction’ in the first and second sections to an indexical claim about the nature of cinema, a specifically subjective presentation of a ‘metaphysical reality.’ What appears on-screen is linked to this revelation of the “hidden reality” of cinema itself—a ‘material function’ that reveals the ‘image carrier,’ the still photographs that become the moving image [Figure 1.6]— identifiable as the stylization expressed by the naturalistic cinematic conventions of lighting, performance, editing/montage, and intermittent projection.This acknowledgment of the duality of naturalism::stylization is posed by how we understand realism: Is cinema a mere record of events actually happening ‘in reality,’ or is it a carefully composed, elaborately constructed illusion? The shifting revelation of ‘the real’ that is at the heart of the third section finds its corollary in the continuously shifting realist modes in the first and

Figure 1.6 Stills showing the kinestasis in Kolchak:The Night Stalker (1974), designed by Jack Cole.

42 Subjectivity second sections: the inability to settle comfortably into one type of presentation means that the viewer is always uncertain, unsure how the sequence is going to proceed. The shifting modes that make Jack Cole’s design for Kolchak: The Night Stalker exceptional appear in the nature of how its emergent indexical claim produces a critical engagement with cinematic realism. It completely ruptures the conventional order of both the ‘long take’ and the montage sequence. This contrast is essential to the meaning of the final seconds of the sequence, as the music crescendos a second time and “Kolchak” looks up synchronized with a push into a tight close up, followed by a cut to profile as he turns in slow motion and looks directly into the camera, and then there is a final shift to kinestasis24 produced with an optical printer. Changing live action to frame holds—first the clock, then the spinning fan, and finally McGavin/“Kolchak” himself accompanied by a fast zoom into the still of his eye, while fading to black—is highly unusual. This design violates all the expected conventions of realist cinema: these differences from the rest of the title sequence, especially apparent in the lighting and kinestasis, are a disturbance of the way that such scenes normally appear in motion pictures. Bazin and Cavell both argued against this intrusion of technology as disruptive to the revelation of a world on-screen.25 The same conception of realism informs its historical, critical, and theoretical discussion, whether in the avant-garde film, video art, or commercial motion pictures:26 their proposal is concerned with the mimetic discourse about the “conditions of reality”—how the world is organized—that requires ignoring the constructed nature of its presentation.27 The encounter with alterity (recognizable as paralogy28 or heterotopia29) renders any existing order an ambiguous potential selected from within a range of possibilities: its ambivalence emerges precisely because the established ‘rules of the game’ in the opening of Kolchak:The Night Stalker do not remain constant for the entire sequence. Although hold frames do appear in other title sequences, especially obvious in Cole’s design for The Rockford Files (1975) where kinestasis substitutes for the movement of live action, creating a rhythmic suggestion of motion synchronized with the music, and famously at the end of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, where it acts as a final, ironic comment that suggests the uplifting moment is fleeting, but extends it forever by holding it as a still image, the kinestasis in Kolchak:The Night Stalker is disruptive, a challenge to the realism itself, rather than a stylized effect. This seen but not-seen role for photography in commercial narratives becomes an immanent encounter, the ‘material function,’ familiar from avant-garde aesthetics that addressed the materiality of the photograph. The shift to kinestasis is a perversely Greenbergian moment of reflexivity that makes the ideological constraints imposed by “pure” conceptions of motion pictures apparent. The static photographic grain that grows larger on-screen—narratively set up as a literal time-stop—is also a fundamental violation and, paradoxically, an acknowledgment of the nature of cinema itself: that we are watching a moving picture composed from a succession of still images. Cole’s design demonstrates the overlap between motion graphics and the avant-garde through its shift to kinestasis that undermines the presentation of ‘realist fiction’ and ‘unreal fantasy’ employed in the first and second sections: the still frames made visible by the frame holds on the clock, fan, and “Kolchak” himself are a technological fact of motion pictures, it is also one that is fundamentally invisible to our encounter with them—it is a breach that undermines the ‘event’ on-screen by drawing attention

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

43

to what we are actually seeing, a ‘metaphysical reality.’ As this final shot fades to black, it corresponds to what film historian P. Adams Sitney’s essay “The Idea of Abstraction” (published in Film Culture in 1977 and adapted from a series of lectures he gave at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1971) describes as the concept of “abstraction” in an attempt at distinguishing the avant-garde from commercial cinema: “There is a double sense of Abstraction in regard to the abstraction of definite eternal objects . . . There is an abstraction from actuality and abstraction from possibility.” They run in opposite directions; from the physical situation there is a gradual purification of abstraction; from the idea of the possible (the realm of all possible things) the process of abstraction gets more and more concrete. . . . We all know, or have some general idea, what a narrative film is. What is its opposite? Narrative does not have a pure opposite. I postulate the word abstract, using it very carefully, as the opposite of narrative.30 Sitney adapts the Platonic proposal of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in building his argument that the ‘material function’ of the physical film in avant-garde cinema evokes a ‘metaphysical reality.’ This “reality of the mind” is hidden in the motion picture techniques of cinematic reproduction: the translations of photochemical processing and the technology of its presentation into the subject matter of the “Structural Film” that includes Michael Snow’s Wavelength, , and La Region Centrale; Ernie Gehr’s Wait, and Serene Velocity; Hollis Frampton’s Winter Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Zorns Lemma; Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and Alpha Mandala; as well as Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G and Color Sound Frames, among others.The transformation of avant-garde film into a serious, Modern art—in which Sitney’s “Structural Film” is the prime example—happens as Greenberg’s foundation of Modernism creates a narrative development toward ever greater restriction: the movement toward ever more reductive, ‘fundamental’ aspects of any given medium is “purity.” This limited formal range focused on the materiality of the photographic basis of film and emphasized the specific technology of film as distinct from the electronic medium of video.31 Instead of addressing the visual appearance of the imagery that Sitney refers to as “imagistic,” he claims the “Structural Film” is only about a single gesture32 that is revealed through its evoking a photographic ontology of projection coupled with the physical nature of photography. Conceiving “abstraction” as opposition to narrative (i.e., as “nonnarrative,” the same suspension of diegesis common to the title sequence and avantgarde film) reflects Bazin’s particular theorization of cinema as a realist form dependent on photography. Greenbergian “purity” is a problem only when one mistakes a single, restrictive definition for the entirety of all possibilities. Sitney’s argument entangles Bazin’s photographic indexicality and the ‘image object’ with the ontology of its technical presentation, drawing attention to the immanent specificity of mechanical reproduction employing optics, the chemistry of film processing, and the techniques of cinematic projection. There is nothing on-screen but a series of shadows. The translation of photochemical processing and the technology of its presentation into the subject matter of motion pictures parallels the same Modernist reduction that Greenberg articulated for painting. This subjective indexicality in the ‘metaphysical realism’ of the third section

44 Subjectivity reveals the “innate nature” of cinema in Jack Cole’s design for Kolchak:The Night Stalker. It takes the teleological destination of Sitney’s historical development in the avant-garde film and dismantles it through its integration with the realist codes of commercial cinema. The suggestions of abandoned convention in the narrative integrate the challenge in the third section with the causality that defines story: “Kolchak” tosses his hat and leaves it where it falls, in the trash—an action that gives the ‘unmasking’ of its apparent naturalism through the progressive stylization of expressionist lighting, montage, and kinestasis a narrative trajectory away from the familiar realm of ‘objective realism’ into the more austere assertion of what is actually being perceived on-screen.The screen is not an imaginary window, but a surface where shadow play creates an “illusion of life,”33 whether in live action or animation; realizing alternatives to the dominant order of cinema=realism. These kinestasis shots connect this third section to the earliest avant-garde experiments with motion pictures explained by the Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna in their statement “Abstract Cinema: Chromatic Music” in 1912: To achieve a harmonious, gradual and uniform sequence of chromatic themes we had removed the rotating switch and has managed to get rid of the shutter action, too; but this was exactly the reason for the failure of the experiment, and meant that in place of the expected marvelous harmony there exploded overt the screen a cataclysm of incomprehensible colors.34 Sequential presentation of serial images is essential for any motion picture to show movement.35 By removing the shutter, they disabled the projector’s functional operation—a continuous scrolling smear is the visual result of the elimination of the shutter, alterations that eliminated the potential for motion on-screen. In film, this separation is created by an intermittent projection technology that creates a flicker—remove this mechanism from the film projector and the resulting presentation is a continuous smear of light on-screen rather than the discretely projected ‘frames’ that this sampled, segmentation process transforms into (potential) motion.The third section thus heralds the challenges posed by digital convergence and the accompanying changes to cinema, forcing a recognition of Modernist ideology as establishing “cinema” itself.36 The awareness of alternatives created by the juxtaposition of the first and second sections with the third section inverts Greenberg’s “purity” that isolates each field it touches. Kinestasis makes an indexical assertion that the still frame is the “reality” of cinema, undermining all the conventional realist modes in this design. Television is different than film, but only by degree. It employs the same foundations in stillness—a progression of scan lines that “add up” to the same field-image held in discrete frames of celluloid; the production of television shows on film, rather than video, in the 1970s attests to the technical capacity to move between these types of motion picture. Presenting individual frames as discrete image-units is essential to rendering their motion.This essential technological basis is typically invisible to the work, masked by its inherent role in the higher-level organizations of ‘shot,’ montage, and sequence that are media interpretation. Thus, when kinestasis transforms motion into stillness into movement, it comes as a violation of our expectations for commercial cinema in an eruption of the priorities of avant-garde “Structural Film.” The essential stillness of cinematography

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

45

does rhetorical ‘violence’ to established realism (order) of the world shown on-screen, thus unmasking an example of what Michel Foucault described as decentering in The Order of Things: Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to but also opposite one another) to “hang together.”37 In Kolchak: The Night Stalker, revealing the material reality of motion pictures that is normally hidden by its conventional presentation—still images created and projected at high speed—uses this rupture to make the return to a familiar reality self-conscious. The narrative order in this design requires a disavowal of the avant-garde techniques as disruptive and problematic challenges to the apparently stable relationships of cinematic realism; it suggests the ontological claim advanced by the use of kinestasis is a rupture in the discourse of cinema. Identifying discourse as reflecting an underlying, dominant hierarchy acknowledges that there can be entirely different interpretations of the same ‘event’ on-screen; it creates the potential for critical meaning through this escape from established norms. The shift from the third section to the start of the story comes as a reversion to familiar convention of the titles as a self-contained entity, different than the narrative and easily recognized by the synchronized musical crescendo and fade-to-black that concludes the title sequence.

Articulating Realisms Cinematic realism is not a given, but a product, of interpretation. The on-screen manipulation of its presentation creates its significances. The expressionist darkness that surrounds Kolchak (McGavin) at the start of the first section suggests this mise-en-scène is a careful construction: he is framed with black at the start of the ‘long take’; then in the second section, the typewriter is shown with very high key lighting emphasizing its black mass; finally, in the third section, the lights go out and he is alone in a threatening, uncanny space. As the title starts, this darkness is nothing more than books and other objects sitting on some shelves, but theirs is an amorphous, soft, gliding darkness that spreads across the screen as the shot slides from behind the shelf and out onto the floor, crossing with him to his desk. The essence of uncanniness is the defamiliarization of what would otherwise be mundane: these are everyday objects rendered threatening by the dark; they evoke childhood fears of things half-seen in the gloom, the familiar rendered alien. Darkness plays a recurrent, ominous role in this opening, both in a literal sense, as the expressionism in the second section is very graphically dark, and in a metaphoric sense, with the idea of “darkness” as a threatening, unknown domain that invisibly surrounds us at all times, but which we are only cursorily aware of being present. The linkage of the uncanny with the unknown, with darkness, is central to psychologist Ernst Jentsch’s

46 Subjectivity classic description from 1906. It is the uncertainty created by this darkness that provokes terror: In the night, which is well known to be a friend to no man, there are thus many more and much larger chicken-hearted people than in the light of day. . . . Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become a cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate. . . . In the dark, a rafter covered with nails thus becomes the jaw of a fabulous animal, a lonely lake becomes the gigantic eye of a monster, and the outline of a cloud or shadow becomes a threatening Satanic face. Fantasy, which is indeed always a poet, is able now and then to conjure up the most detailed terrifying visions out of the most harmless and indifferent phenomena; and this is done all the more substantially, the weaker the critical sense that is present and the more the prevailing psychical background is affectively tinged.38 The uncanny runs throughout Cole’s design, always just under the “surface” of the apparently moving image, waiting to erupt as its true nature. In shifting from one mode of realism to another, and the change from commercial to avant-garde variants of cinematic articulation, reveals the uncanniness in the third section to be this double and duplicitous revelation-acknowledgment that reifies the ambivalence at the heart of the uncanny. The defamiliarized is an encounter with alterity that renders existing orders as ambiguous potentials within a conflicted, paradoxical range of possibilities. As Jentsch notes in his discussion, it is the inability to resolve which mutually exclusive possibility is actually valid—the uncertainty about whether someone is alive or dead, for example—that gives rise to the specific dread sense called “the uncanny.” As the lights impossibly go out at the start of the third section, they create an atypical experience—especially since the first light to “go out” is apparently the sun shining through the windows in the background. Day does not become night so suddenly. And while audiences always know they are watching a motion picture, so it is “understood” that it is fictional, produced with actors (and very likely shot on a soundstage)—this understanding is fundamentally a part of viewing all motion pictures—it is simultaneously not something that the audience will consciously consider as part of the presentation. Cinematic realism always asserts its own continuous reality, mirroring the audience’s expectations about ‘the real,’ a fact the opening ‘long take’ in Kolchak:The Night Stalker exploits. While darkness dominates this sequence, it does so in predominantly familiar, conventional ways: the music modulating downwards into a minor key mirrors this increasingly ‘black’ opening as the whistled theme is translated into a lower, baser, darker key. These musical transitions accompany and audibly mark the shifts on-screen, articulating the break-up into three discrete sections, each of which has less naturalism than the preceding one. This movement away from the ‘objective realism’ in the first section is the same as the shift toward the uncanny in the third section—a product of how Cole’s design transforms the familiar naturalism of cinema into a ‘metaphysical reality’ visualized in the increasingly fragmented intermittent photography shown on-screen.

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

47

The unheimlich (uncanny) unmasks the cinematic, its defamiliarization of what appears on-screen serves to identify a revelation of artifice that converges on Bertolt Brecht’s proposal of Verfremdungseffekt (distancing or alienating effects, an uncanny sense of violated rules and conventional expectation). This implication of the spectator in the onscreen spectacle through their engagement means that their active “participation” as witnessing the ‘events’ includes them in the “theatrical” process.39 The challenge it produces in Cole’s design links the Verfremdungseffekt to earlier conceptions of sublimity and transcendence where interpretation disengages from the fictional, dramatic events to offer a criticality that is implicitly an aesthetic one, derived from formal relations and operating within the context of familiar articulation, as Brecht explains: The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place. . . . The artist’s object is to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work. As a result everything put forward by him has a touch of the amazing. Everyday things are thereby raised above the level of the obvious and automatic.40 Brecht’s transformation/violation of expectations is neither automatic, nor an autonomous effect, but depends on aesthetic ruptures with enunciation and articulation: it is a formal product that must originate in the unfamiliar, arising spontaneously and unexpectedly, thus corresponding to an unheimlich (uncanny) experience.41 Kinestasis is an avant-garde interruption, an abnormal moment that defamiliarizes the realist presentations that come before it, rather than a uniform stylistic device. These still frames’ function is to accentuate and draw attention to themselves as different than the rest of the title sequence. It is an aesthetic, thus formal, dimension of articulation, separate from the modality of its use in realism. Cole’s use of kinestasis violates the most basic dictate of motion pictures—that they move42—drawing attention to their strangeness precisely because of how they break the convention of the moving picture itself. For this title, ambiguity lies at the heart of the cinematic denotation itself—is it a still or a moving picture?—a question that is less rhetorical than immanent in this title sequence. This unheimlich experience is a self-referential encounter for the audience,43 complicated by its contradictory and paradoxical challenge for the unmasking of artifice implicit in the Verfremdungseffekt.44 The ‘metaphysical reality’ in Kolchak:The Night Stalker that “shocks” by its uncanniness depends on its difference from the ‘realist fiction’ of the ‘long take’ and the ‘unreal fantasy’ of montage (changes in being-fictional from objective to subjective mode). Its challenge depends on this sudden, complete change in realist mode from artificial being-fictional to indexical being-factual. The change from movement to this stillness that shows what motion pictures are composed from can only be a demonstration of its technical basis. The third section is an unanticipated deviation from the expected ordering established by earlier adherence to the codes being employed that renders the unmasking of stillness as significant.45 It is a change from the fictional but apparently natural ‘objective realism’ to the stylization of subjective but indexical arrangement. Realism and the uncanny in motion pictures are linked by the phantasmal nature of the photograph. The Verfremdungseffekt in the Kolchak:The Night Stalker title sequence erupts

48 Subjectivity not through the narrative about “Kolchak” going to work, but through the presentation of the reality that is always actually on-screen. Where we see movement, there is only stillness—by making this fact a conscious feature of the titles, Cole’s design forces us to acknowledge the underlying strangeness of the moving image itself. But the uncanny encounter we have at the end of this title sequence is categorically different than what “Kolchak” encounters in the stories themselves. It is our realization that he is not really moving, not really present, not real. What we actually see is spectral, an ‘image object’ that tricks us into believing its portrayal and confusing what it shows with the thing itself. Brecht’s proposal subverts any and all established systems, identifying even its own revelation of artifice as merely a semiotic construction. The discovery that what we accepted (even when we consciously know what we encounter is fictional) as a living, moving presence is actually inanimate, the machine-made phantom that we took to be a living person is actually a lifeless object, its animation a careful trick that exploits our perceptions. For our discovery to happen, both the realism of the ‘long take’ and the fragmentation of montage must work together to assert the same on-screen reality—the “cinematic space”—whose internal naturalism is undone by the eruption of material stillness on-screen created with optical printing. Realism dictates audience anticipations for the way the ‘events’ should develop, but at the same time it is a specialized type of relation, always connecting the artifice of movies to the actuality of lived experience. Defamiliarization arises when established codes and interpretive schemas suggest contradictory (if not mutually exclusive) understandings of a singular subject. Yet even in this crucial violation of expectations, the Kolchak: The Night Stalker title sequence remains confined by realism—the shifts that create the Verfremdungseffekt do not escape from the range of naturalism::stylization. Because this title sequence creates a paranarrative employing only the rudimentary essentials of fictional causality,46 it relies on the audience to supply the significant links and organization to position the kinestasis as “Kolchak’s” response to something attacking him. While the encounter can be understood to be the stillness of these shots, at the same time, it remains unknown; the optical push is narratively equivalent to a point-ofview shot where the audience assumes the position of the monster mentioned in the story he types. The entangling narrative of “Kolchak” coming in to work (‘long take’) and his reportage (montage) undoing ‘reality’ organizes all these shots; the uncanny moment in the third section is structured by a narrative interpretation where ‘time stops,’ announced by the narrative/musical crescendo. As Brecht argues, familiar conventions limit and contain the uncanny effect. At the same time, the technically uncanny effect of stillness erupting to the surface allows a simpler narrative association with the stories the show tells: that what he encounters are the weird events of the show that follows, expressed in the stillness of the freeze frame, but exceeding that limitation. This recursive link of established knowledge to immanent comprehension encapsulates the appeal of the show itself. In accounting for the revelation of stillness—the revelation that there is no physically real motion present—makes the technical artifact into the subject without allowing it to rupture the realist construction of narrative, a double return to realist narration if the shot is also recognized as presenting the point-of-view for the unseen, unknown, unidentified monster that “came at me” as Kolchak’s typed reportage states. That the thing he encounters

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

49

is not shown gives the concluding section an ambiguous character. Asserting the familiar formula cinema=narrative justifies this recuperative interpretation by the resulting coherence of story in a circularity of cause and effect that distinguishes paranarratives from more familiar, complete, and self-sufficient narrative forms. Acceptance of narrative explanations removes the unheimlich effect, but only in retrospect. The optical push at the end of Kolchak:The Night Stalker transforms this on-screen transcendence into an unheimlich encounter with an alien and ambivalent technical product—a shift that anticipates the ungrounding of photographic indexicality familiar from the digital transformations that evoke the terrors of Surrealism and the uncanny valley equally. Yet this acknowledgment and its unheimlich effect is short lived. In the moment of its encounter, the defamiliarization of realism disrupts this narrative engagement with a consciousness of the immanent reality that must be suppressed to maintain the narrative enunciation. This conflict is the source of the uncanny—inherently connected to the manipulations of realist form employed throughout this title sequence, and depends on the ways that conventional ‘reality’ is undone as the narrative progresses through each section. Shifting between these incompatible interpretations allows a strict containment of the uncanny effect in the title sequence, while potentially allowing its feeling to infuse the program itself. To return to a familiar and stable conception of cinema=narrative requires a disavowal of this encounter with ‘the real’ that violates realism: “at homeness” forecloses on potential opposition—this term, Heimlich, is precisely appropriate—the safety and familiarity of an unquestioned and expected order,47 the mere appearances created by cinematic realism. Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, and its unheimlich impact, arises from the audience recognizing a familiar aesthetic ordering and anticipating the progression that order implies, a direct reflection of what the audience already knows.48 Coherence is the result of audience identifications. This correlation has powerful implications for the digital: the continuity of earlier aesthetic conventions with radically changed technology can neutralize the challenges and unheimlich characteristics that might otherwise dominate. This use of past experience to misleadingly invoke familiar tropes renders what might otherwise be threatening and unfamiliar as comfortable. These shifts of de/familiarization do not concern the thing perceived, but the perceiving-process: the incorporation of the audience into the “theatricality” of the work is the challenge offered by the Verfremdungseffekt in the defamiliarized violation of mimetic form that reveals the narrative explanation as an invention. The still frames demonstrate the technical nature of the medium: they force a recognition of the artifice of the assault as the assault itself. Audiences must confront their a priori beliefs as determinate, constructive factors in this narrative interpretation, creating the vertigo of the unheimlich by recognizing their beliefs are arbitrary. The conflict between the defamiliarized challenge to realism and the defense of that depiction by the narrative account of the same events demonstrates the resilience of the Modernist conception of cinema=realism. The revelation of instability that lies at the heart of defamiliarization opens the established networks of control and containment to conscious consideration through its revelation of the artifice that is the system itself. Generalizing the dynamics of realist naturalism::stylization and narrative function from a single title sequence might seem problematic; the case study that Kolchak: The

50 Subjectivity Night Stalker provides is a model for considering its application in other, less specific cases. Its selection for this analysis proceeds from its capacity to offer insights into the importance of familiar realist conventions—such as the ‘long take’ and the appearance of unedited continuity of action—for assertions of realism serve the narrative production, acting to eliminate exactly the uncanny dimensions that come to dominate Kolchak:The Night Stalker; however, resolving the problem of the Heimlich and the unheimlich in this particular design does not collapse Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt into a synthesis of Marxist dialectics. Instead, defamiliarization opens away from the easy duality of class and political economy, or a passive audience that must be ‘shocked’ into criticality by making their involvement in the fictive construction apparent. Neither is Kolchak: The Night Stalker a Marxist demonstration of medium-specificity, nor a revelation of cinematic “purity.”The unheimlich appears in this design as a narrative product that paradoxically undermines and attacks narrative itself, resulting in its precise dominance of the ‘events’ shown— revealing the circularity of reinforcement that realism has for narrative. One asserts and maintains the other. Thus, what stalks “Kolchak” in this title sequence is unrepresentable: it is the reality of cinema. The still photograph freezes him in place on-screen, zooming into his static eye, his frozen expression (terror?) in sync with the crescendo as everything goes black. In this title sequence, the uncanny is the phantasmal nature of cinematic realism itself that reanimates the lifeless still. It is a reminder of the observation made by film director and theorist Jean Epstein, who noted in 1921 that “the cinema is essentially supernatural.”49 The great and wondrous magic of moving images is also, potentially, their source of terror in the re-animation of the dead and their capacity to create a doppelgänger, visibly present but incorporeal, insubstantial. What Jack Cole’s design for Kolchak: The Night Stalker demonstrates is the insignificance of any ontological link between cinema and ‘the real’: the final insistence on denotation as an artificial construct shows the audience’s tacit belief in such a connection matters, but the order imposed by a causal account of the ‘events’ appearing on-screen (narrative) creates meaning (guided by past experiences with cinema). This understanding of realism shows the enduring impacts of the historical conception of cinema=narrative for the digital. Critical concerns with photographic indexicality and ontology miss the point demonstrated here by the shift from objective to subjective modes: the established, familiar morphologies and structures of naturalism::realism are not unique to film or analogue video, but are shared by the capabilities of digital systems in ways that transform the assumptions of historical media into one set of conventional uses, offering alternatives that challenge the ontological claim of a link between the imagery shown onscreen and the mechanism of its production, alienating these foundations. The belief in photographic indexicality and ontology for motion pictures in general—even in the form of its subversion, negation, or refusal—gives the dominant ‘cinematic realism’ a direct influence on motion graphics even though the crediting function of typography always asserts the constructed nature (artifice) of the ‘shot’; being all-pervasive is the necessary and sufficient condition for being “dominant.” The differentiation between Modernist conceptions of medium-specificity and the convergent breakdown of those boundaries by computer technology—coupled with the expansion of its dispositif by the emergent identifications of ambivalent meaning posed by a metastable articulation—assert the

Ontology, Editing, Photography in Kolchak

51

centrality of realist ordering, even in digital motion pictures. The complexity of realist modalities that emerge from rejecting the ontology and indexicality of photography enables the acknowledgment of the semiosis of ‘image objects’ as an artificial process, imposed, that links digital and analogue motion pictures in ways that defy the change of technology.

Notes 1 Betancourt, M. Title Sequences as Paratexts: Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation (Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice) (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 55–74. 2 Eco, U. Kant and the Platypus (New York: Harvest Books, 2000), p. 125. 3 Krauss, R. “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 151–170. 4 Henderson, B. “The Structure of Bazin’s Thought” Film Quarterly vol. 25, no. 4 (Summer, 1972), pp. 21–27. 5 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. 6 Henderson, B. “The Structure of Bazin’s Thought” Film Quarterly vol. 25, no. 4 (Summer, 1972), pp. 18–20. 7 Williams, C. Realism and the Cinema: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 11. 8 Barnard, T. Découpage (Toronto: Caboose Books, 2014), p. 7. 9 Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 198. 10 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 81. 11 Sitney, P. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–1978 (Second Edition) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 370. 12 Bazin, A. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” trans. H. Gray, Film Quarterly vol. 13, no. 4 (Summer, 1960), pp. 4–9. 13 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. 14 Metz, C. Film Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 6–8. 15 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 81. 16 Bazin, A. Qu’est-ce Que Le Cinéma I. Ontologie et Language (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 117–130. 17 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema?Vol. 1 trans. H. Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 41–52. 18 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 73–86. 19 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 81. 20 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 77–79. 21 Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 119. 22 Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 168–171. 23 Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 119. 24 ‘Kinestasis’ is an animation technique where we see a camera move, such as a pan or zoom, done with an otherwise still image; in the case of Cole’s designs, these stills tend to be freeze frames drawn from live action footage. 25 Williams, C. Realism and the Cinema: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 36. 26 Sherman, T. “Vernacular Video” Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube ed. G. Lovink and S. Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), p. 162. 27 Bazin, A. “Ontology of the Photographic Image” trans. H. Gray, Film Quarterly vol. 13, no. 4 (Summer, 1960), pp. 4–9. 28 Lyotard, J.-F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 61.

52 Subjectivity 29 Foucault, M. The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 48. 30 Sitney, P. “The Idea of Abstraction” Film Culture nos. 63–64 (1977), p. 2. 31 The rejection of hybridity by the formalist approach to art promoted by Clement Greenberg makes the fusion of media in synesthetic-inspired art a necessary exclusion from the formalist purity common to critical analytics of the 1960s. 32 Sitney, P. “The Idea of Abstraction” Film Culture nos. 63–64 (1977), p. 14. 33 Johnston, O. and Thomas, F. The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (Los Angeles: Disney Editions, 1995). 34 Corra, B. “Abstract Cinema: Chromatic Music” Futurist Manifestos (New York: Art Works, 2001), pp. 66–67. 35 Barnett, D. Movement as Meaning in Experimental Film (New York: Rodopi, 2008). 36 Hagener, M., Hediger,V. and Strohmaier, A. The State of Post-Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 3. 37 Foucault, M. The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 48. 38 Jentsch, E. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906)” trans. R. Sellars, Angelaki vol. 2, no. 1 (1995), pp. 7–16. 39 Rushton, R. The Reality of Film:Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2011), pp. 98–99. 40 Brecht, B. “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” Brecht on Theater:The Development of an Aesthetic ed. and trans. J. Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 92. 41 Jentsch, E. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906)” trans. R. Sellars, Angelaki vol. 2, no. 1 (1995), pp. 7–16. 42 Epstein, J. “The Cinema Continues” French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939:Volume 2, 1929–1939 ed. R. Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 66. 43 Withalm, G. “The Self-Reflexive Screen: Outlines of a Comprehensive Model” Approaches to Applied Semiotics 6: Self-Reference in the Media ed. W. Nöth and N. Bishara (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 135–136. 44 Irei, N. “‘Abolishing Aesthetics’: Gestus in Brecht’s Arturo Ui” Rocky Mountain Review vol. 70, no. 2 (Fall, 2016), p. 155. 45 Brecht, B. “The Popular and the Realistic” Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic ed. and trans. J. Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), pp. 108–109. 46 Martens, G. and Biebuyck, B. “Channeling Figurativity through Narrative: The Paranarrative in Fiction and Non-Fiction” Literature and Language vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 249–262. 47 Freud, S. “The Uncanny (1919)” trans. A. Strachey http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/ freud1.pdf retrieved February 2, 2018. 48 Robinson, D. Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 198–205. 49 Epstein, J. “The Senses I (b)” French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939: Volume 1, 1907–1929 ed. R. Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 246.

2

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23 (2007)

Subjective articulations pose a problem for the conception of cinematic realism based in photographic indexicality and ontology because “subjectivity” is unavoidable: the fact of selection, framing, mise-en-scène, lighting, and so forth; the issue is not the “film,” but the “film-ing.” All those elements known as “découpage,” a term specifically describing this broad collection of empirically apparent, formative elements that articulate meaning apart from the denotated contents of the ‘image object’ are determinate, but also subjective, choices for cinema.1 They are not givens in the profilmic world: découpage is articulation. Bazin’s comment that “nature finally does more than imitate art: it imitates the artist”2 acknowledges this essential subjective ordering within his ontological conception of cinema as a document (the photograph). For his theory, stylization (subjectivity) is necessarily misconceived as being in opposition to realism, a logical fallacy that claims the “purity” of cinematic form lies in its assumed ontological link to ‘the real,’ what he terms the “myth of total cinema”: The guiding myth of the invention of cinema is thus that it will accomplish the dominant myth of every nineteenth-century technology for reproducing reality, from photography to the phonograph: a complete realism, the recreation of the world in its own image—an image upon which the irreversibility of time and the artist’s interpretation do not weigh.3 Bazin invokes this “myth of total cinema” not to refute it, but to argue for it as a guiding principle in his teleological view of motion pictures as striving toward being-factual, a demonstration of ‘the real’ even within the construction/selection of narrative film. But this myth simultaneously makes any consideration of subjectivity difficult without the enframing supports of narrative. Because his historically dominant cinematic realism conflates naturalism with the typical, everyday experience of ‘the real’—that what appears on-screen mirrors what the audience might see on their own—it necessarily conceives of stylization as its opposite, as lacking any potential to express a connection to ‘the real.’ The refusal of subjectivity is a logical consequence of his ontological argument for the basic “reality” of cinematic form, one that inheres in every frame: the fact of the view shown. It is precisely this denial of subjective articulation that defines his “myth of total cinema” and its confusion over the selective choices expressed by the camera set-up and those actions framed by that view: there are literally subjective reasons for the particular ‘shot’ being on-screen, but they are also entirely independent of its articulation.

54 Subjectivity

Figure 2.1 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a claim about ‘the real,’ while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not address reality.

Bazin’s argument for ontology rejects subjectivity. It can only lead to his proposals of “editing denied,” rather than engaging the articulation of what appears on-screen.4 His analysis necessarily devolves into the debates over the “nature of reality” that Christopher Williams identified5—whether and what cinema reveals—further avoiding the question of articulation by treating “subjectivity” as only detracting from the ontological status of the depiction, an un/reality of what appears on-screen. It creates an ideological invisibility for expressions of ‘subjective realism’ in cinema. Metaphysics and fantasy are necessarily and utterly incompatible with the proposition of cinema: what could be less real than a personal “realism of the mind” rendered immanent for all? It must refuse this on-screen subjectivity independent of the “subjective” point-of-view of a character, thus containing it within the fictional diegesis. Cinematic realism is dynamic. Stylization is recognizable as one end of a range that becomes increasingly naturalistic. French director Jean Epstein’s belief in photogénie suggests a different conception of stylization than Bazin. For him, the subjective role of découpage is not a view that documents everyday reality, but one which offers the potential for a revelatory subjectivity that is very different than the “mere appearances” of the world. This proposal leads him to espouse the aesthetics of a metaphysical cinema that challenges what we assume is the everyday reality outside the cinema: This is why the cinema is psychic. It offers us a quintessence, a product twice distilled. My eye presents me with an idea of a form; the film stock also contains an idea of a form, an idea established independently of my awareness, an idea without awareness, a latent, secret but marvelous idea; and from the screen I get an idea of an idea, my eye’s idea extracted from the camera’s; in other words, so flexible is this algebra, an idea that is the square root of an idea.6 The transformation these peculiar mathematics create is one where objective photography becomes subjectivity. The imposition of this subjective revelation on the apparent

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

55

substance of the world-on-screen disrupts the normative processes of photographic indexicality by transforming its materials without altering their quotational and extractive basis in the selection of shots. His Modernist aesthetic subverts Bazin’s essential “purity” to convert this inherent selectivity of shots into subjectivity-indexicality. The apparently ontological, autonomous process of photography becomes something else, independent of reality and separate from its limitations. The indexicality that every factual statement has is left unchallenged by their appearance on-screen; rejecting ontology recognizes new possibilities. Yet this ‘metaphysical reality’ still requires a claim to being-factual to articulate its “realism of the mind.” This subjective ‘shot’ is not a matter of reportage or documentation but signification. As Epstein argues, associating subjectivity with stylization is not a repudiation of the concept of cinematic realism. Rather than being its opposite, subjectivity has often been taken as its apogee outside of cinema: the presentation of mental reality, a revelation of hidden order, or a demonstration of “truth” that constitutes a more true depiction of the world than the superficial appearances of everyday life. Without the ontological claim about photographic indexicality, expressions of subjectivity outside the enframing of narrative function become easily recognizable as one modality within an expanded field. Modulations of objective versus subjective (naturalism::stylization) are half of this description for realist articulation; the other half is determined by the claim to document reality, indexicality (being-factual) and its opposite, artificiality (being-fictional), an approach that unites this conception of realist form in cinema study with that of art history. The audience uses the dynamics of naturalism::stylization to distinguish between objective modes (‘documentary reality’ and ‘realist fiction’), and subjective modes (‘metaphysical reality’ and ‘unreal fantasy’), while the range of index::artifice is the other, essential dimension of cinematic realism that articulates the difference between fact and fiction expressed by the opposition of being-factual (indexical) and being-fictional (artificial). Figure 2.1 describes four realist modes resulting from the contrast between these paired ranges: the articulation of indexical claims about ‘the real’ defines both ‘documentary reality’ and ‘metaphysical reality,’ versus the fictional, artificial creation apparent in both ‘realist fiction’ and ‘unreal fantasy’ that propose an unreal realm, independent of the world beyond the motion picture. What distinguishes each pair in index::artifice range is not the nature of their presentation, but their claims to being-factual in both the objective ‘documentary reality’ and in the subjective ‘metaphysical reality’ whose aesthetics make the mental, hidden order immanent—and by their absence in the objective construction of ‘realist fiction’ or the subjective ‘unreal fantasy.’ No audience expects ‘realist fiction’ and ‘unreal fantasy’ to describe the real world, except perhaps through an allegorical interpretation because they do not make explicitly documentary (indexical) claims. Audiences recognize indexical propositions about ‘the real’ easily—even if the claims to being-factual are later revealed to be false. This distinction explains the separation of fact and fiction as a specific product of articulation, thus avoiding the difficulty in distinguishing between them created by Bazin’s ontological argument where the connection of objectivity-indexicality converts all films into documents of reality, but blocks acknowledging the combination of subjectivity-indexicality in ‘metaphysical reality’ that emerges via explicitly indexical claims organized in “idiosyncratic” ways. Découpage and montage separates ‘metaphysical reality’ from the objectivity of ‘documentary reality’

56 Subjectivity by the emotional response they elicit as an uncanny, sublime, or magical interpretation of ‘the real.’ This defamiliarization of ‘objective realism’ is what defines the uncanny moment at the conclusion of the Kolchak:The Night Stalker title sequence as an example of ‘metaphysical reality.’ Thus, if the range of naturalism::stylization is one axis in the construction of cinematic realism, the other is index::artifice. Understanding the problematics posed in conceiving realism as an ontological proof of reality illustrates author Mark Twain’s aphorism about the conventionality of realism: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”7 Indexicality is central to the subjectivity of ‘metaphysical reality,’ which depends on this reification of established interpretations about the contents and nature of ‘the real’ to separate being-factual from being-fictional. By necessity it must adhere to these expectations. The irrational animations posed by the ‘reading-image’8 in Peter Frankfurt’s title design for The Number 23 (2007) include kinetic actions that show the emergence of the sublime::uncanny is a symptom of its subjective construction. Identifying or recognizing the subjective potential for the sublime::uncanny does not require actually experiencing it; this difference allows the articulation of subjectivity in cinema to inhabit the same mental realm as these experiences. However, what is central to ‘subjective realism,’ as with the sublime::uncanny emotion it can evoke, is the audience acknowledgment of it—an internal, individual “taking note” of an indexical claim whose discrepancy between anticipation and actuality inverts their typical relationship: the subjective articulation of ‘metaphysical reality’ depends on identifying something as happening that would not happen in ‘objective realism.’ Recognizing this subjective indexicality energizes a distinct and predictable discourse around conventional expectation (based in the most familiar outcomes) and the divergent, unanticipated, and potentially “pathological” claims in ‘metaphysical reality.’ These claims change the presentation-for-audience from offering a naturalistic illustration (‘documentary reality’) to a stylized, alienating statement about an unseen order (‘metaphysical reality’).The circuitous relations to ‘the real’ that define this idiosyncratic claim to being-factual creates mismatches between the audience’s internalized model of reality versus what appears on-screen in title sequences such as The Number 23, a dislocation distinct from the encounter with reality of stillness in motion pictures and which provokes an uncanny response in the titles for Kolchak:The Night Stalker. Unlike everyday life where atypical encounters that can be recognized as examples of the sublime::uncanny are precisely and uniquely individual—an emotional coloring of reality in response to something that violates the anticipated and expected ordering of ‘the real’—in cinema, evoking this same response requires that the material be perceived as linked to reality, as being-factual, rather than an artificial arrangement or an invention of the story or title sequence. The articulation in cinema that defines this terror, alienation, or estrangement is predicated on a mismatch between the immanent photographic presentation on-screen and the audience’s internalized model of reality; the indexical claims offered in this presentation-for-audience must violate a personal belief about ‘the real’ to become a sublime::uncanny experience; mediation draws on this same set of past experiences in creating its effects. However, all our experiences of reality are indeterminate, shifting ambiguously around who observes. The role of indexicality in this recognition gives the cinematic presentation of the uncanny a point of connection to the same

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

57

experience in real life outside the cinema via a paradox: it is both a construct (cinema) and linked to reality (‘the real’).This complexity is fundamental to the sublime::uncanny. Philosopher Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology places estrangement at the heart of our experience of everyday reality; it is this convergence of the two experiences that gives the sublime::uncanny its symptomatic role in identifying the ‘metaphysical reality’ on-screen and marks the distinctions between ‘the real,’ the objective realism of mere appearances, and the models of reality the audience uses to understand the everyday world we inhabit: But uncanniness means at the same time not-being-at-home. . . . Everyday familiarity collapses. Da-sein is individuated, but as being-in-the-world. Being-in enters the existential “mode” of not-being-at-home. . . . Uncanniness is the fundamental being-in-the-world, although it is covered over by everydayness.9 Heidegger’s argument understands the world, our environment, as foreign, dynamic, and changing in ways we typically ignore because this constant difference from expectations is the familiar nature of everyday reality; thus, our normal experiences of it are “at home” or “heimlich.” However, “individuation as being-in-the-world” means that we are actually, fundamentally not at home in our environment, but only under special circumstances do we become aware of this situation, the sublime::uncanny. Only under special circumstances where we are no longer “at home” in the world—when reality becomes “uncanny” or unheimlich—do we become aware of this situation. His identification of this “objective eventuality” (reality) whose recognition produces the unheimlich experience depends on a personal act of “taking note.” Events that are unexpected, such as an obstinate repetition of the numbers “23” or “62” is a commonplace occurrence in reality. Heidegger notes this experience requires an additional element to transform it into the sublime::uncanny effect: that it is happening must become conscious. There are two points of uncanniness in his discussion: [1] the uncanniness of reality itself, where the world which humans inhabit is constantly changing and so is never entirely as expectation would predict it to be, and [2] the sudden, personal awareness of the mismatch between expectation and sense-data (experience) which demands a reassessment to make it consistent, what Heidegger calls “everyday.” For Heidegger, the discovery of uncanniness is the same as the apprehension of ‘the real,’ the world that exists independently of human cognition. Having an “uncanny” experience is terrifying because it describes the subjective feeling produced by discovering this inconsistency. The range of experiences in the sublime::uncanny thus identifies an encounter that suggests an immanent contradiction between expectation for and observation of ‘the real.’ There are obvious overlaps between this conception and the supernatural implications of metaphysics that gives these experiences their magical qualities. This apprehension of reality is apparent in the uncanny eruption that concludes the Kolchak: The Night Stalker title sequence, illustrating how ‘metaphysical reality’ is an encounter with an indexical claim produced by the audience’s observations contradicting their expectations to reveal a fallacy in the (realist) model used to establish and maintain them. The documentary claim of indexicality is essential to the Heideggerian “uncanny,” yet in cinema it cannot refer to a personal experience because it is discursive, produced not just by the individual expectation, but also in its relationship to cinematic realism, as the Kolchak:The Night Stalker title demonstrates. For a mediated experience to evoke the

58 Subjectivity sublime::uncanny, it must be understood by its audience as having an indexical claim—an example of being-factual—or else be dismissed as the subjective artifice of “only art.” Unlike individual subjectivity that creates personal experiences of the sublime::uncanny in response to events in reality, in cinema, the arrangement of ‘metaphysical reality’ depends on its presentation-for-audience to articulate a subjective indexicality independently of fabula (story). This arranged, articulated construction allows ‘subjective realism’ to emerge as a distinct approach, comparable to the ‘objective realism’ that Bazin and Cavell assume for the entirety of cinema. Because audiences experience the cinematic progression of the ‘shot’ as a continuous, immediate ‘event’ happening on-screen as the sound::image unity,10 their interpretation is guided by established lexical fluency, most immediately apparent in how the four realist modes separate fact and fiction. This continuity of subjective with objective modes defined by the range of index::artifice lies in how their claims about ‘the real’ emerge: subjectivity-indexicality claims to illustrate an immaterial, mental realm, a ‘metaphysical reality,’ in the same way that objectivityindexicality makes its claims of ‘documentary reality’ via the appearance of everyday life. This assertion of a ‘metaphysical reality’ describes a hidden, normally invisible understanding of ‘the real.’ It is how cinema presents a world specifically “born of the mind.”11 Designer Peter Frankfurt employs this subjective-indexical presentation—‘metaphysical reality’—in his title sequence for The Number 23. This Comment Mode design12 connects its documentary claims to the fictional story that follows by presenting the central paranoid beliefs of the fabula as the animated numerological substitution of numbers for letters.This ‘reading-image’ illustrates a “mental reality” of irrational paranoia that creates a specifically sublime::uncanny effect.The issue for this emergence of what is clearly an ideological construction is not the shifting roles of naturalism::stylization, but their understanding by the audience as a demonstration of an unseen, transcendent reality, a recognition of the claim to being-factual that masks its ideological basis.The aesthetic heritage of the sublime::uncanny suggested by Heidegger’s observations about the double nature of recognizing subjectivity is central to the interpretative dissonance between the immanent encounter, learned expectation, and the indexical claims that create the sublime::uncanny effect: this discourse about subjectivity deters the ontological question about which depictions compose the mere appearances of ‘the real,’ to the entanglement between familiar reality and its transformation in cinema that renders ‘metaphysical reality’ immanent on-screen. The titles for The Number 23 use a simple format—text typed with a manual typewriter—the photography does not appear to be subjective in itself and presents equally simple, mundane informational statements [Figure 2.2]. The audience must perceive these texts as making indexical claims, but to create defamiliarization, they must also articulate and describe ‘the real’ rather than a fictional cinematic drama. If this indexicality goes unrecognized, so does the ‘metaphysical reality’ it presents; the viewer’s lexical expertise is essential. In contrast to the conclusion of Kolchak: The Night Stalker title sequence where the sublime::uncanny rupture is a product of the contrast between the encoding of the initially narrative scenes and the irrealist stillness whose narrative positioning casts the audience as the monster, in The Number 23, the mismatch between the audience’s ability to approach these titles as an objective realism and their significance as proof for a subjective ‘metaphysical reality’ is never able to definitively resolve how these modes challenge each other through a subsumption into a narrative framework,

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

59

Figure 2.2 Stills from the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt.

giving it a strongly sublime::uncanny effect. This process depends on the numerological substitutions—a paranoid ‘reading-image’—that reveals the links between this title sequence and the aesthetic heritage descending from Surrealist art and its use of psychology. Theorizing the “uncanny” as necessarily dependent upon personal perception, Sigmund Freud regarded the subjective identification of ‘the real’ that results in this response as a misapplication of rational thought and observation in a conception of the uncanny that is exactly opposite to Heidegger’s view: We naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloak-room ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together—if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains—invariably has the same one, or at all events, one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny.13 Freud’s psychoanalytic theories exert a profound influence on subjective presentations in cinema and art from the twentieth century into the present—both directly as plots (as in Alfred Hitchcock’s films) and indirectly via criticism (as through the work of his student Jacques Lacan). His commentary on the number “62” exactly describes the unease the facts offered in the ‘reading-images’ about “23” provoke. The animated shifting-replacement of letters by numbers visualizes this recognition of unexpected and (apparently) unnatural repetitions. His discussion provides a “formula” for the sublime::uncanny by defining a subjective, distorted engagement with reality modeled in the psychoanalytic process, especially the role of automatic and unconsidered responses to reality, and it is this connection to metaphysics that makes Surrealist aesthetics also relevant to this analysis. But his concern is pathology, not aesthetics—what happens to the human mind when some aspect of thought “goes wrong.” The everyday coincidences in his example disturb only if the pattern observed results in a subjective response that suggests an unnatural repetition—a double-bind where perception and intellection reinforces a

60 Subjectivity misplaced locus of attention on what are otherwise unremarkable, specifically coincidental details; however, failing to “take note” of them means that the sublime::uncanny never emerges, just as recognizing that these kinds of repetitions happen all the time without being noticed also contravenes in this experience. In everyday life, all experiences are precisely and uniquely an individual process; the sublime::uncanny is a personal identification of some encounter in reality that violates the anticipated and expected ordering of ‘the real’ developed through past experience. This duality is the paradox of subjectivity: it suggests mimesis and ontology at the same time in a demonstration of how naturalistic denotation in cinema reifies realist ideology as aspirations to ‘the real.’To evoke this response in a title sequence requires an indexical claim about reality—an implication of an ontological relationship to ‘the real’—rather than merely an artificial arrangement or invention of story. The isomorphism between the actual events noted by the on-screen texts about “23” and Freud’s account of what makes the number “62” seem “uncanny” is not a coincidence. This passage from his discussion could easily be a model for Frankfurt’s design, which creates its effects through the cumulative progression of individually factual details: the specific choices for the numerological demonstration about the number “23” are simultaneously instances of catastrophe and conspiracy (either real or imagined). This connection of negative events to numerology is a reflection of its metaphysics, as the spiritualist Florence Campbell explained in her book on numerology, first published in 1931: They show their negative side if we slump or drift through life, refusing to do our share of the work. They become destructive when we deliberately take action in the wrong direction.14 The paranoid interpretation is the conversion of “taking note” into a teleological demonstration of its claims. Both the sublime and the uncanny arise in the same cognitive error that assigns an intentional causality to coincidences and unintelligent, naturally occurring phenomena, an animistic projection of theological intelligence onto the environment. Being constructed means that a title design can create the sublime::uncanny by directing attention to it, as the ‘reading-image’ does in The Number 23: each new example lends more credibility to this occult hypothesis that numbers influence or even determine historical events and control people’s everyday lives.Their progressive impact shows that there is something strange (rather than coincidental) about “23.” The response that defines this estrangement or alienation is predicated on objective observations mismatching an internalized model of reality; it violates a personal belief about ‘the real.’ The way to banish an “uncanny” experience is to undermine its metaphysics and its theology by making the occurrence into a commonplace, thus eliminating its suggestion of intentionality and making its unsettling effect disappear into a world animated by the autonomous arationality of physical processes, not the inscrutable consciousness of transcendent, divine, or demonic intelligence. Changing exceptional into banal events is implicit in Freud’s discussion of how noticing the otherwise mundane repetition of the digits 6 and 2 and believing its appearance is a product of some agency is problematic, but its disconcerting power can be undone simply by remembering that there are only ten total digits that can appear in any number, so either of this pair will be present 20%

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

61

of the time.While these repetitions are common coincidences, their repeated identification (the “taking note” of their presence either in everyday life, or insisted upon in the directed indexical presentation of The Number 23) results in an unsettling experience for its observer when there is a belief that this repetition should not autonomously happen—that it could only happen if something made it happen—that it requires an all-powerful alien consciousness at work behind mundane happenstance (a metaphysical agency). Freud’s example of “62” is a mundane, uncontrolled occurrence in everyday life, but the revelation in Frankfurt’s design is necessarily a conscious construction. The various details that always either produce or include “23” require an extreme care in their selection to achieve this consistent return, but each fact taken from ‘the real’ moves its audience further into that ‘metaphysical reality,’ as film historian Paul Coates notes: Psychoanalysis reveals itself to be a machine for the creation of the uncanny—a possibility Freud himself entertains only whimsically, as if seeking to obscure the degree to which his newly founded discipline really is uncanny. . . . Freud’s essay on the uncanny accords great prominence to Schelling’s definition of the experience: “‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . hidden and secret and has become visible.” Schelling’s words may be rewritten to define the uncanny moment as one in which the other emerges within the same.15 The defamiliarization of known and everyday occurrences is precisely what the shift from an objective observation and reportage into a subjective “taking note” and overinterpretation means for ‘the real.’ This ‘metaphysical reality’ distinguishes the opening credits in The Number 23 from the progression of being-fictional in the narrative that follows; the artificial recognition is entirely different than the indexical claims made by the presentation of “mere” facts. His use of numerology to demonstrate the recurrence of “23” is an exceptionally artificial construct, yet it achieves a persuasive indexicality through repetition. By showing how groups of numbers always add up to “23,” it posits a literally unseen reality-to-reveal, but at the same time, the ‘metaphysical reality’ of this numerology is a reminder of the very human tendency to recognize patterns in noise that encourages a superstitious belief that maybe the rationalization that makes the “uncanny” disappear is wrong, a connection that returns to the importance of psychology in understanding this subjective arrangement of objective facts. This transcendent, hidden order is an example of teleological thinking created by considering the sublime::uncanny in terms of experience rather than arrangement: the concept of “uncanniness” critiques the proposition of an ontological independence and self-sufficiency where meaning arises from universal terms. The construction of cinematic realism is separated from ‘the real’ by convention and past experience, but begins as expectations established by experiences in/of reality—although audiences understand motion pictures as different than reality, all art works remain specialized, privileged moments within real life.What is a variable in normal experience, dependent on audience attentiveness, becomes an aesthetic manipulation, an ineluctable effect that can be called upon through the design itself since aesthetics are always constructed—their contents are precisely determinate and intentionally directed. Unlike ‘the real,’ the sense of a consciousness directing and arranging what appears in art is entirely accurate, separating the sublime::uncanny experiences in realism from those in reality. Aesthetics’ controlled

62 Subjectivity and directed nature distinguishes ‘metaphysical reality’ in cinematic realism from the particular experience of the sublime::uncanny prompted by actual encounters with ‘the real’— modulating and shaping attention is not a minor part of aesthetics, it is their definitional condition, thus making the relevance of realism for understanding this experience obvious. Without the modeling of ‘the real’ provided by the indexical claims of ‘metaphysical reality,’ the sublime::uncanny becomes incoherent in its assertions about that reality. The contingency of the “uncanny” (like the “sublime”) reveals this indexicality as transitory, a product of immanent situational encounters and metastable conditions derived from past experience and expectation. The reflexivity of this relationship suggests indexicality stabilizes the network of meaning that gives it the privileged position of mediator between subjective and objective—the “uncanny” response is evidence for the destabilization of that model, an eruption of masked contingency into consciousness. The dual recognition, exceptional versus mundane, collapses in the “uncanny,” giving it a disruptive effect and producing a terror evoked in the sudden conclusion that the assumed order of the world does not match its actual ordering. These convergences of aesthetics and experiences are representative of a defamiliarization process that entangles indexicality with subjective interpretation. This integration of reality with metaphysics converges on a historical forerunner to Freud’s “uncanny”—the effect called “sublime” that was proposed in the eighteenth century by philosopher Edmund Burke: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger; that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. . . . When danger or pain press too nearly they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.16 For Burke’s sublime, the expressions of subjectivity always devolve from realism. While the “uncanny” identifies a negative experience of ‘the real,’ the opposite extreme from that of the “sublime,” both require their audience to make note of these unanticipated reappearances that reveal the everyday does not correspond to expectation. In the articulation of the title sequences for Kolchak:The Night Stalker and The Number 23, this demand for recognition is addressed by how the indexical claim to being-factual foregrounds these identifications visibly on-screen. Burke’s discussion of the supernatural implications of the sublime presents obvious overlaps with Heidegger’s discussion of the artificial separation between experience and expectation. The sublime and the uncanny identify the same, singular, subjective experience whose naming depends on the nature of what it invokes: the “sublime” is a positive encounter with the same destabilizing force as the “uncanny,” differentiated by the sense of proximate danger noted by Freud and Heidegger.When it is not an existential challenge, the experience becomes Burke’s “sublime,” a spiritual (even numinous) encounter with ‘metaphysical reality.’ While the inconsistency between encounter and expectation in Freud’s example proposes the sublime::uncanny as resulting from individual subjectivity undermining

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

63

established internal models of ‘the real,’ the experience forces consciousness to either reject that experience or attempt to assimilate it, adapting the claims of this ‘metaphysical reality’ to become a part of an established concept of ‘the real’: thus the implicit connection between experience and thought. But subjectivity in the experience of reality is distinct from a mediated presentation of a subjective experience. ‘Metaphysical reality’ enables the sublime::uncanny to arise on demand via its demonstrations of new, unfamiliar indexical claims about ‘the real.’ The subjectivity posed by the titles for The Number 23 is more than just a collection of facts and animation, it is potentially a revelation of a hidden order in the world. The validity of this documentary claim is entirely separate from the claim itself. The arrangement and sorting of details for this presentation become a logical argument progressing on-screen about the nature of ‘the real.’ This argument derives from the indexicality of actual facts for its construction: not merely a fictitious arrangement, but a rhetorical demonstration whose acknowledged connection to reality is necessary for its defamiliarizing result. The subjective realism on view makes an empirical claim about the world beyond the artifice of its construction, making this realism of a different order entirely than the reality of mere appearances only afforded by photography. The specific element that Freud identified as essential for the sublime::uncanny effect is the articulation of a subjective-indexical claim—that becomes in cinematic realism the expression of ‘metaphysical reality’—whose significance renders these repetitions supernatural portents: the importance of facts in Frankfurt’s title sequence reveals the necessary indexical claims about ‘the real’ for the emergence of the sublime::uncanny responses to his articulation. The Number 23 title sequence builds this irrational ‘metaphysical reality’ from statements that are evidence for a hidden order and control demonstrated by the recurrence of “23” in each factual example [Figure 2.3, Left].This indexical

Figure 2.3 [Left] Stills from the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt; [Right] Stills from the title sequence for Seven (1995), designed by Kyle Cooper.

64 Subjectivity link to reality distinguishes Frankfurt’s design for The Number 23 from Kyle Cooper’s earlier Prologue Mode design17 for Seven (1995) that is composed and arranged in a superficially similar fashion. Both title sequences employ extreme close-up, macrophotography of their “evidence.” While the imagery in Cooper’s design is often abject18 and disgusting, focused on the violation and negation of individual, bodily integrity, it does not converge on the same indexical response that Frankfurt’s design produces [Figure 2.3, Right]; the abject response it elicits is tangential to the range of sublime::uncanny specifically because it identifies objective challenges to the self rather than a subjective challenge posed by ‘metaphysical reality.’ While abjection can also produce the “terror” described by Heidegger, Freud, and Burke, it is qualitatively different. Seven provokes disgust rather than the apprehension of a transcendent order. This difference distinguishes the abject from the uncanny or the sublime: the obstinate recurrence of the number “23” throughout Frankfurt’s design is precisely disconcerting because all the information presented is factual.They are less aligned with the narrative than with a connection to ‘the real’: although the story in this film concerns a paranoid delusion about “23,” the title sequence acts to provide an empirical basis for the delusion, rather than creating a prologue in which the collection-process is shown to be delusional, as in Seven. The animated texts appearing during this opening for The Number 23 could be ignored as simply mundane coincidences, and can be accepted as being part of a fictive presentation (as a paratext not dissimilar to that in Seven), but their factuality is not dismissible, only their organization around “23.” None of the details shown in the opening to Seven are indexical in the same way as the statements in The Number 23—they are presented as part of a narrative construction and identified as being-fictional, a recognition that contains their abjection as a specific, but unquestionably ‘unreal fantasy’ that does not allow the horror to escape its confinement within the narrative frame; Seven is “only a movie.” Cooper’s narrative montage shows materials being collected and arranged in notebooks, complemented by a great variety of other, abstract imagery that includes the credits themselves.Throughout this sequence, what would normally be noise—graphic effects, scratches, blurs, and other camera flaws that suggest mechanical glitches and breakdowns become part of its abjection—visualize the narrative’s attack on the physical and psychological integrity of the individual. All this material is arranged in Seven to introduce the serial killer in the story that follows, dramatized on-screen as the breakdown of the camera’s operation and the imagery it produces. It does not offer or claim any indexical link to reality beyond the fact of being photographic (the basis of Stanley Cavell’s understanding of cinematic ontology that is equivalent to his theory of realism19). The unexpected and constantly changing everyday reality in which everything happens, such as the obstinate repetition of the number “23,” only becomes uncanny when these commonplace occurrences are given (taken for) a metaphysical significance. ‘Normal’ thinking is ‘normal’ simply because it is the most familiar solution to the demands of an ambivalent and unstable world;20 the difference between pathology and ‘normal’ is a matter of degree, not of type,21 arising from how the ambiguity is “handled” by the interpreting mind.22 Heidegger, Freud, and Burke all note the sublime::uncanny experience requires the viewer must do more than just “take note,” that this event be given a conscious significance, an action that makes it a vehicle for the realization of ideology as immanent encounter. Heidegger’s phenomenology understands this encounter destabilizes

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

65

(“uncanny”) rather than confirms a transcendent spiritual order (“sublime”): the symptom that initiates the discursive ‘metaphysical reality’ is not a product of ontology, but an indexical of claim made about significance, as Eco noted about perception in general. This philosophical entanglement of encounter and subjective belief converts our experience of the everyday world into a similar construct to that of realist art in a revelation of how past experience informs our normal experiences of the world and makes the confusion of the representations that appear in cinema for reality, such as Bazin’s “myth of total cinema,” comprehensible as a category mistake about what is being-perceived. Familiar objects that become suggestions of transcendence are familiar from the aesthetics of visionary art, revealing the sublime::uncanny’s connection to Surrealist aesthetics through its use of indexicality for paradoxically personal, idiosyncratic, and irrational purposes, which takes these significances as revelations (indexes to ‘the real’) rather than artificial, imposed interpretations (fictional claims of ideology). Without these encultured expectations, the sublime::uncanny is a non-experience in both art and life.

Animation as Revelation Although the title design for The Number 23 is not a Surrealist work, understanding its development as originating within the visionary tradition (of which Surrealism is a pre-eminent exemplar) contextualizes what otherwise might seem to be a unique, unprecedented approach to metaphysical revelation. Peter Frankfurt’s use of animated text visualizes a subjective, occult fantasy reflecting Freud’s psychological model—the uncanny—that for the Surrealists comes to present a subjective, ‘metaphysical reality’ through art. This aesthetic transformation of psychoanalysis makes a brief digression to consider the convergences between what the Surrealists called “the marvelous,” Burke’s “the sublime,” and Freud’s “the uncanny” instructive. These approaches develop the same concern with a socially derived understanding of what exists in “reality” that informs Bazin’s ontological theory about photographic indexicality. This Surrealist presentation of a ‘metaphysical reality’ is specifically discursive, emergent in a concern with accentuating and developing the subjective (mis)perception of ‘the real’ (or “dream”) as a more accurate engagement with reality: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatisme in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner— the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all, all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.23 These twin definitions from 1924 provide the axiomatic constraints on “Surrealism” as both a specific protocol and an ideological model for reality based in the personal,

66 Subjectivity subjective response distinguished from social custom: the concern in surrealism for metaphysical experiences comes as no surprise, nor does the on-going influence of that movement since etymologically “surrealism” literally means “higher realism.” The metaphysical aspects of this meaning are obvious. Embracing Freud’s “talking cure” as a material process, André Breton and his fellow dissatisfied Dadas (whom he enumerates in their initial manifesto—Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac)24 declared a revolution in 1924 that rejected the ontological realm of appearances for a metaphysical understanding of ‘the real’ guided by personal idiosyncrasy and subjectivity. Their movement began as a literary revolution concerned with the use of free association derived from psychoanalysis,25 and “games” that were designed to undermine or eliminate the directed control of the artist’s conscious mind.26 Surrealism avoids the everyday world of mere appearances to focus on the role of the subjective, internal realm as evidence for a metaphysical realm of human desire: they were concerned with life, their material was avant-garde literature, their goal was the complete transformation of everything in their world. Their interest in psychoanalysis refocuses the destructive capacity of nihilism common to avant-garde movements.27 The first Surrealist works were exclusively literary, compositions produced in a trance-state, delivered to and recorded by the poet’s audience-peers.28 Their concept of automatisme derived from the psychoanalytic tools of free association, automatic writing, and trance to valorize autonomous, unconsidered (subjective) responses over conscious deliberation, avoiding “any control” that might censor the results. Their art questioned the empirical foundations of knowledge and sought to reveal the concealed mechanisms that condition reality.29 These dramatizations of repressed desire challenged the society they rejected via a critique of how social norms restrain the individual, resulting in pathological behaviors to contain and control human desire. This unrestricted play is easily understood from the results of word association games,30 but for the necessarily considered labor that creates pictures, initially, the Surrealists doubted the application of automatisme to visual art. Automatisme relied on the associative processes of language, while the “found” assemblage of pictures in collage functioned for visual art in the same way by providing a pre-existing material comparable to words and verbal language: Max Ernst juxtaposed and combined steel point engravings to visualize thought in precisely the same ways that verbal free association did for/with language, or the swapping and moving texts do in Frankfurt’s title sequence that provides a visual poiesis. Convergences between Freudian psychoanalysis, Heidegger’s uncanny, Burke’s sublime, and Surrealist art provide insights into the ‘subjective realist’ presentation of a ‘metaphysical reality.’ Both Heidegger and Freud emphasize a subjective understanding that overwhelms ‘the real,’ rendering ‘the real’ itself uncanny, while Burke marks the distinction between positive and negative appraisals of this identification. Ironically, the approach in Freudian psychoanalysis which emphasizes personal responses (subjectivity) involves an attentiveness to ‘the real’ that simultaneously estranges it. These encounters with reality are a function of an essentially individuated process, a neurotic “taking note” of features apparent in the world, and then always interpreting them as being personally relevant (i.e., narcissistically—a subjective positioning). These idiosyncrasies make the ideological dimensions of ‘subjective realism’ readily apparent, even if they are equally

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

67

present in ‘objective realism.’ This metaphysical connection links similar encounters distinguished by the emotional response of the audience to that aesthetic: awe (sublime), terror (uncanny), fascination (marvelous). As a particular variety of realist form, all three identify metaphysical, even transcendent—yet nebulous—experiences which are offered as a material description of the hidden nature of ‘the real.’The influence of Surrealism on visual art is pervasive, as abstract expressionist painter Hans Hoffman explained in his article “The Search for ‘the Real’ in the Visual Arts”: The significance of a work of art is determined then by the quality of its growth. This involves intangible forces inherent in the process of development. Although these forces are surreal (that is there nature is something beyond physical reality), they, nevertheless, depend on a physical carrier.The physical carrier (commonly painting or sculpture) is the medium of expression of the surreal. Thus, an idea is communicable only when the surreal is converted into material terms. The artist’s problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit.31 However, Surrealist works of automatisme, in spite of the rhetorical claims made in the manifesto, converged on familiar aesthetic territory: the sublime, the uncanny, and the Surrealist concept of the “marvelous” all present a subjective understanding of the world through psychoanalysis, rendered as an “objective fact” for perception. Hoffman identifies the dimensions of this metaphysical presentation as an intangible factor that only impacts its audience when it becomes immanent in the work, i.e., when it is demonstrated in material terms as in the erratic jumps between numbers/letters that appear throughout The Number 23 title sequence. The spiritual meaning ascribed to these emotional encounters is consistently supernatural, a revelation of higher levels of reality than those normally available in the mere appearances of the world that renders their ideological meaning as materially apparent form, reification as a literal presentation.This transfer from metaphysics into immanence is necessarily a shift that places the appearances of the work within the realm of realism, not only as physical objects, but as works whose understanding is indexically connected to reality rather than merely a depiction. This link to reality distinguishes ‘metaphysical reality’ from ‘unreal fantasy.’ In The Number 23 title sequence, each fact’s juxtaposition, arrangement, and combination with the others conspires to become a “marvelous” expression of hidden order. Each new presentation of animated text follows the same convention: typed words that autonomously change into numbers. The direct synchronization of the sound of a type bar in a manual typewriter striking the page with the appearance of letters on-screen reinforces the indexical claim advanced by the facts in each text. The association of this presentation with both the production credits and the ‘mere facts’ collected and shown in this design provides an additional assertion of their validity. It is the fact of their animation that makes the subjectivity of their organization evident. The flickering dis/ appearances and substitutions of letters/numbers creates a ‘reading-image’ where the instability of interpretation visualizes the transition between a personal mythology and the objective demonstration of that ordering in the world. This procedure is the central action of this opening: it impacts not only the ancillary texts—those facts whose inclusion is not connected to the crediting function—but also the primary texts (the actor

68 Subjectivity and production credits) that are the actual concern in this design. This linkage between primary and secondary texts renders them equivalently factual; both are subject to the same kinetic actions.The actors and personnel who made the film are facts which identify and distinguish this film from other works, but the historical materials that accompany them do not have that restriction. Each set is factual in distinct ways, parallel to each other, yet the uniform animation and subjective presentation allows them to mutually reinforce each other.To question one set of facts is to undermine the other—the primary texts (credits) serve as guarantors of the other, more questionable processes visible in this design. Indexicality affirms its realist ideology (whatever the claims presented may be) via mutually reinforcing relationships. Because all the information in The Number 23 was drawn from reality and included within this fabricated construction, its emergent disruption of familiar reality depends on an obstinate refusal of explanations—in context with the other facts about “23,” each new addition becomes further “proof ” of the supernatural nature of this number. Embedding these animated texts in the context of Surrealist automatisme is a critical act that illuminates the conceptual progression of this title sequence and its narrative function: the animated substitution of letters-for-numbers dramatizes the recognition process necessary for ‘metaphysical reality’ as the literal progression on-screen. It is an epistemological discovery of something amiss confirmed by a circular logic of selection focused on the discovered presence of “23.” Grouping together all these otherwise unrelated facts makes the repetition of “23” readily apparent as a demiurgic order. Yet the implication of a consciousness ordering this world on-screen is correct: the sequence is not merely facts drawn from the world, but an articulation planned and orchestrated from the beginning. The shifts and substitutions of letters-numbers is distinctly unnatural (static texts are never unstable in this way), but their motion entails a constant revelation of a hidden order (numerology). Leader of the Surrealist movement, poet André Breton, explained these convergences of the sublime::uncanny with metaphysical understanding in the first Surrealist Manifesto (published in 1924) as being part of an older, visionary tradition which Surrealism sought to continue: Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful. . . . The marvelous is not the same in every period of history: it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the modern mannequin, or any other symbol capable of affecting the human sensibility for a period of time.32 The overlap between Burke’s “sublime” and Freud’s “uncanny” with Breton’s “marvelous” is obvious; the Surrealist understanding of this displacement in the 1920s and 1930s anticipates Heidegger’s later discussion of the unheimlich in the 1940s. Where the transcendence of reality is assumed for the “sublime,” it is utterly contingent on the traditions of its production to be “marvelous,” an ideological product of the link between immanent work and a historical, visionary method.They differ in how the emotive response is conceptualized: the transcendent apprehension of divinity that provokes a disembodied awe

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

69

in Burke, or supernatural terror in Freud becomes a subjective fascination in Surrealism— an aesthetic concerned with documenting a subjectivized reality as the essential material for metaphysical understanding. The demonstrations provided by The Number 23 have this same character; the ideological order of this ‘reading-image’ is precisely a product of the imposed framework of numerology that converges on Surrealist, visionary aesthetics without being a Surrealist work. The animations and documentary information organized by this title sequence dramatizes its ideology as a specifically sublime or uncanny response that depends on the personal response to/by each audience member—the essential “taking note”—but in aesthetic and semantic terms, cinematic defamiliarization cannot be individual, personal, or private. ‘Metaphysical reality’ dramatizes the ideological content—the hidden order of ‘the real’ whose immanent presentation parallels Surrealist automatisme—in the paranoid irrationality that becomes an apparently rational response to the evidence demonstrated. How language set free from the restraints of familiar lexical order connects to the raptures of Surrealism is simultaneously a cypher for the psychosis and paranoia in the narrative that follows recognition of how belief is subjective. It returns to the definition of ‘metaphysical reality’ as emblematic of an order that is not otherwise apparent in experience. The ‘reading-image’ whose letters and words are unfixed, changing, evokes the sublime::uncanny experience, but only if its audience understands the ‘reading-image’ as having an indexical, documentary character rather than mere artifice. This indexical claim connects visionary art to ‘the real’ and allows the aesthetics of sublime::uncanny to challenge the separation of constructed artifice (realism) from reality—without that link, the sublime::uncanny cannot arise, being instead simply an expression of ‘unreal fantasy’ as in the title sequence for Seven. Indexicality is the vehicle for revelation—idiosyncratic, contingent, subjective—asserting this link is not mere rhetoric: it is a necessarily qualification to avoid confusion about the essence of ‘metaphysical reality.’ Frankfurt’s design directs the audience’s attention toward these necessary claims about ‘the real’ that are evidence for what Heidegger calls “being-inthe-world,” and which the Surrealist automatist process developed in the 1920s models. It is not an technique of invention but of rearrangement and recombination that selects existing materials and joins them according to the internal predilections of the artist doing the assembly. The transfer of this protocol from language to visual art was initially problematic, but it was resolved through the use of pre-existing, found material. The cinema provides a mechanism for this same transfer through the selective process that Epstein called photogénie. Cinematic ‘image objects’ always allow their recombination. This constructive mechanism, découpage, invokes a culturally determinate transcendence that reifies ideology, as Surrealist filmmaker Ado Kyrou (and screenwriter to director Luis Buñuel) explains in his book Le Surréalisme au Cinéma, published in 1953: The cinematic, modern marvelous is popular, and the best and most exciting films are, beginning with Méliès and Fantômas, the films shown in local fleapits, films which seem to have no place in the history of cinema.33 The marginal works Kyrou recognizes as falling outside the history of cinema are precisely those hybrid works that effaced the distinctions between animation and live action. The

70 Subjectivity subjective cinema that interests the Surrealists is the same tradition that informs the development of motion graphics—the continuity between the Surrealist “marvelous” and The Number 23 title sequence is thus to be expected, rather than coming as a surprise. The Surrealist “marvelous” depends on an ambivalent indexical link to ‘the real’ where the subjective response dominates, transforming realism into visionary immanence: The Number 23 develops these metaphysics of a realism “born of the mind” through the animated ‘reading-image’ that diverges from the familiarity of static typography and type setting. The typographic movements, repetitions, and swapping of letters for numbers are examples of the subjective immanence of a ‘reading-image’ whose letterforms perform kinetic actions that remind their audience of how words are formed from reconfigurable elements, and (just like the numbers ‘2’ and ‘3’) there are only a limited number of these components used in all words. By shifting positions and identities, this animation reveals a numerological adding-up that always concludes with the same total, 23; thus, it demonstrates an interpretive delirium whose symbolism is unstable. The ‘readingimage’ expresses a hidden order “behind” these words: their capacity to move, change appearance, and alter legibility over time undermines the familiar discourse of written and textual languages.This transformation introduces a “poetic function”34 into the established capacity of cinema to render a ‘subjective realism’ as apparently immanent reality on-screen.The movement and temporal ordering of the facts being presented dominates the interpretation of the lexical interpretation of these words just as in poetry the sound of the words is as/more important than their meaning. This shift from immediate reading to emergent signification makes the process of interpretation into the content of the work—thus a ‘reading-image’—rendering the cinematic dimensions of this subjective organization central to how the audience understands and responds to the ideology manifest in the design. The temporal structure of this title sequence follows the expansive progress of a red stain that gradually saturates the screen space; this red liquid is directly connected to the numbers “2” and “3” in the main title card, spreading out from them at its conclusion as they ‘melt’ [Figure 2.4]. This visual expression of the cumulative impacts of each new fact brings the sublime::uncanny into consciousness. Demonstrating the number’s historical recurrence through this series of facts articulates the necessary indexical claim about ‘the real’ through their cumulative impact. The ways these aesthetics inform Frankfurt’s design are entirely en passant—passive products of a popular and established methodology for transforming mania into art. This exacting set of subjective revelations concerns occult practices orchestrated around a paranoid ideation that is overdetermined by the Surrealist heritage to the point of banality. The Number 23 title sequence makes this history literally apparent in how the text is animated across several lines of parallel and ultimately converging development: first as the isolated statements appearing on-screen; second through the progression of a dark, blood red stain that spreads by saturating and running across the screen; finally in the revelation of a higher-level ordering where the individual ‘typed’ statements combine to form the digits “23.”The red fluid that spreads across and through the typed paper is more than an evocation of blood, it symbolizes the empirical heritage of “23”—all the facts presented are connected to atrocity, death, and murder. The kinetic actions all serve to repeat the

Figure 2.4 Stills showing the letters in the main title card melting into a red stain in the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt.

72 Subjectivity same conclusive revelation of this number. In shifting from a low-level identification of independent statements to this implicit order revealed with an animated push-back at the conclusion of the sequence, this design models the accumulative impacts of all these coincidental but real facts. Their sublime::uncanny order may produce a “terror” that is directly proportional to the audience’s identification of them as true. This emotional response depends on a shift from being-fictional, understood as a part of a dramatic presentation, to being-factual, understood in documentary terms that return this design to the visionary tradition. The empiricism of facts in The Number 23 distinguishes them from the fictional constructs in both Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Seven, making the indexical claims of ‘metaphysical reality’ and its statement of being-factual a tacit acknowledgment that changes ‘objective realism’ into subjective indexicality. The imagery on-screen demands recognition as existing independently of its role in the title sequence: they make specific claims to being-factual apart from their role in the design which renders the obvious subjectivity of that selection a primal act of “taking note” in reality independent of the fictional world being presented on-screen. Each additional statement would have the same cumulative result even if it was nothing more than part of a list on a sheet of paper, since its impact is not a function of how it’s been presented, but what is presented. Statements such as “William Jefferson Clinton has 23 letters” are objectively true; other statements such as “Caesar was stabbed 23 times,” a factual quote from the Roman historian Suetonius,35 require either past knowledge or research to verify [Figure 2.5]. If there is any doubt about its factuality, the audience can check for themselves. That it is possible to verify some of these claims immediately—by counting the letters—makes the other less immanent facts more credible in themselves through the context of their presentation. The narrative of The Number 23 precisely matches what is invoked in the title sequence: it is a story where protagonist “Walter Sparrow” (played by Jim Carey) is gradually revealed to be living in a paranoid fugue state, thus literally recalling the link between the psychoanalytic and the Surrealist heritage of uncanny visualization. Unlike Seven, these details are oriented toward reality—their recognition as comment on the story is an indirect engagement with narrative function—but the organization of Cooper’s design as a prologue that directly anticipates the events of the story subsumes its presentation within the realm of the fictive, cutting it off from reality in precisely the same narrative return that isolates and normalizes the uncanny effect in Kolchak: The Night Stalker. This process finds direct analogy in the shifts between emergent visual form (the spreading red stain) and the “found” nature of each fact presented on-screen in Frankfurt’s title: drawn from reality, these facts change their meaning through their cumulative impact. Because ‘metaphysical reality’ makes an indexical claim to beingfactual, its documentary discourse about ‘the real’ is always potentially applicable beyond its containment in cinema. This relationship creates the problematics specific to the sublime::uncanny effect since it allows the experience of cinema to converge on the experience of the world apart from representation. More than simply montage or a collaged juxtaposition of elements, these transforming texts suggest the restricted expression of an irrational, subjective order; Surrealism understands it as a liberation of the desires held in check by social convention.

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

73

Figure 2.5 Stills showing facts such as “William Jefferson Clinton has 23 letters” in the title sequence for The Number 23 (2007), designed by Peter Frankfurt.

Performing Interpretation The ‘reading-image’ identifies how cinema dramatizes the interpretive process on-screen, a transfer that changes the audience’s internal lexical engagement into the progression in time of motion typography. These movements expand the implicit time of reading into a literal duration that becomes an expression of a particular subjectivity. This reality-claim made about the audience’s reflexive engagement with the presentation-for-audience is fundamental. Facticity distinguishes the animations and progression of The Number 23

74 Subjectivity from other designs, such as Seven, that also have a high degree of photographic naturalism, but whose subjective presentation of an ‘unreal fantasy’ is directly linked to the narrative function of the design as an opening prologue. Unlike these artificial worlds-onscreen, Frankfurt’s design offers a documentary account that implies the narrative that follows is a “docudrama,” a fictionalized narrative derived from reality. The relentlessly repeated determinism of numerology demonstrates the “23 hypothesis” to suggest the factuality of this story—that this number influences historical events, visualized as the individually typed “23”s progressively surrounding and containing all the other credits and typography in a uniform matrix of numbers. This final emergent “23” is expected from the progression of the sequence; it is obvious that something is being “drawn” by the repeating numbers. Shifting from the proximate recognition of each animated text to the chronic emergence of this final “23” gives the entire progression an inevitable character: each fact appears typed on a sheet of paper that is gradually soaked with a deep red liquid suggesting blood. It flows and progressively soaks the “paper,” until, at its conclusion, a large “23” fills the screen as the liquid covers the paper and fades to black. The combination of individual facts, repeating numbers, and narrative ‘discovery’ (via numerology) of the same obstinate pair of digits makes this final higher-level order a confirmation of what the rest of the sequence has already asserted. The reiteration of this “23” concludes the progression in the only way possible. Understanding this title sequence via ‘metaphysical reality’ makes the Surrealist associations subjectivity and poeisis into an immanent concern; their relevance for how The Number 23 progresses into a literalization of paranoid psychosis on-screen via the ‘reading-image’ is obvious. What was of interest about this visionary approach is how motion pictures can evoke the “reality of the mind” contained by subjective thought directly. Surrealist film director Luis Buñuel explains: The cinema seems to have been invented to express the subconscious life, whose roots penetrate so deeply into poetry; but it is almost never used for that end. . . . the reality of Neo-Realism is incomplete, official, and above all rational; but poetry, mystery, all that completes and enlarges tangible reality, is completely lacking in its working.36 This conception of realism as a ontological indexicality as a rationalization of what appears on-screen is a negation of subjectivity in the material substance of reality. In addressing the hard surfaces of things, Italian Neo-Realism was noted for its objectivity—valued by Bazin for the ways the actions progress on-screen without apparent manipulation or intervention—without being subjectively modulated. Buñuel understands this objectivity as a negative realism, one that masks the ideological structures that make the world on-screen appear to operate as reality: the cinema embraces a primordial desire to know—an encultured discourse about mere facts that can become confused with the actual contents of the world (as in Bazin). For subjective modes, this role for cinema as “recording” is of little significance except for the ways that it can render visible what is normally hidden from consideration by narrative and dramatic considerations. How The Number 23 title sequence discards the constraints of story (fabula) enables it to function directly as an expression of subjectivity that inexorably leads to a confrontation with

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

75

paranoia and the revelation of its construction as a commentary on the narrative—the metaphysical order of “23”—that each fact lends its individual credibility to establishing as real. The excommunicated Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method” proposes a system for collapsing reality into the subjectivity of paranoid belief. His protocol for visual construction anticipates and acknowledges how the paranoid fantasy becomes credible by taking observable and mundane facts and fitting them into a new order as examples (conspiratorial evidence) of a hidden order that passes unseen in everyday experience. Dalí explains the role of documentation for paranoid ideation: Paranoia uses the external world in order to assert its dominating idea and has the disturbing characteristic of making others accept this idea’s reality. The reality of the external world is used for illustration and proof, and so comes to serve the reality of the mind.37 Dalí is interested in the synthetic aspects of paranoid schizophrenia. While his concerns lie with the simulation of the creative impacts of paranoia, the paranoiac-critical method takes the passive recording of literary Surrealism and reverses it, demonstrating an active, participatory automatisme that any viewer can see.The “pure psychic automatisme” in Breton’s definition of Surrealism posits a passive audience where the art is an artifact: the “dreaming” happens in the mind of the artist, is documented by the artwork, and presented to an audience.38 Opposing Breton’s passive approach forms the foundation of his variant of Surrealist automatisme: Standing altogether apart from the influence of the sensory phenomena with which hallucination may be considered more or less concerned, the paranoiac activity always employs materials admitting of control and recognition. It is enough that the delirium of interpretation should have linked together the implications of the images of the different pictures covering a wall for ‘the real’ existence of this link to be no longer deniable. Paranoia uses the external world in order to assert its dominating idea and has the disturbing characteristic of making others accept this idea’s reality. the reality of the external world is used for illustration and proof, and so comes to serve the reality of the mind.39 Dalí proposes an active variety of automatisme, one where the audience experiences the “delirium of interpretation” that is normally only a documentary remainder in other Surrealist works. The assertive order of paranoia obsessively documents the irrational order that manifests as an insistent concern with a clearly subjective and individual interpretation that is not/may not be otherwise apparent to others. Dalí’s discussion of “double image” (metamorphic illusion) identifies the duplicity of pathological understanding and how it overlays factuality, bending it to become subjective in the same way that Epstein identifies the subjective in cinema: The way which it has been possible to obtain a double image is clearly paranoiac. By double image it is meant such a representation of an object that it is also, without

76 Subjectivity the slightest physical or anatomical change, the representation of another entirely different object, the second representation being equally devoid of any deformation or abnormality betraying arrangement.40 In Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method and the art it produces, the audience is actively creating the sequence of imagery seen, rather than passively receiving it. Paranoiac-critical pictures are a special form of visual indeterminacy, an optical illusion whose natural form is experiential instead of logical; all double images propose a perceptual paradox that “contains” two or more simultaneously discrete images visible to human consciousness. This conception of automatisme reverses that proposed by Breton: a participatory automatisme where audience actively “dreams” rather than passively receives the remnants of someone else’s experience. Metamorphic illusions were popular at the start of the twentieth century and provide a visual model for Dalí’s theory that demonstrates the limits of interpretative expertise [Figure 2.6]. Schizophrenic responses mimic the creative response in every way but one: the creative response is under the artists’ conscious

Figure 2.6 A selection of metamorphic postcards (1890–1910).

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

77

control and is chosen; the schizophrenic response is neither chosen nor consciously controlled.41 Dalí’s theory models the affects of paranoid psychosis; it finds literal presentation in the shifting texts of The Number 23, where each substitution and movement of text on-screen presents a clearly defines paranoia about repetitions of “23” throughout history.The design clearly evokes pathological thought, which is unable to resolve everyday ambivalences in a ‘normal’ way, and so becomes trapped in the confirmation-bias of its beliefs: the difference between the ‘psychotic’ and the ‘normal’ individual lies in their ability to escape from the traps of ambivalence and paradox. This activity is modeled on-screen by the ‘reading-image’ whose animated text simultaneously demonstrates the substitution-summing actions of numerology and evokes the sublime::uncanny through the indexicality of these facts to ‘the real.’ Frankfurt’s title design creates a ‘reading image’ whose movement and substitution of numbers-letters is stylized, yet remains within the familiar realm of naturalism.The text looks like typewriting (as with a manual typewriter), the paper is not a blank white, but has a rough texture that announces it as “paper,” and the red stain spreading through the sheet is not just a pervasive, amorphous damp, but appears instead as a real fluid flowing across the page as much as through it. This photographic naturalism presents an order that is known and corresponds exactly to familiar recognitions. Without these multiple levels of photographic indexicality that accompany the historical references, “without the slightest physical or anatomical change,” the sequence would not generate the same ‘metaphysical reality’ that is the Surrealist ‘marvelous.’42 As facts, each statement is mundane and obvious. Their banality is required for their subjective transmutation into the paranoid order, as Dalí’s commentary suggests. They aspire to transcend their arrangement in cinema and become proof of an unseen ordering in the world. The duplicity of this construction mirrors the duplicity-without-transformation of metamorphic illusions that is crucial to the paranoiac-critical method. Expressed via indexical materials, the result is paranoid in exactly the same way that interested his theorization, but instead of considering imagery, The Number 23 relies on the lexical statements and numerology to create its demonstrations—their indexical claims becomes a paranoid metaphysics, lending credibility to conspiracy theories and the idea of a transcendent evil lurking just beneath the surface of everyday events. Separating madness from metaphysics depends on [1] the recognition of facticity that transforms the selection from just an interesting selection of statements into a documentary presentation, a “delirium of interpretation” that links these elements together, and [2] the narrative function of this Comment Mode design in relation to the fabula. When the anticipation of the causal relations and drama of the main text dominate the interpretation, this opening necessarily becomes the cypher for madness the animated texts all imply. The “stream of associations”43 these facts offer undermines reality as an inchoate mass, suggesting its conscious ordering and direction in a direct challenge to scientific knowledge. When language becomes unfixed, the kinetic action on display leads toward exactly this narrative conclusion—paranoia—as each letter and its place in a word or name transforms into digits whose combination and summative total always remains the same. The metonymic relationship of ‘reading-image’ as a revelation of mental instability mirrors the subjective progression that creates the ‘metaphysical reality’ in The Number 23, uniting this design with the Surrealist aesthetics that document

78 Subjectivity subjective, unseen mental realities. The truth of ‘metaphysical reality’ is thus revealed, a complex interpretation where the subjective order on display can easily slide into an artificial, ‘unreal fantasy’ that brings an unseen world into visibility, thus realizing ideology as experience, but which does so only by risking its indexical claim to being-factual and ‘the real.’ The ideology commonly associated with realism comes into consciousness through this paradox of indexicality, a fractal recursion of opposed tendencies to belief and denial. Subjective realism emerges as the underlying pathology of Freud’s uncanny that defamiliarizes realism and revises its link to reality as an ideologically contingent claim. Rendering the subjective immanent means risking its collapse into pure caprice.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Barnard, T. Découpage (Toronto: Caboose Books, 2014), p. 7. Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 17. Barnard, T. Découpage (Toronto: Caboose Books, 2014), pp. 5–6. Williams, C. Realism and the Cinema: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 11. Epstein, J. “The Senses” trans. T. Milne, Afterimage no. 10 (Autumn, 1981), p. 14. Twain, M. Following the Equator:A Journey Around theWorld (Hartford: American Pub. Co., 1897), p. 156. Betancourt, M. Typography and Motion Graphics:The ‘Reading-Image’ (Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice) (New York: Routledge, 2018). Heidegger, M. Being and Time trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1996), pp. 189–278. Altman, R. “General Introduction: Cinema as Event” Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 2–4. Williams, C. Realism and the Cinema: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 11. Betancourt, M. Title Sequences as Paratexts: Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation (Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice) (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 75–100. Freud, S. “The Uncanny (1919)” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XVII (1917–1919) ed. J. Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 237–238. Campbell, F. Your Days Are Numbered: A Manual of Numerology for Everybody (Marina Del Ray: DeVorss & Company, 1985), p. 5. Coates, P. The Gorgon’s Gaze (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–5. Burke, E. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful (London: McLean, 1832), pp. 45–46. Betancourt, M. Title Sequences as Paratexts: Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation (Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice) (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 120–146. Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1982). Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Expanded Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 168–173. Bleuler, E. Dementia Praecox, or the Group of Schizophrenias (NewYork: International Universities Press, 1950), pp. 271–286. Garrison, M. “The Poetics of Ambivalence” Spring:An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1982), pp. 213–232. Bleuler, E. “Theory of Schizophrenic Negativism” trans. W. A. White, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (1950), p. 266. Breton, A. Manifestos of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 26. Breton, A. Manifestos of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 26. De Salvo, D. “Memoirs of A Saint: Staging Surrealism” Staging Surrealism (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1997), p. 11.

Sublime, Uncanny, Marvelous in The Number 23

79

26 Brotche, A. A Book of Surrealist Games ed. M. Gooding (Boulder: Shambala, 1995). 27 Poggioli, R. The Theory of the Avant-Garde trans. G. Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 109–128. 28 Nadeau, M. The History of Surrealism (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1989), pp. 79–84. 29 Ades, D. Dalí’s Optical Illusions (Hartford:Yale University Press, 2000), p. 12. 30 Caws, M. The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), pp. 233–235. 31 Hoffman, H. “The Search for ‘the Real’ in the Visual Arts” Search for ‘the Real’ ed. S. T. Weeks and B. H. Hayes, Jr. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1967), p. 40. 32 Breton, A. Manifestos of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 14–16. 33 Kyrou, A. “The Marvelous Is Popular” The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema ed. P. Hammond (London: BFI, 1978), p. 39. 34 Jakobson, R. Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (New York: Mouton Publishers, 1981), pp. 22–26. 35 Suetonius. De vita Caesarum trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press/Loeb Classical Library, 1914), p. 107. 36 Buñuel, L. “Cinema, Instrument of Poetry” The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings of Cinema ed. P. Hammond (London: BFI, 1978), p. 68. 37 Caws, M. The Surrealist Painters and Poets:An Anthology (Cambridge:The MIT Press, 2001), p. 179. 38 Breton, A. Manifestos of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 27. 39 Caws, M. The Surrealist Painters and Poets:An Anthology (Cambridge:The MIT Press, 2001), p. 179. 40 Dalí, S. Oui (Boston: Exact Change, 1998), pp. 179–180. 41 Garrison, M. “The Poetics of Ambivalence” Archetypal Psychiatry (Spring, 1982), p. 224. 42 Dalí, S. Oui (Boston: Exact Change, 1998), p. 180. 43 Dalí, S. Oui (Boston: Exact Change, 1998), p. 178.

3

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger (1964)

Indexicality labels a motion picture’s contents as having a link to/with ‘the real.’1 The conflation of the objective claim to being-factual in ‘documentary reality’ with arguments about the ontology of photography is a consequence of naturalism’s ideological dominance, just as the erasure of ‘metaphysical reality’ is a refusal of the subjective realm ‘born of the mind.’ André Bazin’s association of photography with reality supports his realist theory of cinema: [1] in the ontological sense of photography as a trace of ‘the real,’ [2] in the indexical claim made for ‘image objects’ that signifies a relationship to ‘the real,’ [3] in the entanglement of indexicality with narrative functions to affirm them as a natural demonstration of the status quo (as ideology). His paradigm makes realism appear natural and inevitable and at the same time enshrines cinematic realism as a demonstration of ‘the real,’ shifting the focus of its discourse to concern not the nature of the articulation of claims to being-factual, which are resolved in advance through the ontological argument, but to concerns with what is and is not reality—the status of the representations in relation to ‘the real.’ Bazin’s convergence of ontological and indexical functions for the photograph are mutually reinforcing in his conception of cinematic realism: the essential nature [1] becomes symbolic form [2] in an overlap between being and meaning that turns the depiction into the thing itself, marking it as a fixed value [3]. This debate is so fundamental to cinematic realism that it continually returns when addressing its articulation. The indistinguishability of fact from fiction is implicit in this ontological argument that converts all photography into a documentary proof; it must also deny any type of stylization any indexical potential or interpretive validity outside a narrative framework, thus guaranteeing the confusion of reality with the ‘shot,’ its presentation on-screen, and the audience’s interpretation of that imagery. Subjectivity and its articulation can converge on the demographics of the audience only via the assertion of a transcendent photographic ontology that conflates the three distinct uses of “subjective” as ontology, indexicality, and ideology. Reifying this understanding of the visible world equates vision with knowledge (the linkage of ontology to indexicality), emergent in how Bazin’s understanding of vision is what Michel Foucault critiqued as ideology: [S]eeing consists in leaving to experience its greatest corporeal opacity; the solidity, the obscurity, the density of things closed in upon themselves, have powers of truth that they owe not to light, but to the slowness of the gaze that passes over them,

82 Subjectivity around them, and gradually into them, bringing them nothing more than its own light. The residence of truth in the dark center of things is linked, paradoxically, to this sovereign power of the empirical gaze that turns their darkness into light.2 For Foucault, vision provides more than just a term for transcendental, metaphysical comprehension (the cultural meaning of sight and insight): ‘the gaze’ is a specific metaphor for the organization of the world, an operative paradigm for comprehension that makes ideology a physical feature of the world. This transfer of interpretation into materiality by “the empirical gaze” is a reification of interpretation in/as ontology, an action that significantly disables its questioning—a problem apparent in the need to disentangle these relationships when addressing each realist mode. These connections between perception and thought align with a blurring of the distinctions between the denotation and connotation of imagery: denotation seemingly presents us with the thing itself, recognizable in Bazin’s convergence of photographic ontology with the indexical claims made about its resemblance to the everyday appearance of the world; only connotation makes the link with thought that is productive of symbolic meaning and the procedures of semiosis an accessible dimension of the visual work. Foucault’s discussion of calligrams in This Is Not a Pipe identifies these distinctions as the separation between resemblance and similitude: It seems to me that, for example, green peas have between them relations of similitude, at once visible (their color, form, size) and invisible (their nature, taste, weight). It is the same for the false and the real, etc. Things do not have resemblances, they do or do not have similitudes. Only thought resembles. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.3 The entanglement of resemblance and similitude makes the duality of ontology and indexicality obvious, their convergence in Bazin’s theory acting as precisely this assertion of immanence for an ideological belief. A representation of something will not have the same properties as that thing—Foucault distinguishes between the world of real things and the mental realm of thought to implicitly require an acknowledgment of the viewer as their mediator, a subjective basis which makes the encounter unstable—it is the same central role for the audience that Heidegger describes in his discussion of the Unheimlich. Because the everyday recognition of imagery as being coincident with its denotation happens without difficulty, it necessarily demonstrates the constraints imposed on thought by realism. In shifting from the immediacy of perception to a dominant, interpreted meaning, the audience employs their capacities for shifting between lower-level recognitions and higher-level order—these changes in comprehension are what ‘the gaze’ identifies; Foucault addressed these problematics of audience engagement in his book The Archaeology of Knowledge as dynamic, shifting relationships to the enunciations available for consideration.4 The role of encultured knowledge mediates this process, which resolves their ambivalence; the vehicle of this resemblance is realism. This split between ontology and indexicality acknowledges understanding cinematic realism as a discursive claim about ‘the real’ is a contingent interpretation parallel to any ontological essence, neither dependent on it, nor derived from it.This distinction shifts the meaning

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

83

of the indexicality in photography to being a product of interpretation, rather than an innate part of its articulation, fundamentally separating ontology from signification; their linkage is a fallacy produced by a basic category mistake about what appears onscreen. Cinematic enunciations of subjectivity (stylization) only emerge into coherence with this separation; otherwise, they appear to be a betrayal of the ontological nature of photography, its material essence, an ‘impure’ corruption of reality which informs Bazin’s aesthetics. Both Jack Cole’s design for Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Peter Frankfurt’s title sequence for The Number 23 rely on the banal naturalism of photography to support their indexical claims—an association of the ‘image object’ with reality—which maintains the familiar role of realism in motion pictures; the ‘metaphysical reality’ that emerges in both designs does so over time as a product of how these titles articulate their indexical claims. Stylization (and thus subjectivity) are not features of the imagery itself in these designs—the kinestasis in Kolchak:The Night Stalker retains its recognizable semblance of everyday appearances (the still photograph) while the ‘reading-image’ in The Number 23 is an aberrant animation of what is the familiar appearance of typed letters on paper. The distinction between being-factual (an indexical claim) versus being-fictional (an assertion of artifice) informs the presentation in Kolchak:The Night Stalker where what ultimately undermines the ‘long take’ also serves to critique its apparently objective realism while demonstrating the subjectivity of montage as being equally contingent on the audience’s acceptance of naturalistic, realist fictions. The Number 23 title design develops its presentation as a precisely subjective, ‘metaphysical reality’ that transforms its photographic naturalism through the use of stylized animation, the ‘reading-image,’ and the irrationality of the facts employed in the numerological translations, but this subjective presentation simultaneously entails a claim to being-factual, an indexical assertion that it describes an unseen, literally invisible reality.This enunciation depends on realism emerging in two equal, but divergent potentials, rather than the limited presentation of indexical claims: the paired potential articulations as being-factual (indexical), or as being-fictional—thus independent of reality (artificial)—enables the audience to recognize more than just statements about those things that might exist in the world, and gives the fictional, subjective construction of designs such as Robert Brownjohn’s title sequence for Goldfinger (1964) a complexity demonstrated, rather than betrayed, by its obvious stylization. In neither the “metaphysical reality” of Kolchak:The Night Stalker nor The Number 23 is there any attempt to visualize subjectivity on-screen as a self-contained fabrication apart from ‘the real.’ Their stylization is interpretive, clearly separate from their depictions. Their shift from objective to subjective is a product of specific features of interpretation; the appearances of the familiar everyday world remain a constant in these designs. These familiar spectatorial relations reinscribe the foundational assumption that cinema can be realist only as a part of documentary claims to being-factual. The inventions of fabula (story) and the deductions of cause–effect relationships essential to narrative are demonstrations of this realist bias in the titles for Kolchak: The Night Stalker; although non-narrative, the stylized animation of the ‘reading-image’ in Frankfurt’s design for The Number 23 does not counter its apparently familiar existence as typewriting on a sheet of paper. Changing naturalism into stylization arises in how audiences understand the articulations on-screen—while the instabilities of both title designs defamiliarize

84 Subjectivity the photographic ontology of André Bazin or Stanley Cavell as tangential to ‘cinematic realism,’ they do not necessarily violate its naturalistic premise. In contrast to naturalism, stylization challenges these mundane appearances that assert a convergence between ontology and indexicality. Subjectivity is commonly linked to this presentation of artifice, demonstrating that a ‘cinematic reality’ based in ontology cannot distinguish between the fictional dimensions of the Kolchak:The Night Stalker design and the role of the empirically factual statements in the title for The Number 23—a difference the audience understands easily. This failure of Bazin’s or Cavell’s theory to comprehend such a basic disparity derives from the theoretical blindness created by their ontological basis for realist articulation. The capacity of the cinema to express the “subconscious life”5 relies on the audience’s own capacities to separate fact from fiction and distinguish fantasy from reality: to mark the precise differences that a concern with photographic ontology renders invisible to analysis. The difference between a realism that makes a claim to being-factual versus beingfictional is not simply an issue of photographic indexicality or its violation (via animation and compositing). Subjectivity identifies both the presentation of “metaphysical reality” (based in the identification of indexicality) and the elaboration of ‘unreal fantasy’ (based in the assertion of cinema as an artificial, fictional construct): simultaneously being-fictional and subjective transforms the naturalism of the familiar everyday world (recognizable in the banality of photographic resemblance) into an unfamiliar presentation that does not resemble the everyday experiences of its audience. ‘Unreal fantasy’ uses this acknowledgment of its clearly artificial nature as a signifier for cinematic realism diverging from claims to ‘the real.’ Countering the more common indexical claim for photography with a demonstration of its artifice separates the Robert Brownjohn’s title design for Goldfinger (1964) from the indexical demonstration of ‘metaphysical reality’ (with its attendant claim to being-factual) in The Number 23. In fact, the whole series of title sequences for the James Bond films articulates cinematic realism to visualize an insistently subjective ‘unreal fantasy’ without making indexical claims. This artificial ‘world’ emerges via the critical instability created by its self-referential construction, apparent in the contingent artifice of projection in Brownjohn’s two sequences that anticipate the role that optical printing and compositing have in Maurice Binder’s eleven subsequent designs, or digital animation and compositing for the eight designs by Daniel Kleinman and the single sequence by Ben Radatz [Figure 3.1]. The audience understands their enunciation as articulating subjectivity without recourse to or need for narrative supports. Artificiality functions as a powerful counter-tendency that reveals ontology as entirely tangential to the articulation of any realism in motion pictures, in opposition to the familiar role of Bazin’s and Cavell’s photographic index. Although (almost all) these sequences do include or imply female nudity, their stylized presentation suggests a reversal of anticipated power relations around ‘the gaze’ articulated by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her pioneering essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that could have been written specifically about the on-displayness of sexuality in the James Bond title sequence designs. The self-evidently ‘unreal fantasy’ of subjective desire in the James Bond title sequences superficially aligns them with her feminist critique of representation that axiomatically uses André

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

85

Figure 3.1 Selected stills from the James Bond title sequences: [1] From Russia With Love (1963), designed by Robert Brownjohn; [2] The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder; [3] A View to a Kill (1985), designed by Maurice Binder; [4] Goldeneye (1995), designed by Daniel Kleinman; [5] Skyfall (2011), designed by Daniel Kleinman; [6] Quantum of Solace (2008), designed by Ben Radatz.

Bazin’s realist aesthetic of audience identification with camera. Her assumption of photographic indexicality (Bazin) argues that who this idealized, assumed audience is (gendered identity) matters, and her critique of realist cinema requires these productions be created only by/for viewers who are heterosexual cis-males—the “hidden he”

86 Subjectivity of the patriarchal order. Photographic ontology requires a confusion of the illusory world of cinema with reality that recalls the long take as a prosthetic vision for the audience—that it should show what the audience would see if they were able to look for themselves, as Mulvey explains: Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.6 Visual pleasure, according to Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach, is a function of viewer identification with the unseen camera and, by extension, with the gaze of depicted male characters within the narrative: it is a matter of voyeurism or, more specifically, scopophilia set up through a projected identification with male characters in the fictional world on-screen. However, what is of concern in this discussion is not the issues of her conception of female pleasure as masochistic,7 but the more basic relations between ontology, photographic indexicality, and the conception of spectatorship her proposal develops; while she has amended the initial essay in response to criticism, yet those later discussions do not address indexicality. Her analysis of female protagonists presented as the central subject of identification remain beholden to the construction of cinema=narrative and retain the same problematics of identification discussed later.8 Understanding the dynamics of ‘the gaze’ separates the personal subjectivity of audience engagement from the narrative framing of ‘subjective’ perceptions (such as the “point-of-view” shot) and the creation of ‘unreal fantasy’ that is not engaged with a documentary presentation/claim about reality. The self-consciousness of ‘the gaze’ created by the James Bond title designs undermines the traditional positioning of female nudity as “erotic spectacle” that coincides with “audience subjectivity” in Mulvey’s theory to challenge the essentialism of her “media-effects paradigm.”9 The reception of the James Bond title designs is typically a unidimensional description of them as “voyeuristic” treatments of women’s bodies as sex objects, a product of the contextual link that makes their consideration in terms of Mulvey’s proposals informative of the ambivalence of subjectivity. Her construction identifies cinematic realism as always a signifier of the patriarchal order, and its presentation necessarily demonstrating a dominant masculine, heterosexual spectatorship (cis-male desire) that negates all other options: her proposal of voyeurism/scopophilia re-creates the traditional, religious prohibition on nudity by substituting psychoanalytic pathology for the earlier theological arguments that render all nudity “sinful,” and thus a generator of metaphysical “harm.” The distinction between psychology and semiotics makes the convergence of resemblance and similitude in her theory obvious: In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as a sexual object is the

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

87

leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busy Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.10 The “exhibitionist role” is a familiar, superficially uncontroversial observation about the nude women appearing in these designs that turns representation into what it represents: “plays to and signifies male desire” is an essential claim that dictates (allows) only two interpretations—the first ontological (“plays to”), the second epistemological (“signifies”)—which fuse into an indivisible unit of predetermined meaning.11 Her initial comments precisely describe the conventional, even cliché, conception of the “James Bond title sequence” as a spectacle of eroticism and cis-male sexual desire anchored by its voyeurist progression; understanding it as ambivalent requires recognizing the use–mention paradox that philosopher Arthur Danto explained with the observation that “you can’t mention certain words without being perceived as using them.”12 It is what it critiques—a self-referential challenge entails being the very thing being challenged, the ambivalence of this discourse ironically allowing its dismissal or rejection as uncritical.13 Psychological approaches to audience identification rely on the connections of photographic indexicality to ontology. Their foundational linkage in Mulvey’s construction of voyeurism overshadows any encultured use or meaning and assumes the traditional conceptions of ‘passive audience’ and ‘dominant cinema’ as necessarily fixed positions of viewership. Accepting Bazin’s ontology as definitive creates a proof-assertion of photographic indexicality as an autonomous claim that supersedes any higher-level articulations; this potential confusion between representation and experience is the explicit purpose of the “myth of total cinema” that guides his aesthetics. The implicit dialectic between an active, critical viewer opposed to “typical” viewers who are assumed to be “passive” is a necessary feature of her psychoanalytic argument since it depends on autonomous projections and the imaginary substitution of the male performer/camera for the audience. Filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal explains this understanding of how commercial, narrative cinema articulates spectatorship: In dominant cinema, a film sets up (cardboard) characters (however, deep their melodramas) and through identification and various reversals, climaxes, complications (usually in that order) one aligns oneself unconsciously with one or another or both or more characters.These internal connections between viewer and viewed are based on systems of identification which demand primarily a passive audience, a passive viewer, one who is involved in the meaning that word has taken on in film journalese, i.e. to be not involved, to get swept along through the persuasive emotive devices employed by the film director.14 His description of ‘passive viewership’ is a moralizing description of audiences as mindless embracers of their own victimization by capitalist media—Gidal’s critique is a Marxist reiteration of the same arguments for censorship leveled throughout the twentieth century at cinema. His argument denies commercial motion pictures’ value as “mediums of thought,”15 making them frivolous spectacles like the theater, the circus,

88 Subjectivity and all other performances whose intellectual value and significance were historically denied, while simultaneously considering them “capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition,”16 as in the 1915 United States Supreme Court decision [236 U.S. 230, 231] refusing to categorize motion pictures as worthy of protection from censorship under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The conception of audiences as inchoate, passively manipulated rubes without intellectual action is essential to this familiar argument that Mulvey’s proposal invokes about voyeurism in cinema. Like the challenges to the “female nude” in art history, it has rendered these realist presentations problematic.17 This ideological construct—nudity becomes taboo only when the body itself is regarded as inherently erotic18—depends on an encultured embarrassment about the body: the proposition of “naked” is a rejection of eroticism as Michel Foucault’s term “the body” notes.19 Although the “nude” is very much a subject of controversy and conflict, as psychoanalytic theories of the fetish demonstrate, any picture may be arousing (erotic) for at least some viewers,20 not just those depicting nudity.21 The critical challenge to this response necessarily expands to encompass all of representation; however, the decision to understand “critically” arises not from the work but in the engagement chosen, suggesting a “gignomenological law of identity”22 where a general interpretation is not merely a summary of a certain group of past experiences, but offers/contains potentials that are matched by similar experiences and interpretations in the future. Any viewer can engage any work critically, revealing the fallacy in assuming a ‘typical viewer’ is also a ‘passive audience’ in a fixed position. Gidal and Mulvey create a model for cinematic spectatorship that assumes, as Bazin does, that the camera is a prosthetic apparatus that substitutes for the audience: to become voyeurism, the emphasis must fall on how those being viewed on-screen (the images of actors) cannot become aware of their viewers, this concern derived from his ontology of photography reiterates a fallacy that confuses the ‘image object’ with the reality—the subjective response to an motion picture is not the same as an articulation of subjectivity. The implicit cis-gender identity (masculine/feminine) in the binary opposition of male–female spectatorship constructs and assigns hetero-normative gender roles to the motion picture audience, common for the James Bond films,23 a product of Mulvey’s use of Lacanian theory as her foundation that leaves only one possible understanding of nudity—as erotic spectacle. Her argument reiterates how Foucault understands vision as an assertion of a political order24 via a critique of cinematic representation and realism: ‘the gaze’ defines a desire ‘to see’ that the on-displayness of cinematic voyeurism precisely matches only by collapsing the coded range of nude::naked employed by art history25 into a uniform understanding of all representation-as-eroticized. This interpretation emerges in the conflation of representation and reality: the idea that nudity is “harmful to women” is immediately recognizable as a leftover from Victorian culture, with its strict gender roles and ideas about the “fair sex”—that women need to be protected from “sex” (and any suggestion of an erotic subjectivity) by the men who produce, regiment, and consume it.26 It is a self-fulfilling prophecy and justification for censorship: an argument that creates the use–mention paradox of obscenity as all of representational art, a rejection that recalls the iconoclastic controversy and their rage to destroy graven images.27 Such a conception of nudity places all imagery of the body within the category

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

89

of “erotic,” while simultaneously making realism itself subject to censure because of that inherent eroticism. It develops a closed logical loop of self-reinforcing prohibitions and objections.

‘Unreal Fantasy,’ Representation, Ontology Disentangling the subjectivity of ‘unreal fantasy’ from the psychology of audience identification unmasks the ambivalent articulation of nudity on-screen in Brownjohn’s design. The difficulty of conceptualizing this subjective presentation in terms other than as projective voyeurism is obvious from the familiar response to the nudity in the James Bond titles. This ascription of an inherent meaning to realist constructions parallels Danto’s discussion of what is “dangerous” in art.28 Mulvey’s theory of spectatorship asserts a general problematics of nudity-as-pathological: her theory of voyeurism takes a psychological term for mental illness (pathology) and applies it to all spectatorship. Her application of the concept naturalizes a nineteenth-century discomfort and rejection of the dimorphism of human gender and sexuality by clothing it in arguments over which representations are allowable. The persistence of photographic indexicality conflates representation with reality, an example of a use–mention paradox; for the voyeurist conception of cinema, the same can be said for denotation: the convergence of representation with the appearance of the thing represented informs the full range of naturalism::stylization that is cinematic realism. The resolution to this apparent paradox lies with enculturation in the distinction between nude and naked that art historian Kenneth Clark articulated in his study, The Nude,29 which demonstrates how assumptions about the relationships between the spectators, the image/sculpture, and their past experiences with similar works determines the interpretation of the work in more than merely phenomenological terms. However, comparing this traditional conception of “naked” with the female performances any of the James Bond title sequences reveals a problem—these women are specifically not what Clark would term “naked”: they are not deprived of clothes, nor do their actions betray any embarrassment about being in that condition.30 Mulvey’s argument about cinema is part of the feminist critique of representation underway in the 1970s; its application to motion pictures identifies sexism articulated through realism (mimesis, representation) within a patriarchal order reifies ‘the gaze’ as inherently, always cis-masculine, a dominating force that understands the female body as a thing that symbolically represents and engages cis-male heterosexual desire,31 implying denotation itself is a source of violence and harm.32 This critique of cinematic realism via the psychology of audience identifications dictates interpretation in advance of the work itself, thus avoiding any need to acknowledge or even identify the instability posed by this use–mention paradox and evident in the ambivalent status of the body on-screen. The psychoanalytic concepts of voyeurism and scopophilia are damning for female depictions on-screen, which in this theory necessarily reify cis-male sexual desire (the camera becomes a mechanical peeping-tom which allows the audience to engage in a voyeurism where the object of that gaze can never gaze back). It is the imaginary identification and transfer of the “self ” to the protagonist and hero on-screen that reveals the links between

90 Subjectivity Mulvey’s understanding, a specific conception of cinema that demands narrative identification, and the idea of the “mirror stage” borrowed from Lacan: The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. . . . Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognizes its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. . . . The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child’s physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences in his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognized is conceived as the reflected body of self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, prepares the way for identification with others in the future.33 Her use of psychoanalysis relies on Bazin’s photographic indexicality: that the denotation of women on-screen is commensurate with actual women being seen, that the ‘image object’ be interchangeable with the reality it appears to show. This entanglement of profilmic creation and its depiction on-screen is an issue which continually returns in cinematic realism precisely because it is so dominant, a cliché for cinema studies comparable in its familiarity to the iconography of the James Bond titles themselves: it reifies all motion pictures as reducible to a static set of fixed positions and patriarchal dominance within which there is no ambivalence, or potentials for challenge, or alternative engagements that interpret the unity of shot–body/screen–title card apparent in the Goldfinger design “against the grain” of this familiar approach. The cliché understanding of the “James Bond title sequence” allows only one articulation: the subjectivity on display is a unidimensional set of desires that match those of a heterosexual cis-male audience. Unlike Lacan’s psychology where ‘the gaze’ arises from the child’s discovery that there are other consciousnesses than the child’s own, the voyeurist gaze of Mulvey’s theory is solipsistic and patriarchal: explicitly gendered (cis-male), it assumes the audience’s projection—identification with the camera/actor (protagonist) can only align with this same cis-male audience and the expression of subjectivity can only follow a singular path. Her argument relies on cinema as the archetypal instance of voyeurism. Photographic ontology is the necessary and sufficient condition for this realist articulation, a link that reifies patriarchy as a specific, fixed set of identifications with the camera/protagonist as a surrogate for the male audience’s own presence at/performing the ‘events’ shown on-screen. The familiar facts of historical cinema showings reinforce the assertion of cinematic voyeurism: the audience, unseen by the “people” they watch are thus freed to fantasize about what they see without there being any potential for the “objects viewed” ever looking back. The confusion of representation with what is represented allows the comfortable idea that “blaming the image”34 can resolve the discomfort created by representation. However, mere pictures are not human beings: the pathology of voyeurism depends on an entrapment of the ‘object’ that denies its consciousness, those human capacities for feeling, desire, and action.

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

91

The terms “voyeurism” and “scopophilia” employed in this critique can thus conceive of cinematic realism only as negative, an oppressive action, unidimensionally understanding the depictions of nudity in Brownjohn’s designs as an expression of patriarchal order, and the audience seeing these designs as incapable of a critical engagement or of recognizing the dualities of a use–mention paradox. Yet such a restricted conception of both their contextual presentation and consumption in the 1960s may not be accurate—as historians Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott suggest in their 1987 study of the James Bond films. For the context of the 1960s and 1970s, the “Bond Girl” provided a “liberated” sexuality, apparent in both the narrative and the titles, a role model offering freedom from patriarchal controls.The “Bond Girl” is a critical challenge to other motion pictures of the period: the James Bond films offered female viewers an identification that was neither automatically passive nor disempowered.35 This critical, alternative interpretation offered for the depiction of nudity in these designs demonstrates conflicting conceptions of ‘cinematic realism’; all claims are contingencies, dependent on the ambivalent relationships between multiple levels of engagement simultaneously—the varied modes of subjectivity and objectivity accompanied by claims of either being-factual or being-fictional that articulate realism but impose nuance through a disavowal of any inherent claims about/to reality. This second approach to ‘unreal fantasy’ severs the autonomous assertion of patriarchal order that Mulvey ascribes to all of realism, making the patriarchal order a set of common, particular features that can be subverted and challenged just as easily as they can be affirmed and asserted. This feminist critique renders the familiar relationships between audience and screen as a gendered manifestation of fixed relationships and a singular expression of cis-masculine voyeuristic desire (critically explained by Lacan) reified in/as a specific technical protocol (realism). What Mulvey’s argument suggests for all the James Bond title sequences, including Goldfinger, is simultaneously obvious and over determined, relying on the comfortable assumption that all nudity evokes an essentially sexual response and its viewers can understand the ambivalence of denotation only in a singular, fixed way: nudity as always, already, only sexual. Her argument about on-screen realism as an erotics of presentation reifies assumptions about the male audience’s projected identification with camera/narrative: thus voyeurism is axiomatic for cinema, rather than a contingent rhetoric offered by her psychoanalytic basis, not something created or addressable through the structures of découpage. The resulting rejections of realism that Mulvey’s critique inspired reiterate the familiar claim that “art should have no more sex than mathematics,”36 as Maxime du Camp said in his review of the Paris Salon of 1863 where he criticized the erotics of painters such as Courbet and Manet (whose Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe was rejected from the show that year). This demand for “respectability” is connected to the nineteenth-century invention of photography,37 and the subsequent emergent market for erotic photographs,38 historical developments critiqued by other feminist theorists such as art historian Linda Nochlin39 during the 1970s. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” elides the identification of being-artificial: it cannot acknowledge the ambivalence that is central to the explicit articulation of subjectivity in the James Bond title sequences.The design for Goldfinger offers an opportunity to examine the elaboration of ‘unreal fantasy’ in relation to this well-established

92 Subjectivity critique of cinematic realism and audience identification. ‘The gaze’ appropriates existing terms from another field, psychoanalysis (voyeurism and scopophilia), whose use relies on their established clinical meanings. Mulvey suggests a singular, absolute meaning for spectatorship (as pathology) that defines the female image as (only) an object of erotic reverie that necessarily creates a ‘static’ model for interpretation—even though the concepts she adapts from psychoanalysis exist dynamically in a spectrum that is marked by instability and ambivalence. However, the established, clinical meaning for “voyeurism” is not simply an unobserved, passive act of viewing, but a transgressive, compulsive activity performed illicitly and against societal norms40; “scopophilia” is not merely an intellectual enjoyment but action, an erotic, masturbatory pleasure inherently linked to the illicit nature of voyeurism. Both terms describe aberrant, pathological behaviors and experiences that deny the agency of their objects. Mulvey’s use of Lacanian psychoanalysis specifically pathologizes all motion pictures while simultaneously robbing these narrowly defined clinical terms of their meaning: if all spectatorship is voyeuristic (thus pathological), then the clinical function of the term as a descriptor is useless; if it is not identifying pathology, the term is inappropriately applied.41 Rejecting this conflation of pathology and normal spectatorship opens the subjective presentations created by the James Bond title designs to a different potential: understanding their concern with “sex” as a discourse on cinematic subjectivity and audience identification otherwise obscured by this argument about ontology, voyeurism and acceptable depiction (ideologically appropriate representations).

Composite Realities Although Maurice Binder produced the first James Bond title sequence for Dr. No (1962), and it has formal affinities with his later productions (silhouettes, saturated colors, the use of complex compositing), this first design is atypical of the series. Instead, Robert Brownjohn’s two sequences that employed the subjective mode of ‘unreal fantasy’ to comment on “sex” are the model for later designs: From Russia With Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964) established the familiar iconography of sexuality, nudity, and erotic spectacle that became the “signature” of the James Bond titles. The first title sequence, for Dr. No, lacks this dimension of critical organization, offering instead three distinct vignettes starting as an abstract visual music animation, then becoming a collection of Caribbean dancers in an ambivalent graphic space, and concluding with a synchronized visualization of a song about “three blind mice” where the figures are composited with an abstracted background [Figure 3.2]. The unreal space in Dr. No is not rigorously organized around a single, apparent theme; the shifts in tone and design of each section in Binder’s title are divergent and incoherent, rather than productive of a specific meaning. Only the view through the gun barrel that first appears in Dr. No will return in later films. In breaking with this first design, Robert Brownjohn’s two sequences construct a selfevidently artificial space of heterosexual fantasy whose pseudo-independence signals the distinction between the subjective, stylized ‘image objects’ of the titles and the objective naturalism of the narrative drama; there is no indexical claim to being-factual or implicit naturalism required for the articulation of ‘unreal fantasy.’ The subjectivity presented by these title sequences draws attention to ‘the gaze’ reflexively, as a product of its being

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

93

Figure 3.2 Selected stills from Dr. No (1962), designed by Maurice Binder.

invoked through the design. The application of this approach to photographic imagery depends on denying the potential for erotic content, a transformation where its eroticism becomes at the same time a discursive statement “erotic,” the result of semiosis, rather than merely the unconscious arrangement of ‘shots’ to solicit an erotic response, as art historian William Ewing notes: Quite obviously, the body can be subjected to an infinite number of photographic transformations and reconfigurations. The game may be played as one of signs and symbols, of specific equivalences between the properties, parts of functions of the body and those of some of being or thing.42 Distortions dominate imagery, signaling a shift from being the familiar representation to functioning symbolically depends on the separation and isolation of denotation from its familiar placement in ‘reality’ by the photograph. The linkage of vision–sexuality in Brownjohn’s two Allegory Mode designs dominates any potential narrative function, giving them a self-contained organization typical of all the James Bond titles in relation to the fabula (except for Daniel Kleinman’s design for Die Another Day [2002] that treats the titles as an integral, narrative prologue). This approach to the pseudoindependence of the titles was pioneered in the 1950s by Saul Bass and remained

94 Subjectivity

Figure 3.3 All the title cards from Goldfinger (1964), designed by Robert Brownjohn.

closely associated with all the “designer titles” of the 1960s.43 Symbolic meaning defines the Allegory Mode44—the ‘symbolic dimension’ of the design expresses the story in some metaphorical way,45 but these connections to narrative are often so simple and immediate that they don’t appear to be allegorical since the knowledge needed for their decipherment is trivial: the non-space of the Goldfinger design where the body/screen is at the same time only a surface for projection meets this demand for estrangement from everyday appearances [Figure 3.3]. The juxtapositions they contain also create the possibility of a decoding: the allegorical interpretation proceeds teleologically, produced by the semiotics it enables, rather than being a formative and material separation between one and the other. The potential to employ voyeurism as a self-referential challenge is impossible in Mulvey’s framework, yet Brownjohn develops a critical revelation of her inherently voyeuristic conception of cinema: the cis-male fantasy that defines the James Bond films in From Russia With Love and Goldfinger embraces this traditional positioning at the same time as it subverts it, making that fantasy into the meaning of the work: the subjectivity on display is at the same time a discursive presentation where its familiar and implicit relationships become the self-evident focus, allowing for a critical understanding of them as an imposed order (literally projected on the woman’s body). Screens and projections are the most obvious feature of Brownjohn’s title designs for From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, a manifestation of the projective process required for the imposition of the symbolic order Mulvey critiques that is so obvious as to almost not need identification. The female body becomes a literal screen shown on-screen, an

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

95

‘explicit’ support for the ‘sex’ that is central to the allegory that Brownjohn explained in his article “Sex and Typography.” The problem that his comments pose for Mulvey’s theory is that the “sex” which infuses the arrangement and progression of the titles for From Russia With Love and Goldfinger is a design choice, rather than an unconscious, necessary, or essential constraint on their production: On this type of film the only themes to work with are, it seems to me, sex or violence. I chose sex. . . . In considering the problems of the integration of type and image I had often wondered if film titles did not provide an opportunity for a different solution from the usual technique of superimposing type in the laboratory. [ . . . In Goldfinger,] I painted a girl with gold make-up, had a gold leather bikini made for her, and with a 100 amp. back-projection unit projected moving pictures over her and filmed this in color. The girl became, in effect, a three-dimensional gold screen, with running figures, explosions, and fight sequences moving across her body. The actual images I projected were scenes from all three James Bond films—Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger—and they formed a sort of moving collage.46 The subjective elaboration of this ‘unreal fantasy’ articulates a formal understanding of “sex” expressed in/by the découpage. Without the causality created by story, the artifice of the erotic spectacle dominates this articulation, making its self-evident focus the relationship of all this imagery (including the body/screen) to the figure of Bond himself. Mulvey’s argument about the audience’s projective identification with both Bond and the camera reiterate the same assumption that this imaginary transfer by the viewer is an autonomous, uncritical embrace of photographic appearances. It doubles the presentation in Goldfinger, creating a simultaneous montage of female form–narrative extract that for Mulvey’s patriarchal order can present the female body only as a threat, sex object, or victim of violence47—which reiterates this ordering as the literal construction onscreen. This design affirms her observations about the audience’s subjective understanding of cinematic realism, but does so explicitly: the progression of “sex and violence” in the cut-scenes is so obvious that it forces the audience to acknowledge these exploits as being-fictional, an articulation emphasized by the literally illegible projections of the credits themselves during the titles in From Russia with Love. Although the James Bond title sequences do literally illustrate Mulvey’s description of “female as erotic spectacle,” they do so in a way that forces an acknowledgment that these designs articulate an ‘unreal fantasy’—in recognizing the subjectivity being presented, the audience also acknowledges it as a construct, thus challenging the autonomous nature of ‘the gaze’ that is the focus of Mulvey’s critique.The rhetoric of synecdoche and metonymy become organizational principles only when the audience can perceive their encoded nature. In Goldfinger, this ‘unreal fantasy’ announces how the psychological projection Mulvey described is both the vehicle and significance of/for the design. This visualization is not a passive, autonomous eruption of repressed desire, but a self-consciously organized demonstrative of it, as Brownjohn’s comments about these designs reveal.This choice challenges the critique she develops because it depends on her argument being a revelation of hidden order, rather than a discussion of a deliberate production. To interpret these titles as

96 Subjectivity an autonomous expression of masculine desire removes the agency employed in their design, viewing, and production. Revealing the artifice of photographic indexicality as an issue of découpage in the Goldfinger titles shows how ‘the gaze’ imposes an invented revelation about a reality that is no longer present, an engagement that passes over cinema, around it, and gradually into it as the ‘event’ plays out, confusing the depiction for the depicted. This self-reference destabilizes the erotic spectacle of the titles and the ‘events’ of the narrative, an acknowledgment of artificiality that is at the same time a refusal to understand them as (even potentially) expressing ‘the real.’ Thus, although Brownjohn’s design invokes a voyeuristic engagement, it also makes that engagement the contents of the presentation, self-conscious, a reflexive subjectivity raising the possibility of this gaze’s contingency, that “the leit-motif of erotic spectacle” may not be the only way to approach these constructs—even though they are traditionally encoded that way in the Goldfinger design, the acknowledgment of their constructed nature is also an opening onto alternative potentials—a recognition that challenges their traditional meaning. These identifications of ‘unreal fantasy’ are imaginative transfers that conceive ‘the gaze’ as a symbolic order, interpretive, becoming reified in an implicit cinematic realism that organizes not only the cinema=narrative construct, but the embedding of that form within the patriarchal assumption of the archetypal cis-male viewer that is foundational to Mulvey’s critique. At the musical “climax” of the Goldfinger title sequence, in a colorful “explosion” spreads across the gold-painted model’s back to reveal the power dynamics of ‘the gaze’ with/as both sexual difference and erotic attraction, literalized in the découpage itself. These revelations identify a critique that refutes any conception of audience-as-passive by forcing a confrontation with this patriarchal order. Brownjohn’s titles are a discursive presentation about a cis-masculine audience meditating on the female body as a (literal) surface for projected desire, but understanding this construction makes that gazing a self-conscious action, one that draws attention to itself, inaugurating a regression of ambivalent understandings of these ‘image objects’ as embracing, presenting, or confronting a specific ‘unreal fantasy’ of desire and sex. The self-conscious engagement and manipulation cannot be acknowledged within the framework that Mulvey employs; her theory is necessarily blind to this play of ambivalence and criticism because it uses Bazin’s ontological framing of an inherent photographic indexicality. Both of Brownjohn’s title sequences employ re-filmed projections to transform the female body into a literal ‘spectacle’ on-screen that serves as an equally literal ‘screen’ for the articulation of subjectivity: in his first design, From Russia With Love, the projections are simply text playing across views of three different belly dancers, in shots that frame the text on her thigh, her belly, or her back, while the credits either play across her flesh, or fall onto the background wall/screen with her arms gesturing in front [Figure 3.4]. The insistent illegibility of the projected texts of From Russia With Love draws attention to their constructed and constructing nature as well as the artifice of the title sequence itself. The difficulty with even reading these texts draws attention to ‘the gaze’ and the body/screen that makes the credits unreadable, but still recognizable as language: the progression of each title card involves its becoming-legible in a ‘reading-image’ that dramatizes the lexical process as its chronological development on-screen. Progression-into-

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

97

Figure 3.4 All the title cards from From Russia With Love (1963), designed by Robert Brownjohn.

legibility intersects with the audience’s lexical expertise gained from past experiences— the typical seeing-through-visuality—that conceives this shift between pictorial denotation and verbal language as a fundamental change in comprehension and engagement reflective of an actively interpreting, critical viewer.

98 Subjectivity The inconsistency of ‘the gaze’ rendering these image-texts legible develops around how the audience’s interpretations create an ambiguous meaning as the typo/graphy becomes legible and familiar semiosis proceeds. This ‘reading-image’ is a product of the forced shift between the highly kinetic dancer and the attempts to read the credits. This initial use of projection renders the texts illegible, their play across the female bodies of the three dancers demonstrates the disruptive dimensions of combining a subjective concern with the objective presentation of crediting for the production. In his second design, Goldfinger, the credits are optically printed text (resolving the legibility problems in the first design); instead of words, cut-scenes from all three films are projected onto her body. This use of rephotography is not unusual for cinema in the 1960s—its appearance in avant-garde “Structural Films” also explores these same potentials more systematically by using a “fixed camera position, the flicker effect, loop printing and rephotography”48 to emphasize the materiality of photography using the same technical processes; convergence between avant-garde and commercial motion pictures is typical for title designs. The use of physical projections provides the model for the combination of multiple elements on-screen in all these titles. Understanding their significance derives from an initial, visual acknowledgment of their ‘unreal fantasy’—the self-referential construction provides the necessary codex for deciphering the allegorical order.49 The transformations of live action shots into silhouettes and masks where the female body becomes a literal screen for the text/imagery being projected draws attention to all the ways that these pictures are not indexical representations of an absent physical world. This abstracting process deforms the familiar photography to change these arrangements of juxtaposed elements into a singular, continuous field: a stylized realm different than what we encounter in everyday life. Their composite nature draws attention to the apparatus of its own exhibition, and rather that offering a seamless reverie, it delivers instead a series of ‘events’ matched to each title card that function syntactically. There can be no mistaking the artificial nature of any of these designs (including Binder’s later sequences). The isolation of the body/screen posed against an infinite blackness provides both a model for Brownjohn’s later designs, such as Night of the Generals (1966) [Figure 3.5], and a precedent for the ‘unreal fantasy’ of Tim Miller’s design for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) where photo-realistic digital animation creates a series of shots that are then edited into a fast-paced rhythmic montage. Miller’s sequence uses the same black, infinite, and undefined space to establish the artificial nature of the almost monochromatic presentation—even though it appears to be live action footage, it is not. The questions of photographic indexicality cannot apply to a design that has no photography in it: rendered from high resolution 3-D scans of the actors Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig, this design is a typical example of the convergence of digital imaging and the appearance of live action that has been called “post-cinema” by critic Steven Shaviro. The montage breaks this generated source footage into twenty-seven individual title cards that contain seventy discrete shots, an unusually high number of images for a two-and-a-half-minute title sequence: the majority of these shots appear on-screen for less than two seconds. Their arrangement develops dominant imagery of “drowning” in a dark, black liquid— but its significance arises in the ‘shots’ that show two figures kissing and embracing; hands

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

99

Figure 3.5 All the title cards from Night of the Generals (1966), designed by Robert Brownjohn.

both cupping and striking Mara’s face; computer cables connecting and pulling apart from their connections (which are embedded in the back of a human head) [Figure 3.6]. This montage sequence is, aside from its large quantity of shots, typical for the use of cut-scenes. The rearrangement of découpage in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sequence produces its meaning through the editing and juxtaposition of its pictorial contents: all the shots present fragmentary scenes adapted from all three novels by Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson (this film is an adaptation of the first book), defeating their narrative comprehension to redirect what is otherwise nightmarish and claustrophobic to become instead a discourse about falling in love and the terrors that accompany it. Receiving this ambivalent organization, suggestive of both a nightmare and the sublime or transcendent, depends on how the audience understands the montage. It creates a subjective, ‘unreal fantasy’ that suggests a terror of sex and love that can accompany emotional intimacy, as well as its joys. Ambivalent instability is representative of subjective expressions in cinema: Miller’s design mirrors what emerges from the ambivalent play of identification and eroticism in the James Bond sequences.

100 Subjectivity

Figure 3.6 Selected stills from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), designed by Tim Miller.

The use of allegory in Brownjohn’s design is obvious from his choices of the ‘cut scenes’ from the first three James Bond films, arranged so they neither imply a story, nor introduce characters, offering instead a series of evocative, symbolically charged juxtapositions that interact with the body/screen. As with The Spy Who Loved Me and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, this suppression of narrative functions enables the articulation of their allegorical meaning to proceed. The opposition between title and narrative sequences identifies the absolute division needed to distinguish the subjectivity of Brownjohn’s design from the objective presentation of narrative in the rest of the motion picture. The self-contained nature of this presentation where the title sequence is preceded and followed by more typical live action material is the guarantee of its separation from that fictive reality and the narrative it conveys: a circular identification that reinforces the distinctions created by its own stylization. The elimination of narrative in the titles forces a contemplation of their morphology and structure, precisely drawing attention to their découpage. Explicitly separating the title sequence presentation from the narrative asserts that sequence as a pseudo-independent enunciation, encapsulating its development apart from the progression of cause–effect that defines story. The disruption of cause–effect relationships between shots in the Goldfinger title design enables the non-narrative play of voyeuristic dominance that is Mulvey’s subject: the female body is a literal ‘screen of desire’ and ‘field of action’ for Bond that continues in all of the later sequences created by Binder. This arrangement of text–body–projection presents suggestive, sexually provocative compositions for each title card: this body/screen is a literal presentation of the female body as the surface over which male fantasies of power and dominance play, simultaneously an immanent realization and comment on patriarchal relations because of its self-conscious elaboration. Brownjohn’s designs cultivate these relationships between projected texts/imagery and the female model (which signifies cis-male heterosexual desire in literal, immanent form), but gives them a symbolic role, which forces a recognition of desire as the contents

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

101

of his discourse.The obvious voyeurism of the design is directly challenged by the theme song that simultaneously articulates an alternative to understanding this sequence as being simply a cis-male reverie. The fragmented ‘cut scenes’ show familiar pieces of Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger but undermines their narrative functions; a similar fragmentation and narrative subversion organizes the montage in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Rearranging the narrative blocks the shots’ capacity to present fabula, allowing the symbolic structure of the title sequence to dominate and ensuring its subjective articulation as ‘unreal fantasy’ is not compromised by any narrative function. The Goldfinger title sequence transforms its sources to such an extent that their origins and capacity to reveal fabula are attenuated, a distancing that draws attention to how denotation changes meaning via projection and their relationship with the golden, female body/screen whose physical presence informs the meaning of every shot by providing a visual counterpoint to the projection. Goldfinger develops this subjective elaboration through a suppression of the individuality of narratives implied by the cut-scenes themselves to draw attention to the materiality of the projected image as it deforms across the body/screen [see Figure 3.7]. The splits and distortions of Honor Blackman’s face as it projects across the shoulder makes the process of ‘seeing-through’ the screen reflexively apparent: it doubles the presentation of the film (and titles) which are also presented on another screen that demands a simultaneous ‘seeing-through’ and acknowledgment in this design. Other compositions in Goldfinger make this self-reference apparent: a golf ball rolls across her arm, and down her chest between her breasts illustrate how the complex relationship between body/screen makes the audience aware that découpage manipulates and dominates the female body on-display. That dominance is the sequence’s logic of assembly. This female-body-as-screen is a summative presentation of a traditional gendered hierarchy, suggesting the emergence of erotic spectacle is a self-conscious meaning of Brownjohn’s title designs, as he acknowledges in his commentary. The isolation of the figures without a specific physical context establishes the dreamlike “neverworld” as a subjective space, independent of the familiar relationships of ‘reality.’ In Brownjohn’s design for Goldfinger, this separation is accomplished through the body/screen combination; for Binder’s sequences, optical printing and compositing creates the same estrangement. The specific insistence on artifice in Binder’s later designs renders the question of photographic ontology moot: in its place is the composited field created by optical printing. The subjectivity introduced in Goldfinger is continued by Maurice Binder, whose sequence for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) [Figure 3.8] employs a similar process of combination and juxtaposition, creating iconic combinations of otherwise discrete elements, but without the immediacy of identification that organizes Brownjohn’s use of cut-scenes. Instead of offering an indexical claim to reality, this morphology of irrational, scale-independent compositions placed in a “neverworld” without a clear, physical context of reality, where figures are isolated against an infinite background, serves to direct attention to how this imagery precisely declares itself as being-artificial. Even an insistence on photographic indexicality cannot counter this self-evident arrangement that denies its links to reality. This distinction allows scale-independent composition to seem natural: in establishing the space of these designs as different and independent of naturalistic realism, their artificial organization becomes a reflection of the self-contained

Figure 3.7 Selected stills showing the distortions of Honor Blackman’s face in title card number 7 from the title sequence for Goldfinger (1964), designed by Robert Brownjohn.

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

103

Figure 3.8 All the title cards from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), designed by Maurice Binder.

reality on-screen, untethered from familiar causal relationships. This transformation of the photographic material into a plastic, readily deformable material links these designs with the more easily controlled processes of digital motion pictures—yet the difference between them is more a matter of degree of control than an essential difference. The

104 Subjectivity atomistic manipulations of digital animation and compositing are the logical development of the same processes deployed in these title sequences, an increase of intensity, rather than a rupture with the precedent. The Spy Who Loved Me title sequence begins with an extreme long shot of live action footage where a falling Bond (in a parachute) is ‘caught’ by a pair of silhouetted female hands that form a cup around him. Binder’s photo-composites assert female nudity and guns as a metaphor for desire: as the live action of the falling Bond dissolves into a hold frame (a shot of the golden gun used in The Man With the Golden Gun), a female silhouette rises in the center of the frame, and a long shot of another male figure (Bond) rises up on the right. The various falls and tumbles ‘head over heels’ in this first title card dramatize a ‘literal’ series of entrances and exits that show the “falling for” or “falling into” love described by the theme song: Nobody does it better Makes me feel sad for the rest Nobody does it half as good as you Baby, you’re the best!50 The synchronization between these opening lyrics and the compositing asserts an iconography that makes the audience identification into the meaning. Carly Simon’s performance offers an alternative to what Mulvey argues about audience identification—that realism is an autonomous, unconscious product of the cis-male audience’s psychological projections onto the performer/camera. ‘The gaze’ is not an inherently passive vehicle of autonomous psychological projection and identification following a predetermined “script” that defines meaning in advance. It imposes order, but that articulation is always provisional, requiring continual reassertion because it is easily undone by alternatives as proposed by this theme song rearticulating the découpage. Audience recognitions of “sex” as a thematic organizer for Goldfinger no less than The Spy Who Loved Me changes it from being an autonomous expression into a self-conscious presentation of ‘the gaze’ itself. Contra-Mulvey, the question of photographic indexicality never arises for these designs because of the self-evident difference of ‘unreal fantasy’ from ‘the real’; the artifice of their organization enables stylization to dominate the naturalism::stylization dynamic, eliminating any concerns with being-factual that might otherwise intrude on the progression of this subjective fantasy. It is the same demarcation of the titles as different than the rest of the narrative that also applies to specific sequences within the film itself that are also specifically subjective expressions: dream sequences, narrated flashbacks, montages that compress narrative time all have a similar encapsulation as these titles, but at the same time remain a part of the narrative. The “Bond parody” opening title sequence to Deadpool 2 (2018) [see Figure 0.3, p. 12] is a typical example of these narrative transformations/expressions of subjectivity when contained by fabula. The stylization and artificiality that is immediately obvious is also a product of proximate causes within the story: the eruption of imagery for these titles behaves as a fugue, interrupting and retreating from the narrative (a fact dramatized by the contents of the on-screen text for these “titles”) that at the same time serves as an ellipsis within the fictional drama. No such narrative framework applies in Brownjohn’s or Binder’s designs, allowing the subjective fantasy to dominate consideration.

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

105

The problem posed by ‘unreal fantasy’ demonstrates the estrangement of subjectivity from Bazin’s realist argument about the camera as a prosthetic vision, an ideological reification where cinema stands in place of the audience, allowing them to see through the découpage and imagine that what appears on-screen is a surrogate for their own experience.This approach translates stylization into a faux-naturalism—at best, a defective presentation of reality, at worst, an inappropriate misuse of cinematic form. The understanding of “subjectivity” in Mulvey’s conception is a function of the audience’s projected desires intersecting with the narrative articulation, which then serves as an imaginary standing-in for the audience. These identificatory transfers ratify the realist ideology as a fixed condition mirrored by the ontological claim for the photography. These transfers imply an infantilizing process, one where the preverbal infant’s selfrecognition described by Lacan becomes the (male) adult’s engagement in cinematic narrative. Unlike lexical skills taught in childhood that develop complexity and depth of fluency over time, “the moment when a child recognizes its own image in the mirror”51 does not identify a foundational lexical skill—instead, it is a description of an infant’s cognitive development toward (future) language acquisition. Mulvey’s expansion of this stage to encompass the critical approaches and engagements with cinema by adults reduces those adults to children, a positioning that robs them of their agency, knowledge, and expertise. It denies the role that past experience has for understanding that semiotician Umberto Eco summarizes in his essay “Overinterpreting Texts” with typical clarity: Deciding what is being talked about is, of course, a kind of interpretive bet. But the contexts allow up to make this bet less uncertain than a bet on the red or black of a roulette wheel. . . . When a text is produced not for a single addressee but for a community of readers—the author knows that he or she will be interpreted not according to his or her intentions but according to a complex strategy of interactions which also involves readers, along with their competence in language as a social treasury. I mean by social treasury not only a given language as a set of grammatical rules but also the whole encyclopedia that the performances of than language have implemented, namely, the cultural conventions that that language has produced and the very history of the previous interpretations of many texts, comprehending the text that the reader is in the course of reading.52 The recognition of encultured frameworks gives the audience implicit instruction in how to approach and understand the work encountered: which established lexical fluency might best enable the decipherment of the work. Identifications of ‘unreal fantasy’ as a specific mode expressing subjectivity gives those presentations a very different meaning than when they are understood as demonstrations of reality. These cultural dimensions of semiosis are essential. Audiences must know a language to be able to interpret it; the difficulty for visual semiosis arises precisely because vision and interpretation are commonly linked as equivalents by cultural convention. Without enculturation, meaning becomes impossible, but it is the ambivalences and intertextual references—citations, quotations, and allusions—recognized by the audience that produces the play of significations in cinema or anywhere else.

106 Subjectivity Ontology collapses subjectivity into a singular, predetermined outcome. This process defines the traditional role of realist ideologies for cinematic engagement, obvious in the transitions between evocation and description that separate objective modes of cinematic realism from the instabilities of subjectivity. Mulvey’s theory takes the belief that cinema’s foundations in audiovisual perception means its semiotic construction necessarily dismisses the physical presence of the ‘image object’ as a material site for the imaginary projection and audience identification to function—reified as her implicit suggestion that cinema has only a singular form and meaning. The subjective realm ‘born of the mind’ disappears in this ideology: photographic ontology conceived in these terms inscribes a specific type of cinematic realism into the formal design of the technology itself, placing this order beyond question, critique, or challenge.

Seduction Understanding the subjectivity presented by ‘unreal fantasy’ in Goldfinger and its selfconscious identification as being-fictional develops the visual ambiguity normally hidden by the dynamic of naturalism::stylization. ‘Unreal fantasy’ is not connected to the familiar arrangement of mere appearances that match everyday experience—its organization follows a different set of principles, coordinated by symbolic meaning. This difference from the subjectivity of ‘metaphysical reality’ and the objectivity of ‘realist fiction’ and ‘documentary reality’ demonstrates that ‘unreal fantasy’ does not express reality, but instead proceeds according to its own internal order. Audiences understand this distinction, treating this subjective presentation as an artificial, “dreamlike” construct without the expectation of a connection to their everyday experiences: it is about the imaginary identifications and transfers it simultaneously presents on-screen. Mulvey’s concern with viewership is constrained by narrative without considering the actual encounter as formative of meaning, even though her critique appears to address the act of watching. This duality is common to motion pictures generally: perception is central to their articulation but simultaneously disappears into how their temporal progression models experiences to/for their audiences. All the James Bond sequences employ the Allegory Mode, one in which the audience’s understanding depends on their recognizing the indirect connections that lie between what is actually being shown and the significance of that presentation. The ‘symbolic dimension’ of Brownjohn’s thematic organization, “sex,” forces the audience to engage with their own experience rather than understanding what appears on-screen as a product of the audiovisual synchronization, the juxtapositions of body–screen–cut-scenes, and découpage in Goldfinger. This shift from a primarily text-oriented design to an imagistic arrangement is a precondition for the Allegory Mode: recognizing this organization enables a critical semiosis to challenge the same patriarchal order it invokes. This transformation is an “externalization” of thought without indexical claims that builds discourse in a self-referential appearance—presentation the audience recognizes as the ‘event’ on-screen; the reflexive identification of artificiality created by stylization enables the double articulation of experience/discourse that creates the potential for a critical distance from its contents. In diverging from indexical claims to describe ‘the real,’ these works are thus free to explore alternative understandings of the world

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

107

unbounded from the need to validate everyday experiences. This distinction also allows ‘unreal fantasy’ to emphasize an ambivalence and interpretive instability that enables the critical engagement with what might otherwise be a set of fixed or unquestionable propositions about ‘the real.’ What is meant by “perception” for this analysis of non-narrative design opposes the narrative meaning for “perception” that philosopher Giles Deleuze derived from the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Deleuze subsumes “perception” into narrative elaboration.The ‘subjectivity’ his realist theory defines is a product of the story (fabula)—the presentation of what a character sees: unlike Mulvey’s psychoanalytic theory that makes “perception” a description of the audience’s encounter with the imagery, Deleuze assumes narrative as a foundational guide to cinematic comprehension. The implicit link of cinema=narrative is apparent in how the types of ‘movement-image’ all function as axiomatic relays about the causality of what appears on-screen in the story: We have seen that perception was double, or rather than a double reference. It can be objective or subjective. But the difficulty lies in knowing how an objective perception-image and a subjective perception-image are presented in the cinema. . . . It might be said that a subjective perception-image is a direct discourse and, in a more complex way, that the objective perception-image is like an indirect discourse (the spectator sees the character is such a way as to be able, sooner or later, to state what the latter is supposed to be seeing).53 The ‘perception-image’ explained in his book Cinema 1 is not concerned with the psychology of the immanent encounter, or with the role of audience in its ordering/interpretation—except incidentally, as a necessary (inherent) aspect of watching movies. What Deleuze means by “objective or subjective” is a narrative function based on how the audience explains a particular shot by conceiving it as showing what a specific character sees or understands: a product of elaborating the fabula. Such relationships cannot appear in non-narrative designs such as Goldfinger. The narrational shift between an ‘objective’ narrative presentation and the ‘subjectivity’ of a point-of-view shot are immediately obvious in a sequence of two shots from the titles for The Incredible Hulk (2008) designed by Kyle Cooper that tells the backstory for the main narrative that follows through a complex mixture of live action montage, macro photography, and animated graphics. The invention of fabula is an explanation (discovery) of causal relationships whose narrative function dominates the design to such an extent that the title sequence becomes an extension of the main narrative in the film: The Incredible Hulk is a Prologue Mode opening that renders its credits superfluous, focusing attention to deny the pseudo-independence of the title sequence, assimilating it to the fabula. The narrative identification as a ‘flashback’ relays a statement about “David Banner’s” point-of-view (played by Edward Norton), expressed in the cut between his sitting with his fiancée “Betty Ross” (played by Liv Tyler) lying in a hospital bed to an earlier moment where she is healthy, lying in bed and kissing his hand (the ‘perception-image’) [Figure 3.9]. The effect is distinctly sentimental, a maudlin return to an idealized past. The depicted character action in the first shot (the ‘objective’ narration) in the hospital room mirrors the action of the second shot

108 Subjectivity

Figure 3.9 Selected stills from The Incredible Hulk (2008), designed by Kyle Cooper.

(‘subjective’ narration) in a private bedroom to create the understanding of ‘memory’ (thus ‘flashback’) from their differential. The ‘perception-image’ in The Incredible Hulk titles is typical of how Deleuze’s argument requires fabula for its coherence: the narrative relationship of “now this, before that” explains the juxtaposition of these shots whose similarity asserts their mnemonic evocation and is essential for the emotions it conveys. The audience’s recognition of this causality—produced by the relationship of gesture, setting, and their repetition in the two shots—justifies interpreting this cut post hoc by the narrational designation of ‘flashback.’ Without narrative to account for the progression in these shots from Cooper’s design, neither the ‘perception-image’ nor the recognition of ‘flashback’ emerges. This identification is not a product of the psychological projection Mulvey describes so much as a familiar, semiotic arrangement common to montage, a structure that derives the ‘perception-image’ from the immanence of narrative action. The difference between ‘realist fiction’ and ‘unreal fantasy’ is explicitly a product of narrative function: no narrative/montage structures of any type appear in Goldfinger. Each of the twenty title cards in the design contain a juxtaposed pair formed by the découpage of posed body/screen and projected imagery; editing functions as the transitions between them. This unity of shot–body/screen–title card gives each a syntactic character, allowing their organization to proceed iconically, inflected by synchronization with the theme song. The role of “perception” for the audience engagement with these enunciations and articulations is readily apparent. Unlike the textual statements of lexia (described via parole and langue in semiotics) or the narrative explanations of causality that link storytelling to realist articulation, using perception symbolically corresponds to theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “paralogy,” a parallel logic that counters the established order,54 and converges on what theorist Jean Baudrillard describes in his book Seduction

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

109

in more instrumental terms, as a double articulation, where established orders “flip” into their opposites: To seduce then is to make both the figures and the signs—the latter held by their own illusions—play amongst themselves. Seduction is never the result of physical attraction, a conjunction of affects or an economy of desire. For seduction to occur an illusion must intervene and mix up the images; a stroke has to bring disconnected things together, as if in a dream, suddenly disconnect undivided things.55 The shift from the fixity of meaning to the ambivalence of allegory in Brownjohn’s design for Goldfinger is precisely Baudrillard’s secondary articulation that envelops and transforms the established, normally invoked order and interpretation. The dominant gender-roles that are central to patriarchal order are also inherent to Mulvey’s theory— the (normative) binary opposition of male::female and masculine::feminine—but are revealed as an imposed order through Baudrillard’s ‘double articulation.’ Rather than only objectifying the female body as threat, sex object, or victim of violence, as Mulvey’s “male gaze” demands,56 acknowledging the ambivalences created by Baudrillard’s seduction forces a recognition that the patriarchal meaning is a product of a specific interpretive process that is undergoing semiosis during the sequence; its validity and authority are in question. Meaning cannot avoid semiosis, even if the appearances of the thing-in-itself invites a confusion of the ‘object’ and its interpretive recognition. Symbolic meaning defines allegory. In narrative constructs, decoding an allegory involves using a pre-existing “key” to transform the dramatic events into signifiers of an alternative order distinct from that of story; however, for the anarrative productions such as the title sequence, this inherent distinction between narrative/symbolic collapses—there is only the symbolic order. Deciphering the iconic nature of the title cards in Goldfinger entails the recognition that the space of ‘unreal fantasy’ visualizes its subjective concern, to fantasize, the codex that deciphers these title’s allegorical meaning is literally immanent on-screen—showing rather than telling—engaging both cis-male and cis-female audience members through its evocation of a self-conscious voyeurism. This experiential dimension entails a self-conscious allocation of attention that plays a basic role in Goldfinger, reflected by the design itself: the graphic and visual relations between découpage and body/screen create meaning. The importance of this experiential dimension announces itself at the start of the title sequence. These titles begin with “Auric Goldfinger” (played by Gert Fröbe) being projected onto the golden fingers of a female model’s hand, but this opening shot is not synchronized with either the lyrics or on-screen text stating “in Ian Fleming’s GOLDFIINGER.” It introduces the discrepancy between sound and image to visualize the same displacement of meaning produced by attending to the lyric content. Parsing this organization depends on which aspects of the ambivalent design dominate the interpretation, allowing the Goldfinger titles to express both positions offered by spectatorship as interchangeable potentials: as presenting an object-of-reverie and a discourse about a subject-who-desires. The subjective reality on view re-creates the leit-motif of female to-be-looked-atness typical of traditional erotic spectacle, a presentational use opposed by the symbolic order which contains it. This ‘unreal fantasy’ design uses the theme song to provide a

110 Subjectivity counterpoint to the imagery, changing and dictating a different meaning from what the denotation alone might offer. Even though the libretto was written by men (Anthony Newley, Leslie Bricusse, and John Barry), it was performed by a woman (Shirley Bassey). The lyrics articulate the toxicity of Mulvey’s voyeurism as an exclusively one-sided subjectivity (the cis-masculine desire on display from the beginning of the sequence) that counters the ‘the gaze’ by redefining the meaning of these visuals as cautionary, an explicit warning: Goldfinger He’s the man The man with the Midas touch A spider’s touch Such a cold finger Beckons you to enter his web of sin But don’t go in!57 The sequence begins and ends with the same ‘shot’ of a woman’s gold-painted hand showing “Goldfinger,” a proposal that this man is the subject of both the film and the song. The voyeuristic designation that appears inevitable is simultaneously complicated by a symbolic order (allegory) that dominates it and subverts its meaning. In these designs— Goldfinger is typical of the series as a whole in its organization of counterpoint synchronization—the lyrics are always central to the meaning of the sequence, making the verbal content the true dominant, not the visual, thus allowing the allegorical structure to counter the familiar dynamics that Mulvey articulates. It is a not an appreciation of his beneficence—it explains the projections as the “web of sin” that captures the woman: the theme song re/defines the imagery. In place of the “silent image of woman” is her voice that dominates the soundtrack. “Goldfinger” is clearly described as monstrous, unquestionably the villain of the narrative to come, but the separation of showing him and naming him provides a counter-narration to the traditional, assumptive meaning for what appears on-screen as the coincidence of sound–image. There is no comparable relationship between the individual text/credits and the backgrounds they accompany: only the title cards for Sean Connery as “James Bond,” and Honor Blackman as “Pussy Galore” are calligrams where their names match their depiction. The other text-image composites employ the figure–ground mode, which leaves them as a separate, independent element from the imagery shown. This relationship establishes the opposition between the visuals and the libretto, reinforcing the disjunction of Bassey’s performance and the projected imagery, allowing its juxtaposition to become a source of signification. The role of language (lyrics) doubles the ‘unreal fantasy’ of Goldfinger as both cis-male and cis-female in an elaborate counterpoint of theme song and synchronized imagery that seduces Mulvey’s fixed positions to offer a critical subjectivity. The lyric content challenges the understanding of the title sequence as expressing an exclusively cis-male viewership and is thus central to the meaning of the design. For the culturally coded visuality (the female body/screen) whose understanding as implicitly erotic when expressed as the cis-male voyeurist interpretation, seduction is as an opposing force, one that requires nuanced consideration of context. The subjectivity in Goldfinger proceeds in/as the

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

111

arrangement of this symbolic order. The “sex” (voyeurism) of Brownjohn’s design is the immanent content, not the recognition of allegory, but perception provides its decoding key in Mulvey’s discussion, unlike the allegory in Rear Window that depends on narrative: In his analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience; the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side.When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is reborn erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her.58 Following Lacan, Mulvey understands the symbolic order that enables meaning as simultaneously the assertion of patriarchal order. The transformation of Alfred Hitchcock’s film into an allegory of cinema requires assigning significance to the details of the narrative and then employing those substitutions to arrive at a different interpretation than the narrative presents. Treating the narrative as a metaphor renders its symbolic dimensions immanent—real—asserting the interpretation is the “true” meaning hidden by the story. However, the identification of psychoanalytic content in this film is hardly surprising; its allegorical interpretation is also an obvious structural principle of the narrative’s construction. Rear Window is explicitly concerned with gazes and gazing. Mulvey treats this ordering as simultaneously a visual dimension of découpage (as a feature of photographic ontology) and a narrative product of viewer identification with the protagonist to assert cinema=narrative. By connecting this subjective demonstration to vision, realism, and Bazin’s photographic ontology, her conception of ‘the gaze’ produced by these structures makes the subjectivity revealed also a reflection of socialized gender roles and patriarchal norms, transforming them into a singular unit for critique. It is an organization of details that teleologically arrives at the expected destination since there is nowhere else it could go. This ideology inscribes a specific observer as the only possible one, whose desires are reified into the approaches and types of imagery shown on-screen, giving it a unitary meaning. Because there is no alternative to the coincidence of this découpage with patriarchal order, it assumes a fixed set of relationships and positions, rather than the emergent order that requires continual reassertion that Foucault identifies.This assertion of patriarchy positions the female-as-spectacle. It also identifies interpretation, knowledge, and action with the male; however, these relationships all depend on narrative functions—their application to a non-narrative title design is problematic because psychological projection for her theory is produced/guided by narrative function. To apply it to a non-narrative title sequence requires an assertion of audience identification with the unseen camera and its Bazinian role as a surrogate for the audience—creating a circular logic where the audience identification with the camera is justified by the interpretations it then enables. Mulvey conflates the personal subjectivity of audience engagement with both the narrative framing of ‘subjective’ perceptions (such as the “point-of-view” shot) and the creation of ‘unreal fantasy.’

112 Subjectivity Ambivalence challenges the fixed semiosis and assertion of reality through photographic indexicality in Brownjohn’s designs in From Russia With Love and Goldfinger: the act of “seeing” produces recognition, but it also makes the identity of the one doing the identifying an inherent feature of that process, an acknowledgment of the same critical question that Mulvey posed about Bazin’s realism. Brownjohn articulates this convergence of subjective desire and the audience’s identification with camera apparatus as a choice. His use of these forms serves to make them self-conscious for their audiences in an assertion of artificiality that acknowledges being-fictional to counter the claim of cinematic spectatorship as an only and necessarily erotic voyeurism. Positing ‘the gaze’ as expressive and contingent undermines the capacity of any ontological nature to impose a particular, fixed meaning—such as the transcendent order of cis-masculine interests (patriarchy) Mulvey describes where there is no potential for a critical interpretation, or even an allowance for engagements read “against the grain” to find alternative significances. The seduction of meaning that Baudrillard identifies makes these transitive functions of engagement and interpretation apparent in the apperception of discourse: a use–mention paradox addressing an erotics of vision through its elaboration on-screen. However, the difference between this understanding and Mulvey’s proposal of cinema as an inherently “erotic spectacle” reflecting a patriarchal order depends on the articulation of subjectivity as a particular mode of realist enunciation. Unlike her epistemological challenge to representational cinema that relies on the ontological premises of Bazin—but declares them subordinate to the subjective demands of “patriarchy” which pervades realism generally—the recognition of ‘unreal fantasy’ is not its capacity to present a voyeuristic or erotic spectacle, but the status of that presentation: as an inherent feature of cinema (Mulvey), or as a specific aspect of the construction (Baudrillard). This play of subjectivity and artifice that creates the critique in Brownjohn’s design for Goldfinger is not something that the ontological understanding of photographic indexicality can recognize, and which Mulvey’s critical focus on “scopophilia” and “voyeurism” also does not identify. Ideological critiques of realism are usually visually engaged, but Mulvey’s analysis is implicated in the ideology it challenges. The visual emphasis excludes a careful consideration of synchronization—sound and music—except to the minimal extent that it provides narrative cues for visual identification. This denigration of the soundtrack leads to a blindness to how synchronization modifies signification, creating critical engagements by countering and redefining the visual. The theme song for Goldfinger offers a critical challenge to Mulvey’s proposal, providing an alternative audience identification that counters ‘the gaze’ of the camera to complicate the voyeurist critique, undermining its monolithic conception of the audience as necessarily only identifying with the camera/ male protagonist. Jean Baudrillard conceived this reversal of established order as seduction, not a reflection of pathology, but a product of interpersonal power dynamics that are in flux, metastable: The feminine is not just seduction; it also suggests a challenge to the male to be the sex, to monopolize sex and sexual pleasure, a challenge to go to the limits of its hegemony and exercise it to death. . . . Love is a challenge and a prize: a challenge to the other to return the love. And to be seduced is to challenge the other

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

113

to be seduced in turn (there is no finer argument than to accuse a woman of being incapable of being seduced). Perversion, from this perspective takes on a somewhat different meaning: it is to pretend to be seduced without being seduced, without being capable of being seduced.59 Brownjohn employs seduction as a tactic to critique the same patriarchal order that concerns Mulvey—but does so by deflecting its dominance through a subversive representation of its own established codes: passivity and objectification are closely linked in seduction as reversible, each capable of instantly becoming their opposite, rather than locked into the unchanging hierarchy that Mulvey’s theory of patriarchal order demands. For her critique, motion pictures are a technological construct whose material disjunction between the immediacy of the ‘event’ shown and its artificial nature acts to trap women as depiction (to objectify them), stripping them of both agency and their own subjectivity: a literally domineering structure for the cis-male who looks and studies these pictures of women without the possibility of their denotated subject’s returning this hypothetical gaze. It is a conception that confuses the realist presentation with reality itself, as if photographs were literally coincident with the things they depict. Seduction draws attention to this artifice, allowing the ambivalent play to reverse the positions of dominance and dominated, allowing cinematic realism degrees of freedom that undermine the ideologically fixed spectatorship inherent in Mulvey’s argument and contrast the underlying sexism of the design’s female subject. These interpretive differentials make the use–mention paradox obvious in the ambivalence (‘double articulation’) presented by Brownjohn’s design for Goldfinger. It is a function of their lyrics and synchronization juxtaposed with the unity of shot–body/screen–title card, rather than an innate product of a material ontology evident in photography itself.The disparity between realist ideology and its semiosis creates seductions of form and meaning that allow a critical counter-interpretation of all these designs, one where the patriarchal order becomes the subject presented and challenged in the design, rather than an autonomous constraint that dictates meaning and form in advance of its subjective encounter via ‘unreal fantasy.’ The ideological dimensions of this subjective realm ‘born of the mind’ disappear into documentary claims about the depiction when the ‘image object’ is mistaken for reality. This slippage recovers the ideological basis of subjectivity in a denial of its distanciation from ‘the real’ as a description not of the realm of appearances but as the description and suggestion of a plurality of unseen realities whose significance challenges the inevitability of naturalism and its transformation of depiction into a fixed set of invisibly constrained and constraining reifications of ideological belief.

Notes 1 Gunning, T. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs” Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography ed. K. Breckman and J. Ma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 25–26. 2 Foucault, M. The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. xiii. 3 Foucault, M. This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 58. 4 Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 88.

114 Subjectivity 5 Buñuel, L. “Cinema, Instrument of Poetry” The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings of Cinema ed. P. Hammond (London: BFI, 1978), p. 68. 6 Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 17. 7 Studlar, G. “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema” Quarterly Review of Film Studies vol. 9, no. 4 (1984), pp. 267–282. 8 For these later revisions that retain the same basis in photographic ontology, see Mulvey, L. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 29–38; Mulvey, L. Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 9 Maltby, R. “New Media Histories” Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies ed. R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, and P. Meers (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 3–8. 10 Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 19. 11 Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 203–206. 12 Danto, A. Beyond the Brillo Box (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 191. 13 Debord, G. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London: Verso, 1998), p. 9. 14 Gidal, P. Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016 (London: The Visible Press, 2016), p. 41. 15 U.S. Supreme Court. Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 (1915) 236 U.S. 230 Mutual Film Corporation, Appt., v. Industrial Commission of Ohio et al. No. 456., argued January 6 and 7, 1915; decided February 23, 1915. 16 U.S. Supreme Court. Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 (1915) 236 U.S. 230 Mutual Film Corporation, Appt., v. Industrial Commission of Ohio et al. No. 456., argued January 6 and 7, 1915; decided February 23, 1915. 17 Nochlin, L. Women,Art and Power and Other Essays (Boulder:The West View Press, 1988), pp. 1–36. 18 Dopp, H. “Eroticism and Outrage” Erotic Art (New York: Edition Stemmle, 1995/1999), pp. 16–19. 19 Foucault, M. The History of SexualityVol. 3:The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1988). 20 Blank, J. Femalia (San Francisco: Down There Press, 1993), np. 21 Nochlin, L. Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (Boulder: The West View Press, 1988), pp. 136–144. 22 Ziehen, T. Lehrbuch der Logik auf positivistischer Grundlage mit Berücksichtigung der Geschichte der Logik (Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webere Verlag, 1920). 23 Racioppi, L. and Tremonte, C. “Geopolitics, Gender, and Genre: The Work of Pre-Title/Title Sequences in James Bond Films” Journal of Film andVideo vol. 66, no. 2 (Summer, 2014), p. 15. 24 Foucault, M. The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. xiii. 25 Clark, K. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton: Bollinger Paperbacks, 1972), p. 3. 26 Paglia, C. Sex, Art and American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 49–54. 27 Brubaker, L. and Haldon, J. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 650–850: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 28 Danto, A. Beyond the Brillo Box (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 192–193. 29 Clark, K. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton: Bollingen Paperbacks, 1972), p. 3. 30 Clark, K. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton: Bollingen Paperbacks, 1972), p. 3. 31 Racioppi, L. and Tremonte, C. “Geopolitics, Gender, and Genre: The Work of Pre-Title/ Title Sequences in James Bond Films” Journal of Film andVideo vol. 66, no. 2 (Summer, 2014), pp. 22–23. 32 de Grazia, E. Girls Lean Back Everywhere (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 40–53. 33 Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 17. 34 Pally, M. Sex and Sensibility: Reflections on Forbidden Mirrors and theWill to Censor (Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1994). 35 Bennett, T. and Woollacott, J. Bond and Beyond:The Political Career of a Popular Hero (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987).

Subjective Desire in Goldfinger

115

36 Wood, G. Art Nouveau and the Erotic (New York: Abrams, 2000), p. 12. 37 Sobieszek, R. “Addressing the Erotic: Reflections on the Nude Photograph” Nude ed. C. Sullivan (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 169–179. 38 Koetzle, M. 1000 Nudes: Uwe Scheid Collection (Italy: Taschen, 1994). 39 Nochlin, L. Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (Boulder: The West View Press, 1988), pp. 145–175. 40 Pally, M. Sex and Sensibility: Reflections on Forbidden Mirrors and theWill to Censor (Hopewell: The Ecco Press, 1994), pp. 14–24. 41 Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J. Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile Books, 2004). 42 Ewing, W. The Body (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), p. 357. 43 Bass, S. “Film Titles: A New Field for the Graphic Designer” Graphis no. 89 (1960), pp. 208–215. 44 Betancourt, M. Title Sequences as Paratexts: Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation (Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice) (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 120–146. 45 Haskin, P. and Bass, S. “‘Saul, Can You Make Me a Title?’: Interview with Saul Bass” Film Quarterly vol. 50, no. 1 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 12–13. 46 Brownjohn, R. “Sex and Typography” Typographica 10 (December 1964), pp. 49–58. 47 Woollacott, J. “The James Bond Films: Conditions of Production” The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader ed. C. Lindner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 99–117. 48 Sitney, P. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–1978 (Second Edition) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 370. 49 Borges, J. “From Allegory to Novel” Other Inquisitions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), p. 155. 50 Nobody Does It Better lyrics written by Carole Bayer Sager, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 1977. 51 Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 17–18. 52 Eco, U. “Overinterpreting Texts” Interpretation and Overinterpretation ed. S. Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 63; 67–68. 53 Deleuze, G. Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 70–71. 54 Lyotard, J.-F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 61. 55 Baudrillard, J. Seduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 103. 56 Woollacott, J. “The James Bond Films: Conditions of Production” The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader ed. C. Lindner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 99–117. 57 Goldfinger lyrics written by Anthony Newley, Leslie Bricusse, and John Barry, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 1964. 58 Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 23. 59 Baudrillard, J. Seduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 21–22.

Part 2

Objectivity

‘Objective realism’ in cinema is only understood ‘transparently,’ via an encultured ideology that links découpage to ontology, demonstrating the propositional equivalence between the portrayal on-screen and the experience of what the audience might see for themselves if they were present. This “natural” appearance of a world on-screen enables the historical conflation of cinematic presentations with reality: cinematic articulation as a prosthetic vision. Because of this rhetoric of correspondence between lived experience and cinematography, naturalism ambivalently expresses the artificiality that identifies ‘realist fiction’ (being-fictional), allowing its confusion with the assertion of indexicality whose claims defines ‘documentary reality’ (being-factual).

4

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt (1968)

What is the opposite of ‘the real’? This question for cinema presupposes its answer is inextricably linked to naturalism conceived as ontology in a mirror-like reversal, subjective and stylized, clearly distinguishable from the everyday appearances of reality shown by ‘objective realism.’ However, it is the wrong question to ask about motion pictures: not what is opposite, opposed to reality, but how does realist form identify what is fictional or notreal? Audiences easily distinguish fiction and the unreality of fantasy from documentary works, suggesting a central role for indexical claims (but not ontology) in separating being-factual from being-fictional. As French film director André Malraux describes, and film historian Timothy Barnard explains, the ‘shot’ constructs all of live action cinema; diegesis is a product of how and where the camera is placed: “The shot is the cinematic unit. Shots change when the camera changes places. Découpage is the sequence of shots.” Here changes in camera set-up, not editing, create the sequence of shots.1 Malraux’s concern with the “shot” is an encapsulation of the process required to produce it; “découpage” is more than merely the assembly of shots. The issue is not the film, but the film-ing: the hierarchy of reading–seeing–hearing is an ideology that emerges via découpage. The “view” afforded to a particular camera set-up and the actions framed by that view are the reason for the shot, an association of diegetic construction to formal device. However, the sudden transformation from being an ideal, privileged view of the ‘events’ shown into being narration that integrates that view into the story does not alter the naturalism of its presentation. Cinematic ontology entails a proposition that what appears on-screen is evidence for an external reality, a proof that what the audience sees is what would appear if they were present to see for themselves; thus, it confuses realism for reality. This error becomes obvious with the distinction between the ‘objectivity of documentary’ and the ‘objective realism’ of fictive, dramatic cinemas; splitting the indexical and the artificial from questions of ontology neither challenges nor undermines expressions of cinematic objectivity and subjectivity identified by the naturalism::stylization dynamic. The audience’s past experience with similar works2 allows cinematic realism to instantly shift the significance of a shot or sequence from being a neutral presentation-for-audience into being a statement-of-narrative linked to a particular character, i.e., the “point-of-view shot.” Designer Pablo Ferro

120 Objectivity develops these dynamics in Bullitt (1968) through the transformation of discourse in the opening shots into fabula, a paradox of articulation that establishes them as both non-narrative statements and essential narration for the ‘realist fiction’ that follows. All the shots in this opening are typical examples of the transparent presentation specific to ‘narrational naturalism.’ Even the matryoshka-like text-masks that open the sequence are uniformly crisp, detailed, deep focus whether in color or in tinted black-and-white. His design unveils the fabula via increasingly specific assertions of narrative causality in the contrast between the two sections of this title sequence: [1] as a series of discursive transitions created through optically printed text-masks that form a ‘reading-image’, and [2] as traditional ‘continuity editing’ introduced via a point-of-view shot (a ‘perception-image’) that clearly identifies the changed narrative mode. The adjustment between the sections is frictionless, hidden by how its structure as ‘realist fiction’ dominates this title sequence, converting what would otherwise be a non-narrative presentation in section [1] into the narrative elaboration in section [2]. The cut that marks this transition demonstrates the entanglements of découpage, discursive interpretation, and cinematic realism with the causality of narrative function. This articulation of fabula appears natural and inevitable; separating objectivity/ naturalism from its correlate fictive storytelling reveals their common ideological convergence in cinema=narrative. The process of “objective” articulation complicates the dynamics of denotation in the first ‘shot’ of Bullitt: an aerial pan across Chicago at night serves to establish the location of the ‘events’ which follow. The superimposed Warner Brothers logo that marks the start of Ferro’s titles is set in syncopation to the jazz they accompany—their pace and timing matches the music, conventionally defining the titles as a singular unit, apart from the main narrative. This initial nighttime pan ends with a cut to a closeup of a mirrored ball lampshade showing an anamorphic reflection of a typical but distorted mid-century Modern office: desks and chairs, letter boxes, typewriters. All the découpage in this sequence has the same deep focus and contrasty lighting evoking interior spaces at night. The text-masks appear at the start and conclusion of this sequence, thus visually separating the paratextual opening from the main text of the story. Section [1] begins when the credit for “Steve McQueen” fades up in white against this tracking shot of the deserted office, the text sliding vertically up the screen to leave behind a “hole” (in the shape of his name) that grows larger, gradually filling the screen and revealing a different tracking shot in motion inside/behind it [Figure 4.1]. These text-masks provide transitions between shots in place of a simple cut in section [1]; the masks disappear in section [2] as the credits become groups of smaller blocks of text that simply enter and exit, sliding across the screen without creating a text-mask. The assembly of shots in section [2] using continuity editing allows the recognition of causal relationships necessary for fabula. Addressing the dynamics of the shift from section [1] to [2] in Bullitt makes the complexity of this “objectivity” evident in its entanglement with realism, narrative, and discursive interpretation. ‘Narrative naturalism’ is central to this triad, offering these ‘image objects’ as hypothetical standins for what the audience might see if they were present instead of the camera. Fabula emerges from how the audience creates explanations for what the ‘events’ depict, a shifting set of formal structures that Meir Sternberg theorized as fundamental to

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

121

Figure 4.1 Selected stills showing the relationship and kinesis of the text-mask for “Steve McQueen” in section [1] in the Bullitt (1968) title sequence designed by Pablo Ferro.

storytelling. Audiences identify sequences as developmental building blocks whose connections and reiterations establish narrative: A narrative work is composed of myriad motifs, that is basic and contextually irreducible narrative units. . . . The fabula of the work is the chronological or chronological-causal sequence into which the reader, progressively and retrospectively, reassembles these motifs.3 Realism is a vehicle for establishing causality but is not essential.What matters is the audience understanding the ‘events’ on-screen as demonstrations of the familiar relationship of cause–effect. Naturalism (objective presentation) ensures that entanglements between depiction (‘image objects’) and the understanding of them as evidence for causality (narrative) acts to hide the problematics of this duality inside the superficially fixed and selfevident order created by understanding motion pictures as a vehicle for “narration.” The capacity to recognize parallels between the fictional ‘events’ depicted in a motion picture and actual, lived experience depends on how ‘realist fiction’ enables the organization of discrete interpretive levels and articulations. Film historian David Bordwell advances this metaphor in his study The Classical Hollywood Cinema as rendering the peculiar confluence

122 Objectivity of denotation, memory, and culture as an invisible, ‘transparent’ construct that enables narrative to proceed: Motifs revealed in the credits sequence or in the early scenes accumulate significance as our memory is amplified by the on-going story. . . . The classical aesthetic of ‘planting’ and foreshadowing, of tagging traits for future use, can be seen as laying out elements to be recalled later in the cause-effect logic of the film. If temporality and causality did not cooperate in this way, the spectator could not construct a coherent story out of the narration.4 What Bordwell identifies as “narration” are all those audiovisual elements of découpage the audience employs in creating explanations for what they see happening on screen; cinematic narratives depend on this realist organization of ‘events’ for their coherence. How the audience employs découpage to identify causality allows later events to emerge logically from earlier ones is his definitional feature of “narration.” These arrangements are essential to presenting fabula; the grouping of these lower level statements as being “related” (i.e., the proximate relations of montage/continuity or the temporal contiguity posed by the long take) leads to their identification as belonging in a particular, on-going sequence (syuzhet). They ratify cinema=narrative as unquestionable in a rhetorical conflation of naturalism with ontology. This ordering creates coherence not only because of the narrative function such shots might have, but also through the autonomous role of everyday experience as a formative guide to the realist interpretations of motion pictures: activities such as “going shopping” have a natural, logical progression, delimited beginnings and endings, but are themselves composed from a variety of incidents that occur continuously and whose role is subordinate to this “activity.” Recognizing familiar actions on-screen provides the naturalism necessary for the audience’s elaboration of narrative. Causality is nothing more than an explanation for the arrangement and nature of the découpage: lighting, focal length, and the framing of individual shots as well as their editing into sequences and synchronization with sound (speech, noises, and music) that all combine to establish the formal order of realism—in both objective and subjective modes. Intertextual knowledge guides audience interpretation in all media: articulation is entirely separate from any question of photographic origins or the inherent nature of cinematography, deriving instead from the semantic organization of the work itself. The critical difference between fiction and non-fiction depends on a rhetoric of being-factual, a conclusion created via lexical expertise. It arises as a function of audience’s internalized ability to recognize Bordwell’s variation and repetition that guides and constrains their competing explanatory hypotheses; when one hypothesis fails, alternatives are immanent, giving interpretation a fleeting, dynamic capacity to shift from one potential to another, demonstrating it is an inherently active process.5 Audiences draw on their established “past experience” to create their interpretations—although each new encounter is unique, its understanding depends on how it relates to previous encounters6—the potential interpretations thus produce a spectrum where recognitions of being-fictional are tacit acknowledgments of the artifice of media. The contrary, being-factual, merely depends on an indexical claim, but historically has been entangled with objectivity and

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

123

ontology in theories of cinematic realism, enabling theorists such as Bazin or Cavell to identify the “purity” of photography as “prior” to any realist semiosis, an understanding that depends on narrative for its coherence and aligns cinema=narrative with claims about the innate nature of photography. These problematics are apparent in what Bazin called the “re-presenting” (making present once again) of a particular, existential physical reality made possible by cinematography, but which only allows naturalism in depiction, rejecting stylization entirely.7 His view of motion pictures as evidence for the profilmic reality of denotation—i.e., “photographic indexicality”—means that all cinema is fundamentally documentation of ‘the real.’8 The conflation of fiction and non-fiction necessarily follows; ontology and objectivity become equivalents, their separation merely a transient question of interpretive focus and découpage. This rejection of signification, ambivalence, and the meta-stabile borders of representation combines the antithetical modes of indexicality in ‘documentary reality’ with the artifice of ‘realist fiction’ as equivalents built from the same ontological demonstrations about reality. The assumption of cinema=narrative for Bordwell’s concept of “style” in both his studies, Narration in the Fiction Film,9 and The Classical Hollywood Cinema,10 renders the constructive role of découpage for all ‘realist fiction’ moot, preventing questions about objectivity from emerging by assuming the distinction it describes is an a priori feature of cinema: In the fiction film, narration is the process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula.Thus it is not only when the syuzhet arranges fabula information that the film narrates. Narration also includes stylistic processes. It would of course be possible to treat narration solely as a matter of syuzhet/fabula relations, but this would leave out the ways in which the filmic texture affects the spectator’s activity.11 What he terms “style” is the enunciative form assumed by découpage, the “filmic texture” apparent in the chronological presentation-progression of ‘events.’ Lower-level enunciations that Bordwell terms “style” distinguish the role of découpage from the denotative contents of the shots themselves.12 The ‘events’ on display are the denotative contents of the shot, which découpage combines with the ideological structures of realism to become “narration.” How an audience recognizes these connections requires an application of knowledge from past experience. The transparency of ‘realist fiction’ in this construction constrains audience attention in specific, conventional ways. These enculturated modes and domains can become a denial of the encultured roles of context, aesthetics, and past experience whose constraints on narrative development and structure—those guides (Bordwell’s syuzhet) recognizable as the debates over montage, continuity, and long take mise-en-scène as approaches to organizing and constructing the sequence—render the articulation of individual sequences as an a priori assumption.The particular dynamics of découpage in the articulation, enunciation, and denotation—the formal design and character of the shot that he calls “style”—is subsumed by how encultured expectations organize it as narrative. The transactional edit between sections [1] and [2] in the title sequence for Bullitt reveals this mediating role—the organization of causality itself—by showing the difference between discourse and narration. Elaborating

124 Objectivity the “mystery story” guides the progression of Bullitt, limiting the role of visual and nonnarrative structures in découpage such as the ‘reading-image’ to their impacts on “cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula.” Separating narration from objectivity and indexicality is complex and difficult because of this entanglement in cinematic realism. How the pseudo-independent title sequence in Bullitt integrates the credits with the main narrative reflects and depends on interpretations that arise from the audience’s established knowledge derived from earlier works.13 The intratextual iteration, reiteration, and variation around introduced motifs that are elaborated during the narrative—whether in the causality of events linked across the fabula, or in the realm of symbolic exchanges and progressions—appears natural, an inevitable result of cinematic realism only because their photographic presentation imitates everyday experience. What the ‘reading-image’ that begins Bullitt makes apparent is that without the familiar basis created by ‘objective realism’ (semblance to everyday experience), the explanatory abilities of the viewer to identify causality in the relationships of these composited shots are challenged—narrative is temporarily held in suspension. The ‘perception-image’ that begins section [2] shows causality is a recursive process that associates the imagery of particular shots with what specific characters on-screen see: the immanent features that create “objectivity” (i.e., sharp focus, clear exposure, an idealized framing), are the same ones that enable the causal explanation.This ‘point-of-view’ transition to narration demarcates the change in mode from discourse (titles) to narrative (fabula).The centrality of audience engagement in this construction cannot be forgotten: the diegesis depends on past experience and established expertise. The organization of discrete articulations into a sequence subsumes the various devices employed in its construction as the statement.These distinctions only become significant under special circumstances where their ambivalence becomes obvious, as in Ferro’s design for Bullitt that abandons the familiar diegesis of classical film semiotics14 composed from either singular, apparently continuous, camera-runs, or as collections of discrete film strips glued into series to render the consistent fictional world: section [1] proceeds as a singular, continuous assemblage without editing. This absence of familiar diegetic cues eliminates causal explanations and fabula, offering the series of ‘image objects’ discursively: establishing their narrative relationships becomes the interpretive focus in revealing the story, an encapsulation of “the investigation” that defines the mystery genre.

The Discovery Process The useful concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and change are questions of procedure arising in those cultural recognitions that guide and organize fabula. The shift between crediting and narrative functions in the title sequence for Bullitt is a rupture, a complete change in hierarchy and ordering, hidden by the constancy of ‘realist fiction.’ To separate narrative from realism is particularly difficult for cinema: this confusion is evident in the ambivalence around the terms objectivity and subjectivity. Describing this shift is more complex than the audience’s understanding of it because the commonplace assumption derived from cinema=narrative confuses narrative function and découpage (audiovisual articulation): it conceives “objective” découpage as a transparent,

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

125

presentational showing to the audience (a formal feature of the ‘shot’), while “subjective” découpage is understood to be narrative in nature, linked to a character’s pointof-view (a causal explanation of the view shown). The alternative to this understanding is to conceive both “objective” and “subjective” as semiotic modes defined by their role in articulating meaning on-screen apart from narrative. Ferro’s Bullitt title sequence is instructive in making that separation. Articulation, the progression between one statement and the next, is always dependent on interruption: the separation between the distinct shots conveying fabula (their semantic organization) is what dominates their juxtaposition and subsumes them into the fictive order.This interpretation of any particular shot/sequence as expressing narration is in addition to what it depicts.15 Historical conceptions of the shot as the fundamental unit of cinema, as the building block of montage,16 offers an idea of the ‘shot’ as necessarily brief. Each shot contains the idea of ‘event’ in its singularity, thereby providing Jurij Lotman’s fundamental unit of semiotic articulation: The three-way restrictions on the shot (perimeter—edges of the screen, capacity— the area of the screen, sequentiality—between preceding and following shots) make it a distinct structural unit. The shot is a part of the total film while retaining its independent role as a carrier of separate meaning. The autonomy of the shot, supported by the entire structure of cinematic language, gives rise to a countertendency: an attempt to overcome the independence of the shot and to incorporate it into more complex units of meaning, or to break it down into meaningful elements of smaller dimensions.17 Even as the shot can be edited into a series, it remains a unique, independent unit: this fact defines the protocols of continuity editing whose fragmentation of actions for editorial assembly involves the conventional isolation and individuation of each on-screen “event” as a separate shot. The historical unity of event/shot in commercial cinema has supported the assumption that they are the same unit of articulation. Their arrangement is defined by established rules that reify convention as the formality of découpage, the prototypical example being the shot/reverse that delivers each line of dialogue separately, but assemble into a completed sequence that appears as an “uninterrupted activity.” Recognizing a character’s point-of-view shot invites its understanding as a statement about “subjective” observation. Narrative statements about ‘expression of subjectivity’ confuse the issue: the revelatory assertion of being-fictional that unmasks the ‘documentary effect’ as a fabrication in the ‘newsreel’ that opens Citizen Kane (1941) is the same conversion from presentation-for-audience into being a statement-of-narrative (it becomes a point-of-view shot) that appears at the end of section [1] in Bullitt. It is entirely different than a modal presentation as “subjective,” depending on narrative structure for this recognition; ‘subjectivity as contents of narration’ is not equivalent to the manner of its presentation. The obviously subjective mode articulated formally via clearly stylized shots in the James Bond title sequences is no different than the stylized distortion within a naturalistic sequence identifying a shot as “subjective.” The semiosis required for this identification makes the entanglement of formal marker and

126 Objectivity narrative meaning inevitable; the duplicity of subjective orders in narration masks their formal difference from the rest of the sequence through their narrative function. The first approach employs stylization as a formal mode to identify its subjective presentation, while understanding the second, naturalistic shot as “subjective” is purely a product of narrative, demonstrative of causality and thus derived only from fabula: ‘narrational naturalism’ (objective articulation) becomes “subjective” only when it also coincides with a point-of-view “shot,” as at the end of section [1] of the Bullitt title design, or in the ‘newsreel’ that begins Citizen Kane with an attempt to “trick” the audience in a replay of Welles’s famous 1938 radio broadcast about Martians invading New Jersey. For audiences in 1941, the differences between the fictive claims of this ‘newsreel’ and reality were readily apparent, as none of the “recent” events it depicted happened—the audience’s recognition of the formal devices of documentary establishes the ‘newsreel’ as a documentary, but also reveals its falsity: the audience identifies being-factual or being-fictional via past experiences external to the film. Re-valuation produces a transition between being-factual and being-fictional; this is neither an issue of ontology, nor of ‘the real,’ but is instead directed by semantics and past experiences. It is a formal and informational constraint on indexical claims, not a transcendent relationship to ‘the real.’ Distinguishing objective articulation, indexical claims, and the fictional recognition of being-artificial enables the identification of ‘documentary reality’ through the always provisional assertion of being-factual (indexicality).The role of ‘narrational naturalism’ in both articulations is obvious: recognizing a series of shots as-documentary or as-fictional depends on specific, conventional relationships that allow audiences to have a nuanced interpretation of modality in otherwise uniform, objective presentations. The causal explanations that define narrational naturalism in cinema also direct its interpretation: the recognition of fictive narration emerges from the audience’s understanding of the distinction between the artificial claims of dramatic cinema and indexical claims about reality, as in The Number 23 where familiar facts serve to establish the less familiar information as also factual.The objectivity of these statements’ appearance superficially counters their stylization. Because the text looks like animated typing on paper, its appearance reinforces their link to ‘the real,’ even though this sequence demonstrates a ‘metaphysical reality’ hidden from everyday view. Being-fictional is a discovery that arises in the audience’s reflexive awareness of artifice. It does not depend on stylization for its identification. The peripheral role of these designs as examples of “peritext” is important to this development. The same artificial arrangement that produces ‘narrational naturalism’ in Bullitt and The Number 23 also controls the narrative elaboration of Bullitt and the documentary effect of the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane: even though all these openings rely on the same ‘objective realism’ to establish their naturalism and the ‘newsreel’ makes an indexical claim, only The Number 23 continues to assert its indexicality after the transition to the main narrative. This claim to being-factual distinguishes Frankfurt’s design from both Bullitt and the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane; however, the pseudo-independent ‘newsreel’ shows the ‘documentary effect’ depends on the audience initially accepting it as being-factual due to the same correspondences that rhetorically establish its indexical claims. In Citizen Kane, the ‘newsreel’ unmasks itself as fiction via the shift from a presentational to narrational mode that corresponds to the final cut that makes the ‘newsreel’ sequence

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

127

into an extended point-of-view shot by embedding this entire sequence within the diegesis. The concluding edit on the title card stating “The End” makes the transition between ‘newsreel’ and narrative diegesis. The status and understanding of its indexical claims changes in this revelation of artifice: the cut shows the ‘newsreel’ the audience watched was actually being shown to characters inside the fictional world—the entire sequence was a diegetic point-of-view shot. This discovery unravels its indexical claims by integrating the entire opening into the narrative progression, clearly identifying it as fiction. However, the ‘narrational naturalism’ of its presentation remains constant, formally apparent in the découpage for each shot, even as the final cut changes it from making an indexical claim to being-factual into a definitive statement of being-fictional. This discovery exploits the ambiguities surrounding on-screen depiction. Before the ‘newsreel’ is understood as narration, it is first shown simply and directly as a presentation-for-audience, independent of the later understanding as a “newsreel seen by characters in the story.” This recognition is informed by ‘narrational naturalism’: first by the objectivity of the denotation (intratextual order), and then by its resemblance to other newsreels (intertextual past experience). These formal features coincide with the “objectivity of documentary” to establish the ‘newsreel’ as a documentary independent of the ontological status of the photographic sources that form this opening. It is the coincidence of familiar and unfamiliar materials both in the formal structure of the sequence and the objective, recognizable nature of the découpage that creates the ‘documentary effect.’ Even when the pictures are carefully fabricated simulations of historical footage [Figure 4.2], they still make the same indexical claims that every ‘newsreel’ does through the conventional arrangement of voice-over and montage in an audiovisual show-and-tell. Where the information is novel or otherwise unfamiliar, the conventional structure of audiovisual synchronization articulates its indexical claim: the ‘facts’ and information about “Charles Foster Kane” (played by Orson Welles) are organized in ways the audience has seen in their past experience with other documentary films and newsreels. The final cut that reveals this indexicality as fiction is thus instructive: it makes the ‘documentary effect’ of this sequence a distinctly and wholly narrative function. ‘Narrational naturalism’ is a crucial mediator of indexical claims: it links being-factual to the realist appearance of the shots and transforms the rupture caused by the shift from indexicality to artificiality into a product of fabula, thus preserving the network of correlations to reality that enable the ontological claims about motion pictures to appear natural rather than imposed. The distinction between ‘objective realism’ and ‘narrational naturalism’ is not specifically developed in the ‘newsreel’ from Citizen Kane but becomes obvious in the title sequence for Bullitt. Ferro employs the Prologue Mode to allow the drama to begin immediately, during, rather than after, the credits. The combination of masked transitions in section [1] and the traditional continuity editing in section [2] establishes the beginning of the mystery as coincident with progression of these ‘events.’ The discursive organization in section [1] is commentary on the nature of crime that establishes the thematics of the fabula, while the causal link between the events in section [2] and the rest of the narrative are explicitly identified as fabula within the narrative development—as the police attempt to (re)solve these opening events: the detective story is explicitly a matter of unmasking and establishing causality. Answering the questions posed by this

Figure 4.2 Selected stills from the “newsreel” in Citizen Kane (1941) showing the compositing of actor Orson Welles as the fictional “Charles Foster Kane” appearing with actual historical leaders: [Top] Teddy Roosevelt; [Middle] Francisco Franco; [Bottom] Adolf Hitler.

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

129

three-and-a-half-minute opening title/sequence organizes the plot for the rest of the film, making the dominance of narrative function obvious. Violence, smoke and mirrors, misdirection—what is happening?—these are the elements of that are expected of the crime that a mystery story must solve. Every narrative event shown in Ferro’s design for Bullitt is also a reflexive part of its discursive meaning rather than merely being a cryptic statement about the plot. Unlike detective stories where the audience can “play detective” along with the fictional characters in an attempt to deduce who is guilty, the question invoked by this title sequence is not who did it, but why? and answering this question is the actual focus of the plot, an approach that attenuates the mystery while retaining its concerns with causal relationships. Explaining the dramatic events shown during the titles (the question of motivation for what happens), is a primary focus of the fabula.The dominance of narrative function changes the “unveiling” common to mystery stories by fusing the opening montage with the type animation via compositing to present the on-screen credits (the title cards) as the process of discovery common to this genre: section [1] is a double articulation, first and directly as the progression of masks, and then secondarily as the question the events shown necessary raise—what is going on, and why?—both questions that lead to a singular answer, the motive that is not addressed in section [2] that serves to mediate between the discursive masks and the narrative itself. The concluding optical masks identify the conclusion of the title sequence and the “actual” beginning of the story, casting the entire opening as a prologue to the main narrative. The role of ‘narrational naturalism’ in Ferro’s design is a constant. The first shot of section [1] presents the office space in the convex reflection of a lamp, a highly distorted reflection that gives a panoramic view of the entire office space—but this wide-angle view also suggests the distorted spaces of security mirrors. This interior view is then countered by a tinted black-and-white “rogues gallery” of rough-looking men standing in the dark, their faces lit from below, seen en mass via a tracking shot that appears through an optical text-mask rather than a cut.The sequence proceeds objectively, with a uniform deep focus in all the shots, but without making any claim to being-factual.The sequence of text-masks is discursive in section [1], a ‘reading-image’ that reveals a series of penetrations deeper into what lies beneath the surface within this vacant, rather mundane, office. Section [2] is conventionally narrative: the “rogues gallery” break the plate glass windows and rush into the office, guns blazing, to attack a single individual who escapes by using a smoke grenade. The final shot of the title sequence, the first to include dialogue, reveals the man in the office was under (literal) attack by his brother—who also happens to be his business partner; the office is their shared accounting office. Thus, why these events happened is the question explicitly raised by the concluding shot; it is essential to the dramatic narrative, posing the central mystery itself whose answer drives the events of the plot. This discovery of reasons is what unifies all detective stories focused on police procedures, such as the 1970s television series Columbo. Bullitt is less a mystery where the audience spends their time figuring out the puzzle of “who dunnit?” than a story about how the police catch the criminals by piercing the veil of surface illusions—the lies, deceit, and misinformation used to hide their crimes—an idea visualized by the ‘reading-image’ that adds significance to the scenes appearing on-screen. This discourse implies the shift from optical transitions to traditional editing is also an intensification of that meaning.

130 Objectivity The titles are thus not simply an independent reflection of/on the film, but an integral part of the story. Instead of editing shots (montage), the text-masks replace conventional cutting between title cards with a matryoshka-like structure that suggests movement forward, a literal visualization of the discovery process. Section [1] initially proceeds in a stable, recognizable fashion, even if it is disorienting spatially (where this sequence takes place—in Chicago—is defined, but at there is no precise establishing shot). The initial, tinted view of the rogues gallery matches this darkness. The initial spatial connection between the rogues gallery and the office is only visible for a moment at the start of the first shot inside the office in section [1].The masked transition/cut begins as a “black” space behind the office that does not announce itself as a shot—the presence of the “rogues gallery” is not immediately apparent. The black-and-white shot of “rogues” tinted red suggests they are already present, a part of this nocturnal city. These ambiguities resolve into an inside::outside opposition—discursively rendering the opposition of “society vs. rogues” that suggests the hard edges and high contrast lighting of Weegee’s crime photographs: an unflinchingly objective answer to “what happened?” that enables higher-level interpretations. Découpage and all the internal structures that inflect and organize the material shown are responsible for this emergence of objectivity; its separation from indexical claims demonstrates how indexicality is an ideological construct produced by enculturation because neither découpage, nor photographic ontology, nor the naturalism::stylization dynamic can provide the essential indexical claim for ‘documentary reality.’ This distinction is important for objectivity since it separates ontology, photography, and indexicality as distinct semantic elements whose relations are conventionally orchestrated by the audience’s past experiences with similar works. The significance of this disentanglement becomes obvious in the audience’s initial acceptance of the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane as ‘propositionally factual.’ Although it appears to align with the theory of realist cinema developed by André Bazin (and further articulated in the work of philosopher Stanley Cavell) who imposes a discursive interpretation that takes ‘objective realism’ as a banal link to reality by/for photography itself, their approach fails to gasp the “trick” that is the narrative function of this sequence. Its indexicality is a product of a complex rhetoric where the show-and-tell organization of the ‘newsreel’ creates claims about ‘the real’ that do not depend on the photography except as an illustration that asserts the sequence’s factuality. The “trick” it plays is designed to be a surprise created by the unanticipated shift in enunciation at its conclusion that reveals it is a diegetic point-of-view shot. This discovery recategorizes all its claims from being-factual to being-fictional, negating its indexical status: the illustrations are fabricated constructs created through special effects and optical printing rather than documents of an external reality. Double articulation (objective, indexical) encourages a confusion between the depiction and its status as a construction that the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane exploits and that Bullitt requires to counter the self-evident artificiality of the optical transitions. Objectivity is a cue guiding interpretation. As the white typography in Bullitt slides off screen, the text-masks appear as holes that grow larger, expanding, and in the process, reveal each new shot. The text-mask denies the fragmentation always created by editing—it asserts these pictures-within-pictures are comparable to the effect of the ‘long take.’This

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

131

assertion in section [1] depends on the discursive opposition between the office’s interior space and the externality of the “rogues gallery”: an ambivalent articulation of the space necessarily follows, since discursive relationships do not require any naturalist contiguity. The photographic realism of the depictions counters the abstraction created by the text-masks, thus enabling its subsumption into the causal relationships of fabula offered in section [2]. The shift from discourse to narration discovers the ideological dimensions of these openings (The Number 23, Citizen Kane, Bullitt) in the fixed relationships of dramatic storytelling and the convergence of ‘objective realism’ with ‘narrational naturalism’ made possible by the transparency that makes questions of ideology seem irrelevant.

The ‘Reading-Image’ All lettering is necessarily artificial and stylized: you read the words first, and then consider the significance of the denotation. The problem in cinema arises because composited type is unquestionably imposed onto the shots that become a background to the text, a self-evident challenge to conceiving the ‘image object’ as an ontological proof. It makes its presence on-screen always already a stylized eruption that reminds viewers that what they are watching is not reality. Typography thus poses an existential challenge for naturalistic realism. The credits are a reminder that what the audience sees is not and cannot be the same as their own everyday experience: it disrupts the imaginary ‘contract’ common to naturalism that understands cinema as a prosthetic vision, destabilizing the transparent engagement with the imagery. The history of commercial title sequences describes this tension over the role and arrangement of typography on-screen. Two antithetical approaches have emerged to resolve this disruption of diegetic progression in realist sequences through a recourse to narrative function: [1] the integration of the typography into the realist space itself that transforms typography into an apparently physical presence that is a part of the diegesis, or [2] the parallel articulation of typography as a material discourse that renders non-narrative concerns visual as the ‘reading-image’ [Figure 4.3]. The first tendency begins as an orchestration of parallel elements in the découpage that ultimately converge through VFX with the photo-realistic embedding of 3-D typography that appears to interact with the photographic ‘background.’ The traditional opposition between crediting and narrative functions is erased by this conversion of typography into an apparently material object within the diegetic space on-screen. This method became increasingly common during the first decade of the twenty-first century as digital technology made it cost effective to produce. The insertion of the credits into the photography was commonplace by 2010, appearing in a broad range of designs that includes designer Ben Conrad’s titles for the horror film Zombieland (2009) and the teen-focused comedy Easy A (2010), whose title sequence was produced at The Mill by Christina Hwang [Figure 4.3, Left]. The beginning of the story and the title sequence can then coincide in these designs: these embedded text-objects allow interaction between the typography and their fictional world. Both the Zombieland and Easy A sequences, as different as they are, follow the same formal protocol that integrates the typography with the visible space on screen, allowing what appears in that space—cars, people, zombies, anything physically present—to apparently interact with the type. The crowds of teenagers who walk past the credits,

132 Objectivity

Figure 4.3 Selected stills showing [Left] the integration of the typography into the realist space itself that transforms typography into an apparently physical presence that is a part of the diegesis in the Easy A (2010) title sequence produced by Christina Hwang; [Right] the articulation of typography as a material discourse that renders non-narrative concerns as a matryoshka-like penetration “deeper” into the découpage via the ‘readingimage’ in the Blow Up (1966) title sequence.

oblivious to them in Easy A, serve to assert their physical reality. This VFX embedding of the text resolves the challenge posed by composited type by eliminating its composited nature. The transformation of credit-texts into a visible element of the world attempts to neutralize the artificial and self-contained system that is language by giving it an apparent physicality. This resolution to the ‘typographic challenge’ created by the imposed nature of composited typography is at the same time a triumph of naturalism over stylization that reveals the entanglement of ‘objective realism’ with the narrative function that dominates these designs. The parallel articulation of the ‘reading-image’ for typography in motion graphics offers kinesis (motion and evolution of text on-screen) as a signifying discourse comparable to the visuality of denotation/connotation. It is an approach that emphasizes the kinetic and graphic dimensions of the lettering, rather than remaining confined to its lexical semantics and identification as-language to convey meaning. Although this approach is commonly non-narrative, in designs such as Pablo Ferro’s titles for Bullitt or the credits for Michelangelo Antonioni’s earlier film Blow Up (1966) [Figure 4.3, Right], this discursive structure is nevertheless constrained by the same narrative order it challenges. The découpage contained by the optically printed masks in these designs is understood as “objective” because it is not optically distorted or otherwise visibly stylized in itself, apart from the constraints created by the masking. The visual relationship between layers in Bullitt and Blow Up is strikingly similar. In both title sequences, the text-window shows a second shot behind/beneath the first. However, the similarities between these designs stop with the technique of their production. The

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

133

titles to Blow Up are an Allegory Mode design that symbolically restates the narrative, while Bullitt is a Prologue Mode design that comes at the start of the film, doubling as the beginning of the story. In Blow Up, only the text-mask for the main title card is animated. The shadows assert a clear relationship that suggests the same matryoshka-like penetration “deeper” into the découpage, but with a clearly articulated relationship. One layer lies above the other. These doubled visual fields resolve into a conventional foreground/background structure. The composited text-masks contrast dramatically with the continuous long take of the park lawn that remains constant throughout the sequence. This use of a long take as the ‘background’ for a title sequence is typical for feature films since in the 1920s, giving it a familiar organization that asserts the titles as a pseudo-independent unit, apart from the narrative. Seeing the text as a “hole” showing a second space beneath the surface of the green grass renders the text-masks as cut-out windows mediating between incompatible spaces without necessarily juxtaposing them. Transitions in Blow Up between different title cards are simply cuts, with each new set of credits also containing a different shot of women in Mod clothing, dancing.The change of shot is also a change of text-mask and thus title card. The découpage of the dancers is skewed, dynamic, contrasting with the static, overhead view of the park lawn. Although the titles to Blow Up can be understood as implying a second reality beneath the visible one of the park, this articulation depends on the audience recognizing these relationships allegorically. The procession of discrete window/texts objectively articulate a subjective understanding that, as with the story itself, has a highly uncertain status: Did the events of the narrative happen, or was it a paranoid fantasy? Coming at the end of the narrative, there is no answer provided to this question. The subjective statement in Blow Up arises in the shifting and unstable relationship between the ‘realist fiction’ of the lawn/dancers created by the compositing and the jumps in composition and depiction that accompany changes in text-mask/title card. These cuts have an ambivalent meaning for the allegory they present, either as an assertion of trauma (the park where a murder may have happened) that replaces the revelry of the dancers, or the dancers can be understood as eruptions fleeing from the trauma. The stylization of these masks reiterates the subjectivity of the narrative and its resulting challenge to realism. The ambivalences of the mask–lawn relationship reflect the same uncertainties as the plot, but when understood using psychological trauma as the allegorical “key” to their decipherment, this flux collapses into a subjective reiteration of the narrative, reinforcing its alterior stylization distinct from the ‘objective realism’ in the narrative itself. Unlike Blow Up, the entanglement of narrative, naturalism, and objectivity in Bullitt weakens the superficial stylization of the text-masks: although the kinetic matryoshkatransitions of the ‘reading-image’ are highly stylized, the découpage they contain is not; even the tinted black-and-white shots conform to a commercially standard deep focus and clear exposure. Each masked shot/element allows naturalism to play an implicit role in the entire sequence, one that denies the significance of stylization in these text-masks at the same time as they articulate a ‘reading-image.’ This duality is possible because the text-masks function as deviations from everyday reality at a different level than their découpage, making the opening to Bullitt of critical interest in separating ‘objective realism’ from its entanglement with/in ‘narrative naturalism.’

134 Objectivity These on-screen credits serve to identify the production, while their narrative role depends on the relationship between the masked layers. How they replace editing is doubly significant: first as the discourse offered by the ‘reading-image,’ and secondarily as narration about the events being shown. The subordinate position of narrative to the ‘reading-image’ identifies Bullitt as a pseudo-independent, peritextual sequence that is paradoxically both the actual beginning of the narrative and separate from it.18 Despite this duality, the crediting and narrative functions of typography remain distinct. At the same time, the narrative information contained by this opening sequence is essential to the film that follows: these events are the original ‘sin’ whose mystery requires the process of investigation that is the fabula. It cannot be ignored or elided without causing significant lapses in the understanding of causality that is the essential feature of the mystery genre. The rhetoric of the text-masks (evident in the ‘reading-image’), and the cut to narration provided in the ‘narrative naturalism’ of continuity (apparent as the ‘perceptionimage’), informs the shift in articulation and interpretive modes that marks the end of section [1]. This difference prevents the masked transitions and the familiar relationships of editing from being conflated; the narrative function always dominates the crediting function. The connection to the narrative appears in Bullitt through how the text-masks engage in intratextual dialogue with the fabula. Understanding the discourse in section [1] converges on the same concerns with crime and criminality shown by the live action of section [2]. The audience understands the distinction between these modes of discourse/narration as a singular entangled product of realism, objectivity, and narrative that blurs the differences between the formal elements that compose it. Distinguishing between the progression of the live action diegesis of the shots and the simultaneous discursive order of the ‘reading-image’ (the chronic progression of text-masks that replaces normal editing) inaugurates a process of revelation where the typography must function first as-text and then as-image. This dynamic of text::image in Bullitt is typical of the ‘reading-image,’ which behaves as both visual material and linguistic element to render a non-narrative discourse about hidden meaning as the literal activity of credits on-screen. Unraveling this rebus lays out the central questions and thematic concerns of the story-to-come. It is not sufficient that the credits in Bullitt name only those people who worked on/appeared in the film—the typography also visualizes another meaning apart from its lexical content that addresses the fabula. This discursive function of the ‘reading-image’ coincides with the narrative; however, mediating between these distinct interpretations also naturalizes them as expressions of the same ‘realist fiction.’ This engagement precisely identifies the entire title sequence as being-fictional, an affirmation of the artificial organization demonstrated in the compositing that uses the “objectivity” of photography to force its acknowledgment as artifice. The entanglement of these elements creates an infinite recursion of self-referential identifications and recognitions that make the complexity of their mutual support obvious. The stylization of the masks in section [1] is countered by the ‘narrative naturalism’ of their contents and the transformation into point-of-view produced by the shift at the start of section [2]: understanding this ‘reading-image’ as the opening to the fiction renders all the discursive elements immanent as narration. These reflections upon fabula explains the imaginary motion shown by the masks as a statement about crime and

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

135

criminality that is relevant for the fiction which follows. Their apparent “going deeper” into the space penetrates a series of “veils” nested within each other, as with matryoshka dolls. The ‘reading-image’ creates a discursive claim about the omnipresence of crime and villainy that is not a product of montage or created by a simultaneous combination of elements. This discourse emerges from the kinesis of each principle credit in section [1] that serves as an acknowledgment/commentary on omnipresent crime, thus placing it within a narrative framework of cause–effect where these masks are paradoxically disconnected from the diegesis even as they comment on it. This double articulation derives from these interpenetrating statements within section [1] itself. All title sequences are artificial and self-evidently distinct from everyday life; however, the masked shots in Bullitt conform to the conventional form of cinematic realism in all other ways—only the customary cut between them has been changed. The replacement of editing with these ‘reading-images’ reveals another, additional level of articulation that mediates between narrative and non-narrative signification: an excess meaning which modifies and accents the familiar dimensions of lexical presentation. Like all superimposed typography, these text-masks are entirely artificial, elements offering a parallel order—the lexical—whose stylization is erased by the conventionality of its organization and recognition as-language. Semiotician Roland Barthes described the dynamics of typo/graphics that allow this duality as a problematic aspect of reading and interpreting, even when considering a static text: The lexia is only the wrapping up of a sematic volume, the crest line of a plural text, arranged like a berm of possible (but controlled, attested to by a systematic reading) meanings under the flux of discourse: the lexia and its units will thereby form a kind of polyhedron faceted by the word, the group of words, the sentence or paragraph, i.e. with the language which is its “natural” excipient.19 The conversion of marks into words makes the lexical order they produce seem inevitable and beyond question; their visual nature is submerged in semiosis. But the “units” of lexia begin graphically as the arrangement and relationship of static elements. It is a conventional set of understandings that are essentially stylized transformations of normal sight. Where the meaning of language depends on articulations created by physical spacing out on the page, the elaboration of kinetic typography is not constrained to the metaphoric flux Barthes describes—the dualities of the Bullitt title sequence present semantic functions distinct from language and the transitions between shots. The difficulty in describing these relationships is a problem for their analysis, not the audience viewing them. Audiences understand the difference between the imagery, defined by the contours of the mask, and the typography, obvious as the solid white letterforms which initially define the mask as language: as the main title card stating “in Bullitt” | “a Solar Production” fades up and the optical mask transitions to show a tracking shot looking in the office windows in full color for the title card “Robert Vaughn,” the footage repeats with an identical shot, but tinted black-and-white for the mask saying “Jacqueline Bissett.” This repetition makes the connection between “rogues gallery” and “office space” literally visible: the world of crime is a darker, “bloodier” (the red tint) version of the familiar world. The discursive meaning of this repetition is distinguished from the

136 Objectivity narrative progression by its ambivalence. While the narrative dimension of this masking/montage is simple—a group of men break into an office at night—the doubling of shots alters the significance of their actions: it becomes a revelation of a much darker, sinister side that is not only outside (shown by the rogues gallery) but lies just below the surface of familiar interiors. It is not readily apparent from the arrangement of section [1] that two spaces are actually adjacent to each other, that the “rogues gallery” is outside, looking in. The discursive organization denies the narrative progression, even as the text-masks serve as establishing shots for the familiar continuity montage that follows. The stylization these masks necessarily impose on the relationships between shots is entirely distinct from that created by continuity editing. Their organization does not create specific relationships between outside/inside as actual spaces, but instead proposes them rhetorically, as a rebus whose key to decipherment depends on the (later) narrative relationships between the “rogues gallery” and office space. This rebus replaces montage with a ‘reading-image’ where the kinesis of the typography and the transitions created through these masks provides a metaphoric assemblage—rhetorical—entirely distinct from the causality offered by editing and continuity montage. The repetitions of the same shots of both “rogues gallery” and “office space” in blackand-white tinted red and in full color convey a discourse about their subjects is, while fictional, an accurate statement about that on-screen world. In leaping toward the causality of fabula, their meaning depends on their intratextual relationship foreshadowing the drama. These doublings have a specifically rhetorical value for this design, emphasizing the dualities and duplicities associated with crime while drawing attention to the masking process as a discursive presentation: cinematic realism is immediately implicated in this construction since without it the narration cannot emerge. Even though it is possible that the paired repetitions of shots were used to increase the duration of these shots so there would be enough footage for all the contractually required titles (a more traditional montage sequence would have an entirely different timing and character without Ferro’s optical transitions), this title design is clearly an integral part of how the narrative develops the mystery posed by this particular opening, whether or not this precise composition of titles and transitions was the “originally” planned opening sequence for the film as a whole. While the narrative function of the opening is essential to the detective story that follows, its discursive transformation through the optically printed ‘reading-image’ is not. Narrative function entangles ‘objective realism’ by dictating the appearance of the photography.This denial of the self-evident artifice of text-masks that shows the artificial nature of being-fictional for the ‘reading-image’ paradoxically allows them to develop an objective discourse on the fictional reality of this office space. This apparent contradiction is resolved by being the product of different interpretive levels within the same realist construction: their objective presentation creates the naturalistic effect that allows the transformation of the stylization of the masked transitions in themselves to recede from consideration as the connective link between the two sections dominates interpretation. This emphatic shift allows the chronic progression of the mask’s movement-linkage to become a signifier in itself, rather than merely an invisible assemblage as a simple edit would produce. By prolonging the transitions between one shot and the next, the connection itself becomes the focus of the articulation: the intrusive nature of this transition

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

137

is discourse. The statement produced is not only the product of two images placed in juxtaposition, as with traditional montage, but also the generative result of their mediation (the mask). Adding a third element to the arrangement and relationship of these shots draws attention to them as artificial constructs. The objectivity of ‘realist fiction’ becomes a specific aspect for their interpretation that validates the discursive meaning as a form of narration about the ‘image objects,’ thus returning it to the narrative role that the ‘reading-image’ more typically defies. The articulation of this series of masks as penetrating deeper into the veil of everyday banality to reveal an unsettling and innate criminality that lies just beneath the surface of this office space is also a commentary on the dramatic narrative itself. The moral ambiguity that concerns the discourse of the ‘reading-image’ depends on its role as ‘realist fiction.’ The duality of criminals outside (in darkness) and interior office (brightly lit) is countered by the masks that link the bright interior with their darkened space—reiterated by how the ‘perception-image’ positions the audience in the same morally ambiguous role as the criminals who are also searching the office space with their gaze—a space that before and during their assault is itself transformed into a confusing labyrinth of reflections and smoke. It is this moral ambiguity that produces the troubling dimensions of both story and title sequence, an ambiguity that was of great concern in the late 1960s; Bullitt was released in 1968, the same year that writer W. H. Auden published his discussion of detective stories: I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin. From the point of view of ethics, desires and acts are good and bad, and I must choose the good and reject the bad, but the I which makes this choice is ethically neutral; it only becomes good or bad in its choice. To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which however ‘good’ I may become, remains unchanged.20 The ambiguity that troubles Auden is the uncertainty made literally apparent in the duplicity of this opening sequence, not just through the repeating shots, but through the coincidence of gazes—the criminals and the audience both engage in the act of detection (who become detectives). The ambivalent understanding of crime and criminality blurs the boundary between the “white hat vs. black hat” of traditional Hollywood depictions of ‘good’ versus ‘evil.’ Like all ‘reading-images,’ the presentation in Bullitt is a literalization of this process of discovery as the progression of kinetic text on-screen. The shifts between traditional crediting (white lettering) and the optical masks gives this section of the title sequence a uniform appearance, allowing the discourse to arise not in the individual masks, but as a product contained by the full series of masked transitions. The objectivity of this construction makes the audience’s complicity with the criminals a feature of how the space of this generic office appears. What might be assumed to be a neutral gaze—the ‘objectivity’ offered by the unseen camera’s operation that is Bazin’s realist theory—becomes instead a construction whose artificial arrangement as a ‘reading-image’ enables the articulation of the moral thematics of the narrative in the doubling and repeating of already-seen elements revealed in section [2]: the criminals are outside, breaking in; the office is not as deserted as it initially seemed. That the criminals run

138 Objectivity for cover when the lights come on reinforces their criminal status and that their actions are illicit (their awkwardness and speed is reminiscent of cockroaches running for cover when the kitchen light goes on). The doubling of these opening shots produces confusion not because of their discursive role, but in the shifting and unstable functions for narrative since the “dominant character” in this opening sequence is not human—it is the office itself, that space under observation. These repetitions are significant for how Ferro’s design enunciates its discourse about crime: criminality is universal—that it is not really something lurking in the dark just outside our windows, but is really something just beneath the surface, always present, already in progress—we just aren’t aware it’s there, is happening, until it bursts into view. This discursive meaning is closer to the summative effects of a full montage sequence than to the dialectical product of any pair of shots. Its extended emergence is typical for both the rebus mode and the ‘reading-image,’ a product of the masks’ chronic progression that literalizes a rhetoric of penetrating deeper to reveal a hidden world. This rhetoric of crime just under the surface manifests through the repetition of the tracking shot that is in color for the “Robert Vaughn” credit and then repeated as a tinted blackand-white version of the same shot mid-way through its progression for the “Jacqueline Bissett” credit, a graphic transformation of the office into the space of the criminals. The doubled shots in the full color and tinted black-and-white contained by the text-masks are of particular importance in articulating these collisions between inside and outside, criminals and office space that enable understanding the fabula in this opening sequence. However, this discovery process is not Bazin’s “re-presenting” (making present once again), but instead acts as the initial revelation—although the images are objective presentations of their apparent subject matter (the office interior, the “rogues gallery”)—the manner of its appearance through these kinetic masks changes their familiar realism into a statement about what appears, allowing the understanding of these shots as being more than just a “typical office” or even the particular office. The artifice of ‘reading-image’ coupled with the unusual framing of the initial shot of this office in the convex reflection of the lamp suggests not a “typical office” but a scene of surveillance; the seeing-through into the “rogues gallery” beneath/behind this mirrored surface does not produce the montage effect of shot/reverse shot that would identify these men as looking into that office space. Instead, their revelation becomes an equally stylized counterpoint to the naturalism of the photography, a statement that they lurk just under the surface of these appearances. The surveillance-like reflection created by the mirror reinforces this rhetorical claim. The full-color realism of the first shot, matched by the black-and-white of the men draws attention to the constructed nature of découpage—the shift between color/black-and-white produced by the mask draws attention to its artifice—while asserting the desaturation is a discovery of a more essential ‘reality’ than the world shown in superficial color. The dynamic of naturalism::stylization created by text-masks offers an emergent commentary on this opening sequence that is not allegorical but intratextual, dependent on and producing knowledge of the fabula, but to recognize this discursive ‘hidden order’ requires the artifice of the text-masks to disappear from consideration. The change in level from discourse to narration accentuates their similarities and mutual basis in the naturalism of the component shots.The audience literally “sees-through” the type-masks,

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

139

focusing on the scenes being presented, in a rhetorical shift that reiterates the same consistent objectivity as the photographic naturalism. Stylization is not denied, but held in momentary suspension: this discourse understands the “rogues gallery” via a collapse of ambivalent meanings into a singular statement about pervasive criminality. It affirms the ‘reading-image’ as autonomous from fabula: as Barthes observes about lexical order, the conversions between text and image become meaningful when their articulation suggests an order apart from pure visuality; this surfeit of signification links enunciation (narrative) and depiction (photography) as a presentation about the on-screen diegetic world.The text-masks are effectively subordinated to narrative functions by the contents of their discourse, but these relationships do not correlate to the diegetic space onscreen. Section [1] is a different type of ‘narrational naturalism,’ one disconnected from the elaboration of causality, while section [2] collapses that ambivalence into familiar narrative relationships, ensuring the title sequence’s integration (narrative function) as a rebus concerned with the meaning of the narrative that follows. “Objectivity” is distanced from narrative by these masks: its artificial nature reframes cinematic realism in this sequence without need for any acknowledgment of photographic indexicality. Découpage retains its naturalistic presentation, yet its transformation into non-diegetic narration—discourse—establishes these appearances as constructs. This change allows Ferro’s sequence to make itself into an objective, fictional demonstration of what otherwise might be considered a subjective, paranoid belief about crime and criminality as always lurking just below the surface. The mundane, commonplace acceptance of this ideological structure derives from the deep focus, highly detailed nature of the shots being combined through the masks themselves. While typography and masking are both stylized deformations of découpage, their discursive progression relies on that naturalism as part of its signification, thus affirming it and the realism of superficial appearances it asserts.

The ‘Perception-Image’ The cut joining sections [1] and [2] in Bullitt transforms the discursive ‘reading-image’ into a commentary on character point-of-view. This moment of “objectivity” acting as subjective narration is an atypical instance of what philosopher Giles Deleuze theorized as the ‘perception-image’ in his study, Cinema 1: We have seen that perception was double, or rather than a double reference. It can be objective or subjective. But the difficulty lies in knowing how an objective perception-image and a subjective perception-image are presented in the cinema. . . . It might be said that a subjective perception-image is a direct discourse and, in a more complex way, that the objective perception-image is like an indirect discourse (the spectator sees the character is such a way as to be able, sooner or later, to state what the latter is supposed to be seeing).21 The assignment of the narrative significance of ‘point-of-view shot’ moves in both directions around the edit, transforming the shots that identify “who sees” and “what is seen” into a dynamic pair expressing a singular idea: a causal relationship between the masked

140 Objectivity footage and the shot that follows. This special case links sections [1] and [2] precisely because section [1] is not a singular shot or individual image, but is instead constructed as a linked series of text-masks that begin and end showing the “rogues gallery.” Identifying the final shot of this series as the inference (“who sees”) needed for the ‘perception-image’ converts the entire matryoshka series in section [1] into part of that same narration: that all the searching views of the office correspond to the gaze of the “rogues gallery.” It is not just the kinetic pan that begins section [2] that has this meaning; the entire ‘reading-image’ is a point-of-view shot. This change in function for the masked “rogues gallery” makes the assumption of cinema=narrative in Deleuze’s theory obvious. Each ‘event’ (shot) is a material proposal about the nature of the on-screen world, apart from what the story presents, but also inseparable from it. It is not an indexical claim to ‘the real’ that emerges but an internal assertion about the diegesis: What counts in these examples is that the shot, of whatever kind, has as it were two poles: in relation to the sets in space where it introduces relative modifications between elements or sub-sets; in relation to a whole whose absolute change in duration it expresses. This whole is never content to be elliptical, or narrative, though it can be.22 This proposal recalls director Jean Epstein’s belief in photogénie: the shot is a product derived from an indexical relationship to the profilmic world and simultaneously, a constructive unit whose appearance constitutes the substance of the presented world on-screen. The constructive nature is never in doubt, neither is its tenuous connection to reality. Although his conception of “cinema” necessarily converges on photographic indexicality, his ambivalence around this ontology is not a rejection of Bazin’s theory, but a modification of it to accommodate the artifice of cinematic form.The instability emergent in the transition from section [1] to section [2] demonstrates Deleuze’s recognition that the presentation is ambivalent, “never content to be elliptical, or narrative” and thus subject to sudden, radical alterations because ontology is different than representation. Realism must, therefore, occupy a privileged position, but at the same time it must also be contingent. The duplicity of ‘objective realism’ and the indexicality of photography has a phenomenological basis, rather than an ontological one, reliant on the idea of “emergence,” derived from Henri Bergson’s philosophy.23 Deleuze uses this proposal to address the circular logic of indexicality for cinematic realism through narrative progression: The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions.The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances: the shot will be considered as the smallest narrative utterance.24 What emerges in these assemblages are syntactical meanings that serve as explanations for both the particular framing of the shots (découpage) and their arrangement in particular sequences (montage). He makes the same recognition that Bordwell does: narrative

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

141

is the justification for the progressive nature of this series, as the ‘perception-image’ is a product of (at least) two shots. Deleuze assumes the completeness of every individual ‘shot’ understood as a fully realized articulation in itself, rather than via the fragmentation and disassembly that is familiar from montage: the break-up of a singular ‘event’ into a variety of different vantage points/views combine to describe what “occurred.” This assemblage is the essence of montage, as Sergei Eisenstein noted.25 When a fragmentary series of long shots, extreme close-ups, and slow-motion combine, the group provides an analysis of the ‘event’ they depict that is absent from any single shot. Narrative meaning overshadows their compartmental nature, as when sports coverage dissects a “goal.” Claims about ‘the real’ are linked to this essential feature of narrative construction, an outcome of its entanglement with indexicality and realism. The discrete actions held in the various shots of montage and continuity editing conceives and isolates each elemental moment for re-assembly via editing. Narrative function arises from the complete sequence to express reasons for why these shots, shown as they are, and in this specific order. Naturalism creates the illusion of an inevitable and necessary interpretation the audience understands transparently. Such an analysis embeds questions of “subjectivity” and “objectivity” within a framework where narrative function always and inevitably dominates interpretation to the exclusion of all other potentials. The important role of editing and montage in this construct cannot be minimized, even when each shot forms an essentially complete unit in itself, as in the ‘newsreel’ for Citizen Kane whose progression of information and facts springs from how each shot seems like a full declaration of its denoted subject, clarified through the voice-over. ‘Narrational naturalism’ shifts the presentation-for-audience in Bullitt and Citizen Kane to being an extended articulation of point-of-view (‘perception-image’) that comes at the conclusion of both sequences and mediates their interpretation. At the same time, this adjustment denies any indexical claim, facilitating these sequences’ recognition as being-artificial. For Bullitt, this recognition is redundant, but in Citizen Kane, it is novel and essential: the cut that changes from the ‘newsreel’ filling the screen in a presentationfor-audience to a ‘perception-image’ asserts its diegetic projection for the unknown, off-screen characters commenting on the newsreel itself, not as voice-over but as a dramatic scene. Following this cut, the audience must now recategorize what initially appeared to be ‘documentary reality’ as ‘realist fiction’ all at once, a sudden change that comes without deliberation on the shift from being-factual to being-fictional: embedding the ‘newsreel’ in diegetic space retrospectively positions the audience as watching what the “characters watching the newsreel” also experience in the fabula—the audience sees precisely the same ‘newsreel’ the characters see: a naturalistic presentation that shows the audience what they would see if they were to watch the ‘newsreel’ as a newsreel for themselves in a movie theater, an action that they literally perform while watching this sequence.This revised understanding of the sequence makes it diegetic.The final conversion turns the entire construct into a singular statement-of-narrative by revealing it as an unusually extended, but also highly conventional, example of a ‘perception-image’ that also matches Bazin’s argument for conceiving cinema as a prosthetic vision.26 The duplicity of action and depiction makes its indexical claim appear to be an ontological revelation of cinema. The doubling/coincidence of audience’s action and character’s action is the essential feature of the point-of-view shot (‘perception-image’) in subsuming

142 Objectivity both opening presentations-for-audience. This fluent assembly happens autonomously in Citizen Kane. The sequences allow the “first person” camera to give an ‘ideal’ view of its subject through the transparent articulations of ‘realist fiction’ on a shot-by-shot basis [Figure 4.4, Left]; even the use of compositing and graphic animation in the ‘newsreel’ [Figure 4.4, Right] establishes the facticity of the presentation by illustrating what cannot otherwise be shown. This identification of indexicality is contingent on the same recursive relationships as the presentation-for-audience. Both identifications depend on the same initial recognition of naturalism—that the shots correspond to what the audience might see for themselves. The entanglement of representation of ‘newsreel’ with actual newsreels only becomes obvious when the final shot reveals it is a ‘perception-image’ that demands its consideration as expressing a narrative function. The presentation-foraudience (‘newsreel’) is “what is seen” during the three shots of this sequence’s conclusion: starting with the title card stating “The End,” a side view of it being projected onto a screen, and then a group of backlit figures in the dark act to establish “who sees” and identify this opening as a statement-of-narrative, thus drawing attention to the entanglement of ‘realist fiction’ with ‘perception-image.’ What appears at the start of Citizen Kane makes the audience’s experience of watching the prolonged ‘perception image’ the same as how a newsreel normally would be shown to them. ‘Narrational naturalism’ doubles the presentation-for-audience experience as corresponding to the point-of-view of the unseen characters who discuss it in the following scene. This coincidence of fictional action, realist presentation of that action, and the action actually required and performed by the audience in watching the sequence—the act of ‘watching a newsreel’—makes the linkage of these discrete interpretive levels to the ontological basis of the event seem natural and inevitable: the representation “newsreel” follows the same presentation-for-audience as cinematic realism in general. Seeing the ‘representation of a newsreel’ in the story transform from the reality of watching an actual newsreel—i.e., accepting the indexical claims of the fictional ‘newsreel’ as being exactly what it appears to be, a newsreel, independent of the narrative/fictional drama “Citizen Kane”—masks the revelation that realism and narrative are mutually reinforcing interpretations by making the transfer obvious, natural. This complex doubling of ‘newsreel’ and actual newsreel is a rhetorical effect, apparent in both analysis and in watching the film. The revelation of being-fictional at the conclusion only comes as a shock to its audience if they accept its indexicality. Unlike in Citizen Kane where the transformation into “point-of-view” comes as a revaluation of what was just on-screen, the shift in Bullitt is so subtle that the change can easily be missed. The objectivity of découpage is essential. Section [1] ends after the mask stating “Jacqueline Bissett” with a glimpse of the “rogues gallery” in full color, arrayed in a black space, frontally lit, and clearly peering at something CUT! shown by a full-color pan that begins as a close-up of a typewriter on a desk inside the office [Figure 4.5]. This sudden cut provokes a narrative engagement that relies on the realist understanding of this sequence of shots. It poses the question: what are these men looking at? The response, evident in the point-of-view shot that pans around the office in deep focus, is not initially certain. They are looking into the office, but the frenetic pan suggests that the office is not their target. Point-of-view is unstable in Bullitt; this ambiguity is significant. Their search collapses this space into a confusing

Figure 4.4 [Left] Selected stills from the Hearst Metrotone News newsreel, “The News Parade of 1934,” vol. 6, no. 226 (December 19, 1934); [Right] Comparable stills from the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane (1941).

144 Objectivity

Figure 4.5 Selected stills from the point-of-view pan searching the office at the start of section [2] in Bullitt (1968), designed by Pablo Ferro.

series of things: furniture, adding machines, and desktop clutter; details near and far merge kaleidoscopically. Questions about what is happening undermine and assert the normally simple assignment of ‘perception-image’ as point-of-view shot, allowing the merging of the audience’s gaze with the criminal’s gaze. The next shot in the sequence resolves these instabilities: an expressionless man shifting into view from behind a desk, looking out into the office CUT! to see the “rogues gallery” standing outside the windows; they try to hide as the lights go on. The diegesis falls into recognizable order. Deleuze’s ‘perception-image’ is always a subjective narrational positioning— understanding these men are “outside, looking in” requires a change in articulation. It is not concerned with the audience’s perceptions of what appears on-screen, but instead is a narrational claim about the depiction. Cinema 1 explains his assumption

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

145

of narrative as foundational axiomatic guide to the organization of cinematic reality.27 The “perception-image” is not concerned with the immanent encounter or the role of audience in its ordering/interpretation, except incidentally. Deleuze’s “perceptionimage” is a matter of narrative exposition that identifies depicted character action: most obviously in the shot/reverse shot editing structure of continuity where a character looks in one shot/the following shot shows what was being looked at—a narrative construction minimally reliant on a perceived motivation of actions within the image to make the link between one shot and the next. The audience only has importance for this structure as the marginal proof apparent in their recognition of this causality. However, these narrative constructions are not givens, even though Deleuze’s analysis suggests they are in an affirmation of the Modernist conception of cinema=narrative. The ‘perception-image’ is a causal explanation the audience makes to justify how they are interpreting their encounter, post hoc accounts of reasons why they think what they do about the cinematic articulation. These higher-level interpretations thus take on the character of the circular logic Deleuze sought to escape by explaining the ordering they generate by that generation. The ambiguities in Bullitt demonstrate how this ‘perception-image’ depends on the audience’s recognitions for its coherence. Before the second point-of-view shot, even this basic, spatial relationship is ambiguous, stylized because of the text-masks acting as corollary to the searching pan. Unlike the artificial, subjective presentations within the entire series of James Bond titles by Robert Brownjohn, Maurice Binder, Ben Radatz, and Daniel Kleinman, these shots do not assert their unreality; instead, they offer an objective statement about villainous intent that is a specifically narrative understanding that remains apart from their ‘objective realism.’ Editing in section [2] shifts the discourse from one organized by the obviously artificial displacements of optical printing to the ordinary connections of montage and cinematic realism: in the masked shots, the audience must self-consciously discover the connections between one shot and the next as an excess to their discursive organization. The causal articulations of continuity editing and point-of-view (‘perceptionimage’) establish what the discursive presentation (‘reading-image’) does not show: the “rogues gallery” are criminals about to begin an assault on a lone man inside the office. The second ‘perception-image’ establishes these spatial relationships of inside/outside clearly, allowing the narrative to proceed.The optically printed text-masks do not create a stable, relational understanding of the diegetic on-screen space. Who is where, a basic question, remains unresolved in this ‘perception-image.’ Only the narrational naturalism produced by familiar continuity editing in the second ‘perception-image’ determines the spatial relationships between “rogues gallery” and “office space.” These discoveries proceed reflexively, as a revelation of linkages that are initially hidden by the discursive ‘reading-image.’ The shift from animated text-masks to more familiar cuts also aligns with the development of a more familiar causal action–reaction sequence.This objective presentation is entangled with its narrative functions: the discovery process dramatized in the opening shots and literalized as the text-masks that replace the editing ungrounds what would otherwise be a familiar variation on the standard shot/reverse shot montage. The uncertainty is appropriate. Bullitt is a mystery story, but what the detectives seek to discover is the motives for what happened; the event itself and “who done it?” is never

146 Objectivity in doubt. By drawing attention to the artifice of narrative causality as an imposed order, the Bullitt title sequence forces the audience to actively attempt to decipher what is happening, thus bringing that process into consciousness. The artifice of ‘realist fiction’ provides the needed cues for interpreting this series of non-verbal looks and actions as causally linked. While the searching gaze and tracking shot through the windows can be identified as subjective narration about what the criminals gazing in see, the other depictions in the sequence do not have this narrative connection to any particular characters shown on-screen. The contrasting levels of “objective” narrative and “subjective” presentation force the viewer to search the screen in the same way that the ‘perception-image’ puts the audience in the double role of detective/criminal as the opening plays out on-screen. To identify what appears on-screen as coinciding with the gaze held by the criminal/audience/detective looking into this space, searching, depends on the objectivity of that presentation. ‘Events’ in section [2]—the ‘narrational naturalism’ of the close-up showing the smoke grenade, the lone man’s flight from the office, and his escape through the parking garage—cannot be linked to any particular gaze the way the searching pan or view of the criminals trying to hide must be. However, the difference between the criminals’ search and the audience’s lies with exactly their different intentions: the audience is looking for meaning and acting to decipher the narrative presentation, the criminals’ search is targeted, precise, they seek only confirmation of what they already know within the diegesis. The first gaze being represented through the pan has a specific narrative locus: the rogues outside the windows, looking in. The visual search and its analogous, narrative role in the fabula (as ‘the detective’) connects criminal to detective. These doublings appear throughout this title sequence, reinforcing the confusion of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (the criminal and the law abiding citizen) that emerges from the repeated shots in section [1].This reiteration poses a moral ambiguity that spreads into the events of the main narrative; in this regard, the titles encapsulate the unsettling and paranoid dimensions of this detective story where the villains are as likely to be the police as not. The crime that appears in this opening sequence is merely the catalytic pretext for the broader consideration of the ambiguities between “good” and “evil” inherent in politics, and the social decay that results from the amoral pursuit of personal political ambitions. Rhetorical juxtapositions exploit the audience’s intertextual knowledge to identify the shift from lower-level narration to higher-level discourse.This shift seems contradictory.The ‘reading-image’ delivers a causal/narrative meaning for the ‘perception-image,’ but this change in interpretive level reminds the audience of the entire title’s rhetorical construction: this juxtaposition of sections [1] and [2] models an ambivalent statement about the story that follows, an implied meaning separate from the specifics of depiction that Roland Barthes identified as connotation: Another difficulty attached to the analysis of connotation is that no particular analytic language corresponds to the particularity of its signifieds . . . they constitute within the total image discontinuous features or better still, erratic features. The connotators do not fill the entire lexia; reading them does not exhaust it. In other words (and this would be a proposition valid for semiology in general), all the elements of the lexia cannot be transformed into connotators.28

Narrational Naturalism in Bullitt

147

Controlled, fixed meaning recovers its basic instability through its uncertain relationship to the omnipresent ‘realist fiction.’ Those connections that initially produce the narrative function in this assignment of discourse to diegesis are subtle, authorized by the convergence of the cut between sections [1] and [2]. Understanding the partisan gaze is not an issue of projective identification of audience-with-criminals, but of paranarrational enunciation conveyed imagistically by the intersection of ‘perception-image’ and ‘reading-image’ that explains the transformation from realism to rhetoric.This duplicity establishes the imposed nature of causality and fabula. Depiction in cinema is often the same as identity: higher-level interpretations depend on the ambiguity that changes the ‘perception-image’ into a discursive signifier of “criminal intent” that spectacularly emerges as the events shown. The men outside, looking in are criminals; their presentation communicates the archetypal Hollywood depiction of the “henchman.” There is no question they are members of the American mafia and have already resolved the ethical problem posed by Auden—they have chosen ‘bad’ instead of ‘good.’ For the audience watching this sequence develop, that the criminals’ choice has been made is guaranteed by their appearance and location—outside, looking in—as much as by their actions. When they break the windows and enter, guns blazing, firing blindly into this well-lit office, it confirms what the viewers already know. How realist form distinguishes fiction and non-fiction emerges from how the title sequence for Bullitt uses the ‘objective realism’ common to narrative elaboration to produce uncertainty and ambivalence at all levels of its construction in a way that contrasts dramatically with the stable realism of the main narrative that follows. Yet the unreality of both sequences is unified by the moral ambiguities of crime. This thematic concern in the fabula, made possible only by changing the focus of this mystery from “who dunnit?” (ascertaining guilt) to “why did they do it?” (identifying motive) also defines the opening dual arrangements of text-masks and montage. The shift from discourse to causality draws the audience into the same role as the detective, making the recognitions of narrative comparable to the discovery process the fabula presents. The cut that marks the transition between sections [1] and [2] brings these doublings and instabilities of ‘realist fiction’ into consciousness precisely because it (re)assigns what is a non-narrative, discursive opening to the gaze of the criminals in the same way that the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane becomes a point-of-view presentation as watched by the unseen characters seated in the screening room. Because these beginnings are essential to the progression of the story, the transformation of discourse into diegesis is immediate. ‘Realist fiction’ demonstrates narrative structure can adjust, assimilate, accommodate any presentation on-screen within the relay of cause–effect structures (i.e., story and plot). The complexity of this shift is something that only becomes apparent on reflection—the modal change happens autonomously as a product of interpretive fluency—unpacking it is difficult because it results from how narrative, realism, and découpage converge and intermingle to create the ‘transparency’ of cinematic articulation in such a way as to make its presentation appear necessary and inevitable; naturalism renders ideology immanent. The moralizing about crime that is contained by the organization of Bullitt becomes a pervasive, implicit ideology whose distinction between fantasy and ‘the real’ via naturalism (and the denial of stylization) is simultaneously their guarantee of “objectivity.”

148 Objectivity

Notes 1 Barnard, T. Découpage (Toronto: Caboose Books, 2014), p. 7. 2 Eco, U. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 91–93. 3 Sternberg, M. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 8. 4 Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. and Thompson, K. The Classical Hollywood Cinema (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 43–44. 5 Holland, J. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Reading: Perseus Books, 1995), p. 53. 6 Eco, U. “Interpreting Serials” The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), pp. 88–99. 7 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. 8 Henderson, B. “The Structure of Bazin’s Thought” Film Quarterly vol. 25, no. 4 (Summer, 1972), pp. 23–24. 9 Bordwell, D. Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 66, 160. 10 Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. and Thompson, K. The Classical Hollywood Cinema (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1985). 11 Bordwell, D. Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 53. 12 Bordwell, D. Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 53. 13 Eco, U. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 84–84. 14 Gunning, T. “The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity” Yale Journal of Criticism vol. 7, no. 2 (Fall, 1994), p. 190. 15 Altman, R. “General Introduction: Cinema as Event” Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 2–4. 16 Eisenstein, S. “Form and Content: Practice” The Film Sense trans. J. Leyda (NewYork: Harvest/ HBJ, 1975), pp. 157–216. 17 Lotman, J. Semiotics of Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1976), pp. 29–30. 18 Stanitzek, G. “Texts and Paratexts in Media” Critical Inquiry no. 32 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 27–42. 19 Barthes, R. S/Z: An Essay (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 14. 20 Auden,W. H. “The Guilty Vicarage” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (NewYork:Vintage, 1968), p. 158. 21 Deleuze, G. Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 70–71. 22 Deleuze, G. Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 19. 23 Deleuze, G. Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 7–8. 24 Deleuze, G. Cinema 2:The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 25. 25 Eisenstein, S. Film Form trans. J. Leyda (New York: HBJ, 1949), p. 34. 26 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 81. 27 Deleuze, G. Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 70–71. 28 Barthes, R. “Myth Today” Mythologies (New York: Noonday Press, 1970), pp. 37–39.

5

Persuasion in The Kingdom (2007)

Answering the question What makes a documentary seem real? brings ‘objective realism’ into its a central role in ‘documentary reality.’ Disentangling its objective claims to describe reality from the assumptions of photographic indexicality (and ontology) establishes the articulation of ‘documentary reality’ as a particular mode of objective, indexical cinematic realism in contradistinction to the indexical-but-subjective ‘metaphysical reality,’ and the artificial presentations of being-fictional in ‘realist fiction’ (objective) or ‘unreal fantasy’ (subjective). These considerations of indexicality, their paradoxes of ontology, and cinematic realism’s nature as an ‘event’ all demonstrate a central role for enculturation in the relationship between any motion picture and ‘the real,’ problematizing any assertion of an essential truth or innate documentary nature for motion pictures. When indexical claims to being-factual are presented as ‘documentary reality,’ i.e., are explicitly understood by their audience to be statements about ‘the real,’ they automatically demand an identification of the work as discursively factual and entirely unlike the artificial presentations of ‘realist fiction.’ Documentary media can include not just live action footage, but also stills, animated graphics, and may even contain fabricated restagings of events—as in the films of documentarian Trinh T. Minh-ha, and the many productions shown on television, making the title sequence for The Kingdom (2007) designed by Stephan Burle typical of these constructions. Its use of indexicality to assert its ‘documentary reality’ matches that used in the ‘metaphysical reality’ created by the titles for The Number 23; both designs employ familiar facts about ‘the real,’ but each articulates a different claim about that reality— the audience’s modal understanding of these indexical claims separates the objective/ naturalist presentation from the elaboration of a subjective/stylized “reality of the mind.” However, a uniform appeal to existing knowledge unites The Kingdom and The Number 23. Understanding indexicality as a specific product of discourse reveals the constructive nature of claims to being-factual: it uses readers’ established “competence in language as a social treasury”1 noted by Umberto Eco. Contra-Bazin, cinema is not a scientistic process making discoveries about the world: what are understood to be valid (truthful) statements about ‘the real’ do not depend on any essential ontological relationship. The presentation does not need to resemble the “mere appearances” of everyday reality because the audience already knows it makes informationally factual statements about that reality, showing that past knowledge is the definitional feature for all interpretations, especially indexical claims to being-factual made in both subjective and objective realist

150 Objectivity modes. This marked difference between objectivity and subjectivity is obvious in The Number 23 as the irrationality of the movements and the paranoia they evoke, their stylization, while the familiarity of the facts presented asserts them as documentary proofs for a “realism of the mind.” There is no paradox or contradiction in these claims to ‘the real.’ What distinguishes between the artifice of stylization (‘metaphysical reality’) and the abstraction of an informational graphic or chart (‘documentary reality’) is not an issue of formal design or organization, but whether the audience understands the presentation as corresponding to a familiar ordering of reality (objective), or as belonging to an idiosyncratic, even personal, conception of ‘the real’ (subjective). This estrangement between subjective and objective is always apparent to the audience as an immanent dimension of their discourse about the world. Title sequences make these interpretations self-evident: it is precisely the irrational, uncanny animation of letters/numbers in The Number 23 that separates it from the kinetic animations and photo illustrations in the animated documentary that opens The Kingdom. Audience expectations about reality occupy a central place in these indexical claims. Discourse (ideology) defines a motion picture as making claims to being-factual, even if they are later recognized as false: invalid, untruthful, fictional, propagandistic. Thus, the first thing ‘documentary reality’ must persuade its audience about is the reliability of what it contains: that its indexical claims are trustworthy examples of beingfactual. This need is a constant. The opening titles for The Kingdom are composed from a series of lengthy, continuous sequences that proceed almost without editing, yet are simultaneously composed from what are recognizably independent, diverse archival materials, which are synthesized into a continuous, unbroken progression on-screen.The discursive, animated timeline presents its “evidence” via shifts between still/movement in photo illustrations—a realism that offers the “mere appearances” of everyday life, but contains them in demonstrations that begin as live action stills, but start moving in sync with cues provided by the voice-over [Figure 5.5]. This digital collage allows the edits that are otherwise absolutely necessary to disappear, and its unitary progression defies the parts’ origins in/as archival footage—they behave as if they were the component scenes in a continuous long take, even though they clearly are not. Assimilating all the various archival shots, graphics, audio, and texts into an almost continuous progression revels in the synthetic nature of its own construction, while at the same time demanding the recognition of the discrepancy between Bazin’s claims for a photographic indexicality and the fluid, combinatory nature of digital cinema.This distinction between the indexical claims in ‘documentary reality’ and Bazin’s ontological argument about ‘photographic indexicality’ emerges through the role of the photo illustration that complements the voice-over narration: it is clearly assembled and deployed using digital systems, eliminating the possibility of its understanding through Bazin’s ontology precisely because even when there are photographic elements, their placement, handling, and role within this title sequence challenges any autonomous ontological claim the ‘event’ might have to being “re-presented, made present in time and space.”2 The self-evident construction reminds the viewer that all computer graphics exist as products of calculation; how we produce and interact with them as motion pictures is implemented via algorithm, rendering that virtual data as apparent photo-reality. This recognition challenges traditional conceptions of photographic indexicality and its assumptive ontological links by

Persuasion in The Kingdom

151

displacing the photographic as the fundamental element of motion pictures. There is no pretextual claim that this sequence is not a product of digital animation/compositing, but at the same time, it is unquestionably an example of ‘documentary reality’ arranged and presented on-screen to relay facts about ‘the real,’ and whose claims to being-factual are not in doubt. The sense of paradox that this recognition of digital fabrication can produce ‘documentary reality’ reflects the dominance of photographic indexicality as the historical mediator for claims of being-factual; it does not arise while watching the sequence itself. ‘Documentary reality’ allows the audience to conceive of the presentation-foraudience as a conventional surrogate for their own, direct encounter no matter what technology produces it. The information being presented is the point of interest in their engagement.The articulation of ‘documentary reality’ in The Kingdom emerges from how the audience understands its objective indexicality as resulting from an invoked relationship to their past experience and established knowledge—as enculturation—rather than by demonstrating an underlying natural necessity. Whether these shots actually depict what the voice-over states (as well as their truthfulness) is an entirely different issue from the indexical claim they make—that they identify ‘the real.’ Truth is and must be entirely separate from those statements presenting it—the confusion of message and medium invites the same convergent fallacy apparent in Bazin’s connection of indexicality to ontology. On-screen depictions of ‘events’ discursively become the reality they show, not because of an ontological basis in ‘the real,’ but because the audience understands their naturalism as developing in the on-screen presentation as a conventional prosthetic vision. Thus recalling the discrepancies between indexical claims and Bazin’s argument about photography for the claims of ‘documentary reality’ reveals no set of formal protocols will produce a greater “documentary effect” than any other: they contradict the tendency to define the indexicality of non-fiction by focusing on formalism, the same ontological caprice that effaces the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction. Belief in photographic indexicality mistakes the cultural construct “naturalism” (and its role in the ‘event’ nature of motion pictures’ apperception) for an ontological demonstration of ‘the real.’ The Kingdom title sequence counters this ontological belief via the shift from animation into still/motion photo illustration that makes the artifice of these combinations of graphics and photography immediately apparent. This formal acknowledgment undermines Bazin’s photographic ontology without displacing the parallel indexical claim to being-factual: the “documentary” identification is not necessarily attached to the ‘event’ (denotation) as Bazin’s ontology demands, but reflects its significance (discourse) as a statement concerning ‘the real’ instead, which ironically was his purpose for restricting editing.3 That the audience accepts the information presented in this design as beingfactual establishes the validity of its association with what appears in reality (i.e., the ‘objective realism’ of denotation in the photo illustrations). Precisely this connection between the representation on-screen and an a priori knowledge of reality defines the discourse of being-factual. Indexicality arises, in part, from the audience’s recognition and acceptance of naturalistic articulation as an objective presentation, a conventional assertion for documentary media which claims the information shown has an authoritative, factual relationship to ‘the real,’ but always depends on their past experience and encultured expertise. ‘Documentary reality’ establishes itself as a reliable source of

152 Objectivity information about everyday reality in two ways: first as the immanent presentation itself, through naturalism’s objective semblance to a conventionally abstracted set of everyday experiences and, simultaneously, in those aspects of the presentation that the audience already knows that act to revalidate the unfamiliar elements as being-factual. The photo illustrations in The Kingdom title sequence produce an explicitly self-conscious elaboration that draws attention to its own articulation and discourse, yet this opening sequence paradoxically depends on articulating its own ideological basis to render its indexicality immanent, a transfer that depends on naturalism to achieve its independence from the clearly subjective, ideological articulations of ‘metaphysical reality.’ The two effects are entangled, mutually reinforcing processes. The naturalist presentation in both animations and live action in The Kingdom title sequence minimizes the unfamiliar distortions of subjectivity, such as the irrationally animated lettering of The Number 23, allowing it to integrate the live action ‘shots’ with the graphic animations that contain/introduce them, creating its ‘documentary effect’ by asserting these photos as illustrations of familiar knowledge derived from everyday life. Reflexivity serves as a guarantor of its claims on ‘the real’ rather than as a refutation of them. The objectivity in this title sequence derives from those selfevidently animated constructions whose resemblance to apparently live action footage makes it possible to pretend that they are a surrogate for actual experiences, equivalent to what viewers might see for themselves, while realizing their role is artificial. This acknowledgment escapes the “subjectivity trap” posed by ignoring the inevitable role of ideology in documentaries, allowing the audience to engage the information presented without having to interrupt their engagement by considering its ideological basis; its inherently ideological enframing is irrelevant to the designation of ‘documentary reality,’ a moot point. Unlike ‘metaphysical reality’ that depends on the schizoid duplicity of indexical claims that are at the same time subjective (as in The Number 23), the objective ‘documentary reality’ offered at the start of The Kingdom employs a naturalistic acknowledgment of its own articulation—the shifts between stillness and motion in the photo illustrations—to recognize/deny its necessarily artificial construction by demonstrating it. Making the construction obvious counters the critical objection before it emerges. At the same time, appeals to the technical apparatus of cinematography as the guarantor of a documentary facticity, the unseen camera presumed to be responsible for what appears on-screen, gives the acknowledgment of this apparatus the superficial appearance of an inevitable result, rather than recognizing it as a specific product of highly specialized and precisely controlled conditions that include not only the apparatus itself, but also the design of its optics, the mediating effects of chemistry, and the artifice of lighting the shot (at a minimum) for historical cinema to achieve its “autonomous” naturalism in the same acknowledgment of construction that happens in The Kingdom. However, the self-referential acknowledgment in The Kingdom when the still starts moving has a different quality than a formal emphasis on the ‘unmediated’ presentations typical of the documentary work of Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker’s direct cinema or Jean Rouch’s cinéma vérité, where self-conscious production becomes a marker for the reality of their découpage in a doubled assertion of indexicality–ontology that reflects the same assumptions as Bazin’s theory but

Persuasion in The Kingdom

153

transforms the artificial nature of motion pictures into evidence for a natural link to reality. The artifice of cinema finds application within this method as another turn in the spiral of fabrication and assembly that defines the coded assertions of Bazin’s arguments for photographic indexicality. Showing camera crews and production personnel does not undermine the ‘documentary reality’ of their presentation, but it may counter the articulation of a self-contained fictional world, as at the conclusion of The Holy Mountain. This revelation of artifice substitutes one diegesis for another, reflexive production that shows its own processes as just an additional aspect of the denotation on-screen; the processes themselves are necessarily anterior to the screening, hidden and unseen because they have already occurred. Distinct from these historical assertions of artifice, this title sequence proceeds as a self-evident recognition of the ‘degree zero’ of cinema-as-animation by fusing digital animation and live action archival footage to create a uniform presentation whose naturalism is reflexively presented but retains an ‘objective’ character. The animated graphics of the “timeline” that moves from left to right and the archival shots of Saudi Arabia in the twentieth century have been fused into a continuous, digital composite. This integration gives the text::image relationships the mutually supporting structure of a calligram that reinforces their unity of message.4 Persuasion is central to this construction: text, image, and voice-over narration function as a singular statement of the entangled political and economic history of oil between the United States and Saudi Arabia. This opening provides essential narrative backstory to the fictional narrative that follows. Their redundancy of meaning establishes their indexical claim to factuality through its collage of familiar historical events (such as World War II, the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, the 1970s oil embargo, and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001) combined with less familiar and unfamiliar material that becomes credible through its juxtaposition and relationship to this already-known information. The transformations between graphics and live action, synchronized with audible cues, renders these indexical claims as factuality in a continuous series of animation progressions without editing. The combination of text–image–voice-over informs and directs attention to produce a consistently causal explanation of this progression of familiar historical events. The sequence concerned with the OPEC oil embargo in the 1970s is typical of this interplay between archival footage and animated graphics. It proceeds as a series of complex calligrams built from animated movements around a 3-D animated gas station that becomes a set of graphics that include a wide range of things—bottles, cars, trucks, and airplanes—with simple, recognizable outlines recalling the ISO icons familiar from airports [Figure 5.1]. The precise start of this sequence in the documentary is difficult to mark because the entire opening proceeds as a continuous unfolding. Shifts between animated graphics and photo illustrations punctuate the articulation of facts, creating a rhythmic alternation between diagrammatic and archival materials. There are misleading aspects to this discourse. It does not differentiate between the conflicts between Israel and the Arab countries Egypt, Jordan and Syria who fought the “Arab-Israeli War” or “Six-Day War” (June 5–10, 1967) and the role of oil in the Egyptian and Syrian attacks on Israel during the “1973 Arab-Israeli War” or “Yom Kippur War” (October 6–25, 1973) in which Egypt recaptured territory lost in 1967,

154 Objectivity

Figure 5.1 Selected stills showing the sequence addressing the “Oil Crisis” in the 1970s in The Kingdom (2007), designed by Stephan Burle.

and which ultimately forced Israel to withdraw from its occupation of the Suez Canal. This second engagement began the “Oil Crisis” that lasted from October 16, 1973, to March 17, 1974, as OPEC attempted to use the price of oil to influence Israel’s European and American allies to withdraw material support during the war. The discussion of the 1970s identifies the US support for Israel during both conflicts, alluding

Persuasion in The Kingdom

155

to it through a graphic change to the US flag where one five-pointed star has been replaced with a six-pointed star, evoking the Israeli flag. The series of archival shots that follow this graphic show the King of Saudi Arabia, followed by a montage of hands counting money. The implication of this montage is that the embargo was also a business action, not political, even though the war was central. The same on-screen text stating “1973 OIL EMBARGO” is superimposed throughout this initial section as a voice-over explains the embargo: “Those who control the flow of oil hold the western world hostage” followed by a CGI gas pump integrated with the text “NO GAS.” The voice-over becomes an audio collage: a female voice says, “prices quadruple,” followed by a male voice stating, “oil was an American national security priority.” For all the apparent elaboration of causality, this sequence is typical of the entire opening in presenting “facts” whose larger political context diminishes during the presentation. The series of movements, transitions between types of footage, and audible instructions serve to create complex calligrams on-screen: the result offers an illusion that the conflicts in this region are simply social frictions between capitalism, religion, and Modernism—a transformation that changes war, political struggles, and religious differences into merely superficial conflicts motivated by financial concerns. This verbal information synchronizes with a zoom in on a graphic of a US fighter plane that changes into a live action shot of that plane in flight. This connection of speech to written language to photo illustrations renders them as equivalents, each asserting the dominance of language over the visual through the process of naming and identifying, a mutually beneficial construct where each testifies to the other’s factuality: this series of associations has an already-known basis that draws from established knowledge about the “Gas Crisis” in the 1970s to assert the reality, not of the credits that are interspersed within this documentary, but that of the documentary itself—distinguishing it from the naturalism in the drama that follows. Synchronization develops a synergistic meaning through the statement made in synchronizing text and visuals linked with the soundtrack. The “natural” linkages created by the ‘documentary reality’ of the calligram combined with the synchronization of text-to-speech entangles the connotative meanings associated with language with the ideological content in an elaboration of a complex articulation about ‘the real.’ The voice-over is the cue to understanding this title sequence as being-factual. It proposes an intertextual structure beyond just the integrated live action shots and clips of historical footage to provide an associative connection that gives this assemblage of diverse materials a secondary indexical claim. Even though everything visual is fluently integrated into a seamless progression, the fragmentation of the audio (it has the affect of a collage from multiple sources) serves as a demonstration of archival sourcing. The soundtrack thus counters the artifice of the imagetrack by allowing the acknowledgment of its artificial, constructed nature without necessarily undermining its claims to being-factual; instead, the collection of audio clips serves as another level of the same demonstrative acknowledgment of assembly that produces the ‘documentary effect’ through its suggestion of historical materials, rather than the novel creations of fictional narratives. The double articulation of text::image, and reinforced by the voice-over, gives this assertion of being-factual its validity. Everything named in the calligram mode is on view,

156 Objectivity

Figure 5.2 Selected stills showing calligram mode title cards that connect footage of the actors with their names in the title sequence for The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936).

conventionally presenting a coincident instruction that exploits the traditional doubling of image/text that is the title sequence, but instead of addressing actors and the production, it develops these indexical links to reality as declarations of ‘fact’ in the same way that actors and their names are demonstrations of ‘fact’ in historical title sequences such as The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936) [Figure 5.2]. Philosopher Michel Foucault describes this dynamic of reading::seeing as an opposition that subordinates depiction to language, imposing a semiotic order on perception: The calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read. Pursuing its quarry by two paths, the calligram sets the most perfect trap. By its double formation, it guarantees capture, as neither discourse alone, nor a pure drawing could do.5 The enculturation that enables these transfers between text::image begins with the calligrams in elementary readers for young children where text and image serve as mutual illustrations, and whose validity are never put into question. The picture of an apple accompanied by the text “A is for Apple” makes their interchangeable understanding immanent, but also provides an essential training in the relationship between depiction and lexical form, enculturating these links as unquestionable assertions of factuality— which The Kingdom exploits in turning ideology into immanence. It trains readers to read the words first and then look for confirmation of the words in the pictures, a directing of attention that creates meaning in their union.This encultured order disappears as a commonplace articulation of mutually reinforcing meanings. The authority of this structure depends on this cultural role in education; its application to The Kingdom establishes the indexical claims that are then developed beyond this simple convergence. In engaging

Persuasion in The Kingdom

157

with media, the audience makes a proximate choice to suspend disbelief, which distinguishes this opening to a fiction film from the narrative that follows. Their consideration of these titles as making a series of factually reliable statements about the real depends on this initial decision. Although every title sequence is unquestionably constructed, the assemblage of texts, graphics, animations, and live action footage in The Kingdom does not proceed as self-referential acknowledgment of ideology, but as a self-evident declaration of being-factual: this composition normalizes ideology via a mixture of VFX, animation, and apparently historical footage. This factual recognition demonstrates its construction as originating within the archive, rather than in the fictive realm of dramatic staging, as a further assertion of factuality that denies its ideological basis. The initial graphic line that begins this title sequence becomes the representation of the passage of time, a timeline, whose dates are illustrated by photo/graphic and textual material while being explained by a voice-over that also employs apparently historical, archival materials in its construction. What appears on-screen is artificial, but the audience understands the information it conveys as being-factual. It persuades its audience of its validity not in a series of indexical claims based in photographic resemblance, but through the use of collage and assemblage to suggest archival sources for all the ‘events’ shown, suggesting that they happened precisely as the voice-over claims: the archival basis removes the need to authenticate precisely because of its anteriority—evident in its nature as quotation—that articulates its claims to being-factual. The non-documentary production credits recede into insignificance for this design—present, but also unimportant to the narrational elaboration of history. This displacement is significant since the pseudo-independent title sequence is always clearly demarcated in relation to the main narrative, yet at the same time, The Kingdom titles proceed as a preamble: the facts on display neither anticipate nor explicate the details of the fabula that follows. Unlike the ‘realist fiction’ of Bullitt, the opening to The Kingdom is not a narration of fictional events; it is a relay of facts whose ‘documentary reality’ is not in question because it mixes recognized and familiar information with novel materials whose indexical claims are accepted because of their continuity with the already known; it creates the same relational, mutually supporting context of articulation that establishes the range of texts contained in the title sequence for The Number 23 as being-factual. However, relegating the production credits to a different level of articulation contained in a series of overlaid, dark green bars that announces their independence from the background documentary allows the indexicality to become the primary focus of attention: the calligrams are all contained within this factual elaboration. This separation between credits and documentary-background establishes clear hierarchies and distinctions between different interpretive engagements used to understand the texts on-screen as-credits and as-documentary. Separating these articulations is essential since the credits in themselves are necessarily factual, while the documentary’s indexical claims are contingent on the audience’s acceptance. Their confinement in separate fields of consideration distinguishes the credits from the elaboration of the documentary and its assertion of being-factual. These parallel identifications stand in stark contrast to the clearly fabricated story that appears after these titles: this non-fictional introduction sets the stage for the fabula that follows.

158 Objectivity

Articulation and Enunciation in Collage The digital assemblage that creates an uninterrupted sequence of collaged elements has the same effect of continuous progression that is typical of the ‘long take,’ challenging the foundational assumption that archival materials retain their individual, unique character in an edited sequence. Both elements, individuality and montage, come into question with The Kingdom title sequence. Although each of the distinct sources asserts its own identity within this assemblage of discrete “pieces,” and each is arranged and offered as a material fragment that construction suggests is found footage; at the same time, its integration within a constant, seamless unit proposes these individual parts as depicting a chronologically continuous series of histories; it does not make claims, but collects them from existing sources. Their arrangement elides the cuts between the pieces, asserting their reassembly as a new, developmental account: the issue is not its factuality or fictionality, but how the recognition of these archival materials as archival emerges from the assembly of collage. This use of digital compositing eschews editing, revealing an historical assumption about cinema that is both so utterly obvious and so completely necessity that it passes entirely unnoticed: the concept of the ‘shot’ is central to the re-use of existing, archival materials. But there are few ‘shots’ here. A multifaceted activity of containment and integration distinguishes the articulation and enunciation of collage from the editorial role of the ‘shot’ in traditional montage. Historical cinema has explicitly been a combination of discrete, independent shots, each of which is a compartmentalized unit whose assembly together in series creates a sequence from a progression of distinct parts; only the ‘long take’ and animated films have questioned this fragmentation as an essential limit on the elaboration of motion pictures prior to digital cinema. The discussion of the compounds where American workers live in Saudi Arabia is typical of this integration and transformation of editing: the photo illustrations have the same artificial quality as the rest of the collage—a translucent, immaterial appearance that does not suggest the physicality of things-in-the-world but the luminous display of archival materials brought forth to demonstrate some point before being put away again [Figure 5.3]. There are cuts within the quoted collection of archival shots; however, these edits happen within the animated containment into- and out ofthe quotational sections. Editing becomes a sign of archival sources, rather than the assembly of the collage itself. It establishes these shots as having a different status, one that suggests their archival basis demonstrates their indexicality: these changes of shot are integrated into digital compositing of the “archival footage.” The edits are special markers within an otherwise continuous progression whose contingent visualization gives their meaning its artificial nature: these shots could be from anywhere, produced at any time, yet the audience accepts them as-being documentary, as evidence only because they have been subsumed into the collage as objects complete with their own internal montage distinct from the sequence itself. It contains their editing as a archival artifact distinct from its own assembly. The difference between digital collage and historical cinema has two converging factors, cost and technology, that truncate its development.The early animator Émile Cohl’s work demonstrated the potential for a collage approach to realist articulations prior to

Persuasion in The Kingdom

159

Figure 5.3 Selected stills showing archival footage of Americans living in Saudi Arabia in The Kingdom (2007), designed by Stephan Burle.

World War I. The fusions of animation and live action in his films, such as The Next Door Neighbors (1909) or The Mysterious Fine Arts (1910), show that it has always been possible to create complex collages of animation, graphics, and live action that proceed as a continuous long take [Figure 5.4]. The limitations on the articulation and enunciation of collage imposed by the technical difficulty of these historical productions is also reflected

160 Objectivity

Figure 5.4 Selected stills from [Top] The Next Door Neighbors (1909), and [Bottom] The Mysterious Fine Arts (1910), both directed by Émile Cohl.

in their costs and other technical constraints, which have gradually vanished with the invention of newer, more precise, and cost-effective technologies. Film historian Raymond Fielding concluded the last edition of his extensive study The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography in 1984 with a brief discussion of what was then the immediate future—digital technology; yet those aesthetics concerned with photographic indexicality persists in defining the parameters of cinematic realism even though these challenges to established dogma were apparent long before they arrived. His prescient discussion makes the continuity between historical technologies and contemporary digital systems not only explicit, but also a foundational part of the digital tool’s design. The rupture of photographic indexicality is an easily anticipated consequence of the changes he describes: There is no question that the introduction and perfection of an electronic optical printer could theoretically revolutionize the process of composite cinematography and optical printing. In addition to all of the capabilities of a modern optical printer, such a system could be able to enhance photographic images, minimize grain, add color to black-and-white images or alter colors radically, multiply image elements to whatever extent desired, correct over- and under-exposure, and remove scratches or wires from within the picture area. It is even theoretically possible that such a device could separate designated foreground details out of the background without the need for blue-screen backings, and that computer software could be designed to accomplish this, more-or-less automatically, with a minimum of human instruction. With such a system, the images of expensive miniatures, set pieces, props, crowds, water and sky scenes, and the like might be ‘stockpiled’ and retrieved at will for use in new films! In theory, at least, all things are possible with such a system.6

Persuasion in The Kingdom

161

The range of possible manipulations Fielding foresees renders the digital image fluid and “plastic” in ways that photography is not, offering potential transformations that, while anticipated, have ramifications for established conceptions of “cinema” that were not obvious prior to their arrival. The hypothetical “electronic optical printer” he describes matches the capacities of contemporary digital compositing software exactly. The ability to manipulate, correct, and combine multiple ‘shots’ into a singular, seamless unit reveals the common ancestry of both motion graphics and visual effects in the specialized photographic and re-photographic processes Fielding describes. The articulation of that progression as well as the (dis)continuous nature of motion imagery reveals one of the paradoxes of perception: identification of ‘events’ on-screen as a formally “continuous unit” masks the interpretive role of the audience in understanding one sequence as “continuous” and another as “fragmentary” that defies the formal basis of this identification. It is not the discreteness of the components but their connections to each other that is central to this enunciative role. Any collection of discrete units arranged in a collage, as in the title sequence to The Kingdom, creates the same kind of continuous unfolding of ‘events’ as the extensively choreographed long take that opens Touch of Evil (1958) but differs from it entirely: The Kingdom is an assemblage, while Touch of Evil proceeds as an uninterrupted series of actions elaborately staged.Their continuity of depiction for their ‘events’ is a constant. The correlation of historical cinema to digital compositing arises in how the long take and collage converge via their continuous presentation of space-time in the ‘event’ shown on-screen; however, the three variants of long take reify a belief in cinema=narrative as essential and inevitable, masking this similarity: [1] the static shot organized in depth with multiple actions happening simultaneously, [2] the highly kinetic shot that moves through space, exploring it, and [3] a shot simply held for an extended time, in which duration is the primary focus.7 Bazin’s commentary in “The Evolution of Film Language” makes the long take’s objectivity into a narrative effect, an explicit function that confuses documentary form with reality and the dramatic fabula: For [the documentarian Robert] Flaherty, what is important about Nanook hunting a seal is his relationship with the animal, the real extent of his wait. Editing can suggest time; Flaherty simply shows us the wait. The length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true subject. In the film, this episode is thus composed in only one shot.8 This same durative encounter that defines the seal hunt in Nanook of the North (1922) also defines the opening to Touch of Evil where the audience waits for the bomb to explode, an action (emphasized by the final edit) that literally interrupts the continuous shot and the newlywed’s embrace: their blissful ignorance of what is happening around them dramatized by the frenetic activity that follows the interruption, clearly juxtaposed with the calm that came before.The audience literally knows the length of this shot, three minutes, because the film begins with the bomb’s timer being set. All that follows is overshadowed by the audience’s experience of waiting for the bomb to go off, which literally illustrates Bazin’s commentary on “showing us” the time through the continuous progression of the shot. Duration is content. This contiguity of time superficially has a different character

162 Objectivity than Burle’s design for The Kingdom, but it is precisely in how the uninterrupted progressions on-screen serve as an indexical demonstration that these otherwise very different openings achieve their realist encounter: continuity of action replaces the summary dimensions of montage with the presentational ‘event’ of watching an action progress and develop on-screen. This dramatization of the process appears in both film openings: in Touch of Evil, it is the waiting that accompanies the planted bomb, the process of its exploding is the subject demonstrated through the long take; in The Kingdom, digital collage asserts the continuity of history through the conceit of an animated timeline, visualizing events and relationships that we cannot see progress and develop under normal circumstances. Both sequences thus employ the effect of a continuous duration in the same specific way—they articulate a process of action that is not otherwise apparent via editing. The inertia normally ascribed to history, apparent in the teleological result that is the present, animates in a way that makes the present seem inevitable and natural, an unavoidable consequence of historical processes, thus rendering the relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia an unquestionable fact, not an ideological fabrication of how that history has been arranged/presented. Each of the three variants on continuity offers the same uninterrupted presentation, but has a distinct subject that is depicted on-screen, constraining their articulation in predictable ways, but developing from the same mandate of realist form that Bazin explains—the conception of the cinema as a prosthetic vision—whose basic assumption is that the ‘event’ appears on-screen without apparent modification. However, the range of techniques that Fielding describes in his study are all addressed to producing precisely these types of continuous ‘shots’ whose contents differ from profilmic actions. The cinematographer Linwood Dunn, who invented the optical printer, explains its use in creating the apparently continuous long takes of Citizen Kane (1941): I don’t think there are too many people around who know the extent of the effects work in Citizen Kane.There was a lot of modification of scenes during the editing and post-production phases. Once Orson Welles learned about the optical printer he just went hog-wild with it. Of course, that was great for me, since I got into things that I normally wouldn’t be doing.Welles had such autonomy on the show that I was able to get the support of the studio to give him anything he wanted. For instance, there is the famous shot where the camera goes up the side of a building, over the roof and through the skylight. Originally the shot went right up to the skylight and stopped and Welles said he didn’t want it to stop there. So we made the shot below the skylight, put some optical zooms and effects on it and in the finished film the camera appears to go through the skylight. In the scene in the opera house where the camera moves up to the flies,Welles wanted it to go much higher than it actually did. So at some point in the shot we made a travelling split screen and matted in a miniature. The shot went past the miniature and on to the scene above in the flies.9 These assemblages are invisible to the audience, who understand each shot as a continuous progression whose behavior allows an imaginary engagement with cinema as a prosthetic vision; the impossibility of these shots only accentuates the “magic” of cinema—it does not rupture it. Dunn’s comments reveal a formal reorganization of the ‘shot’

Persuasion in The Kingdom

163

through post-production, a process that has become increasingly common as the costs have decreased. Naturalism reconstructs space–time on-screen in ways that align with the everyday expectations of the audience.The obeisance to the imitation of life distinguishes the invisibility of the VFX shots Dunn describes from the self-evident assemblage of the opening to The Kingdom, a difference in expression that evokes the activity of information graphics rather than disappearing into the diegesis. Distinct from the role of ‘objective realism’ in fiction, where the photographic presentation imitates the audience’s experiential engagement with the world, the combination of elements in ‘documentary reality’ via collage offers a different presentation that visualizes what are unseen relationships that can be made visible only through the artifice of composited animation. Historical conceptions of ‘the shot’ as the fundamental unit of cinema (the building block of montage)10 makes the assumptions of this link between ontology and the indexical claim into the innate association of ‘event’ with the claim of being-factual. Separating indexicality from ontology for documentary forms within narrative, fictional cinema defines fundamental articulations and enunciations of realism. The familiar conception of the ‘shot’ makes this linked indexicality–ontology an implicit feature of its semiosis, as semiotician Jurij Lotman noted.11 This coincidence of ‘the shot’ with its depiction (the ‘event’ on-screen) makes the question of indexicality central to the ability to “speak of ” reality—Bazin’s ontology returns once again—as a set of entangled relationships whose separation is problematic for Lotman’s semiotics. This convergence renders the scope of an ‘event’ plastic, unstable. Découpage proceeds visually, by what is shown on-screen, audibly, by the contents of the soundtrack, or (most typically) in a combination of both elements; however, the implicit singularity of shot-conception in Lotman’s theory makes its coincidence with the ‘event’ it shows (denotation) inevitable: The shot as a discrete unit has a dual importance; it brings interruption and measurability into cinema-space and time. And, since both these concepts are measured, in film, by one unit—the shot—they are interrelated. Any pictures which in real life has spatial extension, can, in cinema, by constructed as a temporary sequence by breaking it up into shots and arranging them one after another.12 The ‘image object’ becomes indexically linked to its denoted contents.The same convergence of space–time that Bazin assumes reappears in Lotman as a transcription of reality into cinema. Thus formulated, the paradox of cinematic representation becomes apparent in the mismatch of movement-through-space for the depictive time of the ‘shot’ that creates the potential for fragmentation: the necessity for repetitions and ellipses in the translation between reality and representation opens up the encapsulation both Lotman’s and Bazin’s arguments assume, leaving the ‘event’ as a discrete articulation that paradoxically does/does not correspond to the individual shot. As découpage becomes montage, it entails a fragmentation of actions for their editorial re-assembly using conventional “continuity editing”—a process that typically involves the isolation and individuation of each ‘event’ not as a singular element, but rather a procession of pieces (shots) whose combination produces the apparent ‘event.’ The individual momentary “scenes” contained in the on-going progression of the long take in Touch of Evil are each neither more sharply articulated due to their place in time, nor would they be less significant if they

164 Objectivity appeared in a different cardinal order. It is the total encapsulation of time that is the subject of this opening, but that construction does not contradict Lotman’s analysis; rather, it sharpens it. What matters in naturalism is the appearance of the subject apart from any particular length or brevity, a question of what is being represented—and that attention to significance is where collage and the ‘long take’ reveal they are variations on the same higher-level mechanism of articulation, the ‘event,’ that allows realism to transform ideology into an immanent enunciation, beyond question as a trace of ‘the real.’ What defines the transformation of ‘shot’ to ‘event’ is a shift in comprehension that is masked by the ontological aspirations of cinematic depiction—the belief in photographic indexicality—that argue for an equivalence between denotation, the ‘shot,’ and the ‘event’ it creates on-screen. Convergences between these elements are obvious in the conventional editing structure of the shot/reverse shot arrangement employed in showing dialogue that fabricates a “singular event” from what is nevertheless a sequence of independent shots. This emergence of unity is the definitional result of “continuity editing.” Unlike the collection of independent action-stages within a long take that makes the convergence of shot/‘event’ seem natural, this compartmentalization replaces the singular shot with the composed sequence. The historical unity of event/shot assumes the three dimensions of shot construction identified by Lotman are an indivisible limit on articulation: [1] the perimeter that coincides with edges of the screen, [2] the capacity that describes the illusory volume or area of space shown on-screen, and [3] the sequentiality that identifies the connections between preceding and following shots.13 His cinema semiotics describes a realist modality completely masked by tangential concerns about cinema=narrative and its implicit ontological conception of photography: One of the most basic elements of the concept “shot” is the boundary of artistic space. Thus even before we define the concept of the shot, we can isolate the most essential fact: reproducing a visual and moveable image of life, cinematography subdivides it into segments. . . . The boundary of the shot is often defined as the line where one episode, photographed by the director, is spliced onto another.14 Lotman’s analysis of découpage, predicated on live action narrative cinema, has only a tenuous relevance for the animations and digitally composite collages of live action, photography, and graphics employed in the extended title sequence/documentary presentation that begins The Kingdom because this sequence suggests his tripartite limitations are inessential to cinema. There are few points that are unequivocally identical to his description of “shot” as a delineated selection; the “boundary of the shot” does not directly appear in this continuous progression of transformations and animorphs. That change produces a different semantics of découpage and assembly, one in which the photographic is merely one more element for animation/combination, rather than the privileged moment of cinematic articulation. This shift to continuous progression thorough a sequence is experientially similar to the long take; in place of montage, the process of assembly becomes collage, with its fabrication of an artificial continuity that effaces the traditional juxtapositions of editing. However, realist ideology remains constant in the artifice of this assembly, masking the compartmentalization of component-pieces. The change produces an entirely different set of relationships that are unlike traditional

Persuasion in The Kingdom

165

editing. The collage of discrete historical shots, new graphics, and animated typography in The Kingdom conspires to disguise its articulation and enunciation with the indexical claim of being-factual. This denial of the formal process of découpage is typical for ‘documentary reality’ especially since it is predicated on masking both its construction and ideological content as naturalism. The elaborations of collage in The Kingdom proceed independently of dramatic, narrative constructions. The established conceptual apparatus of historical cinema predetermines realism as an analysis and articulation that rests upon the shot as the identification of “time” or “movement,” rather than a specific product of the viewer’s analytic encounter.This assumption is foundational for Giles Deleuze’s “movement-image,” an ironic disembodiment of interpretation that develops as a self-fulfilling contrast to montage, a dialectical opposition supplied by his theoretical construct and its organization around the shot: If the movement-image is assimilated to the shot, we call framing the first facet of the shot turned towards objects, and montage the other facet the whole. . . . Each movement-image expresses the whole that changes, as a function of the objects between which movement is established. The shot must therefore already be a potential montage, and the movement-image, a matrix or cell of time. From this point of view, time depends on movement itself and belongs to it: it may be defined, in the style of ancient philosophers, as the number of movement. Montage will therefore be a relation of number, variable according to the intrinsic nature of the movements considered in each image, in each shot. A uniform movement in the shot appeals to a simple measure, but varied and differential movements to a rhythm; intensive movements proper (like light and heat) to a tonality, and the set of all the potentialities of a shot, to a harmony. Hence Eisenstein’s distinctions between a metrical, rhythmic, tonal and harmonic montage. . . . If normal movement subordinates the time of which it gives us an indirect representation, aberrant movement speaks up for an anteriority of time that it presents to us directly, on the basis of the disproportion of scales, the dissipation of centers and the false continuity of the images themselves.15 The denotated ‘image object’ is a given; découpage appears without constructive mediation. The linearity of this logic is only betrayed by its assumption that the ‘event’ contained by the shot is a singularity that ignores the role of the audience’s interpretive encounter, and in being organized in this way, the facticity of shot as the container for these units is also a given—accepting an ‘event’ as being-factual is the same as deciding what it depicts is real. This initial decision separates the objectivity of ‘documentary reality’ from ‘realist fiction’ in a demonstration of how fundamental the indexical claim is for the distinction between being-factual and being-fictional. The ‘event’ defines specific contents (visual, kinetic, audible) appearing within the motion picture; the audience experiences its progression as a continuous, immediate happening on-screen both immanent to the sound::image unit and emerging in its temporality.16 Title sequences such as The Kingdom create a specific history via their articulation and enunciation using archival materials, animated designs, and information graphics. The “time” Deleuze discusses is not the material time of perception that is linked to the mechanical progression of clocks

166 Objectivity and proceeds irreversibly forward, but to the interpreted “time” connected to the narrative significance of events contained on-screen. His analysis creates mutually exclusive dualisms that entangle the encounter and its significance, the denotation and the audience’s understanding of it (connotation). The scope of an ‘event’ is plastic, unstable, not limited to only the “live action” of traditional dramatic cinema; this ideological reification includes animation and motion graphics as well as the fusion of these elements.The magic of movies has always been that the audience can see itself as a “witness to history,” as the events are there to be seen, unfolding in real time and happening on-screen without any of the dangers that come from actually being present, a simulacrum of actuality, but lacking its vicissitudes. The duality of Deleuze’s analysis is apparent in his other term, “time,” that complements “movement,” making the comingling and convergence of the parallax between encounter and encountered seem natural and essential. This implicit decision is the fundamental action required for the conscious acceptance the information presented: an embrace of realism that validates its ideological contents, thus changing them from “ideology” (a false representation of ‘the real’) into its proof.These connections between indexicality and ideology unmask the naturalism of ‘documentary reality’ as being functionally identical to ‘realist fiction,’ separated only by their audience’s decision to consider one as demonstrative of reality (being-factual) and the other as imaginary or illusory, divergent from reality (being-fictional).These separations are obvious, even mundane; the audience makes them without consideration. Acknowledging their instrumental role in the indexical claims advanced through the collage assemblage allows a recognition of realism as the essential feature of their construction. The ‘documentary reality’ of the title sequence to The Kingdom (2007) depends on exactly this identification of facticity to avoid identification as an ideologically inflected work of propagandistic fiction. Boundaries between ‘events’ are marked in ways that correspond neither to the edges of the frame, nor to the start or conclusion of a shot, but to the extent of the ‘event’ in itself. This essential technological rendering is typically invisible to the work, masked by its inherent role in the higher-level organizations of imagery, montage, and sequence that organize articulation and enunciation. What Deleuze calls the “false continuity of the images themselves” is the emergence of movement from the rapid presentation of frames on-screen; it is the “internal time” of the ‘event.’ This duration, emergent in the presentation-for-audience, but contained by individual sequences, is maintained across discrete shots (continuity editing), and in the uninterrupted unities created by the collage assemblage. However, his designation of this movement as “false” is an error: as Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks argue in their article “Movies in the Mind’s Eye,” the apparent movement of motion pictures should be understood as a mental process: the movement we see when watching a movie—whether in the form of a film or a video tape—is more than simply the illusion of motion, it is perceptually as real as any other perceived visual motion—there can be no separation of object seen from its interpretation. The process of human interpretation is the important factor in organizing the morphology and structure of the perceptual encounter into a coherent understanding of the world: A continuous motion in the world is, of course, captured by successive displayed images on film (or their video equivalent). For most events, these displacements

Persuasion in The Kingdom

167

are small, and within the range of the low-level sensory receptors of the visual system; these respond identically to the visual displacements on the screen and to the differences provided from one moment to the next by smooth physical motion in the world.17 Hochberg and Brooks, following the proposals of gestalt psychology, identify human perception as relying on a uniform underlying process where all visual phenomena are encountered in the same way.This identification of perception as part and basis for enunciation and articulation in motion pictures is readily apparent in even Deleuze’s analysis; however, unlike the textual statements (described by parole and langue) in lexia, the markers defining the enunciations specific to cinema are not linguistic (except in a metaphoric sense): the visual displacements appearing in a motion picture are engaged in the same ways that all immanent motions are, without distinguishing their empirical causes. Photographs “arrest” motion in a single consistent and complete frame whose displacements that create motion lie between frames.18 Digital technology models the same visual displacements contained by the intermittent photographs of celluloid using different means, thus retaining the same fundamental articulation and enunciation, yet in these otherwise divergent technologies, the audience’s sensory encounter creates the same identification of motion without distinguishing its technological and empirical causes; as Hochberg and Brooks argue, the resulting apparent motion is real in perceptual terms. This is why photographs are completely (and fundamentally) different than human perception, and the “time” of cinema is an interpretive construct that does not entirely correspond to the actual clock-time duration of ‘events’ shown, while the apparent motion of movies depends on these earlier encounters with real, empirically immanent motion. Naturalism identifies how the technologies of motion pictures were all devised specifically to create a convergence between depiction and experience—the realist ideology that aspires to an ontological proof of ‘the real’—and the assemblage of collage exploits these links to transform its varied archival sources into a continuous, uniform claim to being-factual as the “documentary effect” of non-fiction productions. Contrasting this understanding of movement by neuroscience as an active product of interpretation is the philosophy of “movement” proposed by Henri Bergson that Deleuze adapted and that informs his analysis. It is an understanding whose problematics for the collage approach are obvious. The chapter “Thought and Cinema” in Cinema 2:The TimeImage describes the motion of motion pictures as disembodied, a conception Deleuze links to early cinema: Those who first made and thought about the cinema began from a simple idea: cinema as industrial art achieves self-movement, automatic movement, it makes movement the immediate given of the image. This kind of movement no longer depends on a moving body or an object that realizes it, nor on a spirit which reconstitutes it. It is the image which moves in itself.19 The appeal of such a traditional understanding—cinema as movement without bodies—to Deleuze’s psychoanalytic theories of dis/embodiment, of the human body as apparatus and machinery, does not change the fundamental error of these claims,

168 Objectivity even historically: concerns with kinetics are common to most early concerns with the “cinematic,” they do not dismiss the audience from the construction, but rather draw attention to the pleasure to be had from watching movements in ways that are not always apparent to normal, everyday human vision. Soviet theorists such as Dziga Vertov inflected this approach politically (the Kino-Eye) to claim these projections were not only real but also revelations of an otherwise hidden reality demonstrative of Marxist dialectics.20 The fluid, continuous reconstruction of motion by the assemblage of digital collage belongs to this heritage, is its return to, rather than a deviation from, it as Deleuze’s analysis suggests. Articulation and enunciation are chronic questions: they play out over a specific time frame, they describe elements placed and appearing in a particular sequence—as the Soviet montage filmmakers discovered, to change the sequence of ‘shots’ is to turn one motion picture into another, even if the shots composing them remain the same. Everything cannot happen at once as film historian David Bordwell explains in The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Editing is productive of the paired distinction between [1] the material découpage (the collection of shots, mise-en-scène, montage/editing and composited text, and VFX) that the audience organizes into explanations of cause–effect descriptive of the narrative (syuzhet), and [2] the audience’s higher-level explanation of these sequences as plot or story (fabula).21 His assumption of cinema=narrative constrains his observations, but the ‘event’ on display is the denotative contents appearing on-screen. ‘Objective realism’ allows the pretext of an ontologically linked recording—Bazin’s photographic indexicality and dispositif—while découpage arises in the formal elements Bordwell terms “style” and which the audience interprets as “narration.” The changed technological basis of digital motion pictures creates potentials for continuous progressions of events without editing or traditional breaks required by the materially limited nature of physical film, and yet these changes to the appearance of work do not necessarily alter the audience’s understanding of its articulation. Narrative connection in historical cinema is a conventional linkage between one shot and the next that the audience understands as causality explaining ‘events.’22 These decisions define cinematic narrative through emergent intratextual relations within and between individual shots—either as a continuous progression of events on-screen (as in both the long take and the collage of digital assembly) or through the relational assumptions produced by editing (the conjunctions that define montage). The synchronized interplay between graphic, photography, and text that creates the collage in The Kingdom offers an indexical claim to reality through an almost continuous progression of ‘events’ that are rarely linked through the familiar structures of montage or even simple edits. The shifts throughout the photo/ graphic presentations are a constant reminder of this sequence’s artificial source in digital compositing and animation, yet understanding these elements as being-factual creates a powerful documentary effect that introduces the narrative which follows, allowing its elaboration as a fictional account of factual socio-political concerns drawn from reality. The assertions of the archival nature of the various elements fused into this collage happen at several distinct levels: the fragmentation and collaged voices heard as voice-over narration, the containment of photographic materials within the animation, and the doubling of text–voice repetitions throughout the title sequence. All the higher-level persuasive affects depend on the indexical claim about what is presented in these titles are not just realistic, but journalistic, an explanatory

Persuasion in The Kingdom

169

presentation of reliable information about the world. The ‘event’ (visual, kinetic, audible) for historical cinema makes an indexical claim via the ontology of photography— immanent in the sound::image unit and emerging in its temporality a singular unit whose connection to ‘the real’ is self-evident.23 This understanding of the ‘event’ confuses its realism with reality, conceiving of them as interchangeable. The fallacy arises precisely in the nature of the presentation and the role of cinematic realism: what appears on-screen is not merely a depiction, anterior to its exhibition, it is also an immanent encounter, unfolding and progressing in time for the audience whose viewing is not a remembered action, but immediate. The correspondence between naturalism and the expectations of everyday experience (no less than the visualization of those subjective things that might exist only in imagination) collide with the nature of cinematic presentation exactly: the ‘event’ on-screen happens at the moment of its presentation, “right now,” during the screening. Its animation plays out over a specific, actual duration, no matter what the narrative function signifies within that motion picture. Thus, the tendency to conflate presentation-for-audience with encounters-inreality is paradoxical, since it is both an artificially mediated dramatization (diegesis/ representation) and an actual encounter with the motion picture in reality (an actual experience). The mode of naturalism is directed by an aspiration for resemblance, for the mimesis to become coincident with ‘the real,’ a connection that audience enjoys specifically as the aesthetic experience this system produces—the expression of an ideology it encapsulates. The indexical claims made in The Kingdom are announced through this manipulation of artifice versus reality, in the modulations between the photographic presentations of archival materials fused into a continuously unfolding set of actions. The initial “jump” from the timeline into a static picture of Arabian riders that then animates [as in Figure 5.5] is a shift in kind, but not in significance: this first photo illustration is part of a singular, synchronized statement that is dominated by the voice-over narration that follows familiar conventions of title design. When this historical account says the words “the kingdom,” the photographic material rapidly recedes into the background to reveal its connection to the film title THE KINGDOM that appears simultaneously with this phrase, an assertion of the reading–seeing– hearing hierarchy in which lexical content dominates the visual and audible content. This convergence is typical, asserting the facticity of the articulation and enunciation through their redundancy with the voice-over—an action that employs the viewer’s prior knowledge in such a way as to suggest this sequence is an expansion, an increase in details and knowledge, on what the audience already knows. Collage assemblage reinforces this construction graphically in the interchangeable nature of text, still, animation, and live action. Audience perceptions create all the apparent unities and progressions of time and movement, but these are inventions dependent on the component nature of the work: the disappearance of individual frames in cinema becomes the combination of singular pixels in digital technology. Articulations and enunciations in digital cinema entail the erasure of a greater fragmentation of materials than their division into “shots.” Although the atomistic basis of digital technology is typically hidden by a normative operation that minimizes the recognition of the ‘image carrier’ (paralleling the celluloid base of cinema) conveying the work, the break up into individual shots (even into frames) is rendered ambiguous by this pixelization. The digital datastream behaves as a continuous, singular

170 Objectivity

Figure 5.5 Selected stills showing [Top] the shift from animation to still image to motion at the start of the sequence, and [Bottom] the combination of photographic imagery and graphics to create photo illustrations in the title sequence for The Kingdom (2007), designed by Stephan Burle.

unit that becomes apparent only when the ‘errors’ (glitches) extend beyond the end of single frames/shots, erasing the boundaries and blurring the distinctions historically conceptualized around ‘frames’ and ‘cuts’ in precisely the same way that the collage assemblage effaces the separation of its elements in The Kingdom. However, the audience does not experience this abandonment of familiar aesthetics as a crisis: the continuous progression and development literally shown by the animations and their introduction of the archival material in The Kingdom produces an indexical claim to historicity—that the sampled ‘events’ shown in these photo/typo/graphics are all part of a continuous articulation whose enunciation describes a continuous history: all the traditional ‘edits’ are contained within these quoted archival materials—changes of ‘shot’ allow these

Persuasion in The Kingdom

171

excerpts to serve as a sequence of illustrations, themselves entirely integrated into the continuous assemblage.

Intertextuality and Archive Archival footage has a history in motion pictures that evokes a specifically recombinant mode—the use of quotation and intertextuality. “Found footage” creates new works from the audience’s recognition of old ones. The internal articulation and enunciation of these recontextualized shots in The Kingdom modulates their archival status as the validation of the indexical claims, a recognition explained by film historian Catherine Russell: The found image always points, however obliquely, to an original production context, be it Hollywood, home movies, advertising, or educational films.24 Recognizing the source of any piece of footage as coming from outside the current production is an indexical claim in itself. The Kingdom treats the archive as a codex of preexisting signification,25 establishing this originary as authoritative, offering the footage as evidence. Awareness of these embedded elements in the digital composites of The Kingdom identifies their evidentiary role. It transforms ‘live action’ into a photo illustration without undermining or altering the essential assessment that the footage has a prior existence, an independence, that separates its role in the collage from the original reason for that footage’s production.The proposition that the footage originates with a different primary cause than the current work allows it to serve as evidence for the documentary claims being made; in becoming a “proof,” the first indexical claim of its use is doubled by the second indexical claim of its extraction from the archive. Seriality employs established encultured knowledge (via intertextual expertise and past experience) to direct and constrain audience interpretation. The audience must acknowledge these intertextual relationships for their quotational significance and indexical claims to develop. Umberto Eco addresses this issue of intertextuality through the “temporal ordering” of narrative that accounts for how motifs become significant. Audiences acknowledge the iteration and variation of motifs (whether “recognized” as external [intertextual dialogue] or as internal to the development and elaboration of form) as functions of their engagement and past experience: The problem is not one of recognizing that the serial text works variations indefinitely on a basic scheme (and in this sense it can be judged from the point of view of the “modern” aesthetics). The real problem is that what is of interest is not so much the single variation as “variability” as a formal principle, the fact that one can make variations to infinity. Variability to infinity has all the characteristics of repetition, and very little of innovation. But it is the “infinity” of the process that gives a new sense to the device of variation. What must be enjoyed—suggests the postmodern aesthetics—is the fact that a series of possible variations is potentially infinite.26 Seriality is an active engagement with cinema. To be a “serial” means, first and foremost, that the audience for that motion picture must recognize the role of intertextual

172 Objectivity knowledge in their interpretations. What defines significance are these reflections of an imposed order: the audience relates what happens on-screen to their own everyday experiences, making the opposition of naturalism::stylization seem obvious and inevitable. Eco’s conception of “variability” depends on this past experience. It describes how altering the context of quotations revises the understanding of both that quotation and original source. The changed meaning of the archival footage—that it functions as an illustration of the voice-over, a visual proof for the claims being made in the soundtrack to The Kingdom— is a transformation of this original source material, one which discards whatever the original purpose for the footage was to make it serve as demonstration, as Eco explains: In the most typical and apparently ‘degenerated’ cases of seriality, the independent variables are not all together the more visible, but the more microscopic, as in a homeopathic solution where the potion is all the more potent because by further ‘successions’ the original particles of the medicinal product have almost disappeared.[ . . .] We are thus facing a ‘neobaroque aesthetics’ that is instantiated not by the ‘cultivated’ products, but even, and above all, by those that are the most degenerated.27 For the objective articulations of ‘documentary reality’ as well as ‘realist fiction,’ the audience justifies their explanations of causality teleologically. Audiences recognize the established motif in how each new serial develops from earlier versions of the same collection of elements; the elaboration of motifs within a work follows the same set of constraints and conditions as the intertextual serial form, differing only in whether the audience must know the motif a priori to their encounter, or can glean it from the work itself. Recognition defines both intertextuality and ‘the quotation’ that defines the most common method used in one work to “speak of ” another. The recurrence and its shifting organization and order within the whole is productive of signification—a persistent repetition of elements in a variety of different contexts that are not otherwise limited to what is immediately appearing on-screen. For audiences that recognize these links to absent works, the intertextual behaves as a self-congratulatory ‘reward’ for having the knowledge and expertise to make the identification of sources and externalities within the current work, an identification that transforms the ideological dimensions of these claims into indexical assertions of their validity and factuality by masking ideology as the déjà vu of past experience. Connections between shots identify (are) the relationships between sequences: articulation is first as individual sampled frames that become shots, and then in the progression of those shots either as extended continuous actions (long takes) or via the fragmentations of editing and montage, depends on the compartmentalization provided by the sequence as a unit within the larger whole. This formal identification of morphology seems to arise spontaneously, yet relies on a network of intra- and inter-textual relations for enunciation that are dependent on past experience. The serial thus parallels David Bordwell’s concept of “style”; however, Bordwell dismisses the non-narrative aspects of the sequence and its interpretation by rendering its constructive role moot. The sequence mediates between the immanent encounter and higher-level comprehension. What is important to remember in considering the title sequence for The Kingdom is that although this opening is documentary in nature, it is a peritext that begins an entirely

Persuasion in The Kingdom

173

fictional narrative.28 Bordwell’s analysis requires a past experience—his conception of “narration” absorbs and integrates the particular character of its presentation: whether it is a collage integrating diverse elements or a montage of shots arrayed in series, the materials on-screen are subordinate to the realist demand that makes them cohere, since the narrative explanation dominates the meaning of the constituent parts—and becomes apparent with what Eco identifies as “intertextual dialogue”: By intertextual dialogue I mean the phenomenon by which a given text echoes previous texts. Many forms of intertextuality are outside my present concerns. I am not interested, for example, in stylistic quotation, in those case in which a text quotes, in a more or less explicit way, a stylistic feature, a way of narrating typical of another author—either as a form of parody or in order to pay homage to a great and acknowledged master. . . . For example, the heroine, in the West, tied by bandits to the railroad tracks: the alternating shots show on one side the approaching train and on the other the furious cavalcade of rescuers trying to arrive ahead of the locomotive. In the end, the girl (contrary to all the expectations suggested by the topos evoked) is crushed by the train. Here we are faced with a comic ploy which exploits the presupposition (correct) that the public will recognize the original topos, will apply to the quotation the normal system of expectations (I mean the expectations that piece of encyclopedic information is supposed to elicit), and will then enjoy the way in which its expectations are frustrated.29 The elaboration–articulation employed by audiences to identify sequences as discrete units within the continuous progression of a movie derives its coherence from the audience’s anticipations of its structural organization. The intertextual recognitions that support the indexical claims for The Kingdom title sequence thus become invisible to narrative analysis as part of its intratextual relationship to the fictional story. This recourse is seemingly unavoidable since the similitude between the content of the ‘shot’ and other visual perceptions evoked by the ‘event’ nature of naturalism makes realism appear to be essential to the audience’s explanations for what they see: their articulation of causality becomes fabula. In playing to the viewer’s encultured knowledge and their capacity to deploy that information in encountering novel works, the typical role of intertextuality serves to assert the established order of things, affirming the teleological explanations of fabula. Eco elevates the viewer’s engagement with the novelty of the motion picture currently being seen to the status of an aesthetic: What is more interesting is when the quotation is explicit and recognizable, as happens in post modern literature and art, which blatantly and ironically play on the intertextuality . . . aware of the quotation, the spectator is brought to elaborate ironically on the nature of such a device and to acknowledge the fact that one has been invited to play upon one’s encyclopedic knowledge.30 Audiences draw upon “past experience” to recognize serials in the same way that their recognition of intertextual quotations also requires existing knowledge: an inherent assertion of familiar, encultured models emerge through this use of encyclopedic

174 Objectivity knowledge gleaned from previous works. The artifice of an indexical claim without a concurrent ontological aspiration in the title sequence for The Kingdom makes this ideological dominance apparent. That the audience is the mediator of proximate, contextual and historical engagements is an essential part of the interpretive process. It is this recognition of sources—the drawing together of multiple pieces—that the collage of familiar voices narrating the “history” during The Kingdom title sequence invokes to re/ assert indexicality and ‘the real.’ Realism insistently imposes this existing order on interpretation as an apparently natural, inevitable consequence of motion pictures and the operation of photographic processes. The digital assemblage of collage establishes how the individually distinct articulations, such as the animations and archival photo illustrations in The Kingdom, combine into more complex units. These higher-level interpretations depend on the realist modes used that identify them; the audience is essential to designating both low-level statements and identifying this higher-level order, a role that acknowledges the shifts between the ‘shot,’ ‘event,’ and sequence, implying a fractal scaling of meaning and interpretation through encultured expertise. Different scales reflect the duration of what they articulate: memory and interpretation expands the “time” of perception from a low level immanence to [1] the intratextual knowledge of what has immediately preceded it, and [2] through intertextual dialogue connecting that immanent experience in the movie-being-seen to other movies. These dualities have been part of cinematic articulation since the earliest single-shot productions of the 1890s. Even in the continuous presentation of all three versions of the Louis Lumière film La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (“Workers leaving the factory”), the recognition of the film as containing a sequence of ‘events’ creates its coherence: the factory gates stand open, the waiting workers exit, a progression that continues until they have left [Figure 5.6]. Realism masks the apparently everyday occurrence shown: the anticipated activity suggested by the description/title “workers leaving the factory” summarizes what appears in a way that also misinforms.While it is tempting to assign the extent of the action depicted as corresponding simply and directly to the opening and closing of the gates, this expectation does not match what actually appears in the film; thus the question arises, At what point does this activity begin or end? In historical cinema, the issues and constructive role of the sequence is an implicit actor, enabling a description of events without requiring a recourse to their material construction from component shots; for a continuous camerarun, these relationships are confused by the coincidence of shot with the events it depicts.

Figure 5.6 Selected stills from the film, La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, Lumière Vue no. 91.3 [“Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon,” also known as “Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory” or “Exiting the Factory,”] (third version, August 1896), directed by Louis Lumière.

Persuasion in The Kingdom

175

The concept of “sequence” provides an interpretive solution to this ambivalence, delimiting events and enabling higher-level understandings to emerge. The shift from lower-level immanence (‘shot’) to higher-level emergence (‘event’) requires the audience’s memory to articulate what is not present (the sequence), a recognition that directs attention to how cinematic semiosis is recursive. The perceptual encounter justifies its imposed order teleologically, a grouping of diverse actions and materials as a singular unit—the enunciations articulated by how découpage orchestrates encultured conventions. The audience’s interpretation shifts from one engagement with the ‘event’ depicted to secondary and tertiary interpretations that give divergent significances but employ the same understanding of the progression from one sequence to the next. This relationship is not formal, even though its organization depends on a formal series of recognitions apparent on-screen as découpage. In being “quoted from other texts, and the knowledge of the preceding ones—taken for granted—is supposed to be necessary to the enjoyment of the new one,”31 it changes from an immanent recognition to one dependent on past experience. The recognition of these sequences through past experience is crucial to their articulated meaning—while Eco’s concern is with the transformative role of intertextuality, his observations betray how these sequences’ tendency to be subsumed into narrative function dictates their significance. Parsing the perceptual encounter into these units is a “spacing out” of shorter enunciations, the “second-degree raw material” that forms Bordwell’s style is the organization into sequence. What is significant in his observation for a consideration of the sequence is its organization of disparate and separate units into coherence through their formal juxtaposition. These structural operations arise in relation to the conventional (intertextual) referent that renders them coherent, without these recognitions, the abnormality of the causal sequence emerges. The ‘documentary reality’ created via the animations and photo illustrations becomes ‘the real’ in The Kingdom by drawing attention to the fragmentary nature of this collaged material, complementing their indexical claims through their recognition as a quotational excerpt (as recombined archival materials). What creates the reality of documentary productions relies on these multivalent levels of authority and assertion of factuality. Thus the identification of found footage is a double reference: both an ‘image object’ showing what it is, the denotative contents, and an intertextual reference to that footage as an extracted source from within the archive. The potential self-consciousness produced by archival materials uses past experience and “historical testimony” as the claim to being-factual. The past that is re-created is simultaneously the past shown by the denoted contents and the recognized past of its original media source. The only “ontological” relationship that matters is the recognition of an intertextual source—the archive—that asserts the photo illustration as an artifact. This identification reconceives the ‘image object’ not as an immanent link to an imagined reality but as a procedural demonstration that gains authority from its illustrative utility; the archival converges on the animated as mutually reinforcing “proofs” for the claims made with either on-screen text or through the synchronized voice-over.This connection to external authority anchors the indexicality of these collage assemblages beyond interrogation or analysis.The ideology of realism is absolute, uncontestable, demonstrated by ontological aspirations that can never be met, and so must return as axiomatic beliefs.

176 Objectivity

Notes 1 Eco, U. “Overinterpreting Texts” Interpretation and Overinterpretation ed. S. Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 67–68. 2 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. 3 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 81. 4 Foucault, M. This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 20–22. 5 Foucault, M. This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 20–22. 6 Fielding, R. The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography (New York: Focal Press, 1984), pp. 405–406. 7 Aumont, J. Kino-Agora 3: Montage trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2013), pp. 25–26. 8 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 91. 9 Dunn, L. “Special Effects Cinematography” Journal of the University Film Association vol. 26, no. 4 (1974), pp. 65–66. 10 Eisenstein, S. “Form and Content: Practice” The Film Sense trans. J. Leyda (NewYork: Harvest/ HBJ, 1975), pp. 157–216. 11 Lotman, J. Semiotics of Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1976), pp. 29–30. 12 Lotman, J. Semiotics of Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1976), p. 23. 13 Lotman, J. Semiotics of Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1976), pp. 29–30. 14 Lotman, J. Semiotics of Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1976), p. 24. 15 Deleuze, G. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 34–37. 16 Altman, R. “General Introduction: Cinema as Event” Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 2–4. 17 Hochberg, J. and V. Brooks. “Movies in the Mind’s Eye” Post Theory ed. D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 368–369. 18 Arnheim, R. To the Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 36. 19 Deleuze, G. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 156. 20 Vertov, D. Kino-Eye:The Writings of Dziga Vertov ed. A. Michelson, trans. K. O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 72–75. 21 Bordwell, D. Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 53. 22 Altman, R. “General Introduction: Cinema as Event” Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 2–4. 23 Altman, R. “General Introduction: Cinema as Event” Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 2–4. 24 Russell, C. Experimental Ethnography:TheWork of Film in the Age ofVideo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 238. 25 Wees, W. C. Recycled Images (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), pp. 52–53. 26 Eco, U. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), p. 96. 27 Eco, U. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), p. 97. 28 Bordwell, D. Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 53. 29 Eco, U. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), pp. 87–89. 30 Eco, U. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), pp. 88–99. 31 Eco, U. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), pp. 87–89.

6

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Analogue, electronic, and digital cinemas engage with indexicality as equally an issue of naturalistic denotation, a product of the framework of medium-specific aesthetics, and an emergent result of the technical elements normally hidden in the operation of the system itself becoming visible.1 It develops specifically because the audience’s ‘transparent’ engagement with motion pictures—whether on celluloid, in electronic analogue video, or the digital encoding of computers—requires them to ignore the ‘image carrier’ (the emulsion+acetate/celluloid film base, analogue electronic signal, or digitally encoded image) and look only at what the picture denotes, the ‘image object.’2 This audience engagement is the central, dominant factor in every variant of cinematic realism, whether for the objective elaborations of ‘documentary reality’ and ‘realist fiction,’ or the subjective presentations of ‘metaphysical reality’ or ‘unreal fantasy.’ These modes define the context and convention that “average readers” assume as the normative organization of media articulation. Their identifications are the precondition for realist coherence: their acceptance makes the ‘transparent’ engagement with media appear to be a natural consequence of signification, normalizing cinematic realism and its narrative function as inevitable; the equation of cinema=narrative masks how this presentation changes ideology into immanent demonstration, an on-screen proxy for reality.3 Film historian Richard Maltby explains this “average reader” through their distinction from the “critical viewer”: The reader’s competence is responsive: imaginatively active, perhaps, but not proactive; it accommodates the reader to the world of the text. . . . Unlike the critic, who inhabits an alternative sphere of analytic liberty in which the fissures of the text are exposed and its sutures unsewn, [semiotician Umberto] Eco’s “average reader” is a good bourgeois, never seeking to occupy a position from which it might disrupt the text.4 The “average reader” employs a series of recognitions based on past experience that involves precisely a normative concern “with” the content of the text, and although the mediated ‘event’ of cinema is not the same as what one sees without its intervention, the ideology of ‘photographic indexicality and ontology’ takes the claim that it can be equivalent to lived experience, be interchangeable with ‘the real,’ as the necessity and sufficient condition of the medium. Cinema renders this cluster of historically contingent identifications—the realist claim—as aesthetic system. The ideological nature of

178 Objectivity representation derives from the how this audience assumption of equivalence turns connotation into reality; Bazin’s ontological argument is expressly about aesthetics for this reason. Thus the term ‘transparency’ is apt: the medium “disappears” into the meaning it conveys—accepting the realist presentation forms the essential basis for what Maltby describes; without it, narrative disappears.The role for the audience’s established knowledge distinguishes these engagements, which can be summarized as: [1] The “average reader” interprets the movie via the ‘transparency’ of the immanent encounter, an intratextual engagement that remains primarily fixated upon the enunciations and order arising from accepting their realist articulation in cinema=narrative. [2] The “critical viewer” challenges the immanence of transparent articulation through their recognition and use of intertextual information absent from the realist presentation, a “reading” that complicates and expands the ‘event’ into signification. Denotation and enculturation implement this ‘transparency’ of cinematic presentation that the technical failure corrupts by denying the categorical separation of empirical reality (ontology) from cultural constructs (realism). Realism and lexical expertise thus interact as ‘transparency’: this aspiration to actuality, an ontological symptom of ‘the real,’ reveals the gignomenological law of identity that defines the categories of encounter a priori to their arrangement and modulation.5 This foundational imposition of order distinguishes what is relevant from irrelevant to consideration; normative fluency pronounces errors, glitches, and other technical failures in the ‘image carrier’ as physical eruptions of “noise” that are irrelevant distractions from the contents of digital media, a reflection of the aura of the digital which asserts an imaginary perfection for reproduction transcending its physical presentation—any apparent failing is merely a transitory problem with the particular display that can and should be ignored.6 This automatic erasure of “noise” creates a teleological engagement where conclusions about the on-screen ‘event’ such as narrative causality and fabula also justify their identification. The association of cinema=narrative demonstrates the encultured hierarchies of order and articulation which the idealized “average reader” employs to address obstructions to articulation as a relational designation that mediates between ‘documentary reality,’ claims of indexicality, and aspirations to being an ontological symptom of ‘the real.’ The identification of “glitch” normalizes how the presentation-for-audience makes the physical support of the ‘image carrier’ disappear, be seen through, as a problematic of immanence and invisibility that defines the role of emergent glitches in title sequences such as Blade Runner 2049 (2017) by Danny Yount, or the television program Tosh.O (season 1, 2011) designed by Jonathan Gershon. These problematics become important for the conventional appearance of technical failures since they disguise the naturalism conveyed through ‘documentary reality’ as an ontological aspiration. This link avoids the question of sensory experience and how it determines the parameters for meaning in motion pictures in an ontological aspiration for the ‘material function’ that informs the interpretation of glitches as immanent disparactions recognizable in the confusion

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

179

between “signal” (signification) and “noise” (irrelevance): are the glitches part of these designs or external to them? Perceived intentionality mediates between the immanent “signal” and the invisible “noise”—for example, the transformation of audition, the sensory encounter with sound, into the sensory experience of hearing, depends precisely on assignments of value that allow signification.7 These dynamics are well theorized in relation to art, but their opposition is also deeply unstable. Defining the role of ‘transparency’ in this construction clarifies the complexity of ‘material function’ and makes the ontological problems posed by glitches apparent. The accommodation of the “average reader” to the particulars of the physical presentation results in the disruptions of “noise” being interrogated, then either integrated as signifiers, or rejected as non-signifying. Philosopher Jacques Attali addresses this duality in his book Noise:The Political Economy of Music, a foundational text in the theorization of digital errors and other glitches: With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion. In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among them. Clamor, Melody, Dissonance, harmony; when it is fashioned by man with specific tools, when it invades man’s time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of purpose and power, of the dream—music.8 Attali speaks of music, but he acknowledges “noise” as a specific type of technical failure, one that disrupts communication in all media: it must be rejected for the ‘transparent’ engagement of the “average reader” to proceed. “Noise” is an absence of meaning, while ‘transparency’ is an expression of a dominant ideology: the cinematic realism that separates order from chaos. However, the automatic, necessary dismissal implied by Attali’s opposition is illusory, dependent on their identification as non-signifying elements, placed and appearing without a conscious direction. Designers’ and artists’ expressive use of glitches are distinguished by this recognition of intentionality, by not being random or uncontrolled, while the appearance of technical failures in everyday life is often arbitrary and unintentional. They emerge via the ‘material function’ that posits an arbitrary and capricious doubling of signification in the recognition of “glitch” as the rejection of the ‘image carrier’; “noise” is a signifier of insignificance—the designation of failure-as-failure. The subtlety of this distinction is central to its problematics, which are not a question about defining the abstract rules of semiotics (langue) or representation (naturalism::stylization), but concern the basis for meaning, the audience’s recognition of which rules to apply, and when. It addresses the precondition for signification in the foundational inscribing of those parameters that are being-factual and being-fictional. The glitch reveals this superstructural order in its ambivalent hesitation over what constitutes the meaningful, intentional order of articulation and the statement itself, as Umberto Eco explains in The Limits of Interpretation: Signs are natural events that act as symptoms or indices, and they entertain with that which they designate a relation based in the mechanism of inference (if such a symptom, then such a sickness; if smoke, then fire). Words stand in a different relation with the thing they designate (or with the passions of the soul they signify

180 Objectivity or, in Stoic terms, with the proposition—lekton—they convey), and this relation is based on mere equivalence and biconditionality.9 The identification of glitches as being what they appear to be is an understanding of them as empirical evidence for ‘what has gone wrong’; thus, actual technical failure is never “only” technical failure—it also always signifies “technical failure.” The designation of glitches-as-symptoms seems obvious, inevitable, natural, but this easy duality is an ideological designation that is the end-product of the perceptual–interpretive process— the recognitions that realism make into a representational “diagnostic.” These peculiar dynamics are indexical claims and aspire to an ontological demonstration, playing a structural role in ‘documentary reality’ expressed by material breakdowns. The glitch is the ‘image carrier’ becoming the ‘image object’; its understanding as a proof of machine operation is also a claim about the veracity of the production-as-artifice. The light flares, flutters, scratches, and dirt, to name only a few of the problems common to historical, archival footage that also appear in the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane, differ from the generative products of computational breakdowns only because of their technical basis; both analogue and digital glitches have the same semic role for the human audience whose engagement is governed by the ambivalent codes of representational art, past experience, and lexical fluency. The aspiration to being an ontological proof of ‘the real’ is immanent in the identification of technical failure as a symptom. Yet the self-referential diagnostic—the identification of all these glitches as a symptom—is a constant that transforms Bazin’s indexical claim for photography where “we are obliged to believe in the existence of the object represented: it is truly re-presented, made present in time and space”10 into an immanent acknowledgment of/with “malfunctioning technology.” Connections between indexicality, cinematic realism, and the encultured role of past experience in the identification of “noise” are obvious. Defining the glitch in aspirations to ‘the real’ directly illuminates its complexity by violating the separations between reality, depiction, and signification that traditionally identify the discourse of the ‘image object’ and the materiality of the ‘image carrier,’ between representing and being.11 These problematics of glitches as symptoms of failure-as-failure reveal an instability in interpretation because they constitute a stoppage where interpretation cannot continue without a human decision about engaging their significance as-normative (representationally), or as-glitched (symptomatically).Whether in an analogue or digital motion picture, the protocol that produces the glitch happens twice: first by the machine autonomously rendering the movie for viewing, and again as the audience engages it via past experience. The “average reader” is obviously central to this comprehension: all the expertise gained from past experience, those expectations formed by narrative, and especially the role of lexical discourse, only become important after the initial separation of “signal” from “noise.” The order of cinematic realism allows this articulation of either an objective or subjective order; even potentially disruptive breakdowns are transformed by this ideology into a component of ‘transparent’ articulation. Their interpretive role as symptom confuses the ‘image object’ and ‘image carrier,’ creating a paradox that threatens to dissolve Eco’s separation between signs and words. This ambivalence is the primary character of the glitch as well as the source of its

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

181

problematics: the glitch is not just a thing-in-the-world, it is also a specific artifact existing within a symbolic system, representation. They behave as-normative and as-glitched, giving them a capacity for conveying an excess meaning beyond just a diagnostic empiricism that can disclose how ideology normalizes itself, giving the glitch the false appearance of being inherently critical when its criticality depends on the enculturation it seems to challenge. Relegation to the ‘external realm’ of non-signification (except as a “technical failure” to eliminate) means the attention glitches receive only highlights the role of the aura of the digital,12 evident in how the “average reader” engages them only to deny them consideration and consciousness: rejecting the glitch as neither signifying, nor an ‘image object’ (the depiction itself), but as a material interruption or deviation in the ‘image carrier’ (physical support that makes depiction possible) that violates the denotative contents themselves.13 This ‘transparent’ approach handles glitches as Eco’s thing-in-itself, a “sign close to perception,”14 thus rejecting their potential signification: his distinction between signs and words allows a recognition of the diagnostic approach to ‘material function’ as an anti-representation where ontology and indexicality converge in the aspiration to being a proof of ‘the real.’ Rhetorically connecting the glitch to the technical medium begins this “empirical” approach to ‘material function’: being the thing-in-itself precludes any other meaning since understanding digital glitches and other breakdowns as symptoms assumes an immediate link between what appears on-screen and its cause that parallels Bazin’s argument for photography as a material trace of ‘the real.’ This ontological aspiration is not simply a metaphor, but also a literal methodology for engaging these failings, allowing a diagnostic analysis to “fix” the problem: it is reified in the RCA Television Pict-O-Guide repair handbooks for receivers published in the 1950s and 1960s, which included photographs of various reception problems accompanied by instructions for their correction.15 In treating glitches diagnostically, as problems to eliminate, they cannot be anything other than “noise” that distorts and corrupts the “signal.” This symptomatic identification as “technical failure” is also a reflexive justification for the designation “noise.” The diagnostic approach to the glitch-as-symptom continues with digital media, despite the shift from analogous recording to instrumental code. Separating lexical interpretation from experiential phenomena through an appeal to ontology makes the aspirational claim to ‘the real’ appear that much more secure by simultaneously denying the conventional ‘documentary reality’ of realist depiction on-screen. The designation of “technical failure” is an ontological argument about the nature of the ‘image object’ (representation) that reifies its relationship to ‘the real’ as an immanent causality. The nature of digital media complicates its assessment. What appears in digital motion pictures is thus encoded by/for two audiences: machine and human. When the expected realism of a digital movie becomes instead a series of abstract patterns, something has “gone wrong” according to its human audience [Figure 6.1,Top]. Digital glitches, or breakdowns, or technical failures may seem entirely random to this human audience, but the erratic truncations and deviations that transform what appears on-screen are not arbitrary in computational media.The machine only renders valid instructions: if the file were actually “broken,” then it would not “play” and the machine would stop working.There would be nothing to see or hear—the “halt” in the expression “halt and catch fire” vividly explains the results of real technical failure in early computers. Computer coding is instrumental, not poetic. Digital artist Daniel Temkin explains how the direct manipulation of this datastream

182 Objectivity

Figure 6.1 [Top] Encoding errors produce aberrations in the appearance of the image; [Bottom] Example of MPEG frame compression glitch, also known as “datamoshing.” © 2000 Michael Betancourt/Artists Rights Society (ARS).

disrupts the rendering of digital media by altering the hexadecimal machine code (data) within the file itself to create glitches: We can replace all the “DF”s with “1A”s. The result is an image which becomes glitchy in appearance as the image data is altered. The exposure of the

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

183

code-behind-the-image is part of what helps us recognize this as glitch art. The raw data is exposed for us to hack—this is how many of us began in glitch art, messing with an image data directly in a hex editor, working blindly or referencing glitch tutorials or ancient white papers for file formats. . . . What gives JPEG corruption its signature look is the way that data for each pixel is not mapped one-to-one to a place in memory but distributed within a matrix, along with the changes we introduce (the “error”). We have not actually “broken” the image in any meaningful sense; we’ve introduced no structural damage.16 This process is called “databending.” The glitch exploits the semiotic nature of digital encoding and compression by adding deviant or extraneous instructions to the process: the digital is a semiotic machine whose instrumental instructions (code) engenders lexical processes resulting in the ‘image object.’ Databending is a manipulation of this “raw” digital encoding itself, a methodology that creates instructions for producing specifically anomalous results when a computer renders those data into a human readable form [Figure 6.1, Bottom]. As Temkin’s commentary makes apparent, computational operations in digital systems are purely rational. This fact of digital technology means the unexpected results of glitches are predictable in advance and necessarily determinate—encoded instructions are always uniform in what they render—the datastream or digital file only functions as a prescriptive instrumentality, but the glitches resulting from its alteration dramatically distort and destroy the normative coherence of what is displayed for their audience. Glitches confront the expectations of their human audience, who have several related, potential responses to understanding them that depend on an internalized conception of their role in interpreting cinematic realism: The first identification of the glitch aspires/is [a] as a symptom, in an ontological conception of technical failure, treating the glitch as evidence of an actual failure (unintentional) that potentially requires some response from the audience watching to correct it. Representation is denied by this conception of the glitch as the thing-in-itself. The glitch understood as [b] an indexical marker contained by realist strictures, that functions as evidence of a claim to being-factual (i.e., as historical testimony or proof of authenticity) that articulates meaning through the ‘material function.’ As a signifier of failure-as-failure, the glitch develops the semiotic potentials of the ‘material function,’ defined by the range of [c] representing failure within diegesis (as in a narrative work) and the poeisis of [d] failure-as-aesthetic (its role as artifact presented and used for aesthetic purposes). What the human audience understands as deviations from expected norms of representation creates the glitch; however, any identification other than as the thing-in-itself gives the ‘material function’ a representational role as “signal” rather than “noise”: coherent representation requires more than just a “capturing” of reality on-screen.17 The apperception of the machine’s output by the human audience governs the response (via enculturation) to lapses in coding that the machine renders normally. These relations are valid for

184 Objectivity all glitches, not just those in digital cinema.The symptomatic approach conceives glitches as a demonstration of being-factual, obvious in the connections between [a] symptom and [b] historical testimony, along with its implicit role in [c/d] aesthetic appraisals, demonstrating the power of ontology as an axiomatic, yet inevitable, fallacy because its recognition is a product that emerges only in encultured beliefs about ‘correct’ operation. Appreciating glitches for their aesthetic value thus depends on this initial identification of a glitch as [a] an example of technical failure, then appraising it aesthetically [c/d], responses that are not mutually exclusive; the variety of technical failures in [c] and [d] defines the aesthetic range of narrative::poeisis in “glitch art.” This division between the digital realm and human-readable rendering separates the codes of mechanical systems from the interpretive codes of human language and art precisely over issues of ambiguity and ambivalence: for the machine, meta-stable responses that move within a range of potentials are impossible “unknowns” that cannot be normally executed (if at all). In contrast, they are the essential feature of human communication and art. The ‘aesthetics of failure’ rely on glitches as symbolic representations of technical misfunction, not as aspirants to an ontology of ‘real’ breakdowns. What the audience encounters with the ‘material function’ is a conversion of the ‘image carrier’ into the ‘image object’: realized by the fact that for the cinematic base to become visible, it must transform into a pictorial element. How the particular technical failures of digital cinema are an intensification of earlier, physical failures reveals the continuity between historical motion pictures and digital cinema.The historical capacity of errors to carry across one frame and into the next on celluloid—the scratch that runs across multiple frames, potentially extending throughout an entire motion picture—is the analogue to the digital glitch. But where the scratch remains at the surface, lying over the depiction—as with the scrapes, marks, and dirt common to archival films that also appears in the ‘newsreel’ for Citizen Kane [see Figure 6.2]—the digital glitch is a structural transformation, integral to denotation itself in ways that physical scratches on film are not.This difference between analogue and digital movies is a reflection of technology, not ontology. Although the formal range of ‘material function’ extends across this difference, from the superficial (surface scratch) to the foundational (structural breakdown), the indexical claims for glitches remain the same. Processes such as databending transform the generative basis of the digital work, substituting glitched instructions for the normative ones, paralleling the integral transformations that photochemical processing has on the undeveloped-yet-exposed photograph where changes in the processing chemicals result in dramatic shifts in the results shown on-screen: the results of the ‘material

Figure 6.2 Stills of “archival footage” from the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane (1941); note the scratches and other dirt that suggests a ‘historical testimony’ to fictional past screenings.

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

185

function’ replace the original ‘image carrier’ rather than damage it.The analogue/digital glitch’s common identification with the substance of the ‘image carrier’ is implicit in the ‘transparent’ approach of the “average reader,” who turns these indexical symptoms or markers into an ontological proof, evidence of their entanglement between invisible substrate and visible surface, reality and representation. These encultured relationships between indexicality, objectivity, representation and materiality are articulated via claims to being-factual that tangentially reveal an obsession with establishing some ideological positions as superior, a priori critical vantages whose challenge to a dominant order is inherent to their form. The ‘material function’ assumes its significance from the historical context of a hierarchy that artist and theorist Brian O’Doherty presents as an en passant observation about the ambivalence of snapshots. This process emerges simultaneously from their identification as mutually reinforcing formations of material and encultured expertise. His study Inside the White Cube considers this dominant mediation, but what he describes in the apperception of the snapshot is enculturation: Much of our experience can only be brought home through mediation. The vernacular example is the snapshot. You can only see what a good time you had from the summer snapshots. Experience can then be adjusted to certain norms of “having a good time.” These Kodachrome icons are used to convince friends you did have a good time—if they believe it, you believe it. Everyone wants to have photographs not only to prove but to invent their experience.18 O’Doherty’s observations about memory and perception come as an aside in a larger discussion about alienation and Modernist approaches to art allowing only the “critical reader.”What he has described insists on a rejection of the “average reader” and conceives of ‘transparency’ as uncritical, implicitly condemning it as a trite expression of a naïf cultural belonging. However much this discussion might suggest narcissism, insecurity, or even pathos, the rejection of ‘transparency’ belies its prominent identification of the social relations between people that view the ‘objective realism’ of the photograph, their consideration imbuing it with significance. His snapshots provide a truncated instance of established meaning and its elaboration. If the events depicted in the snapshots seem credible, it is because of an encultured set of values that makes the photographs into indexes of ‘the real’; if they aren’t convincing, then their indexicality also disappears, and with them their ability to “prove” the enjoyment they depict. The inherent distinction of fun/not-fun will be automatically supplied by the viewers whose encultured knowledge gives the “world viewed” its internal coherence. For cinema, these codes are not just vague representations of enjoyment; this same set of recognitions and fluencies applies to how the diegetic effects of narrative are the causality that creates fabula. And these same cultural peculiarities appraise glitches on-screen: if they seem irrelevant or ‘unintentional,’ they may be ignored as in everyday life or addressed symptomatically as errors to eliminate, but if they seem to have a conscious dimension of control and arrangement—i.e., appear ‘intentional’—this social recognition demands their consideration as part of the articulation whose mobilization of familiar cultural codes in the norms of ‘having a good time’ makes the ontological fallacy obvious.

186 Objectivity ‘Material function’ describes an aspiration to being an ontological proof of ‘the real.’ Their conception as an empirical demonstration entangles denotation and connotation in apparent paradoxes that recall Eco’s comments on the problematics of representation versus reality in his book, Kant and the Platypus: If we accept that even perception is a semiosis phenomenon, discriminating between perception and signification gets a little tricky. . . . The fact that a perception may be successful precisely because we are guided by the notion that the phenomenon is hypothetically understood as a sign . . . does not eliminate the problem of how we perceive it.19 Parsing bare sensations into significances and insignificances is not an engagement with meaning or signification; it comes prior to the ‘transparency’ that concerns the “average reader.” Instead, it attracts, deflects, and organizes attention. What interests Eco is this process of recognition: the reality of the experience that is separate from its representation. Eco asks questions of human engagement with ‘the real’ generally, not merely about motion pictures, but when addressed to representation (not reality) they are also the wrong questions to ask. They lead to debates over what is reality, rather than how it is expressed—a distinction that isolates ideology as a protocol from its role as political agency. The question to ask is how does the ideological claim assert itself as ‘the real’ rather than whether that claim is accurate; however, this question is not the one typically asked about glitches. What appears in ‘documentary reality’ is a specific cultural order, but what the ‘material function’ seems to produce is a perceptual judgment (by conflating indexicality– ontology in an aspiration to ‘the real’) that changes the question Eco poses into the same ontological question that Bazin develops as his theory of realism: what is the relationship between what appears on-screen and ‘the real’ that is the cinematic depiction’s presumed source? Posing this question allows the interpretive fallacy20 in an ontology of ‘material function’ to become obvious: the glitch that the audience identifies on-screen is not necessarily a symptomatic description of machinic breakdown. This role for glitch signifies an ontological nature for digital cinema by apparently collapsing representation into reality.21 Thus ‘material function’ mistaken for ontology returns as Bazin’s photographic indexicality, but in a new guise, replacing the photochemical operation of the camera and mechanisms of projection with the autonomous generation of computers and electronic display on-screen. The ontological fallacy arises in how the “average reader” considers the representation that is ‘material function’ as an aspiration to eminence where ‘what is seen’ becomes the thing-in-itself.22 Understanding this complexity acknowledges the problems posed by the scratches, noise, and other marks on-screen in the ‘newsreel’ for Citizen Kane that argue for an archival testimony to being-factual, but which articulates the ‘material function’ as evidence for a history that is fictional. The scratches exploit this normative engagement produced by the visibility of the typically invisible ‘image carrier’ to suggest an indexical presentation not subject to the whims or caprices of subjective modulation. As with the conception of the glitch as an unintentional failure, the indexical claim arises autonomously. These indexical claims are conventionally determined by an apparent merging

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

187

of ‘material function’ with the significance of it as the “historical testimony” defined by theorist Walter Benjamin in the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history it has experienced.23 The ‘material function’ of the scratches in the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane is an indexical marker that establishes the reality of cinema as an artifact, asserting these shots as documentary footage, as being-factual by suggesting a history of screenings and exhibitions for the footage shown—a “historical testimony” for these shots as originating in a repository of factual documents showing historically important events. These markers show the “authenticity” that Benjamin identifies is a conclusion derived from the series of physically present features—the symptoms visible as the scratches, dirt, grain, etc. in film that parallel the compression artifacts, scanlines, aliasing, etc. in digital presentations—that taken together direct the audience to make inferences about its age and authenticity (indexicality). In this ‘newsreel,’ these physical traces are employed semiotically, functioning as representational cues that articulate an indexical claim to being-factual via the hypothetical things that may have happened to this footage in the past. At least part of the aesthetic enjoyment in the ‘newsreel’ from Citizen Kane is produced by recognizing how this ‘realist fiction’ portrays the ‘material function’ as a “testimony to the history these ‘shots’ have experienced.” Material ‘damage’ becomes a signifier of the physical impacts of time, a denotative thing-in-itself. The articulation of cause–effect the symptom implies can be gained only from past experience; this “authenticity” is visible in the composited shots of “Charles Foster Kane” (Orson Welles) appearing with historical leaders—Roosevelt, Franco, and Hitler—at different points in the “archival” footage [see Figure 4.2, p. 128]. Appealing to this existing knowledge is a non-narrative assertion of indexicality, distinguishing it from the narrative role the glitches play in the ‘realist fiction’ of the ITV detective program Inspector Morse (1987) [see Figure 6.6, p. 195]. This ‘material function’—in analogue and digital media equally—creates an aspirant ontology via a reflexive continuity between the imagery and its production precisely because the technical failure resides not in a link to a profilmic event, but seems to be connected instead to the mechanism of its exhibition, giving ‘material function’ a different valence than the other ‘events’ shown on-screen. The “historical testimony” of the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane exploits this basis. Unlike the definitively recorded nature of the representational content of the shot—as with the shots containing glitches in Inspector Morse— understanding a glitch as the thing-in-itself suggests an immediacy that is sequestered from representation via its presumed ontological basis in the proximate operations of the presentation-for-audience. This aberrant stability of the glitch is what establishes its apparent indexicality for the digital as comparable to that offered by scratches and other noise in celluloid film and analogue media. Digital glitches are thus no different than any other claim to being-factual. But their technical basis shows digital glitches only imply the “authenticity” of physical media; they are immanent, generative, unable to testify to when or how long they have existed. Their presence on-screen is not a demonstration of

188 Objectivity existing in the world: the symptom of “historical testimony” that is the physical mark in the ‘newsreel’ depends on familiarity with how the shots and edits present a ‘world onscreen’ from the physical substance of cinema. This layered, multivalent use of the ‘material function’ as an expressive articulation is more a familiar concern in theorizing avant-garde cinema than in narrative cinema or motion graphics. Structural/Materialist filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal distinguishes the ‘material function’ from the Marxist concern with a critical “materialist dialectics” that is entirely dissimilar to the representation of ‘documentary reality.’ The axiomatic belief of cinematic realism collides with on-screen technical failures, which are not physical objects but projections of light. This disparity clarifies the ideological dynamics of ‘transparency’ surrounding the assignment of indexicality and ontology to technical failures and their return to a familiar representational role: The assertion of film as material is, in fact, predicated upon representation, in as much as ‘pure’ empty acetate running through the projector gate without image (for example) merely sets off another level of abstract (or non-abstract) associations.24 Gidal’s connection of “materialist” approaches to representation enables the consideration of these physical procedures as formal devices in themselves. His analysis reiterates the assertion of media as a physical substance that can be manipulated. ‘Transparency’ demands the thing shown on-screen will be directly identified as the thing-in-itself, but not dependent on ontology, being instead an epistemic product connected to the naturalism::stylization range and the modal distinctions of objective and subjective presentation: the appearance of physical and digital glitches are a specific type of ‘documentary reality’ that is a representation of the medium itself, thus defining the ‘material function’ as an ideological construction and an impediment to “critical viewing.” Instead of acting to break this indexical claim, the ‘material function’ is a symbolic identifier for digitality that assumes this aspiration to ‘the real’ as the guarantor of its identity, as suggested by Eco’s analysis. Gidal uses this distinction politically, to argue for an ideologically challenging cinema that defies/violates this ‘transparency.’ Any demarcation between the glitch shown on-screen and the representational contents of denotation is an artificial imposition of difference because in the presentationfor-audience, both dimensions converge, becoming the same thing: imagery on-screen. That convergence is why the problematics of ‘material function’ and its aspiration to ontological proof cycle through a series of interlinked, looping positions. Their relations are redolent of a circular logic that spirals in mutually exclusive oppositions. The apparently ontological assertion produced by the ‘material function’ is an illusion created by historical relationships between analogue breakdowns and their proximate, physical causes. ‘Documentary reality’ shown in those perceptual artifacts, aesthetic objects, and signifiers of failure-as-failure is merely “another level of abstract (or non-abstract) associations” for Gidal’s analysis, in which self-reference serves representational conclusions in a recuperation of ideology: The questions pertaining to representation-systems and codes has to do with the physical reproduction and transformation of forms, a reproduction at some level of

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

189

the pro-filmic, that which the camera is aimed at—a transformation to the filmic, the filmic event, so to speak. This transformation has to do with codes of cinematic usage.25 The dominance of enculturation is unavoidable, obvious in how glitches convey narrative and symbolic meanings, as with the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane: the scratches, dirt, and other “damage” shown on-screen have been added to ingratiate the artifice of their compositing as a more fully authentic example of archival footage—the knowledge that creates Benjamin’s “historical testimony.” They are precisely an example of Gidal’s observations: their natural understanding as indexical claims (historical testimony) creates a ‘documentary effect’ that is not only antithetical to their semantic role, but also essential to their function as narration in the fabula. They create this mutually exclusive superposition without cognitive dissonance because the “average reader” guarantees the dominance of narrative function and ‘documentary reality’ in the normative assumption of ‘transparency.’ Maintaining this dominant ideology is central to establishing a consistent, comprehensible, and complex framework that encompasses all of cinematic representation; the “average reader” guarantees the constant return of the aspirations to ontology and the problematics of indexicality in the semblance of realism to reality. Gidal critiques this formulation: ‘cinematic realism’ is an ideology imitating everyday perceptions, restraints, and controls whose role should not be surprising. Materiality is another turn in this spiral of containment. Expectations about/ for ‘transparency’ guide the “average reader” to identify the object of interpretation: as music, as language, as realism, as documentary, as glitch. Naturalism::stylization resolves any paradoxes and eliminates cognitive dissonance by containing all the challenges to its established order through ideology by directing the “average reader” in how to proceed with interpreting movies: where and how to group depiction into statements, before advancing into their arrangement in sequences, and then into the complexity of fabula. Articulations aspiring to become the thing-in-itself are essential to how cinematic realism assimilates already-known values and orders of everyday experience to establish the apparently ‘natural’ order of the world on-screen, thus as reified ideology.26 This logical procession is familiar, the role of realism explicit in its development; what is new about this analysis is how the ‘material function’ affirms naturalism while complicating ontological aspirations. Although Gidal is discussing celluloid motion pictures—film—his emphasis on the ‘material function’ as a conventionally “automatic” demonstration of the medium applies equally well to digital movies, as demonstrated by Daniel Temkin’s commentary on “databending.” Aspirations to ontology are immanent in this analysis. The machine performs determinate actions precisely specified in advance, either on the filmstrip or in the digital file; the audience is expected to take note of these errors as features that make reality converge with what is shown on-screen. This conversion of abstraction into representation is not the conceptual meaning Gidal describes for “dialectical materialism,” but a procedural semantics. What is in play with these encultured superstructures is the ways audiences order their encounters into sensibility.27 His “codes of representation” are literally the processes that the computer operations render coherent: machine language repeats the coding of realist aesthetics as the instrumental nature

190 Objectivity

Figure 6.3 Selected stills showing the fade to white at the end of The Holy Mountain (1973).

of the digital file. Exhibition is thus a process that makes the ‘material function’ into a symbolic ‘proof’ the medium is the medium. The conversion of what might initially appear as highly abstract, as with a strip of clear leader running through a projector so no photography appears on-screen, becomes a very specific representation of cinema in/as the projection-on-to-screen, as in the concluding sequence in The Holy Mountain (1973) [Figure 6.3]. The rupture with the diegesis created by “The Alchemist” (played by director Alejandro Jodorowsky) speaking directly to the audience as the camera pulls back to reveal the crew and production equipment before fading into white creates a shift from projected découpage to flat white screen, but depends on narrative cues that link the ‘material function’ to this signification of “cinema.” In drawing attention to the physicality of projection—the film strip is a physical object—The Holy Mountain exhibits the same self-referentiality as any other ‘material function.’ Even without the connection to the drama that introduces it, the final white rectangle in The Holy Mountain is never really “empty,” devoid of signification: it is precisely this revelation of materiality that is the representational content. This self-referential moment returns the audience to the movie theater, to the act of watching a film.28 What is called a “glitch” has always been a part of cinema. The “average reader” creates its role as the excess denied at the foundations of interpretation. Understanding the ‘material function’ as a “critical” resentiment of its repression as “noise” is a reversion that restores the ‘transparent’ elaboration of naturalism::stylization that (ironically) begins by ignoring the physical material evident in the stoppages posed by glitches. The wellknown desire to isolate art from the distractions of physical context that are typically dismissed or rejected as insignificant “noise” in these aesthetics historically required the

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

191

clean, sanitized, gallery space known as the “white cube” to eliminate externalities from interpreting art.29 Aspirations to ontology are a central theme in all these engagements with audience perceptions of ‘technical failure.’ Contrary to this apparent coincidence of object and representation, the need for enculturation to identify the glitch pushes the ‘philosophy of being’ into the realms that epistemology and semiotics also describe: all identifications are predicated not on perception but on encultured knowledge that proceeds sui generis from an initial surmise by the viewer about which established fluencies (lexical, perceptual, intertextual) enable the initial giving form that allows engagement with what in perception has “value” and needs attention, thus establishing the chain of signification.30 The audience is central to these initial decisions, such as identifying something as a glitch, ‘naming it,’ that impose a teleological relationship where the clarity of perception– interpretation serves to justify the foundational choices: the cultural entangles the empirical. This decision exceeds the mere sensory encounter for cinema because it, cinema, is articulated by codes of representation rather than merely immanent perception; thus, disentangling the ontological nature of glitches from their role in representation demonstrates how these empirical and cultural values are connected, yet must also remain apart.31 They are interdependent contingencies. ‘Material function’ makes this inherent human element neither exclusively, nor merely an en passant problem in theorizing cinema. By aspiring to an apparently ‘direct connection’ (ontological link) the particulars of each glitch appear to turn the presentation-for-audience (denotation on-screen) into the reality of a technical failure, thus unmasking the ideological basis of realism that defies representation by energizing the combination of ‘event’ with its representation on-screen; however, the difference between cinema and everyday life is always marked, known, obvious. The glitch complicates the ‘event’ of cinematic experience as a cultural product whose self-referentiality undermines these separations as simultaneously being a presentation of Eco’s thing-in-itself and a product of representation.Therein lies the difficulty. Technical failures in cinema assert their connection to ‘the real’ by collapsing the distinction between representation and represented: they are glitches, but at the same time, they represent glitches. (Allowing the fallacy of ‘material function’ creates an ontological paradox that is resolved only through the separation into different levels of interpretation.) This duality encourages the audience to appreciate glitches-asaesthetic in a way that they would not in everyday life, giving the ‘material function’ a role in ‘documentary reality’ that serves to reiterate the separation of indexicality from ‘the real’ even as it entangles them ever more closely. The supremacy of this ideology becomes obvious in the ‘transparent’ media engagement that is the aura of the digital: an internalized elision that shifts the erasure of specifics about location, presentation, and context to the mind of the spectator.

‘Narrative Function’ and Indexicality ‘Documentary reality’ mediates between understanding the glitches in the Studio logos at the start of Blade Runner 2049 [Figure 6.4, Left] and in the main-on-end title sequence at its conclusion [Figure 6.4, Right] as ‘intentional’ or ‘unintentional’: they appear precisely as in-between shifts that are readily identified moments of transition between

192 Objectivity

Figure 6.4 Selected stills from the titles for Blade Runner 2049 (2017), designed by Danny Yount: [Left] Showing the glitched opening studio logos; [Right] Showing the digital glitches in the main-on-end title sequence.

title cards or as statements of synchronization with the soundtrack, yet they also appear autonomous, a demonstration of the ‘material function.’ Their synchronization with the musical score emerges through the rhythmic appearance of each new visual “failure” in the title sequence with an audible musical cue that produces a statement where the technical failure behaves as a visualization of the music; the static that accompanies the opening logos makes the same assertion, but ambivalently: these initial glitches announce their identities as ‘technical failure.’This connection of sound::image establishes the lexical role of the glitches, challenging their identification as transient, unintentional elements, yet they are also not obviously designed artifacts in the same way that the texts are.The suggestion of an intentional synchronization in the main-on-end design prevents the glitches from being potentially dismissed as “noise,” allowing their consideration as/ in a narrative allegory. Yount’s design is instructive. Perception enables the identification of enunciations and the recognition of their signifying structures; connotation is a self-contained system

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

193

whose distinction between ‘the real’ and artifice mirrors the relationship between the world and human thought, empirical encounter and cultural significance. Approaching glitches as formal decorations makes them implicitly belong to the same set of realist operations as more traditional forms of live action, graphics, and animation. These glitches become apparent as momentary break-ups of the typo/graphy and graphics onscreen—revealing the encoded visual structure of the ‘image carrier’ that remains literally invisible under the conditions of ‘normal function,’ since what forms the denotation shown necessarily disappears into the presentation-for-audience: those visible features of the movie in his design normally minimized or eliminated, such as scanlines, pixilation, and compression artifacts, all allude to the technology of the presentation itself. In cinematic realism, these dynamics are unavoidably entangled. The ‘event’ produced via découpage establishes cinematography as a form of representation, conventionally organizing what appears on-screen as an immanent perception, but devised and then understood through encultured codes. The recognition of an eruptive ‘technical failure’ undermines this entire system of representation by signifying the physicality of the immaterial digital medium in Yount’s design: the breakdowns that appear on-screen have the same, familiar qualities as breakdowns in other digital media—they are of the same character as the glitches that interrupt all digital media, appearing throughout everyday experience, making the invented correlations between mediated events presented on-screen and lived experience into an immanent statement about ‘the real.’This apparent collapse between perception and connotation in the Blade Runner 2049 title sequence depends on the confusion of the ‘event’ for what it depicts; thus its ‘documentary effect’ (indexical claim) stands in opposition to the artifice of being-fictional throughout the main text. Recognizing the ‘event’ in these glitches defines an indexical claim as the confusion of signs and words that Eco theorizes as an ‘empirical demonstration’ of digital processes.The digital compression glitches “in” the credits to Blade Runner 2049 demand an acknowledgment that the presentation on-screen is not celluloid, but an encoded result of computer operation rendered as a human-readable form. Meaning is always in flux between these immanent and indexical modes of engagement. Glitches shift the typo/graphics in this design between legibility and illegibility, acknowledging the digital nature of the ‘image object’ by interfering with its lexical role. The encultured basis of legibility emerges in this insistent demonstration that runs throughout the title sequence. The process of reading these texts becomes part of their presentation: they are a ‘reading-image.’ The intersection of this ‘material function’ and the ‘reading-image’ paradoxically makes the ontology of the thing-in-itself simultaneously ir/relevant to this connection between denotation and reality dramatized by how the glitch interrupts the audience’s reading of the credit-texts. Violating lexical engagement is typical for how glitches have been used in title sequences. The same role for the ‘reading-image’ appears in the nine-second title sequence designed by Jonathan Gershon for the first season of the television program Tosh.O (2011) in which compression errors accumulate on-screen as a series of blocky graphics that interfere with the reading process [Figure 6.5]. Synchronization in Tosh.O transforms what might otherwise appear to be an unintentional breakdown into the same arranged and organized presentation as in the titles for Blade Runner 2049. The paired shots of this opening, one showing an animated logo, the other showing the host

194 Objectivity

Figure 6.5 Selected stills showing digital glitches from the title sequence to the cable television program Tosh.O (season 1, 2011), designed by Jonathan Gershon.

Daniel Tosh, have each been glitched in similar ways: what normally appears as a continuous, uninterrupted field becomes a collection of squares whose combination forms the découpage. It is an arrangement that alludes to how digital compression organizes and structures digital cinema. However, the “eruption” of this normally invisible procedural organization remains within the established parameters of ‘documentary reality’ precisely because the “average reader” can engage it ‘transparently.’ Understanding all the glitched deformations as part of the conventional nature of the pseudo-independent title sequence that acts to introduce the main narrative links the errors to the show’s contents directly: Tosh.O is a program of humorous clips taken from the internet with “color commentary” provided by the host who makes jokes about what happens. It is a show that adapts the same amateur video format as the program America’s Funniest Home Videos, but draws from an international pool of material posted online. The glitches in this title design make the connection to amateur, non-professional media production on video streaming websites explicit by incorporating the kinds of technical breakdown that are common to these videos into the design. Announcing what the television show is about in the design is especially typical of title sequences for television programs. The conventional suspension of stylistic expectations in these show openers ironically allows ‘documentary reality’ to easily assimilate these deformations as a ‘material function’ that would otherwise prove highly disruptive, even in a show made from web videos where such breakdowns are commonplace and expected. The role of ‘material function’ for these presentations of ‘documentary reality’ becomes acutely important because glitches, graphic abstractions, and other types of error can only be understood through narrative function if those disruptions become narration about what they disrupt, as with the glitches that appear as part of the story in the ITV program Inspector Morse as a visualization of a computer malfunction that

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

195

Figure 6.6 Selected stills showing glitches that represent a computer malfunction destroying records of financial data due to a “computer virus” in Inspector Morse (series 4, episode 4, “Masonic Mysteries,” 1990).

destroys data [Figure 6.6]. This self-referential assertion of the digital substance of the presentation on-screen informs the glitches in the Blade Runner 2049 title sequence. The recovery of ‘material function’ happens even if the glitched imagery neither appears similar to everyday perceptions, nor progresses as an elaboration of causality.32 This role as a self-referential narration about the shots is what ‘the newsreel’ in Citizen Kane exploits. “Breakdown” (the glitches/scratches) act as an immanent ‘proof’ of the physicality of the media being displayed, a testimony to its archival, historical nature. The “noise” of the ‘newsreel’ shots in Citizen Kane functions as material claims to the factuality of its fictitious archival footage in the same ways that the digital interruptions arise in the Tosh.O and Blade Runner 2049 titles as an identification of these ‘image objects’ as computational, rather than physical (the identification of the glitches as being-factual proofs of a digital nature). Blade Runner 2049 integrates this factual claim with the externality of the credits themselves: the texts are specifically subject to these disruptions in presentation, while in the Tosh.O title, the entire presentation is decomposed into blocks and graphics. ‘Material function’ acts as a self-referential demonstration of the generative basis for the imagery, allowing the glitches to disappear into ‘transparent’ articulation, a return to ‘documentary reality’ that makes their objectivity evidence for their reality and the essential indexical claim required by this realist mode. Being a self-referential expression does not escape from the containment that assimilates these graphic distortions to the more familiar narrative functions of title sequences. The titles for Tosh.O explicitly invoke this narrative role through their demonstration of the show’s sources online. This ability to convert the ‘material function’ into an anticipation of the program to follow changes these visualizations of the ‘image carrier’ into an objective realism: they allude to the sources of the clips to be shown, but at the same time, they are an instance of the use–mention paradox33 where the identification of this material happens through its visual appearance on-screen. This convergence of

196 Objectivity representation with the appearance of the thing represented makes the presentation immanent while placing it in quotations as an allusive statement that comments on the program itself. In the Blade Runner 2049 title sequence, the glitches have a different relationship to the main text than in Tosh.O but retain the character of the use–mention paradox. They become evidence of the digital transformation of reality, allegorically connecting these titles to the fabula. The acceptance of each ‘error’ that distorts the text on-screen as a ‘reading-image’ affirms the link between this main-on-end design and the sci-fi narrative of a future world overrun with broken and malfunctioning machineries.The indirectness of this connection requires knowledge of the narrative, a dimension readily recognized since these titles appear after its conclusion as a main-on-end design. This allegorical reflection on narrative in the titles for Blade Runner 2049 gives the ‘material function’ a causality that entirely contradicts the symptomatic understanding of them as a demonstration of the autonomous (objective) operation of the digital machine. Although this narrative significance relies on understanding glitches as empirical proofs of digitality, in being understood allegorically, the intratextual connection to the main text dominates this merely symptomatic understanding in the same way that fictive articulation transforms the presentation into a self-contained world on-screen. However, this change in meaning depends on the audience’s choice to become “critical readers” and engage the glitches through an interpretive schema where the visuals signify something other than what they depict, what title designer Saul Bass called “the symbolic dimension” in an interview with film historian Pamela Haskin: My initial thoughts about what a title could do was to set mood and to prime the underlying core of the film’s story; to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.34 Allegory in Yount’s design depends on recognizing the difference between “signal” and “noise,” but understanding it in different terms than as-failure. It requires the fluency of past experience and interpretive expertise, since allegory is a kind of writing or cryptography that requires a ‘key’ for decipherment—which, for Allegory Mode title designs, are provided by the main text.35 Because the titles for Blade Runner 2049 come as a main-on-end, as a conclusion rather than opening to the fabula, their placement helps ensure the allegorical connections are easily legible since the themes of the narrative are established before the audience sees the titles. An allegory coming at the end can reflect back on the main text, expanding upon its significance: the prior knowledge of the fabula identifies the narrative’s presentation as a direct subject for the articulation, allowing the audience to recognize its symbolic elaboration easily, thus solving the inherent problem of allegorical enunciation by presenting its “key” before the symbolic elaboration. Interpreting glitches allegorically doubles their familiar mimetic presentation (denotation) by linking it with a specific signification (connotation); the visible thingin-itself becomes a symbolic description of the narrative.36 The ‘material function’ poses these interlocking relationships without becoming a paradox: each identification as-symptom, as-signifier, as-allegory occupies a different level in interpretation,

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

197

creating greater complexity by building on the ambivalence of earlier, simpler recognitions. Those symbolic structures of naturalism::stylization that enable allegory are not simply a product of ‘transparent’ articulation, but depend on a critical choice to actively parse the glitches via a relationship to the fabula. In Tosh.O, it is a comment on the sources of the videos to be shown; in Blade Runner 2049, it is about a decaying society filled with flying cars, space travel, and replicants (androids). The plot in this sci-fi feature decodes the title design: it concerns the replicant “K” (played by Ryan Gosling) whose job is to “retire” malfunctioning replicants, who himself begins to malfunction when he tries to solve a mystery about a missing child. This fabula decodes the end title through the allegorical connection between the ‘malfunctioning’ text and the events of the narrative. Title sequences using the Allegory Mode are peritexts that express their connection to the fabula indirectly, but whose meanings are readily apparent to the “critical reader.” The key to this interpretation comes from how the digital glitches disrupt the text in a way that evokes the breakdown of “K” in the narrative. This relationship must be ‘discovered’ to render the allegory comprehensible, as novelist Jorge Luis Borges explains in his essay “From Allegories to Novels”: “The allegory is not a direct mode of spiritual manifestation, but rather a kind of writing or cryptography.” . . . [A]llegory is made up of words, but it is not a language of language, or a sign of other signs. For example, Beatrice is not a sign of the word faith; she is a sign of active virtue and the secret illuminations that this word indicates—a more precise sign, a richer and happier sign than the monosyllable faith.37 This complexity of signification created by the Allegory Mode engages in a transformation of the immediate thing-in-itself, causing its significance to expand so that the evident features of that object serve as signs for a higher level of meaning. Allegory rearticulates the established articulations of the text in a different way, one that treats the objects of one level as signs for another, more complex engagement. This process arises from the internal order of the entire text, but expanded beyond the confines of the fabula. The “average reader” may ignore this excess signification since it depends precisely on a critical decision about how to understand the ‘events,’ distinguishing them from mere narrative or depiction. This changed engagement is required for the everyday meaning of glitches evoked by the ‘material function’ to achieve an allegorical significance. However, their signifying role as allegory is reinforced by understanding the kinetic action of the glitch as a ‘reading-image’ that decorates the typo/graphy they corrupt as signifying more than just a graphic decoration. These relations require the shifting perceptions of glitches as an immanent reality versus their meaning derived from past experience to create a frisson between distinct levels. These separate levels of interpretation produce paradoxes only when they collapse into a concern with the ontological status of the ‘technical failure.’ Their significance within the design for Blade Runner 2049 does not depend on how or what produced these glitches, only that they are present in the work. This dynamic relationship between legible and illegible in the Blade Runner 2049 title design testifies to these shifts between recognition and alienation. Because the animated

198 Objectivity typo/graphics are texts generated on a computer and shown on-screen, this presentation at the conclusion of the narrative draws attention to that source by posing as a selfreferential claim to being-digital. The reflexivity of the digital disruptions of legibility in Yount’s titles parallels the assertions of a “historical testimony” to many past exhibitions by the physical scratches and dirt in the fictional “newsreel” at the start of Citizen Kane (1941). In both cases, the ‘material function’ serves to authenticate the objective realism without actually stopping its progression. In exactly the same way that the inclusion of audio and visual glitches in the Tosh.O title sequence is an evocation of video downloaded from the internet, the glitches in Blade Runner 2049 assert the text is part of a digital read-out, a display offered to the audience as a description of the production: the visual distortions do not render the text illegible for more than an instant. The “average reader” must be able to read these on-screen texts; it is the essential function of a title sequence—to show the credits. This self-referential nature of glitches mirrors that of each title card: each credit describes the activities performed in the production of the narrative, an extensive listing including the on-screen actors as well as the off-screen technicians, managers, and overseers who are responsible for the elaborate presentation of the fantasy. These momentary breaches do not undermine the integrity of the information being presented—they decorate it, providing variety and interest in what might otherwise be a staid, proforma accounting—turning ‘technical failures’ into the central expressive focus of the title design. This role makes their kinetic action become a “special effect” comparable to expressive lighting or careful mise-en-scène.Yet the ‘material function’ interrupts the credit’s chronic progression, drawing attention to its physical, material organization on-screen in a series of continuously progressing interruptions that overrides the realist continuity of action (duration) while leaving the text/shot/title card itself as a coherent unit. Danny Yount’s title sequence for Blade Runner 2049 affirms the materiality of the title sequence and refers to the fabula, a reflection of the paired material and narrative functions given to glitches by cinematic realism and articulated through the indexical claims of the glitch in itself. The ideology of realism proves essential to this interpretive process, paralleling the more familiar recognition of a known language that begins the reading process: in looking at these marks as you, the reader now do, lies an assignment not only of “language” as a general concept, but also the idiosyncratic particular recognition of being a specific language you know, and in that declaration of recognition (the knowing) comes a series of equally important and essential associations with signification and established meaning that makes the text cohere. At the most basic level, the ‘material function’ in the titles to Blade Runner 2049 acts in the same fashion: that the credits are themselves true affirms the titles design’s status as ‘documentary reality.’ Although the aesthetics of historical motion pictures continue to operate in digital cinema—the articulation of causality that creates narrative is the most conspicuous aspect of this technical lineage—at the same time, the uninterrupted sequence of digital information decouples enunciation from film technology, a change that has prompted the crisis of “post-cinema.” This recognition in Blade Runner 2049 informs its title design’s demonstration of the digital operations literally lying just beneath the surface of the fictive ‘world on-screen.’Thus, identifying the credits as being-factual invokes the same indexicality that understands the glitch symptomatically, acting as a second,

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

199

parallel, convergent assertion of being-factual that justifies understanding the narrative link to the ‘realist fiction’ as ‘documentary reality.’

Editing Glitches The technological distinctions between digital motion pictures and photochemical motion pictures has implications for the historical apotheosis of cinematic realism, the long take. The encoded nature of digital motion pictures gives these works an entirely different technological foundation than film. This continuity of datastreams that Daniel Temkin’s explanation of “databending” makes apparent is one of the paradoxical relations technical failures reveal about the ‘long take,’ as well as the (dis)continuous nature of motion imagery using digital technology. Encultured beliefs around editing and ‘long takes’ make understanding the glitch as a formal marker for ‘the real’ clear: the convergence of ontology with indexicality in ‘material function’ entails recognizing it as a continuation of this earlier realism in which the ‘long take’ makes an indexical claim to ‘the real.’ These dynamics inform the overlaps between shot, ‘event,’ and indexicality for ‘documentary reality,’ a realization that makes their separation in digital motion pictures specifically disorienting and superficially challenging. This aspiration to ontology cannot be easily maintained with the shift from analogue to digital imaging except in special circumstances such as the glitch, resulting in a rhetorical crisis for the factuality of digital cinema that lacks the lowest-level recognition ascribed to the photograph that joins depiction and reality: in digital productions, naturalism is not a ‘given.’ The supposed ontological link between ‘image object’ and source attempts to define denotation in terms of an empirical reality apart from perception, but this connection of photography to what it apparently “contains” (denotation) depends instead on the internalized role of past experience, which Michel Foucault identifies as the relationship between resemblance and similitude.38 The denotations of photographs that leads to their identification as the thing-in-itself are not self-evident ontological proofs of their innate connections to an external ‘optical source.’ Digital technology accentuates the technological modulation that was already in play with film. The contents are created by both the technical apparatus of the photographic system and the autonomous cognitive–perceptual engagement of their audience. Foucault’s distinction between the world of real things and the mental realm of thought implicitly requires an acknowledgment of the viewer as mediator in the identification, with the encounter consequently requiring past experience and established expertise to stabilize interpretation via ‘transparency.’ Because the “average reader” treats ‘documentary reality’ as correlated to everyday experiences without difficulty, this dominance mediates ambivalence into familiarity. The symptomatic use of the ‘image object’ to diagnose problems with the ‘image carrier’ is predicated on the semblance separating empirical observation from interpretation. Denotation is not an ontological identification, but an interpreted conclusion informed by encultured knowledge. Digital technology betrays this historical assumption about the photograph, in the process dispelling the illusion of the ‘long take’ as an autonomous unfolding of reality. Asserting découpage as a process that defines the significance of the glitch unmasks how digital motion pictures challenge the aesthetics of the ‘long take’ and historical cinematic form.

200 Objectivity The earliest motion pictures produced in the 1890s emphasized the relationship between photography (stills) and cinematography (motion), rather than a formalist demand for uninterrupted duration shown on-screen. Considering these dynamics ironically reveals a convergence between the ‘long take’ and the interruptions of the digital glitch. The Lumière brothers made films where the underlying nature of the motion in the frame is constant whatever the length of the shots in question [Figure 6.7,Top].Their découpage is often organized to create a similar effect to figures standing on a stage—the actions shown are continuous and resemble live theater in their presentation, a reflection of the conditions of these early films’ exhibition that becomes especially obvious in the “magic” cinema of Georges Méliès who stages fictive events in front of the camera to resemble the performances of a stage or theater show, a basis that often explicitly constrains the presentation as in The Sorcerer’s Egg (1902). This film serves as a surrogate for him performing magical transformations in person. Its mise-en-scène behaves precisely like a stage show: Méliès addresses the audience, visibly speaking to the viewer as he directs his performance to the camera [Figure 6.7, Middle]. In contrast to Méliès whose performance is redolent of a vaudeville act, the découpage of Émile Cohl anticipates the realism of later narrative feature films [Figure 6.7, Bottom]. His presentation handles

Figure 6.7 [Top] Selected stills from Danse Serpentine, Lumière Vue no. 765 (1896) directed by Louis Lumière; [Middle] Selected stills from L’oeuf du Sorcier, Star Film no. 392 (1902), directed by Georges Méliès; [Bottom] Selected stills from Le Cerceau Magique (1908), directed by Émile Cohl.

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

201

the mise-en-scène as a privileged, magical “window” where the world on-screen only superficially resembles ‘the real,’ offering a self-contained reality whose ‘rules’ do not necessarily match those of ‘the real.’ The conceptual transfer from apprehending the ‘reality’ of a still photograph that O’Doherty describes to Bazin’s ontological claims for cinematic ontology and realism derives from this early, presentational construction. But the idea of an uninterrupted duration shown by the ‘long take’ as an aesthetic feature of the articulation does not emerge until there was an alternative—the various systems of continuity editing and montage that become the dominant modes of theatrical production in the 1920s; by the 1930s, Hollywood productions were commonly using ‘long takes’ only as a background for superimposed titles. This later role of the ‘long take’ becomes a formal marker for indexicality that depends on how it appears to be unmediated—a singular camera run—whose progression on-screen occurs without montage or continuity editing. However, both Méliès and Cohl employ realist découpage to facilitate fusions of live action, superimposition, and animation, producing works that are clearly mediated and artificial, rather than the indexical realism that Bazin describes. While ‘events’ develop in front of the stationary vantage point familiar from ‘long take’ aesthetics, these early films resemble ‘long takes’ only incidentally; the ideological role of ‘long take’ as demonstration of actuality is a later conception, much like the distinction between the non-narrative credits and narrative intertitles that does not emerge until the 1930s.39 The recognition of how shots’ arrangement and progression into sequences in cinema is an encultured phenomenon reveals the connection between them was not initially an axiomatic given for audience interpretations of early film. What informs the historical apprehension of early film before this articulation of the ‘long take’ is not a function of their duration but of their relationship to still photography: to cut or not to cut was less a question than a problem for early film. As film historians André Gaudreault and Timothy Barnard argue in their article “Titles, Subtitles, and Intertitles: Factors of Autonomy, Factors of Concatenation,” this early difficulty with editing makes the role of lexicality and motion graphics essential to their articulation; later cinema identifies these inserted texts as “intertitles.”Their role for edited sequences in early film was to create a more complex statement than just the depictions on-screen would provide, a role that will be handled in later and more complex cinema semiotics using the fluency of past experience. Inserting text between shots resolved the interruptive, problematic effects of cutting: [T]he agent who was responsible for editing the film, although logically invited to do so, did not dare fragment the scene to insert a title card in the immediate vicinity of the moment when the phrase was uttered. . . . This sort of restraint around cutting and inserting title cards into the midst of the action is something we see regularly in early kinematography, and it lasted well beyond the early 1910s. . . . At the time when title cards were tableau titles (scene titles), they were irredeemably turned toward what came next; despite their phenomenal position between two segments of images—two tableaux, two scenes—they could not legitimately be seen as intertitles. To be an intertitle, a title card must not only be sandwiched between two image segments, but must bridge what came before (which it completes) and what comes after (which it announces). It must become an element of, I’ll say the word, editing. For it is the very question of editing—that of passing from

202 Objectivity one scene to the next, of matching two “image packets”—that is explicitly brought into play by interposing title cards.40 That the self-contained scene/tableaux in early cinema did not have internal editing or engage with a combination of discrete shots in the sequence—what Gaudreault and Barnard term “image packets”—demonstrates how editing did not initially produce the obvious and apparently inevitable fusion into a continuity-of-action assumed by later theories of cinema semiotics. In place of these fragmentary and discontinuous shotunits, films made prior to 1910 tended toward a continuous and progressive unfolding of action in front of the camera; narrative changes of scene corresponded to changes of shot, even though these internal progressions would often contain several actions, and offered a narrative exposition closer to live theater than the reconstituted ‘events’ of later cinema.41 Cinema resembled the continuity of ‘long take’ aesthetics not as a choice, but as a response to the novelty of the naturalism presented on-screen. The shift from continuous presentations to fragmented assemblages of discrete shots thus responds to a transformation of cinema watching into the emergent fluency that derives from accumulated past experiences with watching films. Such a transformation of understanding does not render these early works “primitive”—what it reveals instead is the ways that the emergence of narrative forms and transfer of the theatrical conventions described by A. Nicholas Vardac in From Stage to Screen came to dominate cinematic articulation. The explicit ideological understanding of ‘long take’ as a fundamental formal device for realist presentations in cinema and video depends on its audience accepting the apparently continuous action as being unstaged, in exactly the same way that the magical illusion produced by Georges Méliès in The Sorcerer’s Egg (1902) relies on the ‘realist fiction’ of its resemblance to an uninterrupted stage production. The apparent autonomy of the ‘image object’ that denies its manipulation is what creates the indexical claim for all ‘long takes.’ This material revelation of duration is simultaneously part of a series of conventional formal devices that present indexicality: including self-referential production, hand-held camera, long-takes, and various ‘glitches’—intrusive editing, obvious découpage, and varieties of audiovisual “noise.” These features of “documentary” suggesting an uncontrolled (or, at least, an unstaged) profilmic event appear in a wide range of commercial fictions—such as the non-factual documentaries Zelig (1981) or This is Spinal Tap (1984), as well as the horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999) or the sci-fi movie Cloverfield (2008)—and employ the ‘documentary effect’ posed by the ‘material functions’ of the production/imagery itself to establish themselves as unreal fictions which modulate the signifiers of indexicality. As with the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane, the ‘material functions’ of their glitches inform the narrative progression of the scenes; the audience is expected to take note of them as markers for the historical veracity of what is shown—that the footage has not been manipulated, creating a fission between its apparent artifice (being-fictional) and its indexical claims. For realist dramas that use ‘material function’ as a narrative element, as in the corruption of data in the Inspector Morse episode or the blurry and shaky camera in The Blair Witch Project, the appearance of glitches is simply a side-effect of the damage they are supposed to represent within the story. The audiovisual breakdowns on-screen are testimony to the factuality of the technical failures within the fictional diegesis.The normative audience makes note of these

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

203

elements as part of the illusion being created, enjoying the articulation specifically for its manipulation of indexicality::artificiality.The glitched media asserts these breakdowns as representing failure, yet this “failure” is purely artificial in the same way that the interruptions in both Tosh.O and Blade Runner 2049 are. The fictionality of these fantasy, horror, and sci-fi films emerges from the obviously artificial nature of the ‘events’ shown onscreen that contrasts with the indexical claims being advanced about those ‘events.’ The audience appreciates the narrative not as a demonstration of a material fact or through how it suggests a critical relationship to the media, but as the opposite: for the ways that it more fully asserts the narrative fiction, indexicality becoming a “special effect” comparable to expressive lighting or careful mise-en-scène. In asserting the documentary factuality of this collection of on-screen credits, the glitches provide an evidentiary testimony to their veracity and visualize their indexical link to reality as the self-referential ‘revelation’ of the medium. This capacity for the work to refer to its own production makes the indexical– ontological link an immanent feature of its signification and narrative articulation. The proposal of fabula in these documentary effects depends precisely on the audience understanding the discrepancy between their indexical claims and the artifice of being-fictional. ‘Material function’ is a central part of this articulation, since without it the ‘documentary effect’ cannot emerge. This self-reflexive morphology and structure makes the fundamental ideological caprice of ‘documentary reality’ into its primary content: the articulation of cinema as a prosthetic vision, standing-in for what the audience might have seen if they were physically present. The lapses, ellipses, and gaps in these narratives are not instances of incomplete production—the hand-held camera does not see everything, or even provide an ideal view of ‘events’—but are presented instead as part of the ‘material function’ that draws attention to the production. The failure to fully ‘capture’ the narrative development becomes an expansion of the technical failure into the articulation, a narrative impact that exceeds the representational evidence of the glitch on-screen. The nature of digital glitches as an interruption of expectation does not mean they are an interruption of the progression of the shot. The glitches in Yount’s title sequence resemble the visual artifacts common to an intermittent broadcast failure or corruption of the digital signal familiar from television and web videos seen in everyday life: their audience understands them in isolation as momentary problems to ignore, but when they appear consistently and have a sematic role as transitions in/between title cards, these glitches demand attention. This ordering suggests signification, a function within the design as more than merely graphic decorations: misfunctions have a peculiar impact on the presumed “continuous” camera runs of motion pictures, an effect that makes every shot some variant of the “long take.” They pose a paradox for all shots, no matter how short; they breach the progression of continuity precisely because the glitch is not an edit. The glitch is a visual breakdown that serves to signify not the fragmentation into multiple and independent shots, but the interruption-while-continuing of a singular take: they function not as cuts or ruptures in the shot, appearing instead as deviations from its expected trajectory that nevertheless do not alter its course. It does not entail a replacement of one ‘image object’ with another so much as a corruption and distortion that appears through its diagnostic convergence/confusion with the ‘image carrier.’ The variance from expectation serves to assert an original continuity that is no longer present,

204 Objectivity but whose symbolic continuation appears in/as the stoppage. This ability to understand any glitch as a ‘material function’ within semiosis undermines its capacity to interrupt the transparent progression of media.

Notes 1 Walley, J. “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film” October vol. 103 (Winter, 2003), pp. 25–27. 2 Wiesing, L. Artificial Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 35. 3 Ponech, T. “Cineme: Display, Medium, Work” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia T. 69, Fasc. 3/4 (2013), pp. 555–556. 4 Maltby, R. “A Brief Romantic Interlude: Dick and Jane Go to 3 1/2 Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema” Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies ed. D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 435. 5 Ziehen, T. Lehrbuch der Logik auf positivistischer Grundlage mit Berücksichtigung der Geschichte der Logik (Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webere Verlag, 1920). 6 Betancourt, M. The Critique of Digital Capitalism (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2016), pp. 61–74. 7 Attali, J. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 8 Attali, J. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 6. 9 Eco, U. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 113. 10 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. 11 Husserl, E. Collected Works, Volume XI: Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1898–1925) trans. J. B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 564–565. 12 Betancourt, M. The Critique of Digital Capitalism (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2016), pp. 61–74. 13 Wiesing, L. Artificial Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 31–34. 14 Sachs-Hombach, K. The Image as Communicative Medium (Cologne: von Halem, 2003), pp. 73–99. 15 Meagher, J. RCA Television Pict-O-Guide: An Aid to TV Troubleshooting Vol. 1 (Harrison, NJ: Radio Corporation of America, Tube Department, 1949). 16 Temkin, D. “Glitch && Human-Computer Interaction” Non-Object Oriented Art vol. 1, no. 1 (January, 2014). 17 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. 18 O’Doherty, B. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Expanded Edition) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 52. 19 Eco, U. Kant and the Platypus (New York: Harvest Books, 2000), pp. 125–126. 20 Henderson, B. “The Structure of Bazin’s Thought” Film Quarterly vol. 25, no. 4 (Summer, 1972), pp. 23–24. 21 Betancourt, M. Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 108–113. 22 Eco, U. Kant and the Platypus (New York: Harvest Books, 2000), p. 125. 23 Benjamin, W. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Illuminations trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 221. 24 Gidal, P. “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film” Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1978), p. 2. 25 Gidal, P. Materialist Film (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 15–16. 26 Tanaka, J. and Taylor, M. E. “Object Categories and Expertise: Is the Basic Level in the Eye of the Beholder?” Cognitive Psychology vol. 23 (1991), pp. 121–149. 27 Tanaka, J., Curran, T. and Sheinberg, D. L. “The Training and Transfer of Real-World Perceptual Expertise” Psychological Science vol. 16, no. 2 (2005), pp. 145–151. 28 Withalm, G. “The Self-Reflexive Screen: Outlines of a Comprehensive Model” Approaches to Applied Semiotics 6: Self-Reference in the Media ed. W. Nöth and N. Bishara (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 138–139.

Allusion of Errors in Blade Runner 2049

205

29 O’Doherty, B. Inside theWhite Cube:The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Expanded Edition) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 30 Derrida, J. Of Grammatology trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 31 Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 198. 32 Betancourt, M. Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 108–113. 33 Danto, A. Beyond the Brillo Box (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 191. 34 Haskin, P. and Bass, S. “‘Saul, Can You Make Me a Title?’: Interview with Saul Bass” Film Quarterly vol. 50, no. 1 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 12–13. 35 Borges, J. “From Allegory to Novel” Other Inquisitions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), p. 155. 36 Betancourt, M. Title Sequences as Paratexts: Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 67–74. 37 Borges, J. “From Allegory to Novel” Other Inquisitions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), p. 155. 38 Foucault, M. This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 58. 39 Chisholm, B. “Reading Intertitles” Journal of Popular Film and Television vol. 15, no. 3 (1988), pp. 137–142. 40 Gaudreault, A. and Barnard, T. “Titles, Subtitles, and Intertitles: Factors of Autonomy, Factors of Concatenation” Film History vol. 25, nos. 1–2 (2013), p. 90. 41 Vardac, N. From Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949).

Part 3

Ideologies

The conclusions are summative descriptions of conceiving realism as a specific modal relationship emergent in the indexical claims made for cinema: photographic ontology is irrelevant to this proposal of indexicality and cinematic realism. Subjectivity (stylization) is not the definitional condition of fiction; subjective indexicality demonstrates an immanent the realism “of the mind,” while objectivity (naturalism) arises in the resemblance to everyday experience—the conception of motion pictures as a prosthetic vision—that creates a convergence of the presentation with expectation, leading to a confusion of the “mere appearances” of the ‘image object’ with the reality of the thing-in-itself. Traditional ‘cinematic realism’ reflects Modernist “purity” in an a priori conception of media as-document; the emergence of “post-cinema” expresses the failure of this paradigm when confronted by the fluid transformations of the technical lineage of motion pictures as-illusion—apparent in animation, motion graphics, and visual effects—coming to dominance with digital imaging. [a] Photographic ontology is irrelevant to indexicality and cinematic realism. [b] The indexical claim is the same in subjective and objective modalities, functioning as the distinction between documentary and fictional productions. [c] The naturalism::stylization range equally allows for claims of being-factual and being-fictional in both objective and subjective variants of realism. [d] Subjectivity (stylization) demonstrates an immanent the realism “of the mind.” [e] Objectivity (naturalism) arises in the resemblance to everyday experience—the conception of motion pictures as a prosthetic vision—that creates a convergence of the presentation with expectation, leading to a confusion of the “mere appearances” of the ‘image object’ with the reality of the thing-in-itself. [f] ‘Material function’ entangles the ‘image object’ and ‘image carrier,’ giving the ontological engagement with cinema a renewed role by turning the presentationfor-audience into an encounter with the thing-in-itself—a convergence of being and representing that changes denotation into ‘the real.’ [g] Traditional ‘cinematic realism’ reflects Modernist “purity” in an a priori conception of media as-document; the emergence of “post-cinema” expresses the failure of this paradigm when confronted by the fluid transformations of the technical lineage of motion pictures as-illusion—apparent in animation, motion graphics, and visual effects—come to dominance with digital imaging.

7

The Medium

What was Cinema? From the beginning, cinema was Modern, a new, eighth art. Its very existence was a challenge requiring explanations, which tended to be concerned with definitions and prescriptions for what this new thing was.1 Cinematic realism developed from this foundation in two ways: first as an affect of the motion photograph itself, created by the combination of precision optics and intermittent projection—an immanent motion distinct from the painterly motion of painting or draftsmanship;2 second, as a formative practice that was invented by filmmakers experimenting with the technology and adapting stage conventions to the new medium3—a dramatic, theatrical presentation organized by expectations derived from past experience that filmmakers employ in devising their cinematic works.4 These twin origins for cinematic realism conspire to enshrine a belief in cinema=narrative, codified by a specific découpage that dictates the framing of shots, mise-en-scène, and assembly into a sequence of ‘events’ on-screen that establishes the naturalist modes as an ontological proof of ‘the real.’ This process delegitimized all subjectivity unless it is contained/excused as visualizing some part of the narrative drama; the variability of early motion pictures changed into the familiar teleology of a “primitive” cinema working toward a narrative dramatics5: since the 1920s, this historical metanarrative has justified the insistence on not only ‘objective realism,’ but also a narrowed, “pure” morphology and structure (naturalism) that denies its artifice.6 The two-volume, pioneering study A Million and One Nights (1924) by Terry Ramsaye was a history of Thomas Edison’s work with motion pictures where the idea of cinema=narrative became the precondition for cinema as a serious, important art.7 This manifest destiny has been used almost from the beginning to define cinema using an international framework. The History of Motion Pictures (1932) by French historians Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach expanded the scope of works included in Ramsaye without altering his assertion of cinema=narrative, establishing cinema as a Modern art. Their book contributes directly to this development: it was translated from French to English by Iris Barry in 1938 under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork.8 This same assumption of cinema=narrative appears in American filmmaker and historian Lewis Jacob’s two editions of The Rise of the American Film (1939/1948) that explicitly articulated the cinema as a Modernist art,9 expounding on the polemical concerns of his short-lived magazine, Experimental Cinema (1930–1934).10 As all these early history texts demonstrate, the emergence of cinema as an art was unified around the explicit definition of the “medium” in

210 Ideologies dramatic narrative, with the implicit correlate ‘objective realism’ defining the formal scope of cinema as art. The disappearances and omissions from this history are predictable: those hybrids that challenge either dramatic form or naturalist production, such as animation and the composites of “special effects” (VFX), the stylizations of the avantgarde film (which was ultimately relegated to a separate, parallel history apart from that of “cinema”), and all those works that are non-narrative; the concept of “purity” reified in cinema=narrative has allowed the art world to negate the avant-garde in particular.11 Marginalized types and genres of production, such as motion graphics, show that challenges to this framework have always existed; however, only with the development of digital cinema at the conclusion of the twentieth century does the dominance of this approach began to wane, ironically challenging this “purity” as Post-Modernism was in decline during the 1990s.The contemporary term “post-cinema” describes a transitional state where the slippage between the theoretical conceptions of historical cinema and the actual practices of digital production beget a cognitive dissonance derived from a denied lineage returning as technological change. Concerns with dramatic narrative renders the ‘transparent’ realism of naturalist articulation (objectivity) an axiomatic foundation for cinema. André Bazin’s mid-twentieth-century theory codifying cinema=narrative as essential to questions of indexicality conceived it as an autonomous product of live action photography.12 Oversimplifying his cinematic realism makes its ideology readily apparent: he argues that motion pictures are an instrumentality that must document reality. Identifying these relations as built on fallacies does little to alter their course, challenge, or subvert their power: his teleological directives spiral around each other, the formalist restrictions becoming ever more resilient, inescapable. The result of his dominant conception is a necessarily medium-specific reduction and exclusion, an essentialization that runs afoul of the “digital convergence” in the 1980s and 1990s.13 Critical analyses, such as “post-cinema,” arise as a counterpoint to a crisis of implicit authority emerging in the ways that digital technology subverts the ontological assumptions required by Bazin’s aesthetics.14 Ontology and indexicality in cinema are “purity.” They narrow the scope of consideration to a concern with an a priori definition of essential identity or value; these effects are corrosive.15 Cinema=narrative leads to the crisis created by “post-cinema” because of the ways that digital technology renders the photographic index moot.16 Challenges to this reduction leads to a fetishistic demand for film—celluloid and analogue processes—as philosopher Stanley Cavell makes apparent in the philosophical aesthetics developed in his book The World Viewed.17 His argument connects the formalist “purity” familiar from Modernist painting to the development of commercial cinema18 in restrictions that ratify “serious art” (and cinema) as proceeding from within a priori limits19 that assert naturalism and live action photography as the only acceptable realist art.20 These aesthetics make addressing realism a philosophical pursuit whose relevant questions become how to identify ‘the real’ within the construct, to understand cinema only in terms of photographic indexicality premised on the resemblance of image for reality. Like critic Clement Greenberg, Cavell’s precondition for “important art” is selfdefinition: the medium establishes itself in ontological claims that appear inevitable, an inalienable “fact.” However, an index does not need to resemble the thing it represents21: discourse on the ontological status of the photograph confuses and conflates the issue

The Medium

211

of realist articulation and concerns with the revelation of reality, about what qualifies as ‘the real.’ It is responsible for the contemporary crises of digital cinema where the assumptive ability of the motion image to act as demonstration of ‘the real’ collapses; unsurprising since the reductive frameworks of historical Modernism have returned at the start of the twenty-first century despite the Post-Modern critique.22 Both Cavell and Bazin continue to exert influence into the present via their teleology, which justifies cinematic realism as an inherent effect of photographic indexicality, affirming the image as an ideological proof, a “truth claim” for the existence of what it depicts, whether used for fictional or documentary purposes and meanings. Digital cinema upends these claims by facilitating not only the manipulation of photographs, but also their replacement by entirely generative, animated-but-photographic fabrications. However, a specific set of relationships between audience, ‘image object,’ camera, and presentation established in this historical “cinematic” are being not only retained in digital cinema, but also transformed as digital media challenge the assumptive demarcations between historical media; however, this thingness of cinema-as-medium and its relationality to ‘the real’ obfuscates the audience’s role in resolving the metastability of indexicality created by digital sampling and its implicit challenges to a priori conceptions of motion pictures and their relationship to reality. What is on-screen in any motion picture is nothing more than a pattern of light and shadow, whatever its method of production (analogue or digital), the construct depends on its audience to render these patterns coherent. Claims to being-factual are a specific choice that understands cinema as indexically addressing ‘the real,’ but it depends on the audience’s tacit acceptance for its maintenance. Naturalism allows this claim to progress without friction through its conventional arrangement of depiction as a prosthetic vision for its audience—a series of recognitions based in enculturation. Thus, ontology is irrelevant: the fabrication of naturalism ultimately depends on the viewer, as the indexical recognitions in The Number 23 and the documentary claims made by the titles for The Kingdom and the ‘newsreel’ in Citizen Kane demonstrate. This same naturalism collapses the objective narrative presentation into a subjective ‘unreal fantasy’ in the Kolchak: The Night Stalker title via the uncanny revelation of the technical reality of motion pictures. Cinematic realism in all these title designs engages with the artificial nature of motion pictures in a resentiment of those dimensions ignored by Cavell’s or Bazin’s ontological photography.

Modal Media A realist articulation is not the same as an ontological proof: although ontology is irrelevant to the modalities of cinematic realism, opposing it is difficult. The contemporary crises of “post-cinema” are an artifact of this conception of the photographic index, its ontology, and the discourse emergent around them. The weight of historical debates and misconceptions—theorizations of the “photographic index and the dispositive of cinema”23—makes any critique a labored process that must restart with each new object of analysis because the apparent order assumed by cinema gives ideology the status of aesthetic object and claims its critical–theoretical organization as a philosophical demonstration of/about ‘the real.’ Reification justifies this process that hides the complexity and ambivalence of how ‘the real’ relates to ideology, thus making concerns with ideology

212 Ideologies as a language game disappear in advance of its critique. The challenges of contemporary digital cinema in title sequences such as The Kingdom or Blade Runner 2049 destabilizes this articulated nature of indexicality by making it a feature of their significance, developing a relationship to ‘the real’ that superficially legitimates cinema=narrative—but is at the same time a denial of its Modernist foundations. Indexicality creates a self-iterating, all-encompassing discourse about ‘the real,’ but its claims remain inherently unstable, a factor that paradoxically serves their claims to being-factual. Realism constrains interpretation at foundational levels as a discourse that accommodates their easy slippage between the factuality of documentary and the artifice of fictional narratives only because their connection to reality is contingent rather than essential; ontology does not determine their validity.The commutability between these modes emerges from their arbitrariness. The Post-Modern shift from a unitary theory of reality to a polyvalent, and metastable, understanding where it is not an issue of documenting reality, but instead (following the logic of semiotics) an issue of acknowledging the models used to describe it. The crisis of digital cinema known as “post-cinema” is an obvious consequence of digital challenges to the rhetoric of realism and the ideology that informs it, as philosopher Jean-François Lyotard explained about the ratification of visuality in representational art: The challenge lay essentially in that photographic and cinematographic processes can accomplish better, faster, and with a circulation a hundred thousand times larger than narrative or pictorial realism, the task which academicism had assigned to realism: to preserve various consciousnesses from doubt. Industrial photography and cinema will be superior to painting and the novel whenever the objective is to stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable meaning.24 Realism imposes predictable a priori limits on digital imaging that make comprehension possible. Recognizing these affirmations of established knowledge (whether or not conceived as an ontological proof) always returns to the naturalism of cinematic depiction; this academicism takes the imaginary as tangible fact, a presentness that converts the abstract “reality of the mind” into the mere appearances familiar denotation. Digital cinema thus reanimates director Jean Epstein’s concept of photogénie.This essence of academic reinscription begins at the lowest levels of perception and category assignment by making visible those things which can be conceived, but which cannot be seen, presenting them as ‘events’ on-screen. These articulations grow exponentially more complex at higher levels, regardless of the technological mechanisms of their exhibition. This metaphoric understanding applies equally well to the articulations of motion pictures as to those of spoken (or written) language, but without the same formality, giving the organization of cinema a different quality than that of lexical form, but retaining the same necessary role for past experience and audience apperception which then become the foundations of cinema and realism. The Venn diagram in Figure 7.1 offers a modal description of cinema as one of Wittgenstein’s “language games,” but expressed through modulations of audience perception.25 This diagram assimilates historical, mutually exclusive conceptions of cinema. The morphology and structure of this alternative conception is open ended, an expanded

The Medium

213

COMPOSITING/JUXTAPOSITION (WITHIN THE SAME SCREEN)

PROJECTION

EDITING

MONTAGE

MULTIPLE SCREENS IN PHYSICAL SPACE

TIME

SPACE CONTINUOUS SHOTS (SPREAD ACROSS SEVERAL SCREENS TO FORM ONE IMAGE)

THE LONG TAKE

JUMP CUTS STEP–PRINTING

MOTION CONTINUOUS SHOTS DISPLACEMENT

Figure 7.1 Venn diagram showing three formal dimensions of cinema and their potential combinatory relationships: the spatial arrangement of projected imagery in space, whether on one screen or several; the temporal ordering of those images; and the continuity of motion within them.

field that emphasizes the modal articulation of meaning through encultured expertise. The three overlapping domains of time, motion, and space in this model correspond to the morphology that characterizes what appears on-screen: the immanent response the audience has defines the terms time, motion, and space by what this hypothetical viewer would regard as the dominant quality of what they see on-screen—as the editing of ‘shots’ in series [“time”], the continuity of motion within a singular shot [“motion”], or the arrangement of projected imagery in the literal space of the screen/exhibition [“space”].26 These features are distinguished by their historical identification as the mutually exclusive variants of an essential “purity” in historical theorizations of Modernism, but are combined here as a taxonomy of distinct potentials for enunciative articulation where their hybrid positions create the challenges of “post-cinema.” What Figure 7.1 offers to cinematic analysis is an alternative to the construction cinema=narrative. Modernism defined the formal “purity” of cinema as either editing (montage), or duration (continuous motion)—the uninterrupted continuity of actions in the ‘long take’— assigning each in turn the stats of sine qua non for cinematic excellence. This formalism parallels and intersects the modulation of cinematic realism which transforms audiovisual shots into arrangements of ‘events,’ and the sequential explanations of fabula.Their copresence in the Kolchak:The Night Stalker title sequence comes as a coda to their dominance,

214 Ideologies challenged via avant-garde ‘material function’ that anticipates digital cinema as part of this evolutional lineage: this design demonstrates the fallacy of the “it never was/it always was” opposition in demands for “purity” that deny validity to hybrid forms [Figure 7.1]. Intermediates between the long take and montage—such as the “jump cut” employed by Jean-Luc Godard’s narrative films where long takes are cut down, creating gaps in their otherwise continuous action—are relatively rare in commercial cinema, which has typically focused either on the modulation of time via editing described by theories of montage and continuity, or more commonly in the demand for continuity of action within the long take via continuous, extended camera runs where editing is minimized or eliminated entirely. Modulations of “space” familiar from optical printing’s use of windowing to create split screens and collage smaller shots together in a single frame, or from the use of multiple projection screens arranged in space, are historically even rarer in commercial media: both “time” and “motion” assumed the singularity of depiction within the proscenium theater. Multiple image juxtapositions have a provisional status within this history, unused except when they serve narrative ends, as with the shots showing the tramp breaking into the house in Suspense (1913) directed by Lois Weber [Figure 7.2]. The difficulty with producing this composite in 1913 anticipates its future rarity in analogue film; however, in digital cinema, all those tasks which previously required expertise and virtuosity to perform become commonplace and banal rather than rare and exceptional due to the fluid capacities of computer technology to reshape

Figure 7.2 Still frames showing multiple image juxtaposition in Suspense directed by Lois Weber (1913).

The Medium

215

and transform the ‘image object.’ This innovation is a response to specific commercial and technical demands for precision, efficiency, and cost reduction; their historical use has been restricted by technical expense and difficulty of production, rather than a necessarily realist rejection of visual combination or juxtaposition. Audience perception is central to this analytic. Cinema is a technical artifact created specifically to exploit human perceptual-cognition. Realism is a chimera; indexicality is a contingency; ontology is irrelevant. The morphology and structure of cinema enables sight as an actively engaged, organizational process to determine denotation, thus transforming motion perception into cinematic discourse, narration, and fabula. The medium of cinematic motion thus lies with the interpretive encounter, as film historians Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks argue in their article “Movies in the Mind’s Eye”: the apparent movement of motion pictures should be understood as a mental process, specifically embodied. The movement the audience sees when watching a movie—whether in the form of a film, videotape, or digital file—is more than simply the illusion of motion, it is cognitively real. This process of human interpretation is the important factor in organizing the morphology and structure of the perceptual encounter into a coherent understanding of the world, as they explain: A continuous motion in the world is, of course, captured by successive displayed images on film (or their video equivalent). For most events, these displacements are small, and within the range of the low-level sensory receptors of the visual system; these respond identically to the visual displacements on the screen and to the differences provided from one moment to the next by smooth physical motion in the world.27 Hochberg and Brooks, following the proposals of gestalt psychology, identify human perception as relying on a uniform underlying process where all visual phenomena are encountered in the same way. While the mechanical motion rendered on screen in a motion picture seems separate from any living action, as neurologists Zoï Kapoula and Louis-José Lestocart’s psychological study of painterly motion shows, motion perception is actually entirely dependent on the perceiving audience.28 Those visual displacements appearing in a motion picture are engaged in the same ways that immanent motions are, without distinguishing their empirical causes. The audience’s cognitive engagement—human interpretation—produces the perceptual encounter, a recognition that ties the motion picture and its realist appearances to the human sensory engagement; the historical definition of analogue cinema in the link of ontology–indexicality dominates the conceptions of motion pictures as an innate, unquestioned “nature” of cinematography that denies the motion of motion pictures as a distinct realm of articulation. However, the experience of sight is a product of interpretations where past experiences inform the immediate sensory encounter, giving order and identifying what is and is not significant (requires attention). Digital technology models the same visual displacements contained by the intermittent photographs of celluloid using different means, yet in these otherwise divergent technologies, the audience’s sensory encounter creates the same identification of motion without distinguishing its technological and empirical causes. Motion is motion, whether in reality or on-screen. Unlike physical motion, immanent and substantive in the world,

216 Ideologies the movement seen in a motion picture is merely apparent motion, incorporeal, emergent from human cognition. What is perceived is real motion, all perceptions of motion are a uniform identification employing the same mental facilities: all motion perception is cognitive, but that of motion pictures is purely a mental phantasm, an optical illusion, without physicality or reality. Audience perception renders the intermittent presentation of stills into the continuous, dynamic ‘reality’ of movement.The convergence of this superficially autonomous motion on-screen with ‘the real’ is understandable because it is perceptually identical to any other perceived visual motion—there can be no separation of the movement seen from its interpretation. The linkages of mental engagement and perceptual encounter are productive of this experience—as Kapoula and Lestocart have noted—observable in the laboratory using a combination of interviews with test subjects, digital eye tracking, and fMRI.29 This foundation in the sensory encounter shifts the entire focus of motion imagery away from the immanence of “movement” and the development of meaning ‘contained’ by the material object and technical apparatus, and into the mind of the audience guided by their established expertise: these concerns with kinetics are common to most early concerns with the “cinematic”; they do not dismiss the audience from the construction, but rather draw attention to the movement in ways that are not always apparent to normal, everyday human vision.30 This shift aligns the recognition of motion in cinema with other encultured recognitions, allowing its modulation and manipulation—as is common in animated works, or with both slow motion and time lapse photography—to have the same enunciative capacity as any other articulation. Anthropocentrism inheres in motion picture technology— it makes the human element neither exclusively, nor merely an en passant problem in theorizing cinema. The need for a revaluation and reconsideration—the crisis of digital technology—arises because these shifts challenge earlier theories of cinema as conception, implementation, interpretation. What registers in consciousness as the “statement” itself—neither the component parts, nor their meaning—is the realist enunciation.31 However, cinema=narrative cannot accommodate these linkages between motion pictures, optical experience, and established expertise. Both the social realm and individual human engagement—the combination of perception (immanent encounter) and past experience (established knowledge)—must be equally acknowledged as crucial to defining the medium of motion pictures in a final challenge to any residual belief in cinematic ontology, the photographic index, or traditional dispositive of cinema.

Notes 1 Eisenstein, S. “Word and Image” The Film Sense trans. J. Leyda (NewYork: Harvest/HBJ, 1975), pp. 3–5. 2 Betancourt, M. “Motion Perception in Movies and Painting: Towards a New Kinetic Art” Life in the Wires: The CTheory Reader ed. Arthur Kroker and M. Kroker (Victoria: NWP, 2004), pp. 402–409. 3 Vardac, N. From Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), pp. 20–67. 4 Ponech, T. “Cinema: Display, Medium, Work” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia T. 69, Fasc. 3/4 (2013), pp. 552–553. 5 Gaudreault, A. Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema trans. T. Barnard (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011), p. 9. 6 Lubschez, B. The Story of the Motion Picture: 65 B.C. to 1920 A.D. (New York: Reeland, 1920).

The Medium 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

217

Ramsaye, T. A Million and One Nights (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924). Bardèche, M. and Brasillach, R. The History of Motion Pictures (New York: Norton, 1938). Jacobs, L. The Rise of the American Film (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939/1948). Jacobs, L. Experimental Cinema: 1930–1934 (Arno Series of Contemporary Art No. 36) (New York: Arno Press, 1969). Balsom, E. “Brakhage’s Sour Grapes, or Notes on Experimental Cinema in the Art World” Moving Image Review & Art Journal vol. 1, no. 1 (2012), pp. 13–25. Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009). Ponech, T. “Cinema: Display, Medium, Work” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia T. 69, Fasc. 3/4 (2013), pp. 547–548. Buden, B. “Criticism without Crisis: Crisis without Criticism” Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique ed. G. Raunig and G. Ray (London: May Fly, 2009), pp. 33–42. Crimp, D. On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), pp. 18–21. Hatfield, J. “Expanded Cinema and Narrative” Millennium Film Journal nos. 39–40, “Hidden Currents” (Winter, 2003), pp. 63–64. Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 13–14. Hanhardt, J. “The Medium Viewed: The American Avant-Garde Film” A History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema (New York: The American Federation of the Arts, 1976), p. 22. Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 13–14. Rushton, R. The Reality of Film:Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2011), pp. 44–47. Gunning, T. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs” Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography ed. K. Breckman and J. Ma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 23–26. Johnson, C. B. Modernity without a Project (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2015), pp. 6–9. Hagener, M., Hediger,V. and Strohmaier, A. The State of Post-Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 3. Lyotard, J.-F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 74. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Cornwall: Blackwell, 1997) sections 65–84; pp. 31–39. Betancourt, M. Beyond Spatial Montage:Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space (New York: Focal Press, 2016), pp. 51–64. Hochberg, J. and Brooks, V. “Movies in the Mind’s Eye” Post Theory ed. D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 368–369. Kapoula, Z. and Lestocart, L-J. “Space and Motion Perception Evoked by the Painting ‘Study of a Dog’ of Francis Bacon” intellectica 2006/2, n° 44: Systèmes d’aide: Enjeux pour les technologies cognitives (2006), pp. 215–226. Kapoula, Z. and Lestocart, L.-J. “Space and Motion Perception Evoked by the Painting ‘Study of a Dog’ of Francis Bacon” intellectica 2006/2, n° 44: Systèmes d’aide: Enjeux pour les technologies cognitives (2006), pp. 215–226. Vertov, D. Kino-Eye:The Writings of Dziga Vertov ed. A. Michelson, trans. K. O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 72–75. Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 88.

8

The Message

Only ‘the real’ can be what it appears to be.Yet cinematic realism aspires to be a complementary demonstration, a proof of profilmic existence that Cavell and Bazin argue lies with the semi-autonomous recognition (naturalism) of the ‘image object,’ which they argue shows things-in-themselves: their ontological claim for motion pictures denies that depiction is a product of ideology (articulation). Recognizing the ‘events’ shown onscreen via their semblance to everyday experience thus builds a symbolic order from how realism allows the confusion and convergence of depiction and reality. Modernism takes the symbolic distance separating what appears on-screen and what is actually there for an axiomatic ordering of the world in the fixed dynamics of naturalism::stylization as an innate, fixed series of relations crystalized in the denotation on-screen.This ‘transparent’ understanding of the ‘image object’ identifies its apparent stability and ‘naturalness’ familiar from Bazin’s analysis of photographic indexicality as a self-evident ontological proof of an innate connection to an external ‘optical source’—an assumption about analogue technology that does not apply to the digital. However, even this historically precarious affirmation of reality is unstable. The differential between the ‘image object’ (depiction), the ‘image carrier’ itself (the ‘material function’), and the order provided by enculturation (ideology) informs the both the shot-on-film title design in Kolchak: The Night Stalker and the digital animation of The Number 23, allowing them exploit this hidden instability via their uncanny effects. Realism demonstrates its ideological foundations in these designs because their articulation moves across the naturalism::stylization dynamic, drawing attention to realist statements as either an indexical claim to/about reality (being-factual), or as an acknowledgment of being fabricated, an artificial construct (being-fictional). Modernism historically assumed ontology–indexicality is an essential foundation for cinema, yet this connection to ‘the real’ and the naturalism that accompanies it is not a technological ‘given’ but an ideological attempt to define denotation in terms of an empirical reality apart from perception, but this connection of the photographed image to what it apparently “contains” depends on the internalized role of past experience. Understanding realism as independent of photographic ontology establishes beingfactual as part of a range that includes its contrary, being-fictional, the artificial; these modes of naturalism::stylization allow specific differences in understanding between a realism of “mere appearances” and an “unseen, metaphysical order” to create parallel, mutually exclusive ranges of naturalism::stylization and indexicality::artificiality whose

220 Ideologies

Figure 8.1 The four realist modes are defined by the relationships between naturalism::stylization and indexicality::artificiality.

paradoxical doublings repudiate the fallacy of ontology–indexicality by defining four modes of realist articulation [Figure 8.1]. Different modes enact antithetical understandings of reality but employ the same indexical claim of being-factual (‘documentary reality’ and ‘metaphysical reality’), while a second pair that acknowledges the artificiality of cinema does not make any claim to describe reality (‘realist fiction’ and ‘unreal fantasy’). Each set reiterates the naturalism::stylization dynamic, separated by their different, antagonistic associations with ‘the real.’ Michel Foucault identifies these distinctions between realism and reality that emerge from indexicality as the relationship between resemblance (signification) and similitude (being what it appears to be).1 Denotation is neither an ontological identification nor a recognition of an innate indexicality to ‘the real,’ but an interpreted conclusion, a product of specifically formal cues. Foucault’s distinction between the world of actual things and the mental realm of thought implicitly requires an acknowledgment of the viewer as mediator. Realism marshals encultured knowledge to resolve the ambivalence of perception. While stylization is unavoidable, it is also conventionalized in such a way that the naturalism::stylization range is always obvious, containing any disruptive potential. This role remains constant, allowing its ideology to define the technical lineage of cinema that continues with digital motion pictures.The imagery of digital systems distances both the technical apparatus of the photographic system and the autonomous cognitive–perceptual engagement of their audience by shifting from a material connection/relationship with an analog physical phenomenon (light) to the generative product of a computational process. “Post-cinema” identifies this severed ontological link of photograph to source as an existential challenge to cinema, forcing it to confront the newly traditional contingency that has operated at the margins of realism throughout the history of motion pictures. Découpage always needs the interpretive expertise of its audience to identify its modal significance.This ‘transparent’ articulation of fabula and narrative embraces the “content” of shots, proving an explanation for events shown, justifying their interpretation by the coherent result. The particular dynamics of articulation, enunciation, and denotation are subsumed as encultured expectations. These developments inform how audiences recognize Stephan Burle’s design for The Kingdom as making an “objective” documentary claim that also defines the meaning of the glitches in Danny Yount’s design for Blade

The Message

221

Runner 2049, while the statements arranged in Peter Frankfurt’s design for The Number 23 are unquestionably a “subjective” organization of factual materials that demonstrates a schizophrenic ‘reality of the mind.’ These presentations raise the same questions about the reality of what appears on-screen that Douglas P. Lackey has discussed about the fictional performance in his critique of Cavell’s book, TheWorldViewed: Is it true that standard films represent reality in such a way that we must accept their subjects as having a reality independently of the films in which they appear? The proper answer is that it all depends. If you are dealing with a still photograph, you are compelled almost always to treat it as a document; a photograph of Jones represents Jones as he really was, at some place and some time. But if you have a feature film, in which the actors have roles, then there is no longer any compulsion to accept what is seen as real.2 Articulation that renders meaning via “narration” creates a necessary contradiction between resemblance and similitude: this is the question Lackey poses about Cavell that also corresponds to Bazin’s conception of motion pictures as an ontological recording that captures reality like “the intact bodies of insects from a bygone era preserved in amber.”3 Whether the performance is fictive or factual is unimportant to this ontological description, and that is what creates the problem by denying the encultured roles of context, aesthetics, and past experience. The ontological–indexical identification testifies to how the encultured, interpretive guides provided by realist ideology renders the ‘image object’ as an a priori constant independent of its apprehension/presentation.The ideology of realism allows the literary heritage that approaches cinema as a specialized type of dramatic theater or novel to define the artifice of narrative as reality itself in a refusal to acknowledge the fictional performances that are the raison d’être for its simulation of everyday experience. However, actors playing roles are not representing themselves but someone else instead. Understanding the distinction between fact and fiction requires a recourse to the narration that Cavell and Bazin ignore: the potential for fictional behaviors dispels the “compulsion to accept what is seen as real.” These problematics are hidden because the cinema=narrative construction discards the issues Lackey raises. Narrative and semiosis become apparent as distinct, independent functions only when considering specifically non-narrative works such as title sequences where the link to fabula is attenuated or submerged within other structural relations (such as the crediting function). The title sequence for The Big Broadcast of 1937 makes the problematics Lackey explains about actors and acting immanent via the separation of titles from the main narrative itself. The simplicity of text::image relations demonstrates the rupture between ontology and indexicality that is typical of all title designs [Figure 5.2, p. 156].The first of these still frames shows a composite photograph depicting a man looking off screen to the left while silently talking to someone unseen. An optically printed text appears across the bottom of the screen stating a name, “Jack Benny.” Photographic indexicality and ontology only confuse this depiction: while it is true that the image shows the actor Jack Benny, and a voice-over announcing his name asserts that the link between the image and text is the appropriate one to make, these connections are a product of encultured expertise. The text is a part of the image shown on-screen, and at the same time, fundamentally detached

222 Ideologies from it in the same way that voice-over is an independent element of this articulation. Realism employs the familiar conjunction of the calligram to form a redundant circuit between text and image. It superficially appears to affirm an ontological claim because the person shown is Jack Benny, but it also recalls Lackey’s comments—this identification is only necessary because the film is a work of fiction. Jack Benny is not “Jack Benny” within the fabula. His performance disputes the immediacy of the apparently natural, ontological link: this man is someone named “Jack Carson,” an imaginary character. The denotation does not show “Jack Benny” but “Jack Carson,” and this is why its labeling is essential: within the story, “Jack Benny” who is both named by the voice-over and labeled by the text is to be called “Jack Carson,” a distinction that is not apparent from this image. But it is a shot extracted from that story, a diegetic image rendered non-diegetic by its repetition in the title sequence. The character appearing in this shot is not “Jack Benny” but is his character in the film, yet that is not how he is identified. The duplicity of “Jack Benny” versus “Jack Carson” is exactly the problem Lackey identified with the ontological model of realism: by which name should this man be identified? Both designations are true and both describe ‘the real’ but in mutually exclusive ways: he cannot be both in the ontological sense that Bazin and Cavell describe since the role of “Jack Carson,” his aspirations, beliefs, destiny are entirely different than those of Jack Benny no matter how closely they correspond to one another. Insisting on an ontological basis for the denotation creates mismatches between representation, convention, and ‘the real’ in an unavoidable confusion between fiction and reality. Recourse to an “ontological state of playing a role” does not address this problem, instead escaping through the sophistry this ‘solution’ offers by ignoring the problem, rather than resolving it. Once transitive and unstable identities enter into the description of ‘the real,’ the proposition of ontology itself becomes questionable; a better solution to this problem is to reject the ontological claims for motion pictures as a fallacy, as Lackey suggests.This contradictory articulation opens a rift that the audience ignores because they understand these differences fluently. The message of realism is an ideology that masks these failings as a shifting set of articulations about ‘the real,’ each articulation enframed by the facts that form its basis. It is no longer a matter of an essential truth hidden or displaced by the articulation, but of the cinematic articulation itself establishing its own reality independent of ontology. The self-affirming nature of realism derives from how convention and past experience conspire to eliminate from consideration all those problematics that might contest the dominance of cinema=narrative. This foundation in the conventions of realism and its articulation as fabula remains constant for digital motion pictures; it makes the seamless shift between new and old cinemas possible since the new technology does not require a reconsideration of established expertise, offering instead an accentuation and exaggeration of familiar features whose arrangement at the lowest levels of on-screen enunciation remain unchanged.

Active Engagement Belief in cinema as a prosthetic vision rationalizes a banal aspiration to create an immanent reality by denying the constructive role of the audience in transforming découpage into meaning. This traditional view of audiences-as-passive renders realist production,

The Message

223

especially naturalism, as a default recording of ‘the real,’ affirming the ontology of photographic indexicality and denying its illusory, constructed basis in convention and past experience.An ontological–indexical proposal is a self-affirming argument against the manipulation and composition of the ‘image object,’ in favor of it as being a “found object” whose resemblance to reality defines realist ideology and Bazin’s “myth of total cinema.”4 This “purity” is so established that it appears natural, an inevitable product of the moving image itself. However, viewers are actively engaged: they easily navigate realist modes without difficulty, transforming their interpretations of cinema into a materialist illustration of the visible world. Realism takes the dominance of sight as model for knowing and understanding as a given, mediating between the encounter in perception and its organization into the statement—moving images synchronized with sounds change into ‘event,’ narration, and fabula. Michel Foucault’s critique of knowledge explains the differences between “reading and seeing” as the distinction–demonstration of perception ordered via encultured protocols gleaned from past experience. The “empirical gaze” is an order-generating authority: [S]eeing consists in leaving to experience its greatest corporeal opacity; the solidity, the obscurity, the density of things closed in upon themselves, have powers of truth that they owe not to light, but to the slowness of the gaze that passes over them, around them, and gradually into them, bringing them nothing more than its own light. The residence of truth in the dark center of things is linked, paradoxically, to this sovereign power of the empirical gaze that turns their darkness into light.5 Foucault describes interpretation via an active engagement that imposes a predetermined order on the world; for cultural constructs such as cinema, this imposition is essential to their initial parsing of sensations into significances and insignificances that deflects, manages, and organizes attention. For Foucault, “vision” is more than just a metaphor for dominance: it is dominance, recalling the familiar cultural meaning of sight and insight as a connection between perception and comprehension.6 It defines the recognition of realist modes not as a direct engagement with meaning or signification, but rather as an a priori articulation directing how higher-level interpretations proceed. Those factors constraining interpretation are invisible to its engagement—they are what make it possible; both indexical modes, ‘documentary reality’ and ‘metaphysical reality,’ depend on this engagement with ‘the real’ for their coherence. In looking at an ‘image object’ containing both pictorial and typographic contents, to see the denotation, we do not read the text, but in reading the text, the image becomes secondary, a background to semiosis.This shifting process emerges into consciousness with difficulty since the entire system of “the gaze” serves to mask it as a ‘transparent’ engagement with signification. Complex shifts between different modal engagements create a dynamic torsion across mutually exclusive encounters: as-language or as-denotation where the instability of the “Jack Benny” title card in The Big Broadcast of 1937 can emerge only from these shifts becoming the focus of attention. A similar effect defines the ‘reading-image’ in the title sequence for The Number 23, as does the relationship of text to photo/illustration in The Kingdom. These instabilities are a product of the audience’s active recognition of facticity in response to the presentation of information that the viewer already knows. Kinetic transformations demonstrate indexical claims only because those claims arise in familiar

224 Ideologies recognitions and/or self-evident statements of fact (i.e., “William Jefferson Clinton has 23 letters”). Recognitions from past experience are necessary for any realist articulation to overcome its artificiality and make an indexical claim, yet it is entirely masked by the conventional nature of the presentation that converts its overt fabrication and difference from everyday human experience into the natural and uncritical correspondence of ‘transparency.’ Sensory experience not only determines the meaning of the work through the recognition of imagery, it also provides the vehicle for that meaning through the interpretation and intertextual relations accruing to the work because audiences are inherently active.7 Depending on how viewers initially approach interpreting the image, on where their emphasis is guided by the conventionality of realism—on ontology–indexicality or on semantic ordering—determines what details are considered important. Ideology entangles articulation of meaning with the apparent “objectness” of perception in the ‘image object’: although the perceptual encounter lies at the foundation of these recognitions, it is only by extending the range of enunciation/articulation beyond what are purely and innately visual constructs that meaning emerges. This perceptual–conceptual dynamic of interpretation in cinema returns to established expertise and past experience in a necessary assertion of realist ideological structures, as Foucault explains: The relation of the proposition to the referent cannot serve as a model or as a law for the relation of the statement to what it states. The latter relation not only does not belong to the same-level as the former, but it is anterior to it.8 The enculturation that defines realism dominates perception: the issues of denotation, connotation, and all their entangled complexities emerge when considering the confrontations between the immediacy of perceptions and the interpretation of them as symbolic expressions. In shifting from immediacy of encounter to interpreted meaning, the audience is invited to deploy their capacities for shifting between lower-level recognitions and higher-level order: denotation seemingly presents us with the thing itself, only connotation makes the link with thought an accessible dimension of the ‘image object.’ Realism thus arises as the lowest-level perceptual recognition. Enunciation transforms these experiences into meaning via audience recognitions that mark significant change, affirming the viewer’s active engagement in directing the interrelationship between encultured knowledge and immanent encounter. This dependence dissolves the parameters of sequence into the cinematic play and advance of encounters with the ‘events’ shown. Each higher level of interpretation depends on lower, foundational assumptions to increase in complexity—realism, diegesis, narrative—that realist ideology marks as natural and inevitable, beyond question. The construction affirms itself.What the assumptions are always finds proof in their arrangement and progression: the schizoid paranoia that selects the particular facts of Peter Frankfurt’s design in The Number 23 confirms the beliefs that made the selection in a closed loop. Audiences determine articulations in more ambivalent constructions where spectatorship demonstrates a duplicitous organization. Resolving ambivalence defines the ideological role of realism in masking this signifying process: Foucault’s constructive “gaze” is an encultured paradigm for comprehension where understanding vision is an actively

The Message

225

engaged, organizational process that is simultaneously masked and denied. The paradoxes that develop in these unstable constructions depend more, rather than less, on the initial beliefs of their audience for establishing their meaning. This interaction between memory, anticipation, and immanence imposes the audience’s established expertise.9 In the James Bond title sequences, the experience of watching is as important as the considered encounter. The illegibility of the typography in From Russia With Love illustrates this seduction via a “tease” that parallels the ambivalence of the denoted images. Neither text nor depiction are fully apparent at all times.The credits are alternatively both legible and not-legible, forcing the audience to hesitate between seeing and reading. The recognition that voyeuristic reverie is not just a function of the gaze but literally interrupts the titles in From Russia With Love makes their illegibility a critical signifier that draws attention to the conventional nature of the on-screen spectacle of female sexuality-as-display in the same ways that the soundtrack challenges the comfortable identification of the imagery in Goldfinger as a voyeuristic spectacle. The subjectivity in each ‘unreal fantasy’ develops an unstable articulation, drawing attention to itself and to the audience identification of the on-screen imagery of cinema as a prosthetic vision. These recognitions of artifice announces the use–mention paradox: depending on whether Brownjohn’s title designs are understood as an implicit or explicit instance of “voyeurism” defines its meaning as complicit or critical—these are a priori determinations the audience must make first, which then direct their interpretation in foundational ways, invisible to their analysis since the results are self-consistent, allowing no alternatives nor needing them. This excess to the particulars of découpage and design identifies enunciation with the parameters of its organization, not simply of the instantaneous encounter, but in how it extends duratively as the ‘event,’ the entire sequence, and ultimately the fabula itself. Audience demand defines articulation in the ambivalent relationship between interpretation and denotation that separates the ‘event’ into compartmentalized statements. Since the recognition and identification of “sequence” depends on enculturation, it allows the realist ideology of historical cinema to continue unacknowledged in digital motion pictures, ratified in those intratextual relations arising within and between individual shots— either as a continuous progression of ‘events’ on-screen in the long take, or through the relational assumptions produced by editing.10 Découpage is the vehicle for cause–effect explanations and their symbolic interpretation: these connections are a convention of narrative form, interpreted by how the audience links their proximate/contextual encounters to higher-level organization as causality.11 Viewers justify this narration through the coherence their interpretation provides for the ‘events’ depicted using [1] the material découpage (the collection of shots, mise-en-scène, montage/editing and composited text, and VFX) that [2] the audience organizes into explanations of cause–effect descriptive of the narrative (syuzhet), and [3] the audience’s higher-level explanation of these sequences as plot or story (fabula).12 The assembly-structure of individual shots either as singular, apparently continuous camera-runs or as collections of discrete shots glued into series renders the consistent fictional world (the diegesis of classical film semiotics)13 as a coherent message. Fabula arises with/in and as the organization of cinematic articulation, making cinema=narrative seem natural and inevitable.This necessity defines and masks the role of realist ideology for cinema. Viewers use their established knowledge to model their encounter, constantly anticipating, correcting, and re-correcting their interpretations to suggest a

226 Ideologies “gignomenological law of identity” where a general interpretation is not merely a summary of a certain group of past experiences, but offers/contains potentials that are matched by similar experiences and interpretations in the future.14 Foucault recognizes the active viewer is not only foundational but also essential to meaning: The statement is neither a syntagma, nor a rule of construction, nor a canonic form of succession and permutation; it is that which enables such groups of signs to exist, and enables these rules or forms to become manifest. But although it enables them to exist, it does so in a special way—a way that must not be confused with the existence of signs as elements of a language (langue), or with the material existence of those marks that occupy a fragment of space or last for a variable length of time.15 The statement arises from the breaking-up of continuities into pieces; this imaginary dissolution that retains the entirety of encounter is Foucault’s “enunciative function.” Signification depends on the discreteness of its terms as much as the meanings that might be assigned to them; past experience is central to anticipating and recognizing divergences from established norms.16 These variances are what produces the shifting realist modes in the Kolchak: The Night Stalker title sequence, emerging as the uncanny moment that comes at its climax. Duplicity in encounter/experience offers an operative paradigm for significance precisely embodied in how articulation delineates and compartmentalizes experience, dependent on the audience identifying/imposing an order and arrangement that registers as the “statement” itself—neither the component parts encountered (articulation), nor their meaning (signification). Individual parts recognized inside the encounter are the elements whose combination produces meaning, whether it is denotation, or at a higher-level, a particular and “precise” application of the audiences’ internalized, encultured protocols for semiosis and the grammatical order of langue.The documentary assertions of the photo/illustrations in The Kingdom title sequence demonstrate this role, as do the recognitions of facts in The Number 23 opening. However, audiences do not acknowledge this ideological structure. Enculturation renders itself ‘invisible’ as the necessary and sufficient conditions that enable meaning and signification to progress—without the opposition between the being-factual of indexicality and the being-fictional of artificiality cinematic realism cannot be understood as making claims about ‘the real.’ Approaching realism through the traditional framework of cinema=narrative imposes the ‘transparency’ of intratextual organization conveying the content of the work for the “average reader”; a simplicity that creates its antithesis, the “critical viewer,” as a challenge by externalizing signification as intertextual quotations and significances; however, realism must be specifically invoked by using a known morphology and structure. The shifting interpretations of the shots in the Bullitt title sequence rest on these a priori uses of naturalism::stylization in the cinematic presentation-for-audience and its interpretation as a statement-of-narrative. These established frameworks enable (are the precondition for) the same active engagement both “average” and “critical viewers” use to parse their perceptions. Ironically, ideological articulation disappears without this active recognition of known forms: no realism, no narration, no fabula—thus, no cinema=narrative.

The Message

227

Notes 1 Foucault, M. This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 58. 2 Lackey, D. “Reflections on Cavell’s Ontology of Film” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol. 32, no. 2 (Winter, 1973), p. 273. 3 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), pp. 8–9. 4 Bazin, A. What Is Cinema? trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 17. 5 Foucault, M. The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. xiii. 6 Oliva, A., Torralba, A. and Schyns, P. G. “Hybrid Images” ACM Transactions on Graphics, ACM Siggraph vol. 25, no. 3 (July, 2006), pp. 527–532. 7 Eco, U. “Interpreting Serials” The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), pp. 86–87. 8 Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 90. 9 Foucault, M. The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. xiii. 10 Metz, C. Film Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 11 Altman, R. “General Introduction: Cinema as Event” Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 2–4. 12 Bordwell, D. Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 53. 13 Gunning, T. “The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity” Yale Journal of Criticism vol. 7, no. 2 (Fall, 1994), p. 190. 14 Ziehen, T. Lehrbuch der Logik auf positivistischer Grundlage mit Berücksichtigung der Geschichte der Logik (Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webere Verlag, 1920). 15 Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 88. 16 Eco, U. “Interpreting Serials” The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), pp. 91–93.

9

Realist Articulation

Ideology is inescapable because it defines enculturation. André Bazin’s ontological theory of realism, via its elaboration in Stanley Cavell’s work, and its echoes in Giles Deleuze’s analysis, continues to dominate the intellectual conception of realism in motion pictures for the same reason that Modernist aesthetics1 have not disappeared: they are symptoms of how enculturation developed in the twentieth century continues to limit the diversity of the twenty-first, a testament to the persistence and continuity of history. But what matters about ideology in cinema is not that it exists, nor necessarily its continuity with the Modernist past, but what the contents are: how realism makes an appearance into an adamant and unassailable “truth” accepted as the inevitable cinematic “proof ” of reality. Linking cinematic indexicality to ontology changes representation into reality—in becoming a natural demonstration of ‘the real,’ discourse narrows to only ‘transparent’ assertions of established ideology—causing an ontological confusion of distinct categories (such as the difference between factual, fictional, and metaphysical statements).2 Realism thus allows only one possible conclusion—objective, naturalistic, indexical—a homologous, singular (acceptable) outcome that is the dominant social and economic order whose unquestionable inequalities of status, wealth, and privilege eliminates alternatives and restricts representation. Ideology uniformly cloaks this dominant order in a ‘transparent’ realism, making the analysis of relationships between ‘the real,’ cinema, and naturalism::stylization always return and revert into questions about ontologyindexicality.3 Realism is a cultural construct that the photograph teleologically enacts. The established ideology of realism denies the complexity of articulation through “photographic indexicality,” the capacity of photography to directly emulate familiar reality by creating a contingent ‘image object’ that suggests an ambivalent transfer between reality and representation.4 Those physical elements at the foundation of cinematography, photographs, provide an immanent excuse for Bazin’s ontological realism: one can speak of footprints without needing to physically leave them in the sand, but in cinema, the action and statement converge as depiction. Cinematic realism has been innately connected to these arguments—the obsessive return of this issue is a product of its historical dominance over the understanding of realism on-screen; to develop an alternative approach required first addressing the specific fallacies about cinematic realism that animation challenges by determining the ‘image object’ itself without recourse to any ontology of ‘the real.’5 Proposing an expanded conception thus requires opposing the ontological conception before making any reappraisal of indexicality in motion pictures and the articulation of its complement, artificiality.

230 Ideologies The Modernist demand for aesthetic adherence to an ontological realism is a fallacy unmasked by the continued presence “of ” reality via indexical claims made in digital media. Title sequences provided a readily available source of examples that combined familiar aspects of narrative cinema, documentary, and the avant-garde, obvious in the digital animations used in Peter Frankfurt’s opening to The Number 23, Stephan Burle’s title sequence for The Kingdom, and Danny Yount’s main-on-end design for Blade Runner 2049. The modal analysis of indexicality (and its correlate, artificiality) disavows the material relations of analogue technologies by recognizing that the ontological essence described by these historically realist aesthetics and its role for the ‘image object’ are never equivalent, even if they appear to converge in the narrow range of issues around ‘material function.’ Indexical claims make a statement of an epistemological claim about reality, while ontology presents entirely separate, independent claims about what the cinematic medium is, and then proceeds to dictate aesthetics based on this a priori “pure” nature. Addressing the modal articulations of depiction (cinema) apart from these questions about what is reality (‘the real’) requires denying the “purist aesthetics” of mid-twentiethcentury Modernism that conflate indexicality with ontological relations in ways that digital technology undermines, perhaps irrecoverably.The adjustment to digital cinema is a change of address that opens up new potentials in the critique and analysis of motion pictures: some of these discourses the audience understands as documentary claims about reality, while others are fictive constructions whose “reality” does not match that of ‘the real’ world. The appearance of “post-cinema” corresponds to an existential crisis provoked by a technical lineage that has returned as the “image-animation problem,”6 bringing to prominence dimensions of découpage-as-animation repressed in conceiving of cinema–as–art.7

Four Realist Modes Figure 9.1 describes cinematic realism via an estrangement of representation and reality; the principal title sequences discussed in Parts 1 and 2 have been situated in this diagram for clarity. Please note that the historically analogue designs are used to address specifically artificial claims, while contemporary digital sequences have been used to address indexical claims. This selection was made counter to expectations about each technology and its capacity for addressing ‘the real.’ Each realist mode becomes obvious through how it differs from the established arguments about an ontological “purity.” Since interpretive and narrative functions change audience engagement with the ‘image object,’ their contingency and ambivalence in the pseudo-independent title sequence (peritext)8 make it an ideal subject for theoretical analysis since cinema=narrative cannot be assumed as a ‘given’ for analysis.9 The four realist modes develop from treating indexicality as a specific claim, obvious in the assertions of the title sequence design/narrative (apart from the ontology of photography, but potentially invoking that association as a supplemental support). Whether or not cinema has an ontological connection to reality, articulating an indexical claim becomes significant only because it discursively concerns ‘the real’ via past experience; in contrast, the artificial proposes its own reality independent of the world beyond the movie and does not require any association with external reality for its significance. Thus, separating ontology from indexicality allowed the identification of realist articulations in which the shift to subjectivity arises as the change

Realist Articulation 231

The Number 23

Goldfinger

Blade Runner: 2049 The Kingdom

Kolchak: The Night Stalker Bullitt

Figure 9.1 Realist modes distinguished by the separation of “objective” and “subjective” depend on the audience identification of the audiovisual presentation as corresponding to their everyday experience, a separation that parallels the opposition of naturalism and stylization, and that defines the significance of the indexical as a product of its (ontological) direct connection to the real, while the artificial (familiar from fictive entertainment) does not require this same link to reality for its significance. The examples discussed in Parts 1 and 2 are arranged according to the mode they employ.

from the familiar naturalism of ‘everyday appearances’ to the stylization that commonly accompanies the presentation of a ‘mental reality’ hidden from view.This changed understanding of both indexicality and subjectivity opens cinematic articulation to unseen domains that ontology forbids. The title sequence’s attenuation (and refusal) of narrative relations makes this identification of subjectivity as a distinct mode comparable to the objectivity of naturalism explicit. These distinctions between naturalism::stylization and indexicality::artificiality enable cinema to be a discursive presentation that is not confined to making only factual statements. All four realist modes identify superstructures constraining each new motion picture in advance because interpretation depends on how past experience inflects the audience’s immanent encounters toward anticipated, familiar outcomes. Their role in the ideological affirmation of the status quo depends on the nature of their contents, rather being than an autonomous product of realism itself.The potential to craft discursive challenges to a dominant realist order depends precisely on the articulation of that realism: the identification of these cues in Jack Cole’s title sequence for Kolchak:The Night Stalker and Pablo Ferro’s design for Bullitt use their objective presentation as ‘realist fiction’ to invoke a causal relationship, but without requiring the audience to understand these ‘events’ as part of a higher-level fabula (plot), thus drawing attention to that construction. These paranarratives entail reiterations of past knowledge that produces a specific recognition of genre and generic membership depending on intertextual knowledge for coherence, but their lack of narrative specificity implodes this use as a quotation-without-source, derived entirely from the invocation of genre (horror and mystery, respectively). Both

232 Ideologies designs show that quotations do not have to be specifically recognizable as being directly extracted from an already-known source to function referentially.10 Unlike explicit quotations that draw attention both to the specific source and to the ways it reflexively uses the audience’s internalized expertise and knowledge,11 in drawing upon genre expectations as “past experience,” the quotations become allusive, redolent of how allegory employs a decoding “key” to render its double articulation coherent; however, in these designs, this ambiguity of identification is the primary meaning of the sequence. Intertextuality thus arises as a function of the audience’s internalized ability to recognize media via their past experience, creating expectations as groups of competing potentials; when one fails, alternatives are immanent, giving cinema a fleeting, dynamic capacity to shift meaning.12 This past experience from earlier genre works (horror and mystery stories) informs viewers about what is happening in the Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Bullitt openings. The audience selects which hypothesis is most likely to be correct, providing guidance via recognized, familiar cues, testing their hypothetical interpretations through their correspondence to the empirical, perceptual encounter. These title designs exploit this established expertise to articulate an unstable message: the shift from objective to subjective realism in Kolchak: The Night Stalker relies on the same recognitions as the sudden revaluations of the “objective” shots in Bullitt that changes the initially discursive presentation into narrative causality. These changes demonstrate the audience’s capacity for instant reconsideration. Title designs are particularly instructive for considerations of realism, indexicality, and narration because they always contain two levels of articulation: [1] the credits are always, necessarily indexical claims about the production, a reflexive consideration of cinema as an artificial product; [2] the imagery that accompanies these texts and its relationship not only as an independent element on-screen, but also in combination with the credits. The audience understands this conventional nature of title sequences as allowing both the claim to being-factual (indexical) and the claim of being-fictional (artificial) to be interdependent interpretations of the same articulation: the credits register on one level as the factuality of the texts themselves, and on another, entirely parallel level as the ‘image objects’ that accompany the typography, occasionally entering into discourse with the text as in the calligram and rebus modes.13 Making this distinction between levels of enunciation reflects the audience’s internalized lexical expertise with navigating the shifting structures of index and artifice, text and image to arrive at a familiar, recognizable outcome that is the goal of ‘transparency’: signification. The choice to discuss the articulation of objective, indexical claims using only title sequences made with digital animation technology was intentional, as was the use of only designs made with analogue film to consider the artifice of cinema. The advent of digital technology and its attenuation of analogue cinema’s proximate connection to its source has not diminished nor even altered the cinematic capacity to claim indexical connections to ‘the real’ because these claims are semiotic, informed by enculturation and intertextual knowledge applied by the audience. Being-factual is not an innate feature, but a special instance of intertextuality: it can be either a quotation from reality (with the everyday resemblance of naturalism) or a recollection of other, encultured knowledge about the world, thus making all indexical claims dependent on past experience. The naturalism of photography and the indexical claims for the reality of the ‘image object’ often coincide

Realist Articulation 233 specifically in the dynamics of realism employed in title sequences to identify the actors while simultaneously (paradoxically) distinguishing the artifice of fiction from reality. The audience is essential: they must [1] recognize the indexical claims and [2] understand them as [a/b] examples of either objective or subjective articulation—either as describing things that are [2.a] related to everyday typical reality, “documentary reality” (objective), or [2.b] as an atypical presentation that differs from those expectations, but are still examples of a factual, “metaphysical reality” (subjective). The centrality of realism for this arrangement ensures its invisibility: although factual, the indexicality of metaphysics does not create a typical or familiar description of ‘the real,’ leading to its denial in ontological conceptions of cinematic realism. Without the different categorical recognitions of being-factual that separates the actor credits from the other factual intertitles and animated elements, both The Number 23 and The Kingdom title designs become incoherent. The apparition of these emergent dualities is neither ambiguous nor difficult to comprehend; that simplicity is its ideological power to mask the complex, multiple valences that converge on both imagery and text. The immediacy of visual identification and the association of accompanying text with the picture is the calligram mode, as Michel Foucault explains in his book This Is Not a Pipe: In its millennial tradition, the calligram has a triple role: to augment the alphabet, to repeat something without the aid of rhetoric, to trap things in a double cipher. . . . The calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read. Pursuing its quarry by two paths, the calligram sets the most perfect trap. By its double formation, it guarantees capture, as neither discourse alone, nor a pure drawing could do.14 Text::image composites have become increasing common with digital technology, but their mode of interpretation has been a familiar part of motion pictures since the 1920s. The hierarchies and relationship of the combined elements of text::image are immediately understood and do not require explanation; ironically, the categorically separate sets of credits/facts in The Number 23 and The Kingdom title sequences create mutually reinforcing claims to being-factual through their copresence on-screen, an instance of the expansive nature of the calligram and its demonstrative relations—as Foucault observes, arrangements of text and image in proximity become linked as doubles for each other, each testifying to the other’s validity. Coincidence of placement becomes convergence of meaning: their connection is a function of proximity—the text “APPLE” names the fruit, ‘apple,’ paired with the image depicts that fruit, their placement together enables each independent meaning to converge, making the realist presentation appear entirely natural, and without any need for consideration or theorization. Conventions are historical; elementary readers teach the names for things and a system of their ordered comprehension simultaneously. These modes of text::image composition arose entirely before cinema. Their transfer to the superimposition of text over live action is merely a translation of established, encultured expertise to a new form.The initial development of these connections of text::image were a function of the credits being integrated with the other materials produced for the film—via their place in the

234 Ideologies development and emergent role in editing—a progression from early cinema where the text acts as the scene identifier for tableaux, directing their understanding: By the 1920s a standard procedure for introducing characters had been established in Hollywood. A long to medium shot of a person or group of persons is followed by an intertitle of identification, which is itself followed by a closer shot that isolated the named character. In many cases, the actor’s name is listed in this identifying intertitle, thereby enabling the artifice of the opening to spill into the narrative.15 The conception of “cinema” that Chisholm describes in the 1910s is closer to an animated picture book, utilizing those modal relationships to connect and link discrete shots of text::image. Audiences recognize the indexical claims of the calligram mode from the conventional link used in children’s picture books to identify the object shown. Their compositing into immanent unitary wholes (calligrams) became possible in the 1920s after Fred Archer, the Director of Art Titles at Universal Pictures, introduced the superimposition process (“B-roll titling”) already in use in European productions such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to Hollywood productions, thus allowing live action and typography to co-exist on-screen in the same shot.16 Text–image composites’ role in shaping the ideology of realism emerges in how calligrams advance indexical claim that rely on a juxtaposition of elements whose proximity in time or space on-screen creates a singular meaning—a correlation of materials that parallels the same associative connections between different images in film editing that the Soviets identified and developed into their theories of montage during the 1920s. Audience interpretations depend on their encultured expertise in recognizing when to create these groupings of photographic (or any) materials with an accompanying (or superimposed) text on-screen—these associations of text–image make the asserted indexical link to ‘the real’ into the definitional feature of their interpretation. These reiterations of past experience happen at all levels of discourse, shaping and directing its progress, while simultaneously vanishing from immanent consideration. Making the interpretive decision to separate the credits from their background is an autonomous category recognition.The dynamic play of text to image that is the calligram mode relies on an indexical claim of image-to-reality that distinguishes the artifice of an actor in a role from that actor in reality: this calligram mode dominates titling because the distinction of actor/image needs to be illustrated because the film narrative is a work of fiction; in asserting this separation from reality, it defines the scope of the fictive world. The interrelationship of text–image as legend or caption is an apparently banal indexical claim that passes without consideration or analysis—and yet it is precisely this link to ‘the real’ that makes the image into an illustration or demonstration and asserts not only its realism but also the accuracy of the connection to reality it invokes. The ability to distinguish between the messages in texts that make this indexical assertion about their accompanying imagery and those that do not (such as the “James Bond Parody title” from Deadpool 2 [2018] where the “credits” pose a commentary on the narrative action that has just occurred) is an encultured skill the audience employs fluently: text–image combinations happen instantly, without the need for conscious consideration, as the figure–ground mode17 appearing in the Rumba (1935) [Figure 9.2, Top] title sequence demonstrates

Figure 9.2 Examples of text–image composites from title sequences for Paramount Pictures productions in the 1930s: [Top] Figure–ground mode crediting from Rumba (1935) that does not assert an indexical connection between text and image; both [Middle] selected calligram mode credits from The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936), and [Bottom] selected calligram mode credits from She Done Him Wrong (1933) involve an indexical claim about the identity of the actors.

236 Ideologies through its contrast with the calligram mode18 titles in the sequence for The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936) [Figure 9.2, Middle] that depend on the audience recognizing the illustrative indexicality of actor–name–image. The superficial redundancy of the superimposed text stating “Jack Benny” and the image it accompanies announces an indexical claim in the first of these calligrams; however, there is a problem with this label. For the diegetic reality shown by the narrative, Jack Benny is “Jack Carson,” someone else—the role he performs. The artifice of this association of actors/roles is apparent from the calligrams from She Done Him Wrong (1933) [Figure 9.2, Bottom] that directly state both the actor’s name and their performance as a specific character.This distinction between the indexical and the artificial creates a multivalent identification in She Done Him Wrong that employs the calligram’s illustration of the actor in the role to show the difference between narrative and reality. However, this explicit articulation is unnecessary, already established by the boundaries that distinguish the titles from the fabula. Even if the audience does not know who this person on-screen is, the organization of the text–image composite identifies them as distinct from their role, apparent through the conventional recognition of the titles as a pseudo-independent, peripheral element apart from the narrative that follows.19 Distinguishing between the naturalist presentations of ‘documentary reality’ and ‘realist fiction’ that both resemble everyday experiences depends on the identification of indexical versus artificial claims. This recognition of being-factual lies beyond the causal links between action and effect that are familiar as story, drama, or fabula. It is a recognition the audience makes easily, and which can be equally easily revised, as the ‘newsreel’ at the start of Citizen Kane demonstrates. In contrast to these conventional imitations of everyday reality for presentations of objective realism, the role of stylization for subjectivity is essential: it draws attention to the artificial nature of cinematic realism via its clear stylization that typically signifies subjectivity. The metaphysical understandings made possible by the subjective modes of cinematic realism have a long history in art as a concern with “abstraction.” Modernist concerns with abstraction at the start of the twentieth century were not arguments against ‘the real,’ or even about realism, but concerned attempts to present an invisible, “true” reality apart from the mere appearances of everyday life.20 Attempts to make immanent a metaphysical conception of reality are apparent in the concerns of Hans Hoffman’s discussion in “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts.”21 The metaphysical or spiritual presentation is an intangible, immaterial realm that only impacts its audience when it becomes immanent—the same process of becoming visual that defines the realism of cinema.22 How the audience ascribes their apprehension of the motion picture’s relationship to ‘the real’ is what separates subjective elaborations as being-factual (indexical) from being-fictional (artificial)—the elaboration of ‘metaphysical reality’ from ‘unreal fantasy.’ In being delegated a historically minor, insignificant role, the problematics of indexicality and narrative in title sequences have allowed a thorough exploration of naturalism::stylization that is apparent from the case studies in this book. The articulations of stylization in both the artificial ‘unreal fantasy,’ and the indexical ‘metaphysical reality’ rely on the same distance from naturalism. Their separation from the realm of superficial and familiar appearances is not a narrative difference between the juvenile fantasy and the serious drama, but the separation of the discourse that imitates the familiar order and allows the conception of cinema as a prosthetic vision, from the discourse that does not, revealing this capacity

Realist Articulation 237 to parse realism is fundamental to defining fictive artifice and documentary index.What is striking about these modal dynamics in cinema is their alienation from the familiar arguments of ontological realism; they allow and encourage discursive applications that undermine any unitary order. Shifts from objectivity to subjectivity can be very subtle, as with the transitions in both Kolchak:The Night Stalker and The Number 23 where the progression of the title sequence reveals the apparently familiar “world viewed” is actually entirely artificial, unfamiliar, not subject to the expectations of continuous space and time that objective naturalism always creates. The final section of Kolchak:The Night Stalker undermines its opening familiarity through the conversion of the “live action” photography into a series of grainy “stills” whose continuing motion is an explicit technological artifact (a push made with an optical printer) that emphasizes not the illusory reality of the ‘image object’ but its material unreality. It is a shift from a familiar, objective realism to a directly subjective “metaphysical reality” evident in the ‘material function’ of these images reflexivity. The revelation that cinematic realism is an illusory product of a photochemical/mechanical process puts everything that appears in that title sequence in question: what we see is not necessarily what we see, an ontological challenge to the assumed link of photograph to depiction. This demonstration is not incidental; it returns “live action” to its basis in animated stills—anticipating the “image-animation problem” created by digital technology—but also always already altered by the subjective, undetectable manipulations of découpage during production. The various capacities to change the image in post-production pale in comparison to this profilmic capacity that establishes realist naturalism on-screen. Kolchak: The Night Stalker becomes an entirely subjective presentation that describes a metaphysical reality—while remaining within the scope of familiar depictions and the superficial normalcy of resemblance to everyday life without any obvious deformation or change created by visual effects or other distortion. What began as ‘realist fiction’ concludes as ‘metaphysical reality,’ a shift from being-fictional to being-factual: kinestasis (the freeze frames that conclude section 3) is simply an arresting of the normally flowing progression of the live action that enables its stillness to become apparent. Its metaphysical significance lies with precisely this demonstration of a normally hidden material fact of cinema, but the affect this revelation has is either sublime or uncanny depending on the audience’s response. Hybrid media practices such as motion graphics provide insights into resolving the problematics of “post-cinema” by escaping the inherited, limiting framework of ontological “purity.” The four realist modes apparent in the interpretation of title sequences are descriptive, not prescriptive. Their proposal is not to define a more perfect realism nor to demonstrate a better understanding of a cinematic link to ‘the real’; instead, they provide a critical analytic for understanding the audience’s fluent parsing of contingent, relational claims emergent in the role of past experience that apprehends statements as being-factual or beingfictional. Motion graphics attenuate the indexicality assumed for live action in title sequences by their subordination to the demands of typo/graphy and composition. The four realist modes employed in title designs unite analogue and digital cinema as part of a singular ideology that addresses the problematics of “post-cinema” that emerge from the ontological fallacy that opposes naturalist live action to stylized animation. The denial of cinema= narrative requires the separation of realist articulation from the demands of narrative.

238 Ideologies How the titles are at once a part of the narrative (its beginning or ending) and a pseudoindependent demarcation within the narrative demonstrates the paratextual status of these sequences and allows them a greater degree of freedom to hybridize live action, stylization, and animation in the ways that digital technology accentuates, thus articulating four realist modes that are applicable across the full range of cinematic production. The overlap of realist articulations in motion graphics (title sequences) with those familiar from narrative cinema is incomplete, not because of an innate difference between one and the other, but because the aesthetics of realism have not enabled the same freedom for narrative cinema that has always been apparent in title sequences. By neglecting the marginal productions of motion graphics in the critical and aesthetic prescriptions of historical cinema, these hybrids have been allowed to develop at a critical distance paradoxically denied by, participating in, and rejecting this Modernist “purity” in equal degrees.

Notes 1 Keedy, J. “Zombie Modernism” Texts on Type: CriticalWritings on Typography ed. S. Heller and P. B. Meggs (New York: Allworth Press, 2001), pp. 159–169. See also Wiley, C. “The Toxic Legacy of Zombie Formalism” Art News July 26, 2018 https://news.artnet.com/opinion/historyzombie-formalism-1318352 retrieved July 26, 2018. 2 Ashenhurst, R. “Ontological Aspects of Information Modeling” Minds and Machines vol. 6, no. 3 (October, 1996), pp. 287–394. 3 Rushton, R. The Reality of Film:Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2011), pp. 10–19. 4 Barthes, R. Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 20–21. 5 Rushton, R. The Reality of Film:Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2011), p. 53. 6 Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and Its Ten Problems trans. T. Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2012), p. 40. 7 Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Enlarged Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 167–174. 8 Cecchi, A. “Creative Titles: Audiovisual Experimentation and Self-Reflexivity in Italian Industrial Films of the Economic Miracle and After” Music, Sound and the Moving Image vol. 8, no. 2 (Autumn, 2014), p. 180. 9 Stanitzek, G. “Texts and Paratexts in Media” Critical Inquiry no. 32 (Autumn, 2005), p. 29. 10 Eco, U. “Interpreting Serials” The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), pp. 88–99. 11 Navas, E. Remix Theory:The Aesthetics of Sampling (Vienna: Springer, 2012), pp. 65–66. 12 Holland, J. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Reading: Perseus Books, 1995), p. 53. 13 Betancourt, M. Semiotics and Title Sequences:Text-Image Composites in Motion Graphics (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 52–106. 14 Foucault, M. This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 20–22. 15 Chisholm, B. “Reading Intertitles” Journal of Popular Film and Television vol. 15, no. 3 (1988), p. 138. 16 Betancourt, M. Typography and Motion Graphics: The ‘Reading-Image’ (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 23–25. 17 Betancourt, M. Semiotics and Title Sequences:Text-Image Composites in Motion Graphics (Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice) (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 29–51. 18 Betancourt, M. Semiotics and Title Sequences:Text-Image Composites in Motion Graphics (Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice) (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 52–74.

Realist Articulation 239 19 Gray, J. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), pp. 23–46. 20 Fry, R. “The French Post-Impressionists” (Preface to Catalog for the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, 1912) Vision and Design (London: Pelican Books, 1937), pp. 195–196. 21 Hoffman, H. “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts” Search for the Real ed. S. T. Weeks and B. H. Hayes, Jr. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1967), p. 40. 22 Landon, B. The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic Reproduction (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992).

Afterword: Digital Movies

The confrontation between digital cinema and its ancestor, analogue cinema, has been a long time coming. Computer technology since the 1970s has been a source of ‘cognitive estrangement’1 for established categories, as it elides their differences and renders them equivalent, contingent renderings of a uniform apparatus, violating the proposition of any essential or “pure” basis, and in the process revealing the significance of different media-asmedia was a specifically encultured engagement—a semiotic product, not an ontological revelation. This mismatch between the theorization of film and what would be required for digital motion pictures was obvious by the 1990s.2 The emergent digital hybrids of that decade were already violating the established boundaries of cinema, collapsing film, television, and video games into a new, digital movie employing stable interpretive modes derived from historical cinema to shape perception into articulation. What theorist Gene Youngblood called “audio-visual art” in the 1980s,3 and philosopher Noel Carroll termed “moving image” in the 1990s,4 or historian Jonathan Walley identified as “paracinema” in 20035 anticipate/identify the “post-cinematic” expansion that enveloped all motion pictures during the first decade of the twenty-first century, becoming a topic of theoretical concern by 2010.6 The recognition that the combination of film, video, and computers—used in commercial, artisanal, and vernacular productions—would force the received conception of cinema to change converges this critique of cinematic realism on what has been made before in other arts: the historical debates over Modernist medium-specificity, “purity,” and its role in understanding the ‘image object’ collectively known as Post-Modernism in art, a critique that reached its conclusion just as it began to impact cinema.7 Realism is ideology. That becomes clear from even a cursory reading of any of its theorists: Bazin, Cavell, Deleuze, Kracauer, Rushton. The belief in of photography as a trace of ‘the real’ prejudices engagements with digital technology and creates the crisis of “postcinema” in the failure of received beliefs about the materiality and ‘material function’ of photography-as-document. All the transformations and facile shifts between graphics and live action that digital technology have made obvious are an existential challenge to the divergent descriptions of “purity” held in commercial and avant-garde film: equally obvious in Bazin’s ‘long take’ aesthetics promoted by the French New Wave, and in the materiality of the avant-garde Structural Film.8 Arguments about photographic indexicality do not transfer to digital motion pictures that are the products of computer code. Both digital cinema and animated films can autonomously generate their ‘image objects,’ but they both still use the same, familiar lexia established by realism and narrative

242 Ideologies during the twentieth century. The new, digital tools follow a logic of re-selection and re-arrangement (both editing and the ‘long take’) familiar from historical cinema, maintaining these existing traditions in spite of radical change. Separating the specifics of presentation-for-audience from the formative consideration of the ‘image object’ as a technical artifice—distinguishing not only the digital file (the ‘image carrier’) from the ‘image object,’ but from the physicality of its display on-screen, in a print-out, or other physical form—brings the realm of digital cinema into a coherent parallel to older, established media, allowing the transfer of the art historical conceptions of ‘material function’ to apply in the discussion and analysis of digital motion pictures. This Modernist desire to isolate9 the art work from the physical support/context that produces it is the heritage of ‘transparent’ engagements and received ideology.The place of realist theory as a mediator between analogue and digital cinemas invites a revisionist application to the earlier development of cinema as well, implying that the Modernist ontologies of cinema are irrelevant to its definition.This revisionism, whether correct or not, is beside the point10: the transformations of cinema produced by the digital challenge neither the role of realism, nor the capacity of digital works to make indexical claims about the world. The centrality of realism in title sequences, motion graphics, and cinema—no matter their technology of production—remains constant. Being able to articulate a broader range of nuance in modal viewing defines the ideological dimensions of realism more explicitly and enables a more thorough critique. Escaping from the need to debate which representations are “real” and which are “not” returns critical attention to what matters: the significance of what is represented and how that contingency is understood by its human audience. Michael Betancourt Savannah, GA USA, 2019

Notes 1 Suvin, D. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Cambridge:Yale University Press, 1979). 2 Takahashi, T. “Meticulously, Recklessly Worked Upon: Direct Animation, the Auratic and the Index” The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema ed. C. Gehman and S. Reinke (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2005), pp. 166–178. 3 Broderick, P. “Since Cinema Expanded: Interview with Gene Youngblood” Millennium Film Journal nos. 16/17/18 (1986–1987), pp. 55–57. 4 Carroll, N. Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 49–71. 5 Walley, J. “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film” October vol. 103 (Winter, 2003), p. 18. 6 Hagener, M., Hediger,V. and Strohmaier, A. The State of Post-Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 2–4. 7 Foster, H. The Return of the Real (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 205–207. 8 Sitney, P. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–1978 (Second Edition) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 9 O’Doherty, B. Inside theWhite Cube:The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Revised Edition) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 10 Eros, B. “Elastic Film, Mercurial Cinema” Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006).

Index

400 Blows,The 42 abstraction 43, 131, 150, 194, 236 actuality see long take Adventures of Tin-Tin,The 5 allegory xvii, 13, 95, 100, 109–111, 192, 196–197, 232 Allegory Mode 93–94, 106, 133, 196–197 Alpha Mandala 43 Altman, Robert 10 ambivalence xv, 2, 4, 42, 46, 77–79, 82, 86, 87, 90–92, 96, 105–109, 112–113, 124, 133, 136, 139–140, 147, 175, 180, 185–185, 197, 211, 220, 224–225, 230 America’s Funniest HomeVideos 194 Antonioni, Michelangelo 132 Archer, Fred 234 art cinema 6; see also canon Attali, Jacques 179 Auden, W. H. 137, 147 automatisme 65–69, 75–76 Autumnal Equinox 43 avant-garde film xiii, xix, 3–4, 7, 10, 15, 19, 30, 42–44, 204, 210, 241–242 Avatar 5 average reader 177–181, 185–186, 189, 190, 194, 197–199, 226 Bardèche, Maurice 3, 18, 209 Barnard, Timothy 119, 201–202 Barry, Iris 209 Barthes, Roland 135, 129, 146 Bass, Saul 4, 10, 13, 93, 110, 196 Bassey, Shirley 110 Batman 32 Baudrillard, Jean xxv, 108–112 Bazin, André xiii, xvii, 8–9, 24–31, 34–35, 37–43, 54–55, 58, 65, 74, 81–85, 87–90, 96, 105, 111–112, 123, 130, 137–141,

149,–153, 161–164, 168, 178, 181, 186, 201, 210–211, 219–223, 229, 241; contraBazin 35, 49 Benjamin, Walter 187–189 Bennett, Tony 91 Benny, Jack 221–223, 236 Bergson, Henri 107, 140, 167 Berry, David M. xxvi Big Broadcast of 1937,The xii, 221–223, 235–236 Binder, Maurice 4, 15–16, 84–86, 92–93, 100–104, 145 Bissett, Jacqueline 135, 138, 142 Blackman, Honor 101–102, 110 Blade Runner 2049 xvii, 177–178, 196, 203, 212, 230–231 BlairWitch Project,The 202 Blow Up 42, 132–133 Bordwell, David 11, 121–123, 140, 168, 172–175 Borges, Jorge Luis 197 Brasillach, Robert 3, 18, 209 Brecht, Bertolt 47–52 Breton, André 66–68, 75–77 “B-roll” superimposition 31–33, 234 Brooks, Virginia xxi, xxv, 166–167, 215–216 Brownjohn, Robert 83–85, 89, 91–102, 104, 106, 109–113, 145, 225 Bullitt xvii, 119–147, 157, 226, 231, 232 Buñuel, Luis 69, 74 Burke, Edmund 62–69 Burle, Stephan 149, 154, 259, 162, 170, 220, 230 calligram 82, 110, 153–157, 220, 233–236 C˘alinescu, Matei xv du Camp, Maxine 60 Campbell, Florence 60 canon 4–6, 226

244 Index Carey, Jim 72 Carroll, Noel 241–242 causality xv–xix, 2, 44, 48, 60, 95, 107–108, 120–127, 134–136, 139, 145–147, 155, 168, 172–173, 178, 181, 185, 195–198, 225, 232 Cavell, Stanley xiii, xviii, 7–9, 19, 24, 39–42, 58, 64, 84, 123, 130, 210–211, 219–223, 229, 241 Chisholm, Brad 234 cinema=narrative 2–3, 5–7, 14–15, 23, 30–31, 49–50, 86, 96, 107, 111, 120, 122–124, 140, 145, 161, 164, 168, 177–178, 209–213, 216, 221–230 cinéma vérité 152 Citizen Kane 125–131, 141–143, 147, 162, 180, 184, 186–189, 195, 198, 202, 211, 236 Clark, Kenneth 89 Cloverfield 202 Coates, Paul 61 Cohl, Emile 4, 27, 41, 158–160, 200–201 Cole, Jack xvi, 23, 25, 29, 36–51, 83, 231 collage xvii, xxi, 66, 72, 95, 150–175, 214 Color Sound Frames 43 Columbo 129 Comment Mode 58, 77 computational media 5, 181 Connery, Sean 110 connotation 82, 132, 146, 166, 186, 192–196, 224 Conrad, Ben 131 Conrad, Tony 43 continuity editing xvii, 24–27, 38, 120, 125–127, 136, 141, 145, 163–166 Cooper, Kyle 63–64, 72, 107–108, 122 Corra, Bruno 44 Craig, Daniel 98 crediting function 12, 50, 67, 134, 221 critical viewer 87, 97, 177–178, 226 Dalí, Salvador 75–77 Danto, Arthur 87, 89 databending 183–184, 189, 199 Deadpool 2 11, 104, 234 découpage 27, 35, 51–55, 69, 78, 91, 95–96, 99–101, 104–111, 118–133, 138–140, 141, 147–148, 152, 163–168, 175, 190, 193–194, 199–201, 209, 220, 222–230, 237 defamiliarization 45–50, 62, 69, 56, 58, 61–62, 69; see also uncanny Deleuze, Giles xv–xviii, 5–8, 19, 107–108, 115, 139–145, 165–168, 229, 241

denotation xvii, xix–xxi, 27–34, 47, 60, 82, 89–93, 110, 120, 123, 127, 131–132, 153, 163–166, 177–178, 184–188, 191, 193, 196, 199, 208, 212, 215, 219–225 Die Another Day 93 Dieter, Michael xxiv digital convergence xxiii–xxiv, 4–5, 15, 35, 44, 210 direct cinema 152 documentary see ontological realism documentary effect xvii, 126–127, 151–155, 167–168, 189, 193, 202–203 ‘documentary reality’ xvii, 18, 55–56, 81, 106, 118, 123, 126, 130, 141, 149–153, 155, 163, 165–166, 172, 175, 177–178, 180–181, 186, 188–189, 191, 194–195, 198–199, 203, 220, 223, 233, 236 doppelgänger 50 Dr. No 92–93, 95, 101, 234 Dracula 32 Dunn, Linwood 129, 147, 162–163 Easy A 131–132 Eco, Umberto 24, 105, 148–149, 171–175, 177–181, 186–188, 191, 193–204 Edison, Thomas 3, 209 enculturation xvi, xviii, 27–28, 65, 74, 82, 87–88, 105, 118, 123, 130, 149, 151, 156, 171, 173–175, 178, 180–181, 183–185, 189, 191, 193, 199, 211, 213, 216, 219–221, 224–229, 232–234, 241 Epstein, Jean 50, 52–55, 69, 75, 140, 212; see also photogénie Ernst, Max 31, 45, 66 erotic spectacle 86–93, 95–96, 101, 109–112 essentialism xxiii, 12, 25, 86 Ewing, William 93 Experimental Cinema 209 facticity 73, 77, 142, 152, 165–166, 169, 223 Ferren, John 12 Ferro, Pablo xvii, 4, 19, 119–132, 136–144, 231 Fielding, Raymond 160–162 Film Culture 43 Fitzgerald, Wayne 9, 13, 33, 79 Fleischer animation 4 Flicker,The 43 Foucault, Michel 45, 81–82, 88, 111, 156, 199, 220–226, 233 Frampton, Hollis 43 Frankfurt, Peter xvi, 56–83, 126, 221, 224, 230

Index Freud, Sigmund 59–69, 78 Fried, Michael 8 Fröbe, Gert 109 From Russia With Love 85, 92–97, 101, 112, 225 Gaudreault, André xxii–xxiii, 15–20, 201–205 gaze, the 81–84, 86–98, 104, 110–112, 140, 146–147, 223, 225 Gehr, Ernie 43 Gershon, Jonathan 178, 193–194 Gidal, Peter 87–88, 188–189 gignomenological law of identity 88, 178, 226 Ginna, Arnaldo 44 Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The 98–101 glitch xvii, 64, 170, 178–200, 202–205, 220 Godard, Jean-Luc 25, 214 Goldfinger 83–113, 231 Gosling, Ryan 197 Gray, Jonathan 2, 12 Greenberg, Clement 7–8, 19, 42–44, 210 Grusin, Richard xx Hagener, Malte xxiii Haskin, Pamela 13, 196 Heidegger, Martin 57–69, 82 heterotopia see paralogy historical testimony xvii, 175, 183–189, 198 Hoffman, Hans 67, 236 Horak, Jan-Christopher 10 Hochberg, Julian xxi, xxv, 166–167, 215–216 Holy Mountain,The 153, 190 Hwang, Christina 131–132 image-animation problem xxi–xxiii, 15, 230, 237 image carrier 41, 169, 178, 180–181, 184–186, 193, 195, 199, 203, 208, 219, 242 image object 2, 15, 24–28, 43, 48, 53, 58, 83, 88, 90, 106, 113, 131, 163, 165, 175, 177, 180–184, 183, 199, 202–203, 208, 211, 215, 219, 221–224, 229–232, 237, 242 Incredible Hulk,The 107–108 Inspector Morse 187, 194–195, 202 intertextuality 171–175, 232 intertitles 201–205, 233 intratextuality 12, 124–127, 134–138, 168, 172–174, 178, 196, 225–226 Italian Neo-Realism 74 Jacob, Lewis 3, 209 Jentsch, Ernst 45–46 Jodorowsky, Alejandro 190 Johnson, C. B. 13–14

245

Kapoula, Zoï 215–216 kinestasis 25, 31, 41–48, 83, 237 Kingdom,The xvii, 149–175, 211–212, 220, 223, 226, 231–233 Kolchak:The Night Stalker xvi, 23–51, 56–58, 62, 72, 83–84, 211, 213, 219, 226, 231–232, 237 Kleinman, Daniel 84–85, 93, 145 Kracauer, Siegfried xviii, 241 Kyrou, Ado 69–70 Lacan, Jacques 59, 88, 90–92, 105, 111 Lackey, Douglas P. 221–222 Larsson, Stieg 99 Leacock, Richard 152 Lestocart, Louis-José 215–216 Likens, John 11–12 long take 8–11, 24–42, 45–50, 86, 122–123, 130, 133, 150, 158–159, 161–164, 168, 199–203, 213–214, 225, 241–242 Lotman, Jurij 125, 148, 163–164 Lumière, Louis and Auguste 25, 174, 200 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 108, 212 McGavin, Darren 30-31, 37, 42, 45 McQueen, Steve 120-121 Malraux, André 119 Maltby, Richard 177–178 Maltese Falcon,The 32–33 Man With the Golden Arm, The 13 Manovich, Lev xx Mara, Rooney 98 Marion, Philippe xxii–xxiii material function xvii, xxiv, 41–43, 178–199, 202–204, 208, 214, 219, 230, 237, 241–242 materiality see material function Méliès, Georges 27, 69, 200–202 ‘metaphysical reality’ xvii, 18, 22, 26, 41, 43, 46, 55–58, 61–69, 72, 74, 77–78, 81, 84, 106, 126, 149–152, 177, 220, 223, 233, 236–237 Metz, Christian xviii Miller, Tim 98–100 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 149 Modernism xxiii, 3, 7, 13, 15, 20, 43, 155, 210–213, 219, 230, 241 montage xvii, xxi, 6, 11–12, 24–25, 30–31, 34–44, 47–48, 55, 64, 83, 95, 98–101, 104, 107–108, 122–130, 135–141, 145, 147, 155, 158, 162–168, 172–176, 201, 213–214, 225, 234 movement-image 6, 19, 107, 115, 148, 165

246 Index Mulvey, Laura xviii, 84, 86–92, 94–96, 100, 104–113 Museum of Modern Art, New York 3, 19, 43, 209 Mysterious Fine Arts,The 159–160 naked 88–89 Nanook of the North 161 narrative function xvi–xviii, xxv, 11, 29, 49, 55, 68, 72, 77, 101, 107–108, 111–112, 124, 126–127, 129–132, 134, 136, 139, 141–142, 169, 175, 177, 189, 191, 194 naturalism: stylization xv, xvii–xix, 17, 24, 28, 30, 37, 41, 48–49, 55–56, 58, 89, 104, 106, 119, 130, 134, 138, 172, 179, 188–190, 197, 208, 219–220, 229, 231, 236 Next Door Neighbors,The 159–160 newsreel 125–130, 141–143, 147, 180, 184, 186–189, 195, 198, 202, 211, 236 Night of the Generals 98–99 Nochlin, Linda 91 Norton, Edward 107 nudity 84, 86, 88–92, 104 Number 23,The xvi–xvii, 53–78, 83–84, 126, 131, 149–152, 157, 211, 219, 221, 223–226, 230–231 numerology 60–61, 68–69, 74, 77 Oakland, Simon 31 O’Doherty, Brian 185, 201 ontological realism xv–xviii, xxi–xxiv, 39, 229–230, 237 OPEC oil embargo 153–154 optical printing xx–xxv, 6, 15, 31, 33, 40, 48, 84, 101, 130, 145, 214 paralogy 42, 108 paranoiac-critical method 75–77 paratext xix, 2, 11, 18, 20, 26, 51, 64, 78, 115, 120, 148, 238, 239 Partch, Harry 3 past experience xvii, xxiv, 11, 24, 49, 60–65, 105, 119, 122–127, 151, 171–177, 180, 196–199, 201, 209, 212, 216, 219, 221–226, 130–237 pathology 59, 64, 78, 86, 90, 92, 112 Pennebaker, D. A. 152 perception xv, xxi–xxii, 6, 24, 27, 34–35, 48, 59, 65, 67, 82, 86, 106–108, 111–112, 120, 124, 134, 137, 139, 141–142, 144–147, 151, 156, 161, 165, 169, 173–174, 181, 185–186, 189–199, 212, 215–220, 223–226, 241

Perri, Dan 10, 13 phenomenology 57, 64 photogénie 54, 69, 140, 212 photographic indexicality xvi–xix, xxi, xxiv, 5, 7, 24–25, 39, 43, 49–50, 53, 55, 65, 77, 84–90, 96, 98, 101, 123, 140, 149–151, 153, 160, 168, 177, 186, 210–211, 219, 221, 229 Player,The 9–11 poetic function 70 Polar Express,The 5 post-cinema xx–xxiv, 7–8, 13–14, 24, 98, 145, 208, 210–213, 220, 230, 237, 241 post-digital xx–xxvi Post-Modernism xxiii, 210, 241 Prologue Mode 64, 107, 127, 133 psychosis see pathology purity xvi–xvii, xxiii–xxiv, 4, 6–8, 12–16, 24, 41, 43–44, 50, 52–55, 123, 208, 210, 213–214, 223, 230, 237–238 Radatz, Ben 84–85, 145 Ramsaye, Terry 3, 209 RCA Television Pict-O-Guide 181 reading-image xvii, 56, 58–60, 67, 69–70, 73–74, 77–78, 83, 96, 120, 124, 129, 131–140, 145–147, 193, 196–197, 223, 238 ‘realist fiction’ xvi–xvii, 23, 26, 41, 47, 55, 106, 108, 118, 120–121, 123–124, 133–134, 137, 141–142, 146–149, 157, 165–166, 172, 177, 187, 199, 202, 220, 231, 237 rebus 134, 136, 138–139, 232 reflexivity 31, 62, 152, 198, 237–238 La Region Centrale 43 Reynolds, Ryan 12 Rockford Files,The 42 Rushton, Richard xviii, xxv, 241 Rouch, Jean 152 Rumba 234–235 Russell, Catherine 171 Scooby-Doo,Where AreYou? 11 scopophilia 86, 89–92, 112 seduction 106–115 SereneVelocity 43 Seven 63–64, 69, 72–74, 98, 204, 242 Sharits, Paul 43 Shaviro, Steven xx–xxv, 98 She Done Him Wrong 235–236 shot/reverse shot see continuity editing Simon, Carly 104

Index Snow, Michael 43 Sorcerer’s Egg,The 202 La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon 174–175 spectatorship 86–89, 92, 109, 112–113 Spy Who Loved Me, The 15–16, 85, 100–104 Stanitzek, Georg 1, 10, 12 Stewart, Garrett 11–12 Strohmaier, Alena xxiii Structural Film 31, 43–44, 98, 111, 125, 188, 241 sublime 53–78, 99, 237 Surrealism 49, 59, 65–70, 72, 74–75, 77–79, 114 Suspense 214 synchronization 67, 104–112, 122, 127, 155, 192–193 syuzhet 11, 122–123, 168, 225 T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G 43 Temkin, Daniel 181, 183, 189, 199 This is Spinal Tap 202 time-image 6–7, 38, 42, 148, 176 title cards 1–2, 9–10, 16, 33, 94, 97–99, 103, 108–110, 129–130, 133, 156, 192, 201–203 Touch of Evil 9, 11, 13, 33–34, 161–163 Tosh.O 178, 193–198, 203 transparency 25, 31, 123, 131, 147, 178–179, 185–189, 224, 226, 232 trik films xix, xxii Truffaut, François 26, 42 Twain, Mark 56 Tyler, Liv 107 uncanny xvi, xix, xxii, 22, 23, 31, 39–40, 45–50, 55–73, 77–78, 150, 211, 219, 226, 237

247

unheimlich see uncanny unmediated see actuality; Bazin, André ‘unreal fantasy’ xvi–xvii, 26, 42, 47, 55, 64, 67, 69, 74, 78, 84, 86, 89, 91–92, 95–99, 101, 105–113, 149, 177, 211, 225, 236 use-mention paradox 87–91, 113, 195–196, 225 Vardac, A. Nicholas 202 Vaughn, Robert 135, 138 Verfremdungseffekt 47–50; see also uncanny Vertov, Dziga 168, 176, 217 Vertigo 12, 49 Victorian culture 88 VFX xix, xxii, 35, 39, 131–132, 157, 163, 168, 210, 225 voyeurism 86–92, 94, 101, 109–112, 225 Wait 43 Walley, Jonathan 241 Wavelength 43 Weber, Lois 214 Welles, Orson 9–10, 33, 126–128, 162, 187 White Zombie 32 Williams, Christopher xviii, 26, 54 Winter Solstice 43 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 28 Woollacott, Janet 91 Wollen, Peter xviii Youngblood, Gene 241 Yount, Danny xvii, 178, 192–193, 196, 198, 203, 220, 230 Zelig 202 Zombieland 131 Zorns Lemma 43

Taylor & Francis eBooks www.taylorfrancis.com A single destination for eBooks from Taylor & Francis with increased functionality and an improved user experience to meet the needs of our customers. 90,000+ eBooks of award-winning academic content in Humanities, Social Science, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medical written by a global network of editors and authors.

TA Y LOR & FRANCIS EBOOKS OFFERS: A streamlined experience for our library customers

A single point of discovery for all of our eBook content

Improved search and discovery of content at both book and chapter level

REQUEST A FREE TRIAL [email protected]