Deleuze and film theory: An excerpt

Another semester has come to a close, and once again I have completed a paper that probably deserved a great more attention and reflection than I granted it. Although I may continue working on it, it was "officially" complete when I handed it in earlier this week. What once was a clean, unmarked collection of pages will soon become a sea of red, with a single letter at the end, determining the significance of the past four months of reading and study. Already, I see at as an incomplete work that will most probably be abandoned (although hopefully not).

Nevertheless, I see the paper (at the very least) as pregnant with possibilities. Which is why I have included an excerpt from the opening section of the paper. It essentially lays out the questions and thoughts that drove my research, and it suggests the beginnings of a thesis that may or may not have come together by the end of it. It doesn't, however, provide a full angle of the core analysis, which focuses on psychologistic models of film criticism --specifically psychoanalytic film theory and cognitivism-- and the implications of their respective rhetoric and positioning in relation to one another in the spectrum of academic film criticism. Approaching this relationship from a Deleuzian perspective was the point of emphasis of my theoretical exploration.

I honestly don't know if I was able to bring together all those elements and construct unique pathway of theoretical inquiry into cinema. I think I need more time away from this paper to really understand whether it has anything significant to offer. In the meantime, here's the introduction, which, as I said, presents the underlying questions and conflict. For me at least, the introduction nicely sets up a number of potential conflicts and relationships, and although much still needs to be addressed, it leaves me with the thought that Deleuze and film criticism may be more conducive than I previously thought.

I'm eager for feedback, so please feel free to volunteer your thoughts:

"Gilles Deleuze is known as a philosopher by some, a theorist of the cinema by others, and even an artist by his most ardent followers. His writings are ubiquitous, and his concepts unorthodox by the standards of philosophy, cinema and media studies, and art criticism. Despite the rising relevance of his two Cinema volumes in film scholarship, Deleuze’s place in the broader institution of media and cinema studies is oddly situated. Adamantly rejecting the claim that he was a “critic” or even a theorist, Deleuze constructed what he termed a philosophy – or logic – of cinema and movement. Film theorists who consider Deleuze’s concepts significant often draw on this logic, as rendered in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Meticulous in its description of spatiotemporal properties of movement and sensation, Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema at first appears to glide along the lines of neoformalist theories. Yet while Deleuze provided dense descriptions of action-images, affection-images, and perception-images, his concepts decidedly subvert the methods of dominant psychologistic models that now constitute a large amount of scholarly film theory.

While Deleuze’s Cinema volumes are gaining prominence, many theorists harness his principles of sensation as means for explaining or defining the cinematic image in a new way. However, this “application” of Deleuze is a fundamental misunderstanding of his concepts. In spite of their systematic detail and intricate design, Deleuze’s writings on cinema are not a critical model for evaluating or critiquing films, but the foundation for a larger inquiry into movement and sensation. For Deleuze, the cinema is not a communicator of messages or medium for delivering sights and sounds (Deleuze, 1983). And it is most certainly not a representational narrative or aesthetic device. Instead, the cinema is the site of pure immanence and sensation (Deleuze, 1985); it is quite literally its own reality. The image is not something projected onto a screen, but is instead the manifestation of pure thought.

Placing Deleuze in relation to existing theories of cinema is a complicated task. It’s not easily accomplished by employing his concepts as an extension or deviation from various established critical models. Deleuze’s logic of sensation lays the foundation for a fundamentally different engagement of cinema. This logic may provide the theorist with a different kind of criticism, or, moreover, a spectrum of theoretical possibility for engaging and seeing cinema. And yet, to grapple with this new vision of cinema as the basis for a new critical inquiry, one cannot simply stand outside the pillars of theory that have attempted to encapsulate and explicate cinematic motion and sensation. Exploring the possibility of a Deleuzian criticism requires that theorists actively engage the established theories, by analyzing the assumptions on which they are built and the values under which they operate, and situatating them in relation to Deleuze’s mapping of cinematic movement."

On the cinema of music

"There's a role that music plays in just filling up the screen. You don't necessarily hear every detail, but it's behind all the action, it's around all the action -- in the front of it, on the sides."

"One thing you don't want is for the music to become self-conscious, for the music to draw attention to itself. It really needs to be in the film, not sitting on top of the film."

"It really takes the right notes, the right gesture, the right amount of activity at the right time..."
- James Newton Howard

Musicians and filmmakers who intuitively grasp their art form have a way of tapping into the mysteries of perception, movement, and memory, and how they relate to each other. There are striking remblances between music and cinema. One can even say that cinema is a kind of musical expression, or that music has a cinematic-like motion.

These were thoughts I had while watching Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, a movie about law, corporate corruption, and social responsibility. Involving from start to finish, the film has a consistent line of quality regarding formal details, such as writing, acting, lighting, etc. I was surprised with the amount of very distinct moments in Michael Clayton that were like little cinematic universes to themselves. By that I mean the kind of moments that breach that elusive momentary sublimity that the best cinema constructs. These moments creep in, out, and around the movie, despite never really defining it. Sometimes it's a simple composition of a darkly lit street or office building corridor, or a well-acted and crisply-written exchange between two actors. Other times it is an intangible abstraction within seemingly simple movements. These moments often occur when the movement of sound and image interact together.

One of these moment occurs at end of the film, as Clayton (George Clooney) walks away from Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) as authorities swarm the premises. He walks directly toward the camera in a simple, evocative shot of hotel lobby area. As Clayton walks from the lobby to the escalator, the musical score enters into the image with just the right sound, speed, and rhythms to imbue the images with nobility and finality. A subtle piano chord accompanies these long shots of Clooney exiting the hotel and getting into a cab. It's a simple theme, consisting of only a few notes, but it compliments the images and the catharsis of the movie's climax to an extent that they breathe outside the typical Cathartic Climax you so commonly see at the end of a film. Until that point in the movie, the score is hardly noticeable. It features eletronics and ambient sounds, and builds subtle motifs for various moments and characters. But at the end, despite it still remaining quiet, it enables the climax a kind of fresh catharsis, one that hits the right note without overstating it. The sustained string chords and the extended shot of Clooney's face in the back of the taxi cab make for one of the more memorable film endings of 2007. Both the image and the music to "fit" each other. Neither would be right without the other.

The music was written by James Newton Howard, one of the more prominent composer of American film scores today. Howard seems to grasp not just musical theory and composition, with a strong knowledge of classical tradition of both the western orchestra and film scores as well as a keen ear for contemporary arrangements and electronic ambiance. Yet unlike many prominent film composers who write for Hollywood studio films, Howard understands the role of music in cinema. Music itself is a kind of cinema. In a recent video interview, Howard discussed the frequencies of music, noting that certain notes have particular textural and sensual properties. Many musicians have noted this in the past, but Howard's explanation of this notion of particularly interesting. He says:

"I've always felt that all music comes from the same source. I visualize a gigantic shpere --maybe it's a universe itself-- and from that sphere is basically everything that already exists. Because let's face it: everything in music already exists. It's just a matter of unravelling certain things and uncovering certain numbers of layers and finding things that were there. We're not inventing any frequencies. The frequencies exist in physics. They have always existed; they're there. The patterns of frequencies, the relationship of frequencies to each other, the timbres involved -- they're all pieces of some wonderful puzzle that a composer takes and puts together in whatever way [she or he] is able to to form a musical idea. But the salient idea for me is that its already there; it's there floating all around us. it's just a question of getting out of one's own way and letting it kind of come to you. That's really all I do. I spend most of my time trying to get out of my own way."

James Newton Howard would make a very good film critic. His understanding of music stretches beyond music, and seems to have more to do with the plane of sensory perception, i.e. experience. When we evaluate movies or pieces of music as cohesive wholes, all we have to go on is our memory if the chain of moments. These moments don't have specific starting or end points, but are instead multi-varied, ambiguous, and constantly bouncing off of each other. Our experience of perceptual stimulii of any kind seems to come down to how we arrange those moments, how we pluck them from the plane of experience and structure them to make sense, to mean. They cannot be reduced to mere linearities, boxed into symptoms or descriptions, but instead function assemblages of sound, memory, and emotion. The specific sensation of one single note or image is difficult to isolate from the rest of the experience and examined; it is changing along with the image and/or music.

In art, or narrative in general, we arranged images and sounds in recognizable patterns according to visual or musical vocabulary so that the viewer/listener may perceive them and situate them according to the pre-established clusters of visual and musical information. But the essence of cinema, and music as well, is in the experience of those sensations. It's not about understanding or interpreting, but seeing, hearing, feeling. The most effective cinematic and musical compositions are about moments that we experience in unison with various other moments, which we then reconstruct in our memories to form a greater sense of a shot, a scene, or a film, or a note, a bridge, and melody. The only difference is that we see images and hear music. But do we not also hear images and see music?

Although we have been socialized to experience and understand perceptual stimuli in a heavy categorical manner—i.e. sight, touch, taste, etc.—one could argue that sensual perception is a far more fluid process, and that we only condition ourselves to separate and distinguish between them. Artistic expressions like cinema or music employ all of the senses to construct and consume. Some would argue they even incorporate different ones. To "see" a film is to hear it, to touch it, to smell it, to taste it.

This idea is the greater basis for a more Deleuzian definition of cinematic movement, in which the movement-image is not exlusively a visual phenomenon, but also an auditory one, a musical one. Images—even those without sounds—are rhythmic, auditory, even musical. By the same token, cinematic sound deeply embodies the aesthetics of fluid motion and movements in an image. Movement and sound are entwined together. And that's the beauty of each. Cinema and music are the same expression insofar that they each dive into the senses and innate processes of sensation, thought, and lived experience.

We can analyze cinema from a particular theoretical perspective, e.g. Lacanian psycoanalysis or Bordwellian cognitivism, but as useful as it is learn about a film's thematic meaning or systematic relations, perhaps cinema creates a new kind of sensual experience that goes beyond the universalization of experience, which many of said bodies of concepts purport. Maybe it's difficult to recognize how perfect cinema really is because we've broken it down via theoretical or empirical means. But the Deleuzian cinema is right there in front of us. Maybe we just need to know how to see it.

What are some other movies or movie moments that capture this fleeting wonderment of sound and motion?

Deleuze on mediators

The work of Gilles Deleuze is incendiary, even inspiring. His concepts draw no distinctions between scholars, artists, and scientists. He doesn't play to a particular discipline or crowd, especially not an intellectual one. If he is seen as inaccessible, it's likely because he harnesses language and theory in manners that are seen as incongruous to their predetermined function. One of his most profound statements is that we should all become multilingual with our own language, and even foreigners to our own language. For Deleuze, the plane of experience is about motion, movement, and images. There is no subject, and no ideology. There are no "correct" ideas or images, just ideas and images.

Although he has written just two books on cinema, a great focus of his writing is on the cinema. And his unique perspective about it is unlike any other I've seen or encountered. Both an empiricist and a poet, Deleuze locates the lines and spaces in between the binary machines and hetergeneous assemblages which call for experiences to be interpreted. For Deleuze, the pouring out of experience and the dually transient yet eternal plane of perception and experience is what we ought to be examining, and what he thinks writers like Kafka, Kerouac, and Fitzgerald tap into in an almost empirical way. Within these relations, the production of meaning, desire, and multiplicities developed – in the lines and particles of images and movements.

I've been reading quite a bit more about Deleuze's concepts over the last month, and the experience is both daunting and illuminating. I'm convinced that he may be our most relevant and significant thinker (although he died in 1995) with respect to art, science, and philosophy, three schools one would ordinarily think are so different from each other. For Deleuze, however, this is not the case. One book I've recently read of his, "Negotiations" contains his theoretical positions in a nutshell and is indispensable concerning how see media, how to analyze information, and how to critique art. Ahead I will highlight excerpts:

On Truth: "This idea that truth isn't something already out there we have to discover, but has to be created in every domain, is obvious in the sciences, for instance. Even in physics, there's no truth that doesn't pre-suppose a system of symbols, be they only coordinates. There's no truth that doesn't "falsify" established ideas. To say that "truth is created" implies that the production of truth involves a series of operative that amount to working on a material -- stricktly speaking, a series of falsifications."

"Truth, in other words, doesn't imply some method for discovering it but procedures, proceedings, and processes for willing it. We always get the truths we deserve, depending on the procedures of knowledge (linguistic procedures in particular), the proceedings of power, and the processes of subjectification or individuation available to us."

On the death of literature: "People who haven't properly read or understood McLuhan may think it's only natural for audiovisual media to replace books, since they actually contain all the creative possibilities of the literature or other modes of expression they supersede. It's not true. For if audiovisual media ever replace literature, it won't be as competing means of expression, but as a monopoloy of structures that also stifle creative possibilities in those media themselves. If literature dies, it will be a violent death, a political assassination. It's not a matter of comparing different sorts of medium. The choice isn't between written literature and audiovisual media. It's between creative forces and domesticating forces. It's highly unlikely that audiovisual mediawill find the conditions for creation once they've been lost in literature. Different modes of expression may have different creative possibilities, but they're all related insofar as they must counter the introduction of a cultural space of markets and conformity -- that is, a space of "producing a market" -- together."

On Creating Concepts/Images: "Philosophy, art, and science come into relation of mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons. The way they improge on one another depends on their own evolution. So in this sense we really have to see philosophy, art, and science as sorts of separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another. With philosophy having in this no reflective pseudoprimacy nor, equally, any creative inferiority. Creating concepts is no less difficult than creating new visual or aural combinations, or creating scientific functions. What we have to recognize is that the inreplay between the different lines isn't a matter of one monitoring or reflecting another. A discipline that set out to follow a creative movement coming from outside would itself relinquish any creative role. You'll get nowhere by latching onto some parallel movement, you have to make a move yourself. If nobody make a move, nobody gets anywhere. Nor is interplany an exchange: it all turns on giving or taking."

Thoughts on Television and Cinema

In conversation, I often hear the phrases, "It's just entertainment" or "I don't want to have to think, I just want to watch something and enjoy it," and countless others coming from people who claim they are unashamed to watch shows/movies they know aren't "quality drama". This is usually the case with most television and a fair amount of commercial films. Television and cinema are similar in design and function, but the split between them strongly exhibits my adopted notion that not only can nothing be understood or interpreted without context, but that context decides the content; to the point that context is more important than the text. Contextual elements include social, economic, and technological factors (all which are intwined), and they work together to allow consumers/viewers to interpret the difference between television and cinema.

Many have argued that technological and economic factors are drawing together in these media to the extent that the difference between them is growing thinner. Home theater systems and the hypercommercialism of the theater experience, I would argue, blend the boundaries the most. First, home theater systems boast audio and visual perfection so as to replicate one's experience in the theater. Television screens are getting larger, surround sound systems more crisp. Though traditionalists offer that theaters have biggers screens, in reality, one's position in relation to a screen however small or large is more important in terms of the "size" of the image. So what separates these media? It's tough to say. I touched on similar issues recently, which is why I'd rather now look at the texts themselves.

Generally speaking, the medium of television as a visual mode of narrative yields a high level viewer passivity. It seeks to gain a viewer's familiarity with its easily identifiable visual styles and conventions and then loops it, encouraging one to switch off and retreat into a state of numbness. "I don't want to have to think," is one of my favorite phrases because I find it a complete hypocrisy. The process of watching something on a screen, making sense of its narrative and visual cues (however simple they are) requires a lot of thought, actually, and investment. The cognitive and sociocultural elements of watching moving images on a screen and making sense of them are far more complex than most people allow themselves to think about.

Part of the lure of seeing something on a screen as a form of narrative almost entails a bit of shameless voyeurism, as if we know we're not supposed to be watching. This element is intrinsic to all of narrative, but visual narrative especially. And TV is the height of convenient passivity for viewers. That's not to say I'm above it. We all enjoy a little television or simple movies to take our minds off things. It's enjoyable in a very basic sense and for a number of reasons. But the primary source of enjoyment is the desire sameness rather than innovation, which is something that everybody deals with. It is part of our social makeup to fall victim to the lure of convenience and simplicity. Even the most sophisticated of critics cannot deny their indulgences in "guilty pleasures."

But this conflict is much more intricate. Consider the viewer's activity in television. Aside from process of comrehending a moving image, there is a very fundamental essence about TV that enacts its ability to embody passivity yet also breaches this conflict. If we are entertained by something to the extent that we maintain a weekly schedule of watching a show, there is not only thought in that show but investment. Despite readily acknowledging the simplicity of a simple or cliched television show or movie, many of us will invest in spite of this acknowledgment. Where does this come from? Why are we so compelled to watch the screen and engage in thought and feeling (which no one can deny the experience of watching a sitcom or drama is, over long periods of time) yet keep our distance from things we see on that screen that don't adhere to familiar structures and courses? I wish I knew. But it's fascinating to think about. Perhaps even the most sophisticated defenders and/or participants in these media are constantly at battle with some kind of inner desire for the movement-image, which, Deleuze says, is an image one can easily anticipate, and situate within a recognizable field of visual perception. Of course, Deleuze theorized that the time-image frees both the image and the viewer from the limits of the movement-image. But he notes that the movement-image is essentially inevitable, alluding to what seems to be a desire for visual familiarity both social and cognitive in origin.

Though I have only begun reading David Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film, its contents have already struck me as revelatory and intriguing. In an early chapter on narration and film form, Bordwell uses constructivist psychology to explore filmic perception and cognition, which proves useful in a discussion of visual perception in light of different visual media. He writes:

"Speaking roughly, the typical act of perception is the identification of a three-dimensional world on the basis of cues. Perception becomes a process of active hypothesis-testing. The organism is tuned to pick up data from the environment. Perception tends to be anticipatory, framing more or less likely expectations about what is out there."

He continues:

"Taken as a purely sensory experience, seeing is a bewildering flutter of impressions. The eye fixates many times per minute, using short and fast movements (called saccades); the eye rotates to compensate for head and body movement; the eyes trembles involuntarily; and most of the visual information we receive is peripheral anyhow. Yet we do not experience a flicker or smear of percepts. We see a stable world, smooth movements, constant patterns of light a nd dark. To the extent that seeing is a bottom-up process, the visual system is organized to make its inferences in an involuntary, virtually instantaneous manner. You 'immediately' see a visual array as consisting of objects distributed in three-dimensional space, and you cannot help seeing this. The automatic construction is also affected by schemat-driven processes that check hypotheses against incoming visual data.... Seeing is thus not a passive absorption of stimuli. It is a constructive activity, involving very fast computations, stored concepts, and various purpose, expectations, and hypotheses."

While Bordwell acknowledges that this concept requires more unpacking if it is to account for the intricasies of visual perception, this theoretical framework for seeing is nonetheless fascinating. The important point about this approach, in my mind, is how it blends the cognitive and the social to the point that they are nearly inseparable. We perceive and interpret according to our own perceptual schemata, hypotheses, and familiarity of visual and auditory conventions.

These concepts intriguingly tie together with the discussion of visual perception in different visual media. The reason I have been thinking about these ideas in more detail of late is that I have observed an a slightly more prominent mention of television's influence over cinema in many reviews of current films. For example, many have written that Live Free or Die Hard is less an organic extension of the previous films featuring Bruce Willis' John McLane but instead a direct inspiration of high intensity action programs such as 24, an assertion I would agree with. While Live Free demonstrates a slick use of action convetions and objects in motion, it rings up hollow as a pure cinematic experience. Perhaps this loose connection to television may have a hand in that. The similarities exist on narrative and stylistic levels, especially since often times the two converge. Other summer movies fall to similar patterns. For example, Evan Almighty contains an unusual amount of infantile "potty" humor for a story that wishes to be so prophetic. This, one could argue, is a direct extension of the sitcom sensibility of sequencing action-reaction shots (e.g. Shot A: squirrel bites Steve Carrell's crotch, shot B: close-up of Carrell's face, eyes widening as he prepares to yell in pain). This trend is seen not just in sitcom-inspired comedies, but also in the action epics like Pirates of the Caribbean. The film's talking-based scenes largely adhere to the same practice of cutting between two actors -- one's face screen left, the other screen right. This aesthetic borrows heavily from sit-coms as well as day time soap operas, both of which came to fruition in the 80's and 90's. For more on this, check out Henry Jenkins' excellent article.

In contemporary mainstream cinema, the "talking heads" method of editing and framing greatly determines the nature of the acting, performance, visual perception, and narrative interpretation. But the influence of contemporary television is much more vast on cinema. The Live Free or Die Hard example works well in this argument, since its visual style, both in its action sequences and expository scenes of establishing its villains heavily borrows from 24, among other shows. Observe the framing of the the villain as he watches a computer screen. Even the lighting gives us the slick, but intense 24-like feeling. The plot of the film could very easily had felt less like a television show than it does. Yes, the screenplay definitely demonstrates its influences, but the real feeling of similarity comes mostly from the editing techniques and compositions, which feel more like a contemporary television show than a movie. Another fascinating example of television affecting "big" cinema is The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which offers a lot of close-ups and talking heads editing contrasted with stereotypically epic compositions (wide open vistas, sustained helicopter shots. While the movies work better in their smaller moments of detail and precision, they definitely represent a strange tension of aesthetic design that echoes the convergence of the visual styles of television and cinema .

While such editing/framing techniques have always been used, they are emphasized much more since the explosion of television as drama/comedy in American culture. This, in fact, is a strange irony. In matters of technology and visual convention, TV was influenced primarily by cinema. But now cinema seems to be more influenced by TV than by its own growth as a medium. Perhaps its growth today is television, which is why so many films abide by conventions employed by TV shows, which themselves are filtered copies of film conventions.

This apparent shift in framing sensibilities no doubt emerges, at least partly, from the tried and true success of sitcom-style, passive-inducing framing styles. In a discussion of mainstream visual perception, one could say that while television was always the influence of the innotivation of cinema, movies are now one step behind television. I am referring to the visual style of its hour-long dramas, not reality television or sitcoms. Shows like Lost, The Sopranos, and various others seem to be pushing into new visual territory (again, by popular standards). They are often more daring and visually unique than genre offerings as served up by Hollywood today.

Yet these shows are not the real trend-setters. Since Hollywood by-and-large seems content to rest safely on conventions of editing, staging, and framing, non-commercial films seem to be the ones now that are exploiting the technological advances of visual media such as digital technology. (Of note, its massive productions employing technology in daring ways often fail, as last year's masterpiece Miami Vice did from a commercial standpoint.) Many of smaller these films engage these technologies and inquire into their role in visual storytelling. I would argue that Television has looked to non-commercial cinema for its influences, and it has done so with great success. Perhaps audiences have embraced these "new" framing and editing techniques because they are loosely and liberally applied to familiar structures that television offer and movies do not. One of the many potential reasons for this is that audiences may have more room for intrigue when they know that something still needs to pan out, whereas the anticipations and expectations of a movie are different. But this is just one of many potential reasons for such varying shifts in visual style in various visual media.

This is really just the beginning of a bigger dialogue about nature of inter-medium influence, connectedness, and disconnectedness and the varying shifts in visual style in various visual media. Situated within David Bordwell's theory of hyperclassical visual style in modern movies as layed out in The Way Hollywood Tells It, an analysis of film and television (on both popular and non-commercial levels) may yield a greater understanding of inter-media influence of visual style and spectator consumption. An even more lucrative entry point into these inquiries is the use of emerging technologies such as HD and digital film.

Cinema 2006: Old Joy

One of the defining "problems" of cinema is representation. Rarely can an image merely exist. Documentary or fiction, all movies in some form or another adhere to a narrative structure, therefore any image of that movie is constructed and positioned in relation to that narrative framework. The nature of that structure may differ, but since cinema is itself a culmination and extension of various art forms, narrative media and technologies, it has been positioned in a narrative spectrum from which it cannot escape.

While Deleuze may have been overly simplistic in labeling Italian Neo-realism as the liberating movement in cinema, his summation generally holds up insofar that many films of the neo-realism variety were explicitly reflexive of classical styles and refused to adhere to a connect-the-dots mode of film language that the early days of cinema necessarily offered. While much of American cinema moved along that same plane of film language (keep in mind that I'm writing in generalities so as to avoid a dissertation here), neo-realism films created gaps in films language, turned the system of signification that the moving image had become upside down and explored narrative possibilities from a standpoint of subtlty and abstraction. It was still reliant upon those very classical traditions in order to deviate from them, but they opened up what Deleuze calls the time-image, an image free from representation despite being made possible through its properties. The time-image may or may not more stringently adhere to classical narrative structures, styles, and traditions, but the key is that it expands upon them and confounds the comfortable familiarity of their cliches. The time-image does not allow the spectator to see less than the image, but rather enables her to see the whole image, in so doing moving beyond mere representation. This notion best surmises Deleuze's claim that cinema is another world altogether, not a symbolic representation of one.

Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy seems to me an extension of the essence of neo-realism. From a narrative standpoint, it is straightforward, chronicling the overnight camping trip of two old friends. Structurally, Old Joy exhibits simplicity, starting with Mark (Daniel London) receiving a call from his friend, Kurt (William Oldham), inviting him to meet up and hike through the woods of Oregon. Although this short description encompasses the extent of the introduction from the standpoint of plot, the film announces itself as one of real images (despite their apparent lack of stylization) and subtly stated emotions from its opening shot (a bird sitting on the roof of Mark's house). The actors' faces envelope the frames; Mark and his pregnant wife share few words in the film's opening scenes, but in the camera's intimate observation of both of them, the spectator can explore the same ambiguity transpiring between the characters. Nothing is really stated. We don't uncover any plot points other than is made visible in the compositions. Instead, we have an emotionally complex visual design through what appears to be simplicity.

I am spending so much time on this opening sequence because it establishes an atmosphere that permeates the film, setting up the viewer's knowledge of Mark and his wife before incorporating Kurt into the narrative. From a representational standpoint, we can gather what we know about Mark and Kurt based on the images and the dialogue, but this film is not about easily compartmentalized feelings and actions. It's about the feelings underneath the memory.

When the two meet up and begin their trip, the film enables the viewer to immerse herself in the lives of these individuals through the sublimity of the "ordinary" images. The images in fact are far from ordinary and capture every small detail of Kurt and Mark's relationship - from joking at the gas station, uncomfortable pauses when they scramble for things to talk about, shooting cans with beebee guns, and conversing about their lives over the past 20 years in short sentences, carefully phrasing their thoughts do to their own uncertainties about themselves and each other. All the while, the emotions conjured by the images is both hard to pinpoint, yet overwhelming in their nostalgia. The spectator knows nothing about these people outside these few days it follows them. We only know the extent of their relationship based on their own insider accounts of old memories. But this coupled with the observant nature of the film's images - whether it's panning the tree tops or lingering on facial expressions - result in a joyously bittersweet experience of reminiscing and enjoying the transient beauty of an old friendship. The backdrop of the densely wooded forrest only further emphasizes the isolation of such feeling and memory, and the film's contrast of these men and the woods they walk in builds the perfect atmosphere in which to set this nostalgic journey.

In its gentle simplicity and seemingly straightforward observations of these characters on two days of their lives, Old Joy builds a relationship between spectator and image brimming with ambiguity and nuanced emotion, mirroring the relationship between Mark and Kurt. Tensions are abound, and as much as we would like to easily categorize the aspects of the relationship and the feelings emerging from it, such simplicity is not ever possible within the seemingly simple relationship. The main struggle within the spectator/image relationship is (in general terms) the confusion over obervation and identification. Both infer a greater idea of representation, as if the viewer's observation of these characters triggers one's own experiences, thus we have identification through observation. Are we the characters or are we watching and identifying them? Further, what does it mean to "identify" with a character at all? Questions such as these are immensely difficult to answer, even if one has unlimited time and space to do so. They concern the greater relations between individual and cultures and narrative/cinema. With regards to narrative, cinema does separate itself in its visual nature. The purpose of narrative is to form a representation, but the very idea of seeing and hearing an action existing in its own place and time seems to conflict with this notion.

Old Joy exemplifies this relationship between spectator and image. And this comes through in dynamic of the characters and the deeply intimate portrait presented by Reichardt that both lets us into their minds, yet keeps us at a firm distance, as if to remind that every moment and every aspect of lived experience is subject to perception and interpretation. That tension defines Kurt and Mark's relationship as it does the cinema/spectator duality. While it ultimately introduces so many questions in its presentation of this narrative and these characters, what underlies the images and narrative structure is an examination and reflection on the very idea of experience and nostalgia. The images then serve to reflect the ambiguities and abstraction shared between two people whose experiences cannot be surmised by the language between them, but intead by the memory and feeling of such experiences.

Old Joy's sublime images and simple presentation of narrative exhibit a beauty about cinema (as a medium) that no amount of critical rumination can capture. Mark and Kurt's relationship - all its struggles, misunderstandings, and beauties - is not suggested through (or represented by) the images, but rather exists in the images themselves and our perceptions and interpretations of them. That is cinema, and that is the human sociocultural experience.

"Nothing is More Human than Artifice"

Update: Excerpt now finalized.

"I do indeed say that writing is artificial, and maybe one of our divergences is due to my not having explained that I do not consider being artificial necessarily bad at all, but rather of itself good. Nothing is more human than artifice. Only human beings can make products that are truly artificial–extensions into the outside world of the interiority of human consciousness or, if you wish, appropriations of the outside world into the interiority of consciousness."
- Walter J. Ong

[The following excerpt is a small section of the paper I have recently completed concerning Film Language, Deleuze, and digital cinema. The paper's titles is Digital Artifice: Toward a Revisioning of Cinema and the Interpretation of Images. The above quote serves as something of an introductory passage for the paper and its explication of the relationship of language to technology. Keep in mind that this is but a small section. I would post the entire paper, but I am going to hold off for now in the interest of perhaps presenting and/or publishing it. That is if I'm lucky.]

A Digital Problem

Since cinema has ingrained itself in our collective consciousness and restructured thought, it is essential to analyze its stylistic and compositional techniques that have cemented themselves in our minds regarding how we see the world. Furthermore, to understand the thought processes it enables and works through, it is important to examine how its emerging technologies sustain or work against classical conventions of filmmaking, practices which have dominated American cinema, David Bordwell argues, even as it has moved into its supposedly “postmodern” age, a fallacy in and of itself (Bordwell, 2006).

According to Lev Manovich, cinema provides “lens-based recordings of reality,” (2001, p. 294) consisting of unmodified photograph recordings of real events taking place in real physical space. The camera “records” reality, says Manovich (2001). But to Deleuze, cinema embodies another reality, another space, another time (Uhlmann, 2004). Here, we have problem of conceptualization, highlighting the issues raised in trying to understand a medium that is a culmination and collision with many other media, electronic and otherwise. Thus, the importance of film technology is incredibly important and critical in possessing an understanding of what cinema is. Manovich claims that cinema captures an already existing world, whereas Deleuze claims that cinema does not represent a world - as a language might - but instead is its own world based on the spatial and temporal relationships it forges in the time-image.

If we define cinema by Manovich’s description of being a filmed reality, then any distortion of that reality compromises the integrity of the image. For cinema to be cinema, space and time must be captured photographically. Interestingly, Manovich does make mention of the birth of the moving image being in animation, but he keeps the two separate (2001). Manovich defines digital cinema as “a particular case of animation that use live action footage as one of its elements” (2001, p. 298) Thus, for Manovich, digital cinema is not really cinema at all, but animation, which is why he claims that the digital age is bringing cinema full circle and connecting it with its roots of animation. He traces the history of cinema to animation, a narrative medium that never involved film. Cinema was then born from the traditions of animation as a means of capturing motion, only it marked the beginning of photographically capturing images within a certain time and space. Interestingly, images of hand-drawn and digitally animated films are made to look as if they were captured photographically. From a cinematographic and continuity perspective, they are strongly influenced by the photographic properties of cinema, while obviously stretching the camera’s “recording” of actual movement.

We are experiencing the pinnacle of this problem right now in cinema, as digital technology is ever more prominent in mainstream, independent, and foreign films (McLean, 2007). The term "film" supposes that the means through which a moving image is presented is on film and photographically captured. But this definition is fundamentally contradictory of film’s narrative promise of providing a world into which the viewer may escape. The emergence of digital technology directly calls into question what constitutes a produced moving image and raises the question: does cinema need to be photographic to be considered cinema?

Digital cinema is often understood as digital effects in movies (McLean, 2007), in which a digital component is added to a photographically captured image, keeping true with Manovich’s definition. Much like animated films, the digital is often understood within a culturally cemented understanding of cinema as “film,” in that digital technology is processed in relation to photographically captured images. But what constitutes a pure photographed image? While a camera captures "actual" reality, that reality is represented on film differently than the eye may perceive it. While the camera is an obvious technological extension of physiological components of the eye and the brain, as is all of cinema, but what can we account for as truly being "real." Digital images on film represent a component of cinema outside of "film," yet it is often comfortably situated amongst our ideology of cinema as film. Therefore, digital images are designed to stand-in for “the real” (McLean, 2007); they synthetically add elements to a composition that the camera did not capture, but they are still positioned as such.

In terms of classical filmmaking, digital effects often serve the same purpose in their execution of classical norms and conventions (McLean, 2007). Since The Abyss (1989), digital effects have become increasingly prevalent in American filmmaking, in both big budget blockbusters, e.g. the computer generated dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993), the shape-shifting T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1992), or the spider-bots in Minority Report (2002), and lower budgeted art-house and independent films. How these digital effects are employed often vary incredibly. Nevertheless, their design remains the same: they exist as digitally added components of a photographically captured image. Although they do not take up space as “real” elements of a composition might, they are meant to feel that way. They may be incorporated to add to the narrative as the viewer sees it, in reflexive films such as the consumer apartment sequence in Fight Club (1999) or the visual presentation of Harold Crick’s very structured lifestyle in Stranger Than Fiction (2006), or they may be used to enhance a composition dramatically in small, almost undetectable ways.

Although their use varies depending on the narrative, genre, and stylistic aspects of a film, digital effects are meant to appear to take up the same space as the filmed aspects of a frame. Thus, these effects may be understood as organic extensions of classical filmmaking styles. While they exist to expand photographic capabilities, their place in narrative filmmaking is to sustain the elements of style as established by norms and standards defined long before the technology existed (McLean, 2007). However, digital effects are of growing prominence in many different films to the point that they work against their supposed purpose of upholding already established stylistic conventions. The fact that they are noticed and that the viewer can identify whether an aspect of a composition is “real” or not signifies a separation of the digital from the analog, a separation suggesting a tension. If the viewer can identify that a particular image or component of an image is digital, then the digital is not serving its purpose to stand-in for what the camera can actually capture.

An interesting example of the dualistic relationship between the digital and the analog is Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005), a film that is realistically about 90 percent digital effects and 10 percent “real”. This is of course a rough approximation. The point is that an overwhelming portion of the film exists entirely digitally, which calls into question whether it should be called a film at all. It is a prime example of the shift Manovich explains in which cinema is being launched back into the realm of animation, becoming more of a painterly art than a photographic art. However, it returns to its painterly roots after having been strongly influenced by photographic properties, as mentioned previously, which can result in problematic ways of conceptualizing cinema. Herein lies the tension.

How digital images (both digital effects and digitally captured images) sustain classical filmmaking traditions through its photographic qualities is evident in Star Wars: Revenge of Sith, which follows a specific stylistic and narrative design. This makes it an interesting artifact of study for exactly how those stylistic and narrative elements are communicated, sustained, or altered through the film’s reliance on digital effects. However, its outward embracing of digital technology is subsidized by its use of such technologies to form a narrative that may have existed without it. The digital components of the film are designed to be perceived as analogically real. Therefore, the film’s attempt at classical structuring and stylistic devices is ultimately artificial. Compositions, movements, editing, and photography employ the digital to execute a thoroughly analog image; but such an image is not possible under digital terms Thus, the digital effects are essentially counteractive to the film’s intent of sustaining classical filmmaking and narrative values.

These films decisively exemplify the tension between “film” and “digital.” Many critics have lambasted the films and other effects-heavy productions, citing that they are overly reliant on effects and therefore not really “films”. Nevertheless, despite being problematic, the Star Wars prequel trilogy represents a significant exploration of digital technology in cinema; often times, they result in awkward movement-image effects, but there are moments laden throughout all three recent films that display a true time-image in their marriage of the digital and the analog to the point that they are unnoticeable and the image itself becomes new. Rarely are these moments seen, however, since many scholars have focused on the movement-images. Such criticisms tend focus on the presence of the digital and the presumption that a “filmed” reality results in more effective cinema. But this too is a problematic approach.

Since cinema has been defined by its photographic qualities for more than a century, the emergence of the digital as positioned in relation to that century’s worth of photographic properties seems to establish digital cinema as a betrayal of cinema's "realness." But cinema, in its narrative origins and manipulative nature, is a fundamental distortion of “reality” in that it locks movement to a specific space and time not our own; that is its purpose. From a Deleuzian episteme, one that collapses language and technology, cinema is not a representation. Therefore, to focus on the notion that a camera better captures a world and represents it than digital images do is incredibly problematic. Cinema is its own world; it’s own image. It does not represent and replicate movement but creates movement (and therefore time) in its complex compositional relations and elements, which constantly transmogrify to interact with one another so as to form an image that a spectator can “see” (Deleuze, 1989). The extent to which the spectator can “see” the whole image – essentially, that which is unseeable – depends upon those very relations that forge the movement on screen. Therefore, the problem with the Star Wars films isn’t in them being so reliant on digital technology, but rather in how they employ digital technology for the purpose of recreating the movement-image. To focus on the overwhelming presence of digital effects in the Star Wars films as the reason for their problematic nature is more a reflection of the ideology that the term “film” and film language imposes and assume on cinema and its spectators.

Deleuze claims that in its abilities to embody sight and sound as the eye, ears, and brain capture it, cinema becomes another world, another image, rather than a mere representation of perceptions of stimuli (Deleuze, 1986). Since cinema is a culmination of various media and technologies, to envision its properties as purely photographic would be to limit its capabilities and its visual potential. Nevertheless, the properties of language have categorized cinema and its narrative components to be a certain way, as is reflected in the recent Star Wars films, thus shaping an understanding not only of its content, but of the form itself.

Digital cinema: the debate rages on... Or is it just beginning?

I recently made the distinction between "film" and "cinema" and observed why these terms are crucial to how we constitute, understand, and build upon the medium. David Bordwell brings these issues to light in the latest entry on his blog by mapping a cinema in relation to its influences. He points to the fact that cinema is a fusion of various media, technologies, and aesthetic traditions, which in turn provides a wide number of theoretical frameworks through which to engage it. Of particular interest to me in relation to my recent discussion of film versus cinema is Bordwell's mention of the photographic properties of cinema and how they have influenced our notions of what cinema is:

"The great film theorist André Bazin claimed that cinema’s photographic basis made it very different from the more traditional arts. By recording the world in all its immediacy, giving us slices of actual space and true duration, film puts us in a position to discover our link to primordial experience. Other arts rely on conventions, Bazin thought, but cinema goes beyond convention to reacquaint us with the concrete reality that surrounds us but that we seldom notice.

I think that Bazin’s idea lies behind our sense that long takes and a static camera are putting us in touch with reality and inviting us to notice details that we usually overlook in everyday life. (I try out this line of argument in relation to the tactility of Sátántangó here.) Moreover, you can argue that in treating cinema as a photographic art the filmmaker surrenders a degree of control over what we see and how we see it. Bazin made this claim about the Italian neorealists and Jean Renoir: creation becomes a matter of an existential collaboration between humans and the concrete world around us.

An example I used in my book Figures Traced in Light pertains to a moment in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Summer at Grandfather’s, when a tiny toy fan falls between railroad tracks as a locomotive roars past. The fan’s blades stop, then spin in the opposite direction as the train thunders over it. The blades reverse again when the train has gone. (This detail might not be visible on video.) Did Hou know how the fan would behave? Isn’t it just as likely he simply discovered it after the fact, making his shot a kind of experiment in the behavior of things? Conceived as a species of photography, cinema can yield visual discoveries that no other art can.

Interestingly, cinema didn’t have to be photographic. Many early experiments with moving images were made with strips of drawings, such as the Belgian Émile Reynaud’s Praxinoscope. You can argue that recording glimpses of the world photographically simply proved to be the easiest way to obtain a long string of slightly different images that could generate the illusion of movement. Some filmmakers, such as George Lucas, hold that filmmakers are no longer tied to photography, and that the digital revolution will allow cinema to finally realize itself as a painterly art."

This last paragraph is particularly resonant because it dares to suggest that perhaps cinema is not interchangeable with film. Perhaps we have been using the wrong terms to discuss cinema, in so doing shaping a very limited approach to what constitutes a moving image. Somewhere along the line, it seems as though with use of terms like film we have conditioned ourselves to understand cinema exclusively in terms of photographic. As Bordwell mentions, there is a myriad of narrative conventions, technologies, and media that have contributed to the birth of cinema. Why must our understanding of cinema be limited to what can be captured with a camera?

The emergence of digital technology directly calls into question what constitutes a produced moving image. Interestingly, we often refer to digital cinema as digital effects in movies, in which a digital component is added to the photographically captured image. The digital is often understand within a culturally cemented understanding of cinema as film in that digital technology is often understood in relation to photographically captured images. But what constitutes a pure photographed image? While a camera captures "actual" reality, that reality is represented on film differently than it may be perceived by the eye. While the camera is an obvious technological extension of phisiological components of the eye and the brain, as is all of cinema, but what can we account for as truly being "real." Digital images on film represent a component of cinema outside of "film," yet it is often comfortably situated amongst our ideology of cinema as film. Therefore, digital images are meant to "stand-in" for the real; they synthetically add elements to a composition that the camera did not capture, but they are still positioned as such. Shilo T. McLean elucidates these matters in the essential book, Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film.

But I am particularly interested in an oft-forgotten (and arguably more important) aspect of the digital cinema: digital video. With digital video, you have a digital treatment of a medium that was dominated with a photgraphic understanding of the analog. Therefore, digital video has its roots in film, only it represents a different form of photographically capturing an image. Movement is captured, constructed, and presented differently, therefore relations of time are understood differently (since, according to Deleuze, space creates time, not the other way around) via new synaptic possibilities of presenting movement within a space as digital video enables. With digital video, then, we face a problematic issue of defining film or cinema and, more importantly, how those definitions greatly influence how we interpret the images it produces and understand the techologies through which such images are constructed. Of course, this is an oversimplified summation of concepts and analytical approaches that require far more in-depth examination. Nevertheless, this necesary overhaul of how we understand cinema begins with identifying the tensions within our current ideologies regarding the medium and recognizing the problem. We must first start by asking the question: what is cinema? Perhaps that is harder to answer than we think. And maybe we can't answer that question sufficiently because the tools with which we build our conceptions of cinema have constructed an ideology of cinema that ignores a great variety of other possibilities that would alter how we define the medium of cinema and how that medium grows.

Shaping a Knowledge of Cinematic Visuality

When the subject of movies or television shows is under discussion, I have observed that often times those who have not seen the film or show being discussed are typically aggravated when those who have seen it disclose important plot details. Discussions about movies with surprise endings are ripe for this social situation, especially. My continued observation of such discourse has lead me to consider what is it about plot twists and surprise endings that interests so many viewers, and how does one think that if she or he knows of a particular twist or plot point, the experience is ruined.

As many have said before, when it comes to that which we see, how we see something is far more important than what we see. If you're not interested in how a particular action is made visible, then cinema is not the medium for you. Nevertheless, I have either observed or been apart far too many conversations in which individuals insist upon not knowing certail details, as if what happens is why they see the movie at all. I can understand that for many viewers, cinema and television are just distractions into which they can lose themselves for an hour or two. Therefore, they would rather not catch themselves up on how an image is working; they are more interested in what that image signifies.

I certainly understand this perspective, however I remain convinced that if an individual is more focused on content rather than form, than form becomes less important and since form decides content, content becomes nothing more than sensory-motor cliche, to use Deleuze's term. What we have then is a "bad" image, one that creates a temporal and spatial reality only allowing the spectator to understand its image by means of identification with cliche. The viewer then sees what she or he wants to see, and the act of processing and intepreting images becomes one of commodification, convention, and easily identifiable patterns rooted in the idea that plot is the mosty important point of visual storytelling. viewers then determine what they will see based on whether the plot adheres to their preferences in particular plot or genre conventions. Essentially, this mentality breeds the notion that images are to fit nicely into little boxes that we can label, leaving viewers to choose to consume exactly what they expect. This mentaility of valuing content only then spawns a culture of images makers and spectators to understand images that way, and hence interest in real, nuanced images and cinema becomes lost in the mix of commodification, marketing, and demographics.

While this is a larger cultural problem, there will always be cinema lovers and filmmakers who understand the value of images and the urgency to see and construct new ones. The identifiable patterns of plot, genre, or stylistic conventions as set forth by the destructive, yet highly influential notion of "film language" are irrelevant. Nevertheless, since cinema is grounded in traditions of narrative and situates a story and plot within its spatial and temporal reality, these kind of things are inevitable. I do not propose that we need to do away with plot and narrative. I am instead proposing that filmmakers and viewers become more demanding of what they create and see. Cinema has an amazing capacity to structure a world and make it visible. Narrative conventions and patterns are in a sense inevitable, but there is no end to how they can be expanded and responded to, thus forming new realities. But only by rejecting a content over form mentality is this possible. Maybe we will come to a point when people no longer care if they find out what happens and are instead more interested in the images themselves and how narrative conventions are comprehended based on how images present space and time through their motions, juxtapositions, and existence.

While I would love to revel in such optimistic modes of simplistic solution-making to cultural problems of seeing, it's more important to consider the implications of conditioning images to content, thus prizing easily identifiable patterns of style. Of course, it's impossible to see or know nothing about a film to which one buys a ticket or purchases. There is always some form of context as well as text to which a movie belongs that signals something about the movie before one sees it: even the title "means" something. Therefore, the idealistic model of film viewing, i.e. knowing nothing about the plot or images of a movie, is not possible. Which is why it's very crucial to understand the role of expectation and anticipation in how we consume films.

Returning to the aforementioned issue of knowing too much about a plot, I believe that a knowledge of plot elements, however extensive, only damages the film viewing experience only as much as the viewer allows it to. As I have argued, an emphasis on the images themselves would nullify the potential damaging effects that any explanations or disclosure of story details may cause to one's film viewing experience. But, even if we move beyond this paradigm and into one focused on images, familiarity and stylistic convention must still exist, firstly, and we still have a looming issue of how expectations of a film affect or influence the experience of seeing a film.

The first thing that one should note when considering this potentially problematic issue in film viewing is that now movie exists within a vacuum, both from the perspective of how a viewer sees it and how a filmmaker constructs it. A knowledge of how to construct and consume images is directly informed by a culture's or individual's previous experience with the medium. Therefore, the content-over-form mentality informs images by means of promising images that are congruous with sensory-motor schemata, thus diffusing the viewer's ability to and capacity to engage with the images, because the viewer is instead focused on the processing of the cliches dictating the form of those images. In the form-over-content paradigm of film viewing, there will still be patterns and conventions to identify, however the viewer/maker is often reflexive of that and the conscious knowledge of that allows one to think about how such identifiable elements can be arranged so as to be incongruous to one another, forming a new image based on knowledge of how cliche images are put together. This is certainly possible with cinema as the elements of a moving image constantly transmorgify and form relationships based on how movement constitutes space and time, which may therefore inform new relationships and allows new ways for the elements to engage one another.

But adopting this approach still begs several questions: the main concern being how much discourse one to which one should engage concerning a movie she or he intends to see. This discourse inevitably affects how one sees a film's images and is different from one being informed by a knowledge of images from other movies because this discourse specifically focused on the form of the film that the individual has not yet seen. Is it better to have an extensive knowledge about a film before one has seen it or not? If not, would we have the same cultural perspective of films such as Citizen Kane and Casablanca? How does the inevitable histroy of film criticism that any self-respecting criticism exposes her or himself to alter, influence, and inform the experience of seeing such milestones in cinema history and how might it be shaped otherwise? In terms of films being influenced by other films, to what extent are all films influenced by particular modes of seeing, particularly that of classical style. Do not avant-garde films exist as alternatives to classical cinema and therefore by acknowledging such conventions still exist in relation to them? Or, is "originality" possible when considering that all films that employ similiar narrative and/or stylistic conventions of building images, either consciously or unconsciously. The films that borrows images consciously and reflexively is of particular interest now considering the many pastiche films being released, e.g. Grindhouse. I plan to address these areas of inquiry in coming posts. I can only surmise now, however, that these are all important questions to consider from the standpoint of criticism and the theorizing of images, as we attempt to understand how to consume and process images as the media and technologies through we do so continue to expand.

Classicism and Modernism in the Digital Age: An Essential Piece of Criticism

From Jean-Baptiste Thoret's illuminating criticism of Miami Vice, one of the most evocative and important cinematic achievements in recent memory:

"The classical/modern conflict, essential in Mann, takes here an unexpected turn and puts Miami Vice undoubtedly at the origin of a new cycle in Mann’s work. The question is no longer, as in Manhunter (1986) or Heat, to evaluate what between two worlds is similar or different since, if disparity remains, it is in a negligible manner. From this point of view, classicism with its strong events (hold-ups, shoot-outs, marked positions, etc.), its simplification of the stakes and its resolution of an initial given situation is consumed: the leak in the heart of a governmental agency that launched the narrative will never be identified, the romance between Isabella and Sonny appears suddenly on the way and finally takes the upper hand, while, at the end, Montoya vanishes. From modernity and from American cinema of the 1970s, Miami Vice has kept a problematic rapport to action, between deflating (how many dismissed sequences and aborted conclusions) and overheating. But there is also the feeling of a complex and illegible world, in which it has become impossible to interact if not in a peripheral manner (the release of Trudy from the claws of the Aryen brothers, the elimination of Yero, etc.).....

How can man hold on in a disembodied world, so transparent but ultimately so opaque? The disappearance of the human, its dematerialization in the heart of an urban universe governed by technology, and thus its capacity for resistance, constitutes one of the central themes of Mann’s cinema and finds in Miami Vice its most accomplished extension. Here, the only point of view capable of reversing the flux is in the Sonny-Isabella axis. When their eyes connect, immediately the world recedes and the flux subsides."

Many others have offered a wide variety of approaches to Michael Mann's masterpiece, but this criticism is a significant starting-point for a new analysis and understanding of cinema in the digital age. It articulates new technology as it relates to cinema and narrative, which I believe to be a crucial realm of cinema and media studies to which I soon hope to contribute. As Deleuze notes, cinema doesn't create a representation of a world or an idea. It is its own world. And Michael Mann understands this in relation to film technology as no other filmmaker does.

Breaking Down Film Language

[The following argument is a broad encapsulation of ideas that require greater exploration, consideration, and scrutiny. I don't propose to possess the key to challenging our interpretive sensibilities or comprehending stimuli, but it's a place to start. I'm sure there is much I have left out, as this was a sort of "stream of conscious" experiment, so feel free to challenge, expand upon, or downright call me out on anything. Again, I stress that this is a broad overview of some of the introductory concepts of visuality and language. I steered clear of dropping names and citations, as it would have become too cluttered. So here are a list of scholars and thinkers who I credit for allowing me to think about such concepts. They are Deleuze, Metz, Barthes, Thayer, Berger, McLuhan, Ong, Burke, Mitchell, Messaris, Bordwell.]

As terms such as "media literacy" are routinely being pushed down our throats, now is as relevant a time as any for a greater discussion of the notion of "film language." Some accept the term without question, and I would argue that such a mindset can be incredibly damaging in the increasingly visually culture of which us internet users are now apart, and most other people for that matter. Of course, saying that visuality is replacing textuality is perhaps too broad a claim to make. However, a rigorous review of that claim and its potential implications reveals a greater discussion about language and images that is currently only being considered in the academic realm, but is even rather spare there. Just thinking about language and images as systems of representation inevitably brings to mind their relationship, one that we quickly realize is too problematic to simply accept without questioning. These very issues are at the center of cinema studies and criticism and they are a great focus of what constitutes our social environment and ability to interpret anything at all, which is why it is so crucial to consider them no matter how frustrating it may be.

How do images work? Certainly, the answer to that question depends on which of the various disciplines and divisions amongst those disciplines to which one subscribes, because, ultimately, a broadly stated question like that boils down to ideology. Some attempt to study the mechanics of images (how they are produced, the elements within them and how they are positioned, etc.), whereas others would claim that interpreting images is more reliant on social environment; still others claim that its narrative familiarity and being able to accept conventions of narratives and certain images associated with particular narrative styles or genres. While there are many possible ways of answering the question, there is no one right answer. Because, quite honestly, images are incredibly complicated in how they create meaning. There are surely components that are cognitive, social, phisiological, linguistic, and who knows what else. It would be impossible to treat this situation in a vacuum because, like anything else related to development and functioning as a member of society, perceiving, interpeting, and understanding a given stimulus requires the interaction of many different things, not the least of which is language.

A fully functioning human being can (in very simple terms) see. Systems of communication such as language allows us to break down what we see, to understand it in a certain way, and have it make sense. Therefore, our social, economic, and cultural institutions are constructed around and according to the principles that language deleneates, the most prominent of which is separation and categorization. But language came from somewhere, and our ability to form it at all is rooted in the brain, obviously. But given that we know so little about the brain, it is more important to analyze the systems through which all stimuli are interpreted and understood, which are rooted in communication and language. But the important thing to note is that human beins were born seeing before talking or communicating. Now, this is a bit different since all of us are born into this great web of discourse. But for the sake of making my point, I am discussing "the caveman." Since human beings could see before communicating, the need to communicate arose from the ability to see and interact with the visible and aural world. It is no surprise then that the roots of language, for thousands of years, are in oral traditions; sounds, noises. We see the beginnings of systematically interpreting signals. Noises became more refined, more accessible over time and oral culture began to take shape. All of this communicating was a way for humans to make sense and order of the stimuli to which they were exposed. Whether the need for order was intrinsic or resulted from language is another argument entirely.

From there, oral became literate, and when the written word was used, represented the oral aspect of language in visual form. A word somehow exists in a more permenant way that the sound of one doesn't, which is more dependent on memory of that sound. So as we understand language as a visual and oral representation of systematic categorization and translating the world into forms, technology further developed and gave us the printing press, which represented the visual emobodiment of the visual aspect of language. As cultures became literate, oral traditions never died. That's why it's so important to understand that media and technologies, even today, emerge from previous knowledge of existing media and technologies. From orality came literacy. From literacy came textuality. And with electronic media, from textuality came visuality. The important thing about these four components is that although they represent a progression, each one depends upon the other in order to exist in any kind of meaningful way.

Now that I've covered human communication over thousands of years in one paragraph (well, maybe not all of it), we can now explore the relationship of visuality to how we currently constitute time and space and make sense of "the world outside." Since I don't want to write a dissertation here, I'll limit visuality (for the time being) to cinema. How does cinema work? Certainly, in a narrative sense, it has emerged from the traditions of literature and theatre, both of which are heabily influenced by orality, literacy, and textuality in different ways. Many spectators had an understanding of storytelling based on those media and were able to interpret film images, most of which were based on the theatre. The camera rarely moved, rarely edited, and demanded little from the audience in terms of interpretting a space and time. As it has evolved, however, cinema has progressed in an infinite amount of ways, at least regarding the relationship of the image and the spectator. This has resulted from the advancement of many electronic media and technologies, for sure, but also from a greater knowledge of the practices of cinema, of positioning elements compositionally within a frame and allowing the spectator to understand the narrative. It should be noted that even non-narrative films borrow heavily from narrative tradition.

When current norms are challenged and stretched, it's often met with skepticism by some and embrace by others. Gradually, audience expectation in terms of style and narrative techniques were stretched and whole genres became associated with the visual aspect of cinema, such as the film noir. But more to the point, how do we interpret images? Quiet simply, interpreting an image is very much like interpreting letters and words. The elements are different, of course, but seeing images in the context of a narrative is a similar system of representation to language. However, I would argue that even though cinema and visuality is informed and made possible by literacy and textuality in many ways, they can and do function differently, and are an entire different system of representation altogether. Of course, terms like "new," "original," and "different" are being used here not in the sense something being entirely new, because that's not possible. What I mean by new or different is stretching the capacity of understanding that previous conventions of that understanding allow, thus forming a new understanding.

With language, you have a series of pre-determined elements with which to work. In terms of the English language, you have 26 elements, or 26 digits. With those 26 components must one communicate thought. Being that language is a symbol system and exists for the purpose of interpreting outside stimuli, it is based on the idea of seeing. But, language also structures experience so greatly that it by and large determines what we see to the point that so much of the physical matter we see is a direct result of media, technology, and literacy in general. Taking this into the spectrum of cinema, the spectator familiarizes him or herself with the images based on how images are typically presented, a knowledge that influences how not only they are seen, but how they are created. There is most definitely a strong relationship between spectator and image maker; they exist because of the relationship they share and are defined by each other. Therefore, the images of a film are very much made to embody a system of representation very similar to a language, but the components that make an image, while limited to an understanding of language and communication, can indeed transcend it. There is no end to the componenets that make up an image. Only through our understanding of language, one that we really cannot escape, do we understand and make sense of these possibilities. Like all other aspects of the stimuli we comprehend visually, cinema images are broken down, categorized for comprehensive consumption. They do not intrinsically exist as such, however; something that language does. So, while images of cinema may be byproducts of language and literacy, they encompass a much greater way of seeing, comprehending, and experiencing. With the emergence of "new" images, we can aesthetically consume images and narratives in new and challenging ways, transcending the confines of language to the greatest extent that we can. Ideas represented by language become abstract, unintelligible by way of the old way of seeing, thus moving into a new realm.

Only if we let go of this ideal of film language or media literacy can we come to embrace such new ways of perceiving, interpreting and understanding images, feelings, and thoughts. While our visual media and technologies will never be totally removed from literacy and textuality, they can transcend their current positioning and represent new ideas, new feelings, and new images.