What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Death, Stillness, Delay

Today’s topics The art of the index 2. The ‘death’ of cinema? 3. The film stilled and cinema delayed

1. The art of the index Cinema as live action or animation?

‘Cinema is the art of the index; it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint’ (Manovich, ‘What is Digital Cinema?’, p. 406) ‘The photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint’ (Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’)

Analogue: transcription Digital: conversion

2. The ‘death’ of cinema? In the mid-1990s, the metaphor of cinema’s ‘death’ gained currency for several reasons Cinema’s 100th birthday

The deaths of the last stars of classical Hollywood: films as memorials ‘To see the star on screen in the retrospectives that follow his or her death is also to see the cinema’s uncertain relationship to life and death’ (Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second, p. 18)

Negative Space (originally titled Dead Cinema; Chris Petit, UK, 1999): ‘The cinema is becoming increasingly about what is past. It becomes a mausoleum as much as a palace of dreams’

Computer-made films: the end of cinema as indexical art?

However, new technologies offered the means to revitalise cinema and old films Histoire(s) du cinéma (History/ies of Cinema), Jean-Luc Godard, 8-hour video-essay (1988–1998)

What was cinema?

Dead characters, directors and stars

But Histoire(s) brings new life to Hitchcock’s films by extracting, slowing and stilling particular moments.

3. The film stilled and cinema delayed Mulvey: digital carriers (eg DVD) enable new ways of interacting with old films Digit – finger

‘Now, cinema’s stillness, a projected film’s best-kept secret, can be easily revealed at the simple touch of a button’ (Mulvey, p. 22).

Post-cinema conjures up pre-cinema

Ulysse (Agnès Varda, 1982) explores the relationship between cinema and photography, movement and stillness and the halting and passing of time.

Digital technology also enables us to manipulate film narrative, isolating and repeating moments and turning them into tableaus.

‘As the film is delayed and thus fragmented from linear narrative into favourite moments or scenes, the spectator is able to hold on to, to possess, the previously elusive image. In this delayed cinema the spectator finds a heightened relationship to the human body, particularly that of the star. Halting the flow of film extracts star images easily from their narrative surroundings for the kind of extended contemplation that had only been previously possible with stills.’ (Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p. 161) From voyeurism to fetishism?

Artaud Double Bill (Atom Egoyan, 2007); Anna goes to see Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962) and Nicole goes to see The Adjuster (Egoyan, 1991)

Dialectic between old and new modes of spectatorship Fragmenting film narrative, extracting moments Contemplating star bodies and faces intertitle ‘la mort’ (death)