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Essays (book reviews) |
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Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image |
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We
are familiar with cinema histories that tell their tale in two parts – making a
grand slice between the silent and sound eras (the old-fashioned version), or
between the ‘movement-image’ of classical Hollywood and the ‘time-image’
ushered in by European and Asian cinema after the end of World War II (the
new-fangled version care of Gilles Deleuze). But, in the early days of the 21st century, we are beginning to see the emergence of three-part schemas, such as
that offered by veteran critic Jacques Lourcelles on Sacha Guitry in a 2006
essay in Trafic magazine.
In
her fascinating Death 24x a Second,
Laura Mulvey offers a particularly ingenious division of the history of cinema.
In its first phase, she argues, cinema was dominated by the marvel that she
names the ‘technological uncanny’: even documentary footage could seem strange
and magical, and fiction films frequently followed the trail of such
wonderment. Eventually, however, the magic waned, and cinema entered its second
phase of ‘everyday entertainment and modernity’: in all its forms, it became
routine, formulaic, banal, nothing new or surprising anymore, and more an
instrument of ideology than of poetry.
But
the dawn of a new century, with its rampant digital technologies, brought
massive changes that, for the most part, prompt optimism in Mulvey. The cinema,
as we have known and loved it, has now become a vast archive of images and sounds
that can be effortlessly stored, retrieved, recombined and manipulated. Rather
than this cultural and industrial phenomenon heralding the much-vaunted ‘death
of cinema’, Mulvey hails it as a rebirth: once again, as in the very first film
projections, there is an effect of the technological uncanny, the ‘sensation of
seeing movement fossilised’ and – most importantly – reanimated. The cinema
may, in a sense, indeed be dead; but that means it is now a precious trace of
the past that – as it comes alive for us again and differently on a digital
support – we can reinterpret, remake and project into the future.
Laura
Mulvey knows a thing or two about being fossilised. She is still most often
cited as the author of that canonical, mid ’70s Screen article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ – as if she
scarcely wrote anything since, or at any rate must surely hold to the
principles she laid out so influentially over thirty years previously. In
truth, Mulvey has never ceased returning to, commenting upon, revising and
expanding that early piece, in her essays, lectures and books including Visual and Other Pleasures (1989) and Fetishism and Curiosity (1996). But –
and this is just as significant – she has never repudiated it, either, as so
many intellectuals are prone to do when they spectacularly convert from one
movement or ideology to another. Mulvey remains faithful to the pleasure – as
much intellectual as cinematic – that got her into the game in the first place.
The
trick that sustains her own engagement in the field is her rigorous habit of historicising both the practice of film
theory/analysis, and her own part in it. And so, returning to her three-part
schema of cinema history, it turns out to be a record not merely of changes in
the medium, but also of the commentary made by critics like herself.
When the initial magic of cinema gave way to a grubbier, more suspect kind of
illusion, film theory (including its semiotic and feminist wings) needed to
expose its workings, problematise its pleasure. Fortunately for all of us,
history does not end there.
Mulvey
is far from being the severe theorist of the male gaze in cinema that she is so
often caricatured as. In fact, I would propose that the central motif of her
work as a scholar and critic (as well as filmmaker) is not scoptophilia but change – the pressing question of how to
‘live historically’ (as Jean-Luc Godard once put it). Technology rapidly alters its forms
and thus its possibilities; collective cultural moments (even the most inspiring
and idealistic) must pass; intellectual paradigms shift (in Mulvey’s case, from
the exploration of the gaze to the more open theme of curiosity) – but what
remains constant, if any individual or community is not simply to blow every
which way with the winds of cultural fashion?
A
key essay, in this regard, is Mulvey’s 1983 ‘Changes: Thoughts on Myth,
Narrative and Historical Experience’ included in Visual and Other Pleasures, in which she wrote: ‘If narrative … can
be conceived around ending that is not closure … it can question the symbolic,
and enable myth and symbols to be constantly revalued.’ This, in embryonic
form, is the argument of Death 24x a
Second. Except, now, technology has entered into a happy rendezvous with
intellectual Utopia: first video, and then even more powerfully DVD, have
brought what Mulvey and others once practiced behind closed classroom doors as
textual analysis into the loungerooms of anyone who can afford the equipment.
To slow down or freeze the image, to seize or ponder it, is a radical act in
Mulvey’s account of contemporary film-watching experience: it reconnects cinema
with its long-lost association with the still photograph, and the different
kind of temporality it brings.
Although
parts of Death 24x a Second have
appeared in print before, it is far from being a loose collation of Mulvey’s
essays since her last book – a lazy
format we are seeing a little too frequently in academic publishing today.
Mulvey argues her case coherently, building it up gradually and lucidly from
chapter to chapter. The red thread of the book is the opposition – a classic
one in film theory from its earliest days – between stillness and movement. The
still image, the single frame, is associated with death; while the moving image
is associated with the flow of life. This deathly image is also something of a
guilty secret, since the cinematographic apparatus, when in projected motion,
‘represses’ the materiality of the individual frames that make up the celluloid
strip. The new twist that Mulvey brings to these familiar terms (formerly
theorised by Raymond Bellour, Jean Louis Schefer and others) is a certain
poignancy, and power, that comes with passing time: the secrets of the dead
that are buried within the artefacts of cinema history are now precious indices
or documents – records not simply of faces or places or styles, but also of
what Mulvey (following Roland Barthes) calls the punctum, moments of uncanniness that can infiltrate past, present
and future.
It
is possible to quibble here and there with details or tendencies in the book.
At times, I feel that Mulvey confuses the virtual power of the digital age – i.e., what people might possibly do with the new technology – with what they already, actually do. Let us not forget that, not
so long ago, cultural theorists wrote paeans to the consciousness-raising power
of the humble VCR, or even the zapper on the TV remote control – and yet these
devices hardly delivered to the world new generations of aware, radicalised
viewers. It is perhaps a little too easy to claim, as Mulvey is keen to do,
that the intellectual tools of the ‘70s (such as textual analysis) are now,
osmotically and spontaneously, democratised. Likewise, Mulvey’s (unapologetic)
attachment to her formative period of the ‘60s and ‘70s tends to lead to a analytical recycling of very familiar (and very few)
figures like Hitchcock, Sirk, and the two Michaels (Powell and Snow), with only
Abbas Kiarostami and Douglas Gordon’s tricksy 24 Hour Psycho standing in for The New. And yet, from another
angle, even this amounts to a demonstration of Mulvey finding a way to live
historically within her own practice: it is thrilling to see how she adapts and
alters previous tools she has used, such as gendered narrative and the
castration complex.
If
I have a stronger criticism to make of this book, it is not to point out faults
internal to its argument, but rather in the spirit of historicising its project
still further. About every fifteen years, it seems, contemporary film theory
takes what is commonly called a Turn. The Psychoanalytic Turn of the 1960s and
‘70s (the inquiry into the cinematic apparatus and its effect on the
spectator’s unconscious) was followed by the Historiographic Turn (the
attention to social and industrial contexts) that took us through much of the
‘80s and ‘90s. But now we are fully into a Philosophic Turn. Deleuze kicked off
the trend in
However,
it is fair to say that many film scholars whose formation predates this
Philosophic Turn are greeting it with indifference, suspicion or outright disdain.
Those who have brought an essentially leftist orientation – however
intellectually inflected – to the study of cinema are wary (fairly or otherwise)
of philosophy’s supposedly timeless, metaphysical categories, and its often
seemingly apolitical musings. Perhaps more mundanely, the edifice of
philosophy’s history, not to mention the complexity of its specialised
language, is daunting, and impossible to master
quickly. You can almost hear the exasperated collective sigh go up: after the
rigours of Christian Metz and Stephen Heath, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan,
Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin, another jargon that must be learnt!
Mulvey,
for her part, expresses no explicitly negative sentiments towards this new wave
of film-and-philosophy in Death 24x a
Second. Indeed, it is safe to predict that many with a dual interest in
philosophy and film will embrace the book and make extensive use of it. But
Mulvey, consciously or not, pulls her own project up short of the Philosophic
Turn. Certainly, she quotes Deleuze’s cinema books – but only in order to mine
the propositions pertaining to film history (which, as Rancière argues
persuasively in his Film Fables, are
not the strongest aspect of Deleuze’s analysis), not as philosophical
speculation (which is what all the stuff about movement-images and time-images
essentially and primarily is). And, while she reflects eloquently throughout on
‘the human psyche’s anxiety at the shadow of passing time and the inevitability
of death’, she still operates at some distance from a properly philosophic
inquiry into Being or Time. More centrally and crucially, a philosophical
approach – of the kind used by Jean-Luc Nancy in his investigation of ‘the
image and violence’ in The Ground of the
Image – might have probed and problematised further the assumed
self-evident equation between the photographic image, stillness and death.
Ultimately,
however, I judge any film book by a simple test: does it affect how I see the
very next film that comes my way? In this case, the film was De Palma’s The Black Dahlia (2006). And, sure
enough, this movie about a horribly mutilated corpse that returns, as a mental
image, to haunt and psycho-sexually destabilise the living was greatly
illuminated by the image from Psycho that Mulvey vividly places at the centre of her argument: naked Janet Leigh
performing the stillness of death so brilliantly that, when a drop of water
from the shower nozzle jolts us into the recognition that the frame is not
still, we are truly in the uncanny realm between the animate and the inanimate,
the living and the dead. It’s true: everything old is new again.
© Adrian Martin October 2006 |
