Movement Behind Your Back: Cinematic Technology in Light of Simondon’s Philosophy of Technology

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Movement Behind Your Back:

Cinematic Technology in Light of Simondon

’s Philosophy of Technology

University of Amsterdam

Research Master

’s Thesis in Media Studies

Department of Media Studies

Vladimir Lukin

e-mail: vladimir.lukin@gmail.com

Supervisor: Dr. Abe Geil

Second Reader: Dr. Marie-Aude L. Baronian

Third Reader: Dr. Bernhard Rieder

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“La représentation du mouvement est la raison d’être du cinématographe, sa faculté maîtresse, l’expression fondamentale de son génie.

[…]

l’affinité du cinématographe pour le mouvement va jusqu’à découvrir celui-ci là où notre œil ne sait pas le voir. ”

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Abstract

Movement is the essence of cinema. But it is not the movement that we see on the screen but movement that happens behind our backs — both literally, in the cinematic apparatus in the movie theater, and metaphorically, for it defies our conceptual grasp. Thus, this thesis addresses the question of technical production of motion — the question which, as Tom Gunning aptly remarks, is “the repressed Freudian subject of film theory”. By drawing upon Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology, this thesis attempts to lay bare the technicity of cinematic technology and also to reveal the reasons why it remains misunderstood and under-theorized in the current debates on the moving image.

This thesis contends that cinematic technicity can be defined through the three technical operations, namely, movement data organization, movement analysis, and movement synthesis. As this thesis attempts to demonstrate, the misconception of cinematic technicity occurs on both the technological and conceptual levels. If optical technologies obscure cinematic technicity on the technological level, I claim the concept of the image obscures our conceptual understanding of movement. It the process, this thesis provides a critical rereading of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts of cinematic movement and suggest to restage the current debates on the moving image not in terms of the image but in terms of movement.

The project concludes by turning to the MPEG video codec family and explores its politics of movement production hidden in its algorithms. The final chapter explores datamoshing and glitch techniques in video art in order to show that these practices not only subvert the logic of standardization of codecs but also develop further cinematic technicity in its ability to generate new types of movement. Discussing datamoshing in negative terms of lo-fi aesthetics, suggesting image degradation, media theorists, I claim, fail to notice the politics of movement that grounds this aesthetics.

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1. Introduction: Movement Behind Your Back

In 1954 Martin Heidegger published what is now considered a classical essay “The Question Concerning Technology”. With it, he inaugurated a new era in

philosophy. From that moment the question concerning technology started to gain a prominent place in theoretical debates, not only in philosophy but also in sociology, cultural and media studies. Film studies was no exception. The recent anthology

Technē/Technology, published by the Amsterdam University Press in 2014 in the

series The Key Debates: Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies, eloquently demonstrates that today technology still remains a pressing issue.

The increased attention on the technological dimension of film studies is due to two main reasons. On the one hand, the scholars belonging to The New Film History movement and then media archaeologists argued that the history of cinema could not be treated anymore as a linear, progressive, and teleological process (Elsaesser ed., 1990; Gaudreault ed., 2012). Consequently film studies witnessed the proliferation of research into cinema’s origins and its early days which produced a plethora of film genealogies, quite often incompatible with one another. On the other hand, the advent of CGI-technologies forced film scholars to pose anew the classical Bazinian question: “What is cinema?” Obviously, this question urged scholars to reexamine the technological basis of cinema, since it has been radically transformed in recent decades (Manovich, 2001; Rodowick, 2007). Screening practices also

underwent serious transformations. The variety of ways cinema can be screened posed a serious challenge to film scholars and, as a result, studies of different cinematic

dispositifs have flourished (Albera ed., 2011). That lead Thomas Elsaesser to claim

that the main question for film theory today is no longer “What is cinema?” or even “When is cinema?” but “Where is cinema?” (“Early Film History” 21). Thus the ontological and historical modes of thinking about cinematic technology gave way to a topological one.

My project does not seek to enter directly into these debates, which would produce yet another film ontology or trace a different genealogy of cinema. Rather, I

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wish to explore these accounts of cinema, which are sometimes contradictory and incompatible with one another. What conditions these accounts, I contend, is the

technicity of cinematic technology.

To be clear, I deliberately use the term technicity in order to distinguish myself from common approaches that understand technology in terms of either social relations or experience and subjectivation. One of the most basic premises of my project is that cinematic technicity possesses some kind of agency and cannot be accounted only by its social and sensorial effects. Of course, humans and technology is so deeply entwined and connected that sometimes it is difficult to differentiate them. However, as I will try to demonstrate, analyzing the technicity solely in social terms only gives us a partial picture. Some scholars already signaled the narrow-mindedness of such an approach. In his Embodying Technesis, Mark Hansen argues against the view that technologies must be "one hundred percent" social and “that the cultural construction of technologies somehow exhausts the extent of their impact on our experience” (3). In his Transductions, Adrian Mackenzie claims that

“technologies are … difficult to access in terms of subjects and societies” (XI). In

Onto-Cartography, Levi Ryant asserts the right “to speak of the powers of things

themselves, to speak of them as producing effects beyond their status as vehicles for social relations” (3). At last in his Protocol, Galloway challenges the hierarchy of terms and describes his project as not a work “about information society, but about the real machines that live within that society” (17). My project is very much in line with this type of inquiry and attempts to extract the technicity of cinematic technology from the complex network of socio-cultural relations onto which it is inevitably intertwined.

Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology serves as the methodological basis for my project. The reason for this is threefold. First, since the technical object is in the center of his theory, his conceptual toolbox enables the exploration of the technical sphere in its own terms and differentiates it from the socio-economical sphere. Second, the concept of technicity allows theorization of the way technical objects evolve without bogging down in minute descriptions of various mechanisms. At the same time, it enables the analysis of cinematic technology in all its temporal and special variety. As I will argue, the three fundamental questions of film theory as

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described by Thomas Elsaesser are in fact closely related. It is impossible to answer the question “Where is cinema?” without a preliminary answer to the question “What is cinema?” But this question, in turn, is also impossible to answer if we don’t know the genesis and evolution of cinematic technology, that is, if we don’t know the answer to the question “When is cinema?” In contrast to deterministic accounts on technology, Simondon’s theory doesn’t claim “media defines our situation” (Kittler,

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter XXIX). On the contrary, it recognizes the openness of

technological evolution and incorporates socio-cultural factors.

Approaching cinema from the Simondonian perspective, I will claim, allows us to pose the question of the technical production of motion — the question which, as Tom Gunning aptly remarks, is “the repressed Freudian subject of film theory” (“Animation and Alienation” 2). For as I will try to demonstrate, the essence of cinematic technology, to paraphrase Heidegger, is nothing optical. Seeing from the Simondonian perspective not only allow us to pose the question of the technical production of motion but it also lays bare the possible reasons why it has been repressed. Movement is the essence of cinema. But it is not the movement we see on the screen but movement that happens behind our backs — both literally, in the cinematic apparatus in the moving theater, and metaphorically. It is the movement which escapes today even dispositif theory. For, as I will argue, formulating a question in terms of dispositif (the conditions of screening of moving images) obscures the question of cinematic technicity (production of moving images), since the latter precedes and grounds the former.

Blinded by the radiance of the moving image on the screen, we fail to notice the technical movement which, in the era of analog cinema, lurked in the cinematic apparatus and now lurks in the algorithms of video codecs. This movement, as Mackenzie convincingly demonstrated, now remains on the sub-representative level. And as Hansen argued, due to the complexity of digital media we cannot grasp it in the movement of perception, for we remain ‘operationally blind’ to it. But, in fact, this was always the case. In the era of analog cinema, the coupling of the cinematic and optical technology was so tight that we failed to notice. However, Simondon’s

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conceptual toolbox allows the separations of the technicity of cinematic technology from the optical one even during its first days.

Approaching the cinematic technology from the point of view of its technicity, I claim, induces the need for the conceptual articulation of movement and image in the notion of ‘the moving image’ which replaced the notion of the film (Gunning,

“Animation and Alienation” 2). In order to explore this articulation, I propose to distinguish between the aesthetics of the image and the politics of movement, or, to be

more precise, the politics of movement production. As I will demonstrate, different

film theories and filmic production put into practice different politics of movement. Movement manipulations can be valorizes, as was the case of the first wave of French avant-garde filmmakers with their concept of photogénie, or it can be downplayed or even barred, as certain theoretical works of Andre Bazin demonstrated. However, in order to stay within the limits of the technical sphere, I ultimately turn to look at the MPEG video codec family in order to reveal the politics of movements operated in motion rendition algorithms. Analyzing certain datamoshing films which make this politics visible, I attempt to explore the ways in which the politics of movement affects the aesthetics of the image.

Chapter description

Following Chapter One (“Introduction: Movement Behind Your Back”), Chapter Two (“The Technicity of Cinematic Technology”) explores the pre-history of cinematic technology in order to lay bare its technicity. The chapter introduces

Simondon’s conceptual framework and situates my project within the current debates in film theory and media archaeology. The main aim of the chapter is to untangle the genealogy of the cinematic technology from that of optical technologies in order to demonstrate that what accounts for cinematic technology as such is its operations of movement analysis and synthesis. These operations can be implemented in various ways as the history of pre-cinematic technologies demonstrate. However, on the conceptual level they remain stable. In addition, optical technologies, I claim, serve as interfaces of cinematic technology. While they are indispensible for movement data detection and projection, on the level of technicity, however, they remain external to

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cinematic technology and historically contingent. Optical technologies, I argue, obscure the technicity of cinematic technology. Therefore it is the movement and its manipulations and not image that defines cinematic technology. Revealing the technicity will enable me to show how it grounds our ontological theories.

If Chapter Two analyses the misconception of cinematic technicity on the technological level, Chapter Three (“Cinematic Technology in the Grim of Metaphors of Subjectivity”) analyses its miscomprehension on the conceptual level. If optical devices obscured cinematic technicity on the technological level, I claim the concept of the image obscures the concept of movement. In order to trace possible reasons for such misconceptions, I take on a critical rereading of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts of cinema in order to demonstrate how the concept of the image contaminates their understanding of cinematic movement. Instead of issues of the image— thinking cinematic movement in terms true/false — I argue we need to reformulate the debate in terms of the issues of movement and consider cinematic technology in terms of virtual/actual: which new (virtual) movements that cinema enables and how. Such reconfiguration of the debate allows posing the question of the politics of movement production.

Chapter Four (“Video Codecs and the Politics of Movement”) how the

cinematic technicity was transformed by digital technologies. Specifically, it critically examines MPEG video codec family in order to lay bare the politics of movement hidden within its algorithms. By drawing upon Bergson and Deleuze’s distinction between the ancient and the modern way of considering movement, I reveal the paradoxical way in which video codecs combine these two ways of considering movement in their algorithms. In addition, I explore datamoshing and glitch

techniques in video art in order to show that these practices not only subvert the logic of standardization but also develop further cinematic technicity in its ability to

generate new types of movement. Many media theorists, I claim, fail to notice this as they continue to discuss datamoshing in negative terms of the glitch aesthetics, suggesting image degradation, and fail to notice that it also introduces new types of movement into cinema.

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2. The Technicity of Cinematic Technology

Before looking at the history of pre-cinematic technologies, I must first introduce Simondon's conceptual framework. I will explicate and assess Simondon's most basic notions and will try to distinguish his approach from both media

archeology and the social construction of methodologies on technology. In rereading the history of pre-cinematic technologies, I will try to lay bare the technicity of cinematic technology which, as I will argue, can be defined through the three technical operations, namely, movement data organization, movement analysis, and movement synthesis. My aim in this section will be to distinguish the lineage of cinematic technology from that one of optical devices. As I will argue, merging genealogies of optical devices and cinematic technology together obscures the technicity of the latter and leads to its misreading, for the concept of image prevails over that of movement. Lastly, I will conclude this section with a discussion on the opportunity for new critical assessments of film ontologies, and how I will move forward with a critical assessment of the concept of cinematic movement in film philosophy.

2.1. Simondon’s philosophy of technology: Technicity as the Process of Concretization

Simondon doesn’t propose a general theory of technology, nor does he attempt to define the essence of technicity as such. Rather, he attempts to account for the universe of technical objects in all its variety and diversity1. Such a middle-level approach immediately poses certain methodological complications. Right at the start of his thesis On the Mode of the Existence of the Technical Object (1958), Simondon

1_{As many scholars indicated, the driving force of Simondon’s philosophical project is ethical. He} fought against the misrepresentation of technics in public consciousness and sought to reintegrate technology back into culture. For more on the ethics of technical culture see Gilbert Hottois Simondon

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warns against two fallacious, if common, ways of thinking about technology. First, we can theorize technical objects as a tool and think about them, as Simondon puts it, “in terms of the practical end it is designed to meet” (On the Mode 11). But this approach immediately leads us to confusion. For example, both an analog clock and a digital clock perform the same function or, to use Simondon’s vocabulary, they both were designed to serve for the same practical end, namely, to show time. However, on the structural level they operate differently and employ different technical elements. As Simondon rightly remarks: “Usage brings together heterogeneous structures” (On the

Mode 11). At the same time, one cannot simply analyze a given technical object in

terms of its structure. Furthermore, the same structural elements can be found in different technical objects — for example, in a digital clock and in a digital doorbell — as such, a simple description does not suffice. The same structural element can perform diverse functions in various technical devices. In order to get out from theoretical impasse, Simondon suggests analyzing how these structural elements evolve and transform when they are used in specific technical objects: “The individual technical object is not such and such a thing given here and now (hic et nunc), but something that has a genesis” (On the Mode 12). As Simondon demonstrates in On

the Mode of the Existence of the Technical Object and elsewhere2, we can only get access to the specificity of technological object. This is why he defines the technical object as ‘a unit of becoming’. He elaborates this point further: “The genesis of the technical object is part of its being. The technical object is something that does not exist prior to its becoming, but that is present at every stage of that becoming” (On the

Mode 12). In other words, we shouldn’t only analyze the current structure and its

constitutive elements of a specific technical object. We must also take into account the temporal dimension, that is, we must trace the evolution of this structure in the course of inventions and improvements. One might notice a Bergsonian inspiration lying behind Simondon’s project: it is only by taking into account both the actual (a given structure) and the virtual (the genesis of this structure) that we can get a proper understanding of the specificity of a technical object.

According to Simondon, what defines technical evolution is the process of refinement. Again, he warns us not to think too hastily of refinement in terms of

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usefulness or profitability. Economical and practical reasons, indeed, play an

important role in the evolution of technical objects but these are only external criteria which obscure the essential nature of the technical object. Here, he subtly argues against Marx: “If technical objects evolve in the direction of a small number of specific types, it is by virtue of an internal necessity and not as a consequence of economic influences or practical demands; it is not the production-line that produces standardization; rather, it is intrinsic standardization that makes production line possible” (On the Mode 17). The internal necessity Simondon mentions here is a process of concretization. A historical example of the car engine might help to elucidate his idea.

Invention, Simondon states, begins with a primitive or abstract form. In the abstract form of the car engine, each sub-system is independent. We can even say that the 1910 engine is more ‘perfect’ than the 1956 engine. Simondon supports this seemingly paradoxical claim with the following example: “Old engines work on fishing boats without breaking down after being taking out of worn-out cars” (On the

Mode 13). And this exactly testifies to the abstract character of the old engine. But

one cannot equip a boat with a modern engine simply because every part of it is interrelated and dependent on one another that together they form a technical ‘individual’: “In the current engine every piece is so well connected with the rest by reciprocal exchanges of energy that it cannot be other than it is” (On the Mode 7). For example, the shape of the modern engine has been formed not only to perform its function effectively but also to incorporate some elements of the cooling system. Thus each element of the concrete technical object is interrelated with others and performs not only its initial function but also that of others that used to be external to it. As Simondon notices: “Technological progress is achieved through a dialectical

relationship between mediation (adaptation to the end terms …) and autocorrelation, the relation between the technical object and itself ” (qtd. in Chabot 11). We can therefore summarize that the abstract car engine — and the abstract technical object in general — lacks the system of autocorrelation: “The different parts of the engine are like individuals who could be thought of as working each in his turn without their ever knowing one another” (On the Mode 14). Thus, Simondon arrives at the conclusion that the evolution of the technical object is defined by the process of concretization: “[The] divergence of functional aims remains as a residue of

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abstraction in the technical object, and the progressive reduction of this margin between functions of polyvalent structures is what defines the progress of a technical object, it is this convergence that specifies the technical object” (On the Mode 16). We might conclude that the Simondonian analysis of technicity aims at distinguishing certain tendencies within the development of technical objects and attempts to

account for technical object on the basis of the tendency which engenders it. Simondon’s approach to technology is thus in compliance with his ontology of individuation which can be summarized in the following motto: “To know the individual through the individuation rather than the individuation starting from the individual” (qtd. in Barthélémy 207).

Having described Simondon’s basic theoretical presuppositions, I will now attempt the rereading the history of proto-cinematic technologies in order to reveal the technicity of cinematic technology thereby complicating and articulating his theory of concretization. But before I proceed, a couple remarks need to be made regarding the aim of my analysis and possible misreadings of Simondon’s theory.

2.2 Technological Determinism and the Master Narrative

In recent decades, film theorists have radically reconsidered early film history. Film scholars like Tom Gunning, Noël Burch, André Gaudreault, Thomas Elsaesser and many others have tried to reread the first years of cinema in its own terms. Having abandoned the idea of linear history, they criticized the idea of early cinema as a primitive precursor of the matured narrative cinema and, instead, theorized it as a complex phenomenon whose cultural identity and aesthetic motivation significantly differs from the cinema as we know it today.

In its turn media archaeology — a recently established academic discipline partially inspired by the New Film History movement3 — questioned the dominant modes of media historiography and aimed at a radical revaluation of the technological history of media and cinema in particular: linear, teleological, and non-progressive. Many new methodologies have been proposed: Kittler’s discourse

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network analysis, Zielinsky’s variantology, Huhtamo’s theory of topoi, to name a few. In his recent article, Deac Rossell criticises film historians for their persistent

commitment to ‘master narrative’4_{and, instead, proposes to consider the social} construction of technology for it enables the consideration of “the artefacts of early cinema … symmetrically, giving equal weight to both successful and failed

innovations” (318). Against the background of such paradigmatic shifts, Simondon’s theory of technical concretization might look hopelessly outdated, if not, naïve. For at first glance, it is subject to both technological determinism and a neglect of socio-economical factors. I propose such miscomprehensions of Simondon’s theory should be immediately dispelled.

First, Simondon is by no means a technological determinist. It is not a

coincidence that he talks about the genesis of the technical object, for the technicity of the technical object can only be inferred retrospectively. Jean-Yves Chateau

explicates Simondon’s theory of the technical invention: “There’s but the objectivity of the successful, realized, and accomplished invention … which allow

retrospectively to qualify the preceding process as an ‘invention’” (17, my

translation5). Even when Simondon talks about the “essence”, or the “absolute origin” of the technical object, he understands it temporally, that is, both as the principle of identity and the principle of production: “Technical essence can be recognized by the fact that it remains stable across an evolutionary line, and not only stable, but also productive of structures and functions through internal development and progressive saturation” (qtd. in Barthélémy 215).

Second, a reader of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects might get the impression that Simondon ignores socio-economical factors considers its

importance minor for the question of technicity. Nonetheless, as his lecture courses

4_“_{The principal assumption that underlay this inadequate perception of the years of invention of}

moving pictures in the nineteenth century concerned an unexamined belief in the steady progress of technology, a technology whose success was its own justification and which evolved in an inevitable and unerring way towards the matured cinematic institution of projecting narrative (and sometimes documentary) films to mass audiences in large fixed cinemas” (Rossell 306)

5_“

Il n'y a ici que l' objectivité de l‘invention réussie, effectuée , achevée , de l' objet effectivement inventé, qui, après coup et rétrospectivement, autorise à qualifier le processus qui l'a précédée comme celui d'une « invention ».”

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testify, Simondon analyzed technology from both objective and subjective

perspectives. The theory of technical concretization is mirrored in his theory of the psychology of technical invention6_{. Besides, his theory of technical concretization} doesn’t neglect the importance of socio-economical factors —his 1974 lecture contains considerations on “social, cultural and, economic” conditions of inventions (L'invention dans les techniques 310) — but, at the same time, it doesn’t allow them to be the sole determinant of technological development7. In that respect, his approach stands in stark contrast with the theory of social construction of technology which argues that “technological artifacts are culturally constructed and interpreted” (Pinch and Bijker 40). Simondon’s theory provides a conceptual toolbox that allows to reveal the agency of technological artifact and which grounds social interpretations.

Finally, my analysis might give an impression of building a master narrative of the invention of moving pictures as it only deals with the apparatuses which contributed to the cinema as we know it today. Choosing only these inventions was my conscious decision dictated by the nature of my research and shouldn’t be understood as an argument against Simondon’s theory and its supposed narrowness. As I indicate further, Simondon’s conceptual toolbox allows representing the history of cinematic technology as a garden of forking paths. Furthermore, my analysis doesn’t attempt to account for the history of cinematic technology in all its variety. Rather, it aims at laying bare the technicity of cinematic technology as we know it today. And the fact that video codecs — one of the dominant forms of cinematic technicity today — is the final destination of my project justifies this decision.

2.3 The Absolute Origin: The Photographic Revolver of Jules Janssen

My historical analysis starts with the account of Jules Janssen’s experiments for it is here, I contend, we can see “the absolute origin” of cinematic technology.

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For a detailed discussion of the objective and subjective sides of the technical invention and their relationship see Jean-Yves Chateau’s introduction in Gilbert Simondon. L’Invention dans les

technique. Paris: Seuil, 2006.

7_{As Simondon remarks in his course Imagination et Invention: “It would be partially false to say that} invention is made to obtain a goal, to realize an effect that was known in advance’ because ‘true invention contains a leap, a power that amplifies and surpasses simple finality and the limited search for an adaptation” (qtd. in Barthélémy 216).

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Optical devices, like camera obscura, laterna magica or optical toys of the XIX century, as I will explain, belong to a different technological lineage. For the sake of my argument, it is useful to mark the difference between them. Therefore, I bracket off the history of optical technologies despite admitting that analyzing them could also bring new insights into media theory.

Pierre-Jules-César Janssen (1824-1907) was a French astronomer who

succeeded in photographing the different phases of the passage of Venus between the sun and the earth. It is an extremely rare phenomenon which occurs only twice in a century and, in order to document it, Janssen constructed a device known as the ‘Photographic Revolver’ which allowed him to take a series of successive pictures at regular short intervals (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Janssen’s Photographic Revolver

French film historian Laurent Mannoni describes the Photographic Revolver as “a system with a rotating disc coated in photosensitive emulsion, whose

circumference would be revealed and exposed at successive intervals by an intermittent electrical mechanism” (300). Although it was still a very primitive device, seeing from a Simondonian perspective, it nonetheless had a certain level of auto-correlation. As Mannoni further specifies: “The instrument was self-contained, and produced the series of images itself without intervention from the operator. The circular plate was inserted in the revolver, and the operator pressed a release pin which activated the clockwork mechanism constructed by Rédier” (301). This

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machine marked a true beginning in chronophotography, though “at the same time it didn’t have any significant future, since the sensitive disc … could only record a limited number of images” (Mannoni 301).

Janssen dreamed about a device that would allow one “to capture successive ‘instantaneous’ images of humans or animals in motion” (Mannoni 301). Bearing that in mind, we can deduce a first preliminary formula of moving image technology:

movement analysis via ‘instantaneous’ images + automatic succession

Janssen’s Photographic Revolver was far from perfect and his followers undertook serious attempts to improve it. Still, here we can already see a direction of technical improvement — increasing the speed of automatic succession by means of increasing the number of ‘instantaneous’ images and improving the photosensitivity of a photoplate. One immediately notices here a paradoxical rationale which lay behind this technical invention — in order to analyze movement one needs to

decompose it into a sequence of static images.

As for the technicity of this invention, we can see that it consists of constructing a technical object with a specific function by using other technical objects (other examples include Plateau’s Phenakitoscope, daguerreotype, the

revolving devise, and the Maltese Cross). Their functionality, however, had nothing to do with the functionality of a newly constructed technical object, for here they serve only as elements of the new technical object and lose their individuality. Pascal Chabot neatly summarizes Simondon's point: “Technological invention consists of assembling a coherent system from disparate elements” (14). These disparate elements can be both natural and artificial. They form what Simondon calls the pre-individual and serve as conditions for the appearance of new technical pre-individuals.

My analysis of Janssen’s device might be summarized with an insightful remark by Virgilio Tosi which confirms the preliminary technical formula of cinematic technology:

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The real birth of cinema is not to be found in the invention and development of the cinematic spectacle. […] The real birth of cinema was determined in the nineteenth century by the needs of scientific research, by the need (and

the gradually increasing technical possibilities) to record physical reality in its

dynamic quality for the purposes of analysis, discovery and therefore

understanding. (Tosi XI, my italics)

At the same time, Janssen took as his task not only the analysis of movement but also its reproduction. When he presented his device to the Société Française de Photographie on 1 April 1876, he wrote: “The property of the revolver, to be able to

produce automatically a numerous series of closely spaced images as required of a

rapidly changing phenomena, permits us to approach some interesting questions of physiological mechanism relating to the walk, flight and other movements of animals…” (qtd. in Manonny 303). But it was Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey who later succeeded in this task. I will now proceed from the

astronomical observations of Janssen to the physiological experiments of Edward Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey in inscribing movement.

2.4 Minor and Major Improvements: Photography of Motion

Since the technicity of cinematic technology is the primary aim of my

analysis, I will skip biographical details of the inventors of pre-cinematic technology. In this section I will concentrate on the technological aspects of Eadweard

Muybridge’s (1830-1904) photographic studies of motion8.

In his book The Great Art of Life and Shadow, Mannoni has a very telling chapter title — “Eadweard Muybridge and the Photography of Motion”. It neatly summarizes Muybridge’s approach and the paradox lying at the origin of cinematic technology. Although Muybridge brought about a very sophisticated system for making pictures of galloping horse, he did not attempt to invent an automatic system

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As Simondon argues, technicity possesses its own temporality which should be distinguished from a ‘general’ history. Major and minor improvements discussed in this section can be understood as processes and points of reference which structure the technical temporality.

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for taking successive instantaneous photos. Instead, he used a row of photo cameras. The shutter of each was triggered by a thread as the horse passed (in later studies he used a clockwork device to set off the shutters and capture the images). Muybridge achieved impressive scientific results but on the level of technicity it wasn’t a step forward. Muybridge “rigidly adopted a single and unique method of taking pictures. Even though it was improved over the years, a technical solution which involved photographing movement with batteries of twenty-four or even forty cameras in series had no future” (Mannoni 308).

Fig. 2. Muybridge's battery-of-cameras method.

Muybridge’s system for taking pictures of moving bodies is often considered one of the predecessors of cinema. Although it is true that Muybridge tried to solve the same scientific problem as Janssen, from a technological perspective, he didn’t invent anything new, nor did he improve on the system devised by Janssen. A picture of a battery of cameras is a perfect example of the definition of abstract technical object given by Simondon: “The different parts of the [technical object] are like individuals who could be thought of as working each in his turn without their ever knowing one another” (On the Mode 14). Instead of inventing a new device from different heterogeneous structures, Muybridge simply combined several technical objects of the same structure. One cannot help but think about Muybridge’s spacious system (see Fig. 2) which he built in his yard when one reads the following lines from

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Simondon about the abstract technical object: “Because of its analytical character, this object uses more material and needs more construction work; while it is simpler logically, it is more complicated technically because it is made from a bridging of several complete system” (On the Mode 18-19).

We can say that Muybridge made a minor improvement. Simondon

distinguishes between minor and major improvements in the following way: whereas major improvements increase the synergy of functioning through structural

transformations, minor improvements just “diminish the harmful consequences of residual antagonisms” (On the Mode 36). As he elaborates his point further: “Minor improvements are harmful to major improvements, because they conceal the real imperfections of a technical object by using non-essential devices, incompletely integrated into the functioning of the whole, to compensate for real antagonisms” (On

the Mode 36). What was the real antagonism at the origin of cinematic technology?

We can say that it was the problem of analyzing movement (something dynamic) by means of instantaneous images (something static). The automatic system for taking and consequently reproducing successive images invented by Janssen was the first technical answer to this basic problem or antagonism. It was still too abstract, and it was the technical genius of Marey, Edison and the Lumiere brothers who made essential, or major, improvements and turned a nascent cinematic technology into a concrete technical object. The important thing to keep in mind is that “minor

improvements promote a false understanding of the continuity of progress in technical objects” (On the Mode 37). We should pay attention to leap in the development of the technical object, since its “genesis is achieved by essential and discontinuous

improvements” (On the Mode 38). As one can notice, from that perspective,

Simondon’s conceptual framework is by no means linear and teleological for it allows the exploration of different processes of concretization with the same ‘absolute

origin’, Augmented by his theory of socio-economical and cultural conditions of the technical invention, his conceptual framework enables the accounting of both successful and failed inventions. “Many abandoned technical objects are incomplete inventions which remain as an open-ended virtuality and could be taken up once more and given new life in another field according to the profound intention which informs them, that is, their technical essence” (On the Mode 38). One can see here an

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archaeological practices — epistheme (Albera), discourse networks (Kittler), or topoi (Huhtamo) — departs from the technicity and doesn’t consider technological artifacts as solely “culturally constructed and interpreted’ (Pinch and Bijker 40) while, at the same time, escaping the pitfalls of technological determinism.

2.5 The Interface Effect

Before I move on to describe Marey’s experiments in inscribing motion, I would like to pause on the following moment of Muybridge’s biography, since it looks quite emblematic. When Muybridge got decent pictures of the galloping horse the question arose how to present them to the public. As Mannoni describes: “Finally, at the end of 1879, Muybridge too began to wonder about the magic lantern. It was a classic intellectual progression: the inventor perfects a new method of animation, but then needs to exhibit it to everyone ‘on a big screen’” (311). This historical evidence illustrates an important point — cinematic technology and optical technologies belong to different genealogical lines. Different inventors used different optical devices, such as the magic lantern or the Zoopraxiscope, in order to present the results of their research. What’s significant here is that all these devices were only important for demonstrating the results of movement analysis. By using a term form software studies, they can be described as interfaces9 between cinematic technology and a human being. And history gives us a plethora of examples of different types of

interfaces — the magic lantern, Edison’s peep-show, Lumiere’s projector, etc. Indeed, the invention of the movie projector was essential for the establishment of cinema as a phenomenon of mass culture, but there’s nothing essential about the movie projector from the point of view of the technical genesis of the cinematic technologies.

Therefore, we should be careful not to confuse cinematic technology with optical technologies even if they are so closely connected that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between them10.

9

Lev Manovich defines interface as “the ways to represent (‘format’) and control the signal” (“Media After Software”37). As it will be explained further, in the case of cinematic technology the signal is represented in the form of movement data.

10

As I will try to demonstrate in Chapter Four, this distinction became more pronounced during the era of digital cinematic technologies.

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Still, it would be an overstatement to say that concretizations of optical devices and cinematic technology have nothing in common. They are not external to one another: if anything, they are tightly related, which explains why

conceptualizations of the moving image are so biased toward the image rather than movement. But, as Simondon stresses, the process of concretization includes both the technical individual and its associated milieu. As Simondon writes: “the technical being creates around itself [the technical milieu] and that conditions it in the same way that this milieu is conditioned by the technical being” (MEOT 56-57). In other words, the technical object and its associated milieu are coextensive to one another. Optical devises affect the process of concretization of cinematic technology, for they define the way movement data is registered and represented. At the same time, cinematic technology also affected the process of concretizing optical technologies11. As sensitive receivers, optical technologies supply the cinematic technology with movement data; as projecting devices, they allow to represent movement in a legible way12. But as Alexander R. Galloway demonstrated, interface is a “control allegory" (The Interface Effect 30); it is important to take into account not only what it enables but also what it hides and limits. The significance of this inherited characteristic of interfaces will be explored in the Chapter Four of my thesis.

2.6 The technicity of cinematic technology: Marey’s Movement Machines

French scientist and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) invented many different apparatuses for capturing images of movement. In 1863, he

constructed the “Sphygmographe” — a graphical plot of the pulse. He also recorded muscular movement by the means of the so-called “Myographe”, not to mention a

11

The following observation by Rossell supports my claim: “Although many historians today consider the magic lantern, and magic lantern culture, a significant precursor of moving pictures, a symmetrical look at the facts and artefacts of alternative optical intermittent mechanisms discards the idea of the magic lantern as only a ‘precursor’ of moving pictures. Instead, the magic lantern was the environment into which the cinema was born, the milieu which nursed it through its extended period of invention to

about 1903” (321, my italics). He then describes how optical technologies fostered the development of

the cinematic technology: “Projection on larger screens demanded an absolute steadiness in the picture” (323).

12

On legibility of movement and cinematic technology see Mary Ann Doane. The Emergence of

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host of other scientific instruments — Polygraphe, Dromographe, Cardiographe, and other thermographs. Initially he ignored photography, believing that the graphic approach was a “universal language” of science. After he became acquainted with Muybridge’s experiments, however, he changed his opinion and, starting from 1878, he began to incorporate photographic technologies into his own research. In 1882 he significantly improved Jannsen’s photographic revolver by making his own

‘photographic rifle’ (gelatino-bromide plates were more sensitive then the

daguerreotype or collodion). Still, his two major improvements were the fixed-plate chronographic camera and the celluloid film chronophotograph.

Marey presented his new photographic process at the Académie des Sciences on 2 July 1882. A distinctive feature of this device was that it could combine several successive images on a single photographic plate (Fig. 3). Another important feature of the technical structure of the chronographic camera was that it took a series of images at strictly regular intervals. As Mannoni comments: “It was not the case in Muybridge’s system, in which the horses themselves, travelling at varying speed, released the electric shutter” (338).

Fig. 3. Examples of Marey’s chronophotography.

We can see thus than in terms of its technicity it was a major improvement in comparison with Muybridge’s system. First, the system was auto-correlated — it

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made pictures automatically. More importantly it was an attempt to solve the basic antagonism of dynamic movement/static images lying at the core of cinematic technology. Photography here was used to record not the trace of the physical body but the trace of the movement itself13. This is especially noticeable on photographs

where Marey dressed his subject in a dark costume with narrow strips of shiny metal. One cannot help but think of Marey as a precursor of motion capture technologies.

By combining several shots on the same plate Marey tried to overcome two limitations of the photographic rifle. First, a rotating disc allowed him to make only a limited number of pictures. Second, each picture represented only one fragment of motion, whereas for Muybridge the task was to represent movement in its entirety. His invention was only a partial solution to these problems and still had certain shortcomings. Marey was aware of them. For instance, he complained: “If the object is animated with too slow a movement, or if it is performing movements in a single location, the images are imperfectly separated or even completely superimposed” (qtd. in Mannoni 341). It is only by using the sensitized paper strip and then the celluloid film that he was able to solve this problem. On 3 Octover 1890, Marey filed his first patent on the photography of motion where he wrote:“This apparatus is arranged to receive successive images on a strip of sensitized film. This film is mounted on enclosed spools; it moves rapidly past the focal point of the lens and stops during the time of exposure” (qtd. in Mannoni 343).

As Mannoni comments on this event: “At last, life and motion had been captured and secured in all their phases on a flexible, sensitive, transparent base: the film” (321). Due to its compact size and flexibility, the film stock allowed a more advanced level of integration and auto-correlation. We can also see how the basic antagonism of movement via static images is solved here. The filmstrip moved intermittently and stopped during the moment of taking a photo.

13

As Doane remarks: “He [Marey] moves from the graphic method to the photographic method only to defamiliarize, derealize, even de-iconize the photographic image” (54). This might be seen as a confirmation that when the technical object forms an element of the new process of concretization it redefines its technical functionality. As I will demonstrate in Chapter Three, the confusion of photographic and cinematic technologies was one of the reasons of Bergson’s misunderstanding of cinema.

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Another important distinction of Marey in comparison with his predecessors is that he tried to provide not only movement analysis but also its synthesis. Janssen and Muybridge’s main concern was how to present the results of their research to their audience, both to professionals and laymen. For Marey, synthesis was about verifying the results of analysis of movement. As Mannoni remarks: “Synthesis would allow him to confirm whether or not the analysis had been made correctly” (324). So, when he needed to illustrate his experiments, he used a turning zoetrope or projected a chronographic image with the magic lantern, but at the same time he started to think how to make a chronophotographic camera reversible, that is, how to make it not only able to record movement but also to reproduce it. He eventually designed a

chronographic projector, but it was still far from perfect. The main shortcoming was the lack of a system for image stabilization: “Marey’s films were not perforated. This was a major defect, since without perforations the movement of the film throughout the camera was not constant and the pictures were not evenly paced” (Mannoni 345-346). It was Edison who used the perforated filmstrip for the first time. Marey’s failure to construct a decent projector might be also partially explained by his ‘scientific’ mind. As François Dagognet surmises in his monograph Etienne-Jules

Marey. A Passion for the Trace: “It was not a matter of chance that theoretical success

was accompanied by lack of interest and partial failure in the practical sphere. Marey preferred absorbing the spectacle of the world into graphs rather than the opposite. He had no interest in the artifice of fictitious moving images” (157). Even if this claim is debatable, it is difficult to deny that Marey was more disposed to movement analysis than synthesis in his scientific endeavor.

Marey’s experiments allow us understand better the genesis of cinematic technology. Our formula now should look as follows:

movement analysis/synthesis via instantaneous images + automatic succession by means of the intermittent movement mechanism.

However, as Marey’s experiments demonstrate, there are many systems to produce instantaneous images. They can also be recorded in the variety of ways. In addition, we should bear in mind that images didn’t necessarily have to be

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representation and we shouldn’t deny the former simply because it didn’t play a major role in the history of cinema as an art form. Again, my concern here is the genesis of cinematic technology and not its dominant socio-cultural forms. Abstracted from the historical formulation, the basic formula of cinematic technology runs like this:

movement data + movement analysis + movement synthesis

On a level of technicity, moving technology is the assemblage of these three basic and inevitably quite abstract (in the Simondonian meaning of the word)

elements. It organizes data in a certain way in order to enable operations of movement analysis and its consequent synthesis. Obviously the engineering problem of

movement analysis and synthesis can have different solutions as the history of technology clearly demonstrates. What’s important to keep in mind is that all three operations are important in cinematic technology. As I will try to demonstrate at the end of the chapter, they are incompatible ontologies.

2.7 The Intermittent Movement: Edison and Lumière Brothers

A typical historical account of Edison and the Lumière brothers’ contribution to the development of cinematic technology usually sees the most drastic difference in their spectatorial usage. On the one hand, Edison’s Kinetoscope was designed for individual viewing while, on the other hand, Lumière’s Cinématographe was contrived as a projecting device which, in turn, defined its subsequent

social-economical success. From the point of view of Simondon, however, this was a minor improvement that obscures the essential difference between these two apparatuses. In addition, as I indicated above, optical media belong to a different technological lineage. Therefore, in my analysis, I will concentrate my attention on the structural differences between these two devices.

From the perspective of technicity, the first important movement is the fact that for Edison both analysis and synthesis were equally important. In the first draft of his patent he famously wrote:

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I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of

things in motion, and in such a form as to be both Cheap practical and

convenient. This apparatus I call a Kinetoscope ‘Moving View’. (qtd. in Mannoni 389, my italics).

Since his initial source of inspiration was the phonograph, he tried to

implement the Kinetoscope with the photographic cylinder. “But in November 1889 there was a complete about-turn: Edison abandoned his optical phonograph to adopt the process of photochronography on a sensitized strip, as recommended by Marey since 1888. He added one essential element, possibly borrowed from Reynaud: perforation” (Mannoni 391). It was perforation that allowed him to implement a sufficiently regular drive mechanism and to stabilize movement. However, Edison used perforation only for making films and not for their demonstration in the

Kinetoscope. In the Kinetoscope the band travelled continuously. In addition, the film band was looped allowing only a very short film to be shown. These characteristics indicate a lower level of auto-correlation.

The Lumière brothers, on the other hand, retained the mechanism of

intermitted movement for the Cinématographe. Two pins or claws were inserted into the sprocket holes punched into the celluloid filmstrip; the pins moved the film along and then retracted, leaving the film stationary during exposure. Louis Lumière designed this process of intermittent movement based on the way in which a sewing machine worked, a tactic that Edison had considered but rejected in favor of

continuous movement. This allowed him to get a stable reproduction of movement and, coupled with its relatively small size, allowed the Cinématographe to achieve a concrete character as an invention.

Discussing the history of the Maltese Cross, Rossell notes: “From the beginning, there were many proposals for constructing a mechanical intermittent movement” (321). By analyzing the history of these mechanism, he somewhat scornfully remarks: “Historians are well aware of the great variety of intermittent mechanisms offered on the market in the early days of moving pictures, but have

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or have passed off this tumult of activity as merely attempts by various latecomers to find a patentable device not in conflict with prior apparatus” (321). While the study of alternative technical devices might be important for the film history, it doesn’t add much to the discussion of the technicity of cinematic technology. Technicity is accounted by the initial antagonism (‘the absolute origin’, or ‘essence’) and the technical functionality which has been suggested in order to overcome this antagonism in its temporal development (via minor and major improvements). Specific technical devices are implementations of the process of concretization, partially by definition. Ontologically preceding the technical object, the process of concretization by no means determines particular actualizations of the virtual tendency contained in the technicity. In the Cinematograph, movement data was organized as a series of photographic images, which were related to each other by means of intermittent movement. But as I will show in Chapter Four, movement data organization has been significantly transformed when digital technologies entered into the associated milieu of cinematic technology.

To sum up, Simondon believed that the effects of invention exceeded the formulation of the initial problem:

Concretization brings not only new properties, but complementary functions, beyond those sought after, which we might call ‘super-abundant functions’. ... These properties of the object surpass expectations; it is a partial truth to say that an invention’s purpose is to attain an objective, to produce an entirely predictable effect. An invention is brought into being in response to a problem, but its effects extend beyond the resolution of the problem, due to the

superabundant efficacy of the created object when it is a true invention (qtd. in Chabot 15).

It seems that the whole history of cinema attests to this claim: starting as a scientific tool, cinematic technology became the major art of the XX century, not to mention its other numerous functions in industry, education, etc. It was thus a true invention.

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3. Cinematic Technology in the Grip of Metaphors of

Subjectivity

In the previous chapter, I tried to lay bare the technicity of cinematic technology and argued that cinematic technicity lies in the technical operations of movement manipulation. Thus, movement should be put at the center of our conceptualization of the cinematic technology. In “Animation and Alienation”, Gunning observes: “Today the novelty of new media has once more foregrounded technological motion, as the “moving image” asserts its priority over the more limited entity “film” (2, my italics). However, as Gunning rightly remarks, in spite of the technological revolution we have been witnessing in recent decades, relatively little attention has been devoted to the question of the technical production of motion. In this chapter, I will analyze possible reasons for such an imbalance from the point of view of film philosophy. In order to do this, I will provide a critical reexamination of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts of cinema, two philosophers for whom movement was central in their philosophical projects. By inverting Friedrich Kittler’s thesis on media as metaphors for senses, I would like to reveal a reverse process, namely, how subjectivity provides metaphors for the cinematic technology and thus

obscures its technicity. By putting to the fore the concept of the image, metaphors of

subjectivity overshadow the more fundamental technical operations of movement data

organization, movement analysis and synthesis. In conclusion, I will discuss how

reconfiguring the debate not in terms of the image, but in terms of movement, reveals certain problematic and under-theorized zones in film theory.

3.1 Motion Production: the Repressed Subject of Film Theory

The historical accounts testify that movement was the key feature that

intrigued first film spectators. As Doane writes: “In the early days of the cinema, the film was sometimes run backward, exploiting a curiosity about the limits of the machine, its uses and abuses” (108). One of the common entertainment tricks at that time was starting the film projection with the still image and then putting it into motion in front of the eyes of the astonished audience (Gunning “An Aesthetics of

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Astonishment” 116). Another telling example is the anecdote about George Méliès who was way more intrigued and fascinated with the moving leaves in the

background of the Lumiere brother’s Repas de Bebe (1895) than the ostensible event or the proto-narrative of the movie. All these testimonies lead me to agree with Doane’s assessment that “much of [early] cinema could be characterized as the sheer celebration of movement for its own sake” (177).

However, although movement reproduction was determinative for the reception of cinematic technology as these historical illustrations testify, scholars of early film history tend to neglect the problem of cinematic movement in favor of other issues. While discussing pioneering work of Marey, Doane admits the importance of the question of movement but nevertheless makes it subordinate to the questions of time storage and representation. In her monograph on Marey, Picturing Time, Marta Braun concurs with Doane’s assessment that although Marey studied motion, his more primordial concern was the problem of time. And, as the title of Francois Dagogne’s book Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace suggests, the key notion of Marey experiments for him was that of the index. We can see through the example of Marey that, although scholars admit the importance of the notion of movement, they relegate the question of its technical production as subordinated to other seemingly more fundamental issues. As Gunning eloquently remarks: “The technical production of motion may form the Freudian repressed subject of film theory” (“Animation and Alienation” 2).

Gunning’s provocative claim should not be taken too literally. He doesn’t argue for a more deeper media archeological research of the cinematic apparatus, nor does he appeal to the cognitive theory to explain the perception of motion. Rather, he addresses the question from the philosophical perspective and immediately invoces Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze — two philosophers who not only elaborated their original conceptualizations of movement but also related them to cinema. For both of them, however, the question about cinematic technology was primarily the question of whether the cinema produces false or true movement. Bergson condemned cinema for its impossibility to give the direct intuition of movement, while Deleuze argued the opposite. While critical to both Bergson and Deleuze, Gunning seemingly concurs

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with them that the question of cinematic motion is primarily the question of human perception or, more broadly, sensorium.

However posing the question in terms of truth is misguided when we try to analyze the technicity of cinematic technology. As I will argue, by imposing the metaphors of subjectivity (primarily that of perception) onto cinematic technology, both Bergson and Deleuze miss its technicity. For, as John Lechte demonstrated, the concepts of image, perception, and subjectivity are genealogically connected. In his

Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image, he remarks: “To the extent that there

is a detailed analysis and philosophy of the image in modern accounts, they almost invariably give precedence to the perceiving subject or the observer” (11). On a more fundamental level, Lichte adds, the concept of image is intrinsically entwined with the concept of truth. First, as Lichte demonstrates in his analysis of Plato’s theory of Forms in Republics, to see for Plato means to see truly, that is, to know ideal forms. The metaphor of the cave clearly supports this claim for the shadow on the wall is the index of the material object which, in turn, refers to the ideal Form. As Lichte

summarizes: “To see, therefore, enters into the conceptual canon of Western

philosophy. ‘To see’, then, is not to engage with a semblance or with an imitation of reality; it is instead equivalent to an engagement with the truth itself” (14, my italics). Further, Plato specifically addresses the problem of the ontological status of the image in the Sophist. After discussing paradoxes of the image with the Eleatic Stranger, Thaetetus comes to the conclusion the image is an entity in which “real and unreal do seem to be combined in that perplexing way” (qtd. in Lechte 17). In the Sophist, Lechte distinguishes two conceptual series — that of ‘appearance’, ‘image’, likeness’, ‘existence-being’ and that of ‘form’, ‘being’, ‘model’, and ‘prototype’ — entwined with the problem of the image and concludes: “Mingling within both series,

sometimes fore-grounded, sometimes back-grounded by Plato, is the question of the

difference between truth and falsity” (17, my italics). While the concept of the image

certainly has a long and intricate history in the Western thought, this basic paradox of truth and falsity (or real and unreal) remains, as it were, the prime mover of

theoretical debates.

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reconsider Platonic thinking not in terms of true/false (what I would call the

problematization in terms of the image) but in terms of virtual/actual (the

problematization in terms of movement). The question of cinematic technicity is not if

it produces a real or false movement but how it enables to discover and actualize new types of movement, in other words, how it allows translating virtual (i. e.

imperceptible, invisible, unrepresentable etc) movements into actual 14.

3.2 Bergson: Cinema as False Movement

Henri Bergson’s attitude toward cinema is well known. In his Creative

Evolution (1907), he condemns cinema as the achievement of Western metaphysics.

The original sin of the Western thought, according to Bergson, consisted in thinking movement by means of immobile ‘snapshots’ or moments to which an abstract idea of time as succession is then added. Bergson’s firm belief was that departing from immobility, one would never be able to attain ‘real’ movement. Seen from this perspective, the cinematograph was an ambiguous alley. On the one hand, it

effectively refutes Zeno’s paradoxes about movement for the spectator doesn’t see the succession of the still images onscreen; she, to use Bergson’s vocabulary, intuitively grasps the moving image as an inseparable whole. On the other hand, the examination of cinema’s technical basis indeed confirms Bergson’s thesis: the movie camera which runs static photograms at the constant speed of 24 or 18 frames per second looks like a perfect embodiment of the Western tendency to consider time

homogenously in spatial terms and to represent movement by means of immobile ‘instants’. Bergson’s philosophical project, on the contrary, was aimed at fighting against the mind’s ‘cinematographical’ tendencies. As it is well known, Deleuze — arguably the most prominent and consistent Bergsonist in the history of film theory —

14_{Overturning Platonism immediately brings to mind Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum. After} introducing the concept in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze seemed to abandon it. However, as David W. Smiths notes, the concept of the simulacrum underwent a transformation and were reformulated in terms of Deleuze’s own ontology: “In Deleuze’s own ontology, things no longer “simulate” anything, but rather “actualize” immanent Ideas that are themselves real, though virtual” (116, my italics). My project thus in a certain way continues Deleuze’s project. However, contrary to Deleuze I seek to explore virtual/actual dimensions not on the level aesthetics by on the level of cinematic technicity which grounds aesthetical practices.

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had to resort to Bergson’s earlier book Matter and Memory (1896) in order to redeem cinema from the original metaphysical sin of which Bergson accused.

Closer inspection, however, reveals that Bergson’s condemnation was not that categorical. In order to reveal his ambivalent attitude, I would first like to analyze the famous paragraph from Creative Evolution containing his critique of the

cinematograph:

The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. (Creative

Evolution 322, my italics)

What is noteworthy in Bergson’s account of the cinematograph is that he examines the production of cinematic motion in relation to the question of perception and intellect. In his lecture course Optical Media, Kittler notoriously claimed that technical media “override our senses” (36); as a result, they provide models and serve as metaphors for our subjectivity15. At first glance, Bergson’s account confirms Kittler’s thesis. But, in fact, what Bergson states here is quite the opposite: he imposes

the metaphor of human subjectivity on cinematic technology. Comparing the

15_{“We knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors” (Kittler, Optical}

Movement Behind Your Back: Cinematic Technology in Light of Simondon’s Philosophy of Technology