Following a previous posting, Damian Peter Sutton writes:
> In Bergson's _Creative Evolution_ from 1907, he describes
> cinema as an abstract depiction of movement. Cinema does
> not, and cannot, recreate the movement of the objects which
> were filmed. That movement cannot be recreated under any
> circumstances, such is the nature of duration. Cinema is
> only false movement, as it seeks to create order from
> duration, in consecutive sections. This is opposed to
> duration itself, which is a natural process from order to
> disorder. (I'm paraphrasing my reading of Bergson here, so
> if anyone feels I'm missing something, then please
> feel free to speak up)
>
> Cinema cannot record movement, since it turns duration into
> an abstract set, or slice of time - time(duration) being
> the only thing we are internal to. The projection of the
> cinema's individual frames can only present movement as
> ordered and uniform. This has its most deceptive
> consequences for Bergson in that time is therefore
> presented abstractly by ordered movement. Hence Deleuze's
> further re-reading of Bergson.
>
> Magnetic recording of sound has no such intervals, or
> sections, and appears continuous. Whilst still not a pure
> image of duration, the recording of sound is more
> continuous, and therefore presents mobile sections of
> duration, rather than the immobile sections of the shot, or
> the individual frame. It is from continuity of sound that
> Eisenstein allows montage to unfold, as Deleuze notes.
>
There is certainly a semiological puzzle here. The automatism of the process
in both cases, sound and image, photography and phonography, guarantees a
causal relation between the signifier and the signified. So in both cases,
the signifier belongs to the type of sign which Peirce called an index,
because of causal linkage. But the photograph is also an icon. For sound,
the recording process would seem analogous but is subtly different. There is
no equivalent, for example, to the photographic negative, as if *the
recording does not so much copy the original sound as recreate it*.
Phonography is therefore not quite like taking a photograph after all. In
other words, what I look at on the screen is, and I know it to be, the
representation of a profilmic scene. What I hear is not the representation
of a sound, but the sound itself (artfully reproduced and mixed with other
sounds, etc., of course).
Yes, this seems paradoxical, but what it means is that the silent movie
(where music was provided live) and the sound movie are two different
(though related) types of representational space - to use the term put
forward by Henri Lefebvre to describe all such symbolic productions of
space.
If anyone wants a copy of an extract from 'The Dream That Kicks' where I
explain about the myth of persistence of vision, let me know privately and
I'll send it by e-mail.
Michael Chanan
personal web site: http://www.mchanan.dial.pipex.com/
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