From: CTHEORY Editor [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 5:35 PM
To: ctheory
Subject: Article 94: Material Memories: Time and The Cinematic Image
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 24, NO 1-2
Article 94 02-05-01 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
Material Memories:
Time and The Cinematic Image*
=====================================================================
~Paul D. Miller (Dj Spooky)~
"Time is invention, or it is nothing at all..."
-Gilles Deleuze, _Movement-Image_
"I am the OmniAmerican born of beats and blood, the concert of the
sun unplugged..."
-Saul Williams, _Om Ni American_
It was Maya Deren who said it a long time ago: "A ritual is an action
distinguished from all others in that it seeks the realization of its
purpose through the exercise of form." [1] The time was 1945 and she was
to later go on to be one of the first cinematographers to document
the Voudon dances of Haiti. For her film was both rupture and
convergence -- the screen was a place where the sense of vision was
conveyed by time and its unfolding in the images of her
investigation. Black bodies, white screens -- a ritual played out in
the form of possession and release in her projections. The rhythms of
fragmentation and loss for her were a new currency, a new way to
explore the optical poetry of the Americas reflected in the dances of
the Caribbean. Time and cinema for her were one dance, one meshwork
of physical and psychological time, the rhythms were altars of a new
history written in the movements of dance. In her 1945 film "Ritual
in Transfigured Time" she explored the poetry of suspended time to
try to create a new artform of the American cinema, a ritual of
rhythm and noise that would engage everything from later films like
"Divine Horsemen" (her homage to the Loa of Haiti) to her classic
1948 film "Meditation on Violence" that explored the Wu-Tang school
of boxing (not the liquid swords of Staten Island, but the Chinese
art based on the _Book of Changes_ in China). Ritual time, visual
time -- both were part of a new history unfolding on the white
screens of her contemporary world. She sought a new art to mold time
out of dance, a social sculpture carved out of celluloid gestures and
body movements caught in the prismatic light of the camera lens: "in
this sense [ritual] is art, and even historically, all art derives
from ritual. Being a film ritual, it is achieved not in spatial terms
alone, but in terms of Time created by the camera." [2] In the lens of
the camera the dance became a way of making time expand and become a
ritual reflection of reality itself. Film became total. Became time
itself -- a mnemonic, a memory palace made of the gestures captured
on the infinitely blank screen.
"Money is time, but time is not money." It's an old phrase that
somehow encapsulates that strange moment when you look out your
window and see the world flow by -- a question comes to mind: "How
does it all work?" Trains, planes, automobiles, people, transnational
corporations, monitor screens... large and small, human and
non-human... all of these represent a seamless convergence of time
and space in a world consisting of compartmentalized moments and discrete
invisible transactions. Somehow it all just works. Frames per
second, pixels per square inch, color depth resolution measured in
the millions of subtle combinations possible on a monitor screen...
all of these media representations still need a designated driver.
From the construction of time in a world of images and advertising,
it's not that big a leap to arrive at a place like that old Wu-Tang
song said a while ago "C.R.E.A.M" -- "Cash Rules Everything Around
Me." That's the end result of the logic of late capitalist
representations redux.
Think of the scenario as a Surrealists' walking dream put into a
contemporary context. Andre Breton first stated the kind of will to
break from the industrial ~roles~ culture assigned everyone in Europe
back in 1930: "the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down
into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly as fast as you
can, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who
at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to
the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a
well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level."
[3] Weapons drawn and firing as you take a sleepwalk through the
crowded thoroughfares and shopping malls of the information age, your
surrealistic statement makes even less sense than the world that you
want to join as you become a mediated celebrity straight out of a
Ballard short story or maybe Warhol's kind of 15 minutes of fame.
What the Surrealists called "automatic writing" -- letting
subconscious thought become a formalized artistic act -- gets
flipped, becoming a gangsta dreamtime remix, like an open source
Linux coded operating system, psychogeographic shareware for the open
market in a world where identity is for sale to the highest bidder.
Screen time. Prime Time: Life as a infinite level video game with an
infinite array of characters to pick from. It's one of those
situations where, poker-faced, the dealer asks you, "pick a card, any
card..." It's a game that asks -- "who speaks through you?" There
are a lot of echoes in the operating system, but that's the point.
The game goes on. The moment of revelation is encoded in the action:
you become the star of the scene, your name etched in bullets ripping
through the crowd. Neon lit Social-Darwinism for the technicolor age.
Set your browser to drift mode and simply float: the sequence really
doesn't care what you do as long as you are watching. "Now" becomes a
method for exploring the coded landscapes of contemporary
post-industrial reality, a flux, a Situationist reverie, a
"psychogeographie" -- a drift without beginning or end... Ask
any high school student in the U.S. and they can tell you the same
thing.
Most people trace the idea of time without variation to Newton's 1687
_Principia_. With the term "Absolute Time" he created a sense that
the world moved in a way that only allow one progression, one
sequence of actions. Joel Chadabe's (director of the Electronic Music
Foundation in the U.S.) book length essay on the idea of Time and
electronic music, "Electric Sound," points us to the old referential
style of thought that Newton highlighted:
as if models of a synchronous universe, every musical
composition and painting of the Newtonian period -- roughly from
1600 to 1900 -- reflected one line of time. In every musical
composition, there was but one line of chord progressions to
which all notes were synchronized. In every painting, there was
but one line of travel for the viewers' eyes, one perspective to
which all objects were synchronized. [4]
The kind of synchronized time imagined in this scenario is what, by
most accounts, fueled the Industrial Revolution, and lubricated a
culture based on highly stratified regulation of the limited amounts
of time available for production. Einstein's 1905 special theory of
relativity paved the way for the physics that Richard P. Feynman
would extend and develop much later in the century. As Chadabe puts
it: "Einstein's universe was a multiplicity of parallel and
asynchronous timelines."[5] Chronos, the Greek god of Time, was a
cannibal: he devoured his children and left the universe barren. From
time all things emerge and into Time all things go. Chronos at the
heart of Europe, Chronos at the crossroads becomes a signpost in
suspension -- multiplication of time versus the all consuming one
track time, one track mind.
Anyway, feel a million flurries of now, a million intangibles of the
present moment, an infinite permutation of what could be... the
thought gets caught... You get the picture. In the data cloud of
collective consciousness, it's one of those issues that just seems to
keep popping up. Where did I start? Where did I end? First and
foremost, it's that flash of insight, a way of looking at the
fragments of time. Check it: visual mode -- open source, a
kinematoscope of the unconscious: a bullet that cuts through
everything like a Doc Edgerton, E.J. Maret or Muybridge flash frozen
frame. You look for the elements of the experience, and if you think
about it, even the word "analysis" means to break down something into
its component parts. Stop motion: weapons drawn, flip the situation
into a new kind of dawn... It's only a rendition of Breton's dream --
surrealism as a mid-summer night's scheme, check the drift in the
21st Situationist scene. A scenario on the screen: camera obscura,
the perspective unbound walking through a crowd, gun drawn, firing
wildly until everyone is gone... could it be another version, another
situation... like the police whose 19 out of 41 bullets shot Diallo
dead or the kids that walk into the schools to live out their most
powerful stunningly banal lives by ending their classmates. This is
how it is in the sign of the times -- an advertising link to the
symbols of a lawless world, something anything to grasp onto to give
meaning to the ultra swirl...
Or something like that.
For Breton and the Surrealists that moment of total freedom --
walking into a crowd firing blindly, was a psycho-social critique of
the way that time and culture had been regimented in an industrial
society. Freedom was in the abandonment of the roles that they, like
everyone else around them, were forced to play. Flip the script,
timestretch the code: From Frederick Winslow Taylor's "clockwork
economy" that was taken from his _Principles of Scientific
Management_ on up to the hypercondensed TV commercials of the early
21st century the motif: "Money is time, but time is not money."
What happens when you look at the time part of the phrase? You're
left with a paradox in math and physics translated into the social
realm of human transactions and the uncanny system of correspondences
that make up the components of reality as we know it. What would
happen if the dream stopped? What would happen if the bright lights
and technicolor illusions that hold contemporary reality together
were swept away in a swirl of static? What would we do if that place
where all the stories come from suddenly vanished like a mirage in
the desert of our collective dreams? As the amount of information out
there explodes exponentially and threatens to become almost the only
way people relate to one another, it's a question that seems to beg a
response: what would happen if it just vanished and the lights went
out?
I write this after a week of intense activity -- a trip to Washington
D.C. where I saw first-hand some of the time machines the Naval
Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue uses to measure half-life decay
of cesium particles and their relationship to the precise measurement
of time, and then the image and soundtrack switched and now I'm in
Austin, Texas, half a country away, for the SXSW film festival of
interactive media. Crossfade to a week later, Newark Airport,
transfer to the Toronto Music Festival... The script unfolds while
the fragments coalesce. I like to think of this kind of writing as a
script information -- the self as "subject-in-synchronization" (the
moving parts aligned in the viewfinder of an other), rather than the
old 20th century inheritance of the Cartesian subject-object
relation. What are the ontological implications for such a shift?
What does this kind of "filmic time" do to the creative act, and how
do we represent it? It's been well documented that music has engaged
these issues from the beginning of the cinematic moment. From D.W.
Griffith's awe inspiring classic _Birth of a Nation_, to the first
sound film _The Jazz Singer_, the issue of how to deal with different
approaches to the notion of fragmented time -- and how we portray it
-- has haunted the cinema. After a couple of years of movies like
_The Matrix_, _Bamboozled_, and _Blair Witch Project_ it seems that,
without a doubt, the conflicting impulse of how to portray
psychological time has become a core motif in cinema. Early films,
like Oskar Fischinger animation intro for Disney's _Fantasia_ or Man
Ray's film shorts explored how to portray the human subject in
relation to the objects around us. But when jazz entered the picture,
that's when things really flipped into a more immersive narrative
context. The first sound film to hit pop culture's criteria of mass
sales and massive influence was Alan Crosland's 1927 epic _The Jazz
Singer_ -- film shorts were used to keep audiences occupied while
film reels were changed. The ongoing relationship of how to go
between images arrives and conquers -- becomes song.
A blip on the radar? A database sweep? A streamed numerical sequence?
In a short space, my narrative has switched formats and functions,
time and place -- all were kind of like fonts -- something to be used
for a moment to highlight a certain mode of expression, and, of
course, utterly pliable. As I sit here and type on my laptop, even
the basic format of the words I write still mirrors some of the early
developments in graphical user interface based texts, still echoes
not only in how I write, but how I think about the temporal placement
of the words and ideas I'm thinking about. It's a world-view that
definitely ain't linear but came out of the graphical user interfaces
invented by the likes of Alan Kay, and Douglas Engelberts, and Ivan
Sutherland -- stuff that let you move into the screen and interact
with the icons and objects on the monitors surface. Into the picture,
into the frame -- that's the name of the game. Context becomes
metatext, and the enframing process, as folks as diverse as Iannis
Xenakis, Kool Keith aka Dr. Octagon or Eminem can tell you, like
Freidrich Kittler, "Aesthetics begins as 'pattern recognition.'" [6]
Repetition and Claude Shannon? Repetition and James Snead? As has
been well documented by folks such as Tricia Rose, James Snead, and
Sherry Turkle (whose book _The Second Self_ could be a digital era
update on W.E.B. Dubois' critique of African American "Double
Consciousness" and the multiplying effects of digital media on self
representation) the sense here is one of prolonging the formal
implications of the expressive act -- move into the frame, get the
picture, re-invent your name. Movement, flow, flux: the nomad takes
on the sedentary qualities of the urban dweller. Movement on the
screen becomes an omnipresent quality. Absolute time becomes dream
machine flicker. The eyes move. The body stays still. Travel. Big
picture small frame, so what's the name of the game? Symbol and
synecdoche, sign and signification, all at once, the digital codes
become a reflection, a mirror permutation of the nation... Where to
go? What to do to get there?
Sometimes the best way to get an idea across is to simply tell it as
a story. It's been a while since one autumn afternoon in 1896
when Georges Melies was filming a late afternoon Paris crowd caught
in the ebb and flow of the city's traffic. Melies was in the process
of filming an omnibus as it came out of a tunnel, and his camera
jammed. He tried for several moments to get it going again, but with
no luck. After a couple of minutes he got it working again, and the
camera's lens caught a hearse going by. It was an accident that went
unnoticed until he got home. When the film was developed and
projected it seemed as if the bus morphed into a funeral hearse and
back to its original form again. In the space of what used to be
called _actualites_ -- real contexts reconfigured into stories that
the audiences could relate to -- a simple opening and closing of a
lens had placed the viewer in several places and times
simultaneously. In the space of one random error, Melies created what
we know of today as the "cut" -- words, images, sounds flowing out
the lens projection would deliver, like James Joyce used to say
"sounds like a river." Flow, rupture, and fragmentation -- all
seamlessly bound to the viewers perspectival architecture of film and
sound, all utterly malleable -- in the blink of an eye space and time
as the pre-industrial culture had known it came to an end.
Whenever you look at an image, there's a ruthless logic of selection
that you have to go through to simply create a sense of order. The
end-product of this palimpsest of perception is a composite of all
the thoughts and actions you sift through over the last several
micro-seconds -- a soundbite reflection of a process that's a new
update of Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_ or the German proto
Expressionist 1920 film _Der Golem_, but this time it's the imaginary
creature made of the interplay fragments of time, code, and (all puns
intended) memory and flesh. The eyes stream data to the brain through
something like two million fiber bundles of nerves. Consider the
exponential aspects of perception when you multiply this kind of
density by the fact that not only does the brain do this all the
time, but the millions of bits of information streaming through your
mind at any moment have to be coordinated. Any shift in the traffic
of information -- even the slightest rerouting -- can create, like
the hearse and omnibus of Melies film accident, not only new
thoughts, but new ways of thinking. Literally. Non-fiction, check the
meta-contradiction... Back in the early portion of the 20th century
this kind of emotive fragmentation implied a crisis of
representation, and it was filmakers, not Dj's who were on the
cutting edge of how to create a kind of subjective intercutting of
narratives and times -- there's even the famous story of how
President Woodrow Wilson when he saw the now legendary amount of
images and narrative jump-cuts that were in turn cut and spliced up
in D.W. Griffiths's film classic _Birth of a Nation_ called the style
of ultra-montage "like writing history with lightning." I wonder what
he would have said of Grand Master Flash's 1981 classic "Adventures
on the Wheels of Steel"?
Film makers like D.W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Oscar Michaux, and
Sergei Eisenstein (especially with his theory of "dialectal montage"
or "montage of attractions" that created a kind of subjective
intercutting of multiple layers of stories within stories) were
forging stories for a world just coming out of the throes of World
War I. A world which, like ours, was becoming increasingly
inter-connected, and filled with stories of distant lands, times and
places -- a place where cross-cutting allowed the presentation not
only of parallel actions occurring simultaneously in separate spatial
dimensions, but also parallel actions occurring on separate temporal
planes -- in the case of Griffith's _Birth of a Nation_, four stories
at once -- and helped convey the sense of density that the world was
confronting... Griffith was known as "the Man Who Invented
Hollywood," and the words he used to describe his style of
composition --"intra-frame narrative" or the "cut-in" the "cross-cut"
-- staked out a space in America's linguistic terrain that hasn't
really been explored too much. Griffith's films were mainly used as
propaganda -- _Birth of a Nation_ was used as a recruitment film for
the Ku Klux Klan at least up until the mid 1960's, and other films
like _Intolerance_ were commercial failures, and the paradox of his
cultural stance versus the technical expertise that he brought to
film, is still mirrored in Hollywood to this day. Jazz time versus
Hollywood time. _The Jazz Singer_ versus the silence of _Birth of a
Nation_ on the mind-screens of contemporary America: echo meets alias
in the coded exchange of glances. What Mikhail Bakhtin might have
once called "diacritical difference" now becomes "the mix.," or as
James B. Twitchell says in "Adcult USA" his classic analysis of
advertising culture, media, and the "carnival of the everyday" in the
images and sounds that make up the fabric of American daily life:
"[the situations are] homologues of each other and semilogues of
those in the genre. Entertainments share diachronic and synchronic
similarities; they refer to individual texts as well as to all
precursors and successors -- every programmers worst fear is that we
might change the channel." [7]
If you compare that kind of flux to stuff like Dj mixes, you can see a
similar logic at work: it's all about selection of sound as
narrative. I guess that's travelling by synecdoche. It's a process of
sifting through the narrative rubble of a phenomenon that conceptual
artist Adrian Piper liked to call the "indexical present:" "I use the
notion of the 'indexical present' to describe the way in which I
attempt to draw the viewer into a direct relationship with the work,
to draw the viewer into a kind of self critical standpoint which
encourages reflection on one's own responses to the work..."
To name, to call, to upload, to download... take on the notion of
dance and memory. By moving across the screen you uncover slowly
deteriorating images of dancehalls -- a lyrical critique of how much
we move physically and the immense amount of potential culture has
for change, a project that's based on geographic and temporal
simultaneity -- i.e. creating a new time-zone out of widely dispersed
geographic regions -- reflect the same ideas by using the net to
focus our attention on a world rapidly moving into what I like to
call "prosthetic realism." Sight and sound, sign and signification:
the travel at this point becomes mental, and as with Griffith's hyper
dense technically prescient intercuts, it's all about how you play
with the variables that creates the artpiece. If you play, you get
something out of the experience. If you don't, like Griffith -- the
medium becomes a reinforcement of what's already there, and or as one
critic, said a long time ago of Griffith's _Intolerance_: "history
itself seems to pour like a cataract across the screen..." This is
the James Snead critique of what Spike Lee ironically called "Colored
Peoples Time" in _Bamboozled_, or what Morpheus in the form of
Lawrence Fishbourne asked Neo in the _Matrix_: "Do you think that's
air you're breathing in here?"
Like an acrobat drifting through the topologies of codes, glyphs and
signs that make up the fabric of my everyday life, I like to flip
things around. With a culture based on stuff like Emergency Broadcast
Network's hyper-edited news briefs, Ninja Tune dance moguls, Cold Cut's
"7 Minutes of Madness" remix of Eric B and Rakim's "Paid in Full" to
Grandmaster Flash's "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" to later
excursions into geographic, cultural, and temporal dispersion like
MP3lit.com -- contemporary 21st Century aesthetics needs to focus on
how to cope with the immersion we experience on a daily level -- a
density that Sergei Eisenstein back in 1929 spoke of when he was
asked about travel and film:"the hieroglyphic language of the cinema
is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any
political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of suspect
dramatic or psychological past" Does this mean that we make our own
films as we live them? Travelling without moving. It's something even
Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover" wouldn't have thought possible. But hey,
like I always say, "who's counting?" Chronos -- the all consuming
father -- watches as somehow his children are given a "stay of
execution" and he is forced to stay hungry -- what happens when a
scene is no longer a scenario, but a computational process?
Notes
-----
*Notes for the Oberhausen Film Festival, (Forthcoming).
[1] Maya Deren, "Ritual in Transfigured Time," _Experimental Films_,
New York: Mystic Fire Video, 1945-6.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Andre Breton, _Manifestoes of Surrealism_, translated by Richard
Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1972.
p. 124.
[4] Joel Chadabe, _Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of
Electronic Music_. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997. p. 21.
[5] Ibid., p. 22
[6] Friedrich Kittler, _Literature/Media/Information Systems:
Essays_. John Johnston, editor. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers
Association, 1997. p.130
[7] James B. Twictchell, _Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in
American Culture_. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
____________________________________________________________________
Paul D. Miller is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician working
in NYC. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The
Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine, and a host of
other periodicals. He is a co-Publisher of the magazine "A Gathering
of the Tribes" -- a periodical dedicated to new works by writers from
a multi-cultural context. Miller is most well known under the
moniker of his "constructed persona" as "Dj Spooky that Subliminal
Kid". Miller has recorded a large volume of music as "Dj Spooky that
Subliminal Kid" and has collaborated with a wide variety of pre-eminent
musicians and composers.
____________________________________________________________________
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