Film After Film: (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) BY J. Hoberman (Verso Books, 2012) From the Publisher: “In this sly and thought-provoking essay, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman suggests that it’s possible to speak of a distinctive twenty-first century cinema, only a decade into the new millennium. The advent of a new digital technology has led to the displacement of the medium of film — and of the real, as digital image-making ends the necessity of having an actual world, let alone the need for a camera. The future history of motion pictures, Hoberman asserts, will be the history of animation. Meanwhile, the 2000 American presidential election and the trauma of 9/11 have reshaped the movies politically. The two events have combined to create a rupture in film history, perhaps presaging, as Susan Sontag forlornly predicted at the close of the century, the death of cinema, or at least cinephilia….”

The distinction between “cinema” and “film” is, on the surface, an arbitrary one. One term could just as easily be exchanged for the other in our normative modes of speech (“I’m going to watch a film” / “I’m going to the cinema”). Film could be used in the singular individual case, a film or the film, or it could be used — as “cinema” is used — as an encompassing field of mediational events and practices, the whole social and aesthetic realm of film: as artform, medium, and discipline. The term film, more crucially, derives from the chemically sensitive photographic material that has been used since the golden age of industrial motion-picture cinema, i.e. photographic film. It is in this respect that the term film provides a more material basis for the cinematic arts: like still photography, cinematic film records and preserves the “what-has-been” and is vitally grounded in the photo-capture of actual people, places, and things in an authenticated temporal unfolding. Cinema thus presents itself as a state of mind: it has always, in an imaginative sense, been with us. Film, on the other hand, conveys a historical pressurization that places the medium in a very distinct period that stretches from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Cinema, seemingly the more elegant term, connotes a different order of specificity (or rather a specific order of generality) which isn’t strictly materially based, but is instead conceptually driven: cinema is the art of motion pictures, regardless of the material or mechanism that records this movement. Reduced to its etymological origin, cinema (from Greek kinema “movement” and kinein “to move”) is a photographic image in movement. Yet it is a term that could profitably be employed outside of the realm of film proper and inside the field of literature and poetry for instance — the idea of a “cinematic poem” or a “cinematic novel” is an acceptable construct even when the literary text predates the technological formation of the cinematic medium. Cinema thus presents itself as a state of mind: it has always, in an imaginative sense, been with us. Film, on the other hand, conveys a historical pressurization that places the medium in a very distinct period that stretches from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Yet both terms have come under intense scrutiny in recent years, and there is some pressure to not only distinguish between what “cinema” and “film” do but also what at bottom they are and what has become of them during the 21st century “digital turn.” J. Hoberman’s latest book, Film After Film (2012), asks precisely this question, which directly suggests the subtitle: “What became of 21st century cinema?” Taking stock of the “technological shift in the basic motion picture apparatus — namely, the shift from the photographic to the digital that began tentatively in the 1980s, and gathered momentum from the mid ‘90s onward,” Hoberman sees in the “digital turn” (a term inspired by Richard Rorty’s theorization of the “linguistic turn,” as well as by W.J.T. Mitchell’s subsequent conceptualization of the “pictorial turn”) a transition to a cinema suddenly freed from photographic realism, unconstrained by the “filmness” of film, and newly opened to a CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery)-heavy, often CGI-dependent, cinema that threatened to replace the vérité of the photographic punctum with the simulacra of green screens, post-production computerization, photoshop aesthetics, and increasingly sophisticated motion-capture animation. As Hoberman makes clear, “with the advent of CGI, the history of motion pictures was now, in effect, the history of animation.”

Citing the example of André Bazin’s landmark essay, “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946), Hoberman restages the swift evolution of a relatively youthful artform that has swiftly acquired greater degrees of simulation and technological prowess through digitization, becoming at the same time farther removed from the authenticity and realism of the photographic image — hence, the closer cinema got to its manifest destiny of total representation (or usurpation) of the real and non-real alike, the farther it got from the groundedness of its photographic nativity scene. Bazin’s Total Cinema, which aimed for the “‘recreation of the world in its own image,’” posited a cinema that with each technical development gradually arrived at a cinema closer to its own prerogatives. “Thus… Bazin’s dream arrived as a nightmare, in the form of a virtual cyber existence: Total Cinema as a total dissociation from reality.”

Hoberman does distinguish between film and cinema: “I will use cinema to mean a form of recorded and hence repeatable moving image and, for the most part, synchronized recorded sound… The terms motion pictures or movies imply a projected image; film refers to movies that are produced on or projected as celluloid (or its derivatives) and hence have some basis in photography.” Though Hoberman doesn’t extend the connotational division between cinema and film beyond the mere demarcation of projected and/or celluloid images (in which the “material flicker” of the projected image comes to constitute a verifiable imprint or passing of time), he does attribute some of the “objective anxiety” surrounding the decline of photographic film culture to the collateral decay of film as medium and of cinema as culture:

By “culture,” Hoberman references his own vocation as a film critic and journalist, a practice that has become complicated by the “digital turn” (and, in some ways, by a free-form interweb blog culture that opened the critical arena to a significantly larger audience). The privileged relationship of the indexical photographic image with its referent in the real world shadowed something of the privileged relationship which photographic film culture conveyed to an ardent community of critics, cineastes, and cinephiles who made the effort to watch films in their original print at movie theaters around the world; for such a community, streaming or downloading a film on a laptop could not replace the real thrill and grainy splendor of 35mm (or 70mm) photographic images projected at 24 frames per second in a darkened theater surrounded by others as devoted as they were to the filmic image. Yet it was precisely the digital turn which has made streaming and downloading films the new norm, in which films could be ingested at faster rates on screens of numerous sizes, on smartphones, notebooks, and web-based televisions. When formerly film culture had presented itself as a ritualized participation set apart from mundane events (in which people set apart time to “go to the movies”), 21st century cinema has gradually become so accessible and transportable that it is less about setting apart time than it is about filling a “homogeneous empty time” (on the subway, in planes, at work) in which boredom is constantly offset by the instant recall of digital images.

Éloge de l’amour
DIRECTED BY Jean-Luc Godard
(Cahiers du cinéma, 2007)

This transition toward instant gratification also influenced what Hoberman calls a reactionary desire for a “new realness” in which “the loss of indexicality… promoted a new compensatory ‘real-ness’” that emphasized “film as an object (if only an object in decay).” Some early instances of the “New Realness” could be seen in the Dogme ‘95 movement that advocated a “neo-neo-realist” constriction of production measures that reformed the tendencies of digital video toward the simulacral by restricting the overly-standardized use of pre and post-production artifices (the “dogma” advocated hand-held camera use only, filming on location, no non-diegetic sound/music, no f/x, etc.). Another instance cited by Hoberman is Godard’s In Praise of Love (Éloge de l’amour, 2001), which dialectically employed black-and-white 35mm footage alongside highly saturated digital video as a way of “mourn[ing] the loss of photographic cinema, as well as the memory and history that, more than an indexical trace, photography [made] material.”

More significantly, the New Realness insisted upon a highly “experiential” cinema that did not anachronistically return to photographic means but instead utilized the immediacy of the digital wave to return to a cinema that felt thing-like and urgently visceral. Hoberman cites the example of the “torture porn” genre — which would include not only horror films like the Saw and Hostel series, but also Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay (2009), to name a few — as an instance of the desire for an analogical (as opposed to a digital) rootedness to the “real thing.” Gratuity, in a way, canceled out the decay of the filmic image by giving so much more of it, even when such images revolved around the grotesque abuse and dissection of the human body.

But even if the “death of the analog image” (embodied in the ritualistic dismemberment or zombie-fication of the human body) reversed its own decay through the controlled staging of its multiple deaths via digital means, did not this adoption of the “digital will” only accelerate the obsolescence of the analog image? Hoberman suggests that even the most thoroughgoing CGI-dependent digital films, when at their most simulacral and removed from the real, already “embalm” the indexicality of the photographic image through its very absence. Borrowing the concept this time from Bazin’s “Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), Hoberman locates the most salient example of mummifying the already mummified remains of the photographic image and its analog world in the computer animated space of the Pixar films, most brilliantly in WALL-E (2008):

WALL-E
DIRECTED BY Andrew Stanton
(Pixar Animation Studios, 2008)

Within the world of WALL-E, we are even provided with a direct allusion to pre-“digital turn” cinema: “An ancient VHS tape of Hello Dolly (once the epitome of elephantine, retrograde movie-making)… is the robot’s most prized possession. This fetish serves to instruct the (male-coded) machine on the nature of the human, providing a synecdoche for the entire cultural heritage of the pre-apocalyptic Earth.” Does this mourning for the analogic world via the cinematic image come to embody a sincere desire for its return, even when such a world is staged through film-photography’s oppositional other, the digital CGI image? Hoberman never completely answers this question, since it is equally unanswerable and perhaps irrelevant. Even a film as unabashedly simulacral as Avatar (2009) does not quite sever its link to the golden days of photographic cinema: it is on many levels a full-blown Bazinian “‘recreation of the world in its own image… a hallucination that was also a fact.’” The immersive reality of Avatar’s dense 3-D images would have been welcome, as Hoberman makes clear, by Sergei Eisenstein, who “deemed 3-D to be inherently progressive (‘Mankind has for centuries been moving toward stereoscopic cinema’).” The loss of the real has thus become only a motivation to produce a new real, one driven by a post-9/11 anxiety that can no longer distinguish real world events from cinematic apocalyptic turns. If Avatar presents a way to escape the grim sur-reality of a post 9/11 world, then the phantasmatic world it posits may only offer the optical illusion of a “virtual depth” superimposed on an already false (and heavily politicized) depth-of-field.

Hoberman’s Film After Film, divided into three parts, does not fully deliver on the promise of its first (and best) section, “A Post-Photographic Cinema,” in which he gives his most cogent and compelling thoughts on what a 21st century cinema might be. This is perhaps because the latter two sections act more as a compilation of his previous writings and not as a logical continuation of the thought process which the first section brilliantly commences. The second section, “A Chronicle of the Bush Years,” essentially maps out a counter or mirror history to the geopolitical simulations of the Bush regime through a tracking of the films that were released during that era and leading up to the momentous 2008 election of Barack Obama. The third section, “Notes Toward a Syllabus,” compiles the select reviews Hoberman wrote on films throughout the 2000s that exemplify what a 21st century cinema is shaping up to be. Hoberman’s syllabus ends with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), a film that appears “classical” (i.e. filmic) in design and shape, but which, Hoberman notes, was actually shot on HD video and transferred to 35mm — in a way acting as yet another simulation, perhaps the finest one, of a cinema that had once been epically large-scale and materially based on real situations, real places, and real people. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which would be Hoberman’s last review for The Village Voice before he would be controversially dropped from his position as its head film critic, thus embodies a nostalgic desire, in its very title, for a cinema of long ago that had based itself on the material splendor and largeness of photographic images.

Cinema After Deleuze BY Richard Rushton (Continuum Books, 2012) From the Publisher: “Cinema After Deleuze offers a clear and lucid introduction to Deleuze’s writings on cinema which will appeal both to undergraduates and specialists in film studies and philosophy. The book provides explanations of the many categories and classifications found in Deleuze’s two landmark books on cinema and offers assessments of a range of films and directors, including works by John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais. Richard Rushton also discusses contemporary directors such as Steven Spielberg, Lars von Trier, Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-Wai in the light of Deleuze’s theories and in doing so brings Deleuze’s Cinema books right up to date. ”

Richard Rushton’s concise and useful commentary on (and guide to) Gilles Deleuze’s cinema theory, Cinema After Deleuze (2012), provides an appropriate counter-valence to Hoberman’s concerns with 21st century cinema. Deleuze’s monumental Cinema books (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image / Cinéma, tome 1 : L’Image-mouvement, first published in 1983, and Cinema 2: The Time-Image / Cinéma, tome 2 : L’Image-temps, first published in 1985) have remained an imperative standard in high-end film theory, and together they form a colossal reevaluation of cinema not so much as a history of moving images but as a veritable philosophy of thinking-through-images. If for Deleuze philosophy enacts and stands for the “creation of concepts,” then cinema, as philosophy, generates thought (or the possibility of thought) through the formation of images. Deleuze’s Cinema books, much like the bulk of his philosophy texts, have gained a reputation for abstruseness and stylistic opacity, and Rushton performs an exemplary job of summarizing, clarifying, and highlighting the central tenets of Deleuze’s two books. As an introduction to Deleuze’s formulation of cinema-as philosophy, Rushton’s slim yet sufficiently thorough text will be invaluable to those who find Deleuze’s style too onerous for parsing. As an introduction to Deleuze’s formulation of cinema-as philosophy, Rushton’s slim yet sufficiently thorough text will be invaluable to those who find Deleuze’s style too onerous for parsing. What might a “cinema after Deleuze” signify? Deleuze, who passed away in 1995, would not have been able to experience what a 21st century cinema has come to entail, nor did the question of what a post-photographic cinema might come to mean for cinema as a whole definitively present itself in his time. But Deleuze’s concepts, most importantly those of the “movement-image” and the “time-image,” remain pivotal toward formulating a conceptual language capable of dealing with the problematic Hoberman sets up in Film After Film. Rushton’s book distinguishes itself from other texts on Deleuze’s cinema-thought by applying these very concepts to the current trends of 21st century cinema. Similar to how Hoberman provides us with a film “syllabus” for the 21st century that investigates the attributes of a post-photographic cinema aesthetic, Rushton utilizes the Deleuzian optic to critique the virtues of the latter-day cinema of directors like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Luc Besson on one side (all of whom in their work demonstrate different features of the “movement-image”), and that of the cinema of directors like Lars von Trier, Abbas Kiarostami, and Wong Kar-wai on the other side (whose work demonstrates qualities of the “time-image”).

Rather than ask “What is cinema?” Deleuze asks “What does cinema do?” and “How does cinema construct concepts?” Implicitly taking up a position bordering on Bazin’s “Total Cinema,” Deleuze avers that “the cinema is always as perfect as it can be”; thus to determine what is “good” or “bad” cinema needlessly complicates the issue of determining how cinema provokes thought through image-formation. For Deleuze the filmic image, be it a “digital” or an “analog” one, never descends into mere representation — the cinematic image is not an imitation or mimesis, “there is nothing behind the image,” because the image, thing-like, already inhabits space-time as only itself and nothing else. Hence, the controversy of a photographic cinema versus a post-photographic cinema does not for Deleuze necessarily exist, if we consider that both cinemas, practically any cinema, whether in the boldly reality-infused films of directors like Abbas Kiarostami or Jia Zhangke, or conversely in the Pixar films rendered completely through CGI, the cinematic image constructs a movement, an unfolding in time, that doubles as a way of seeing or thinking in the world. For Deleuze, the image inhabits the world, and in the image we inhabit the world. But there is not just one image, but multiple: “perception-images,” “action-images,” “relation-images,” “crystal-images,” “affection-images” (Rushton offers the possibility of a “digital-image” or “silicon-image” for the post-Deleuze age). In any case, these images line up under the general rubric of the movement-image and/or the time-image: what then differentiates these from each other? Rushton succinctly, and ably, categorizes Deleuze’s movement/time image dichotomy for us:

Since for Deleuze (who acquires his principal concept of the movement-image from Henri Bergson’s “three theses of movement”) time is “change or it is nothing at all,” the movement-image fails in some respects to embody time in all its fluctuant multiplicity since it is “defined in terms of actions and reactions, which aim to solve problems….” The time-image, on the other hand, gives off “a little time in the pure state” because it is fundamentally open to change: “The solutions to the problems established by time-image films are not solved in determinate ways — rather, their solutions are left open. This openness… means that, at a first level, the future remains open to change. That is to say, what has happened in the past need not determine ways of conceiving of the future. In short, a direct image of time is not just one in which the future is left open, but is one in which the past, the present and the future are all open to change.”

Deleuze argues that the movement-image came of age, and into ubiquity, during the early cinema industries that established themselves, respectively, in France, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States, before World War II. The movement-image would be exemplified by the films of directors as foundational as Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Fritz Lang, John Ford, Elia Kazan, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock. The films of each of these directors (albeit in different ways and on divergent scales) are modeled on a general movement-image system that through shot, frame, and montage techniques attempts to rectify or bring into rhythmic order a series of actions and reactions that revolve around a key problem, or array of problems, in the film scenario. The “past” in such films stands forth as that against which the present has to measure or reform itself, or rather, the past is presented as that which has to be severed or distinguished as apart from the present — the present and the past are never fully in accord, nor truly latent in each other, since the past in the movement-image film is always in some need of being resolved and/or “canceled out.” (This is why genre-cinema is typically, but not exclusively, a cinema of the movement-image.)

The time-image, on the other hand, came into real dominance after World War II, when the films of directors like Vittorio de Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Max Ophüls, Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard (among others) brought into relief a different conception of time that was no longer indirect but powerfully present, and even a bit unstable and undifferentiated, in the suddenly deconstructed space of the shot/frame. Italian Neorealism provided a natural transition from the cinema of “solving (or attempting to solve) problems” via movement, to a cinema in which the problems are no longer clear-cut nor solvable, and the solutions are either absent or fruitless — because the mass destruction which World War II wreaked on the collective consciousness and on the geopolitical landscape had nearly eradicated any optimism in the ability of social and aesthetic movement to rectify wrongs and set things right again. The poverty that followed in the aftermath of World War II cultivated a solution-less atmosphere of despair or helplessness, if not a nostalgia that recalled the past within the very fabric of the present. In such a landscape of erasure only time continued to exist in a “pure state” unmolested by the subjective idealisms and manipulations of the human eye; time was, in a sense, allowed to roam free among the ruins of the post-World-War-II landscape.

Yet all was not lost, only changed: the objectivity of the camera eye would still be capable of redeeming fragmented reality in its pure temporal state and reawakening in the human spectator what Deleuze calls “spiritual automata.” Rushton explains:

Rushton emphasizes that the importance of the “spiritual automaton” in Deleuze’s cinema-philosophy is not split between movement-image cinema and time-image cinema, but is native to the intrinsic principle of cinema in all its forms: “What [Deleuze] argues is that what is most valuable about cinema is precisely that it turns me away from the thoughts I own. Instead, it introduces thoughts that are not mine; it makes me experience the act of thinking as something which comes from the outside, external to me.” In other words, cinema makes automatons of us too, though in a manner which does not preclude human thought and emotion, but rather opens us to the possibility of the “unthought” of thought, those thoughts which we would not have been able to bring up on our own without the outside-objectivity of the camera eye, the cinematic image.

…cinema makes automatons of us too, though in a manner which does not preclude human thought and emotion, but rather opens us to the possibility of the ‘unthought’ of thought, those thoughts which we would not have been able to bring up on our own without the outside-objectivity of the camera eye, the cinematic image.

Though the conceptual machinery of “spiritual automata” can be readily found in movement-image films, it is perhaps even more useful in helping us to understand the more cryptic qualities that define, and set apart, the time-image. The anarchic openness of the time-image, in which past, present, and future are immanent in each other, and are constantly open to change in their relations with each other, is accommodated and deciphered by the possibility of a temporality that lies, crucially, outside our own sense of time: the time-image generates other temporalities that emerge from, and merge with, each other, in the porous, montaged space of the shot/frame. Thus, with time-image films, “there is no longer any distinction between actual and virtual, past and the present.” If, according to Deleuze (who takes his stance from Spinozist philosophy and Humean skepticism), thought only begins to happen when we cease to impose meaning on ideas or concepts and allow for them to express themselves in us, then cinematic images, when we allow them to think for us through our perceiving them in movement and time, open us to the “unthought” that lies outside us, since “the only thoughts we have come from the outside”:

Taste of Cherry
DIRECTED BY Abbas Kiarostami
(Abbas Kiarostomi Productions,1997)

What then might all this mean in relation to the problematic of the “actual” and “virtual” natures of, respectively, the photographic and post-photographic cinemas of the 21st century? Firstly, that since the advent of the time-image (a cinema which Deleuze and Rushton make clear had existed before the decisive break of World War II, since its qualities are organically embedded in the movement-image as well), the recent digital turn has not introduced anything significantly different to the stakes at hand. According to Deleuze, the “actual” and the “virtual” emerge from the same plane of image-formation, so there is no essential distinction between, say, WALL-E or Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) (except perhaps that the former might be considered a movement-image while the latter may be considered a time-image). Secondly, while the movement-image has come back into full force with the “spectacle-cinema” of directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and J.J. Abrams, the time-image does not automatically present a natural opposition to this movement-image cinema, nor is it under threat by the digital turn. If anything, the digital turn has allowed for a replenished time-image cinema, alongside a re-invigorated movement-image cinema, by opening up the digital wave — a hand-held, cost-effective, and supremely transportable system of image-production and distribution — to countries and cultures that had traditionally remained outside the hegemony of the American and European cultural industries. The digital turn has allowed independent filmmakers like Filipino auteur Lav Diaz (for whom “digital is liberation theology”) to emerge on the international scene and make DV films that do not sacrifice their time-image aesthetic, and are able to thrive and circulate outside the heavily commercialized, mass-industrial sector.

Perhaps most important, as Deleuze makes clear in his discussion of Godard’s films, the time-image can still find a place in the post-photographic world (the broken analogic world depicted by WALL-E for instance) precisely when it has formulated a break with such a world, a rupture that necessarily enjoins us to cultivate what Hoberman had called a “new realness” or, better yet, what Deleuze calls “belief in this world”:

Rushton explains, through the example of Godard’s critical cinema, that “what is at stake for these Godardian experiments is a sense in which cinema breaks free from the world, so that the question of the image and of montage is no longer one of reconnecting with the world, as it was for the movement-image… Against this bringing together of man and the world, Godard’s breakages between the image and world instead introduce the ‘unthought’ element.” Applied to the post-photographic cinema of the 21st century, the “unthought” of thought returns again, only this time in the formation of CGI images that come from the outside of the analogic world, an outside that obligates us to think in new forms, using new systems of expression, and which moves us to cultivate a belief in the “New Real” of this world.