The Moving Image: From Imprint to Expression - Part II

Continued from yesterday

Address at the Convocation of the University of Colombo, on being awarded an Honourary Doctorate, on 29 June by film director Tissa Abeysekera.

Stanford took a huge bet to prove his point. He had to produce concrete acceptable evidence. How could one capture that fleeting moment, only a fraction of a second, during the movement of a running horse when all his four legs were off the ground.

This was the historic moment when two inventions of modern science, born within ten years of each other and had totally different histories of development, came together. Leyland Stanford enlisted the services of a famous photographer in America, Eadward Muybridge, to obtain a photographic imprint of that fleeting moment.

Only that process, where, in the words of Andre Bazin, the bias, the prejudice, and the manipulation by the human element is totally absent, and ‘only the instrumentality of a non living agent intervenes between the originating object and its reproduction’,could be depended upon to provide the necessary and acceptable evidence.

Eadward Muybridge’s fascinating exercise, of mounting 24 cameras in a horizontal line-up covering a reasonable length of track along which a horse was made to run, and wires laid across the path of the horse activated the shutter of each camera at every moment of the horse’s run, and captured unmistakably several moments when all four of its hooves were off the ground, has passed into the folk lore of the moving image.

Let us avoid the details of that story, and get to the main point I wish to make, Both photography and the moving picture, which have separate histories, and have developed their own dynamics and their aesthetics, though both complemented each other in finding for us the way to realize what Bazin called “mankind’s ancient dream for its double, its mirror; the creation of an imaginary self alongside the physical self, and a way of preserving that other self - ‘The Mummy Complex’”, are both genetically the off-springs of modern science. From Muybridge, to Edison was only a short step.

The father of the moving picture found the means by which a perforated roll of film could be made to move continuously within a single camera instead of multiple cameras, by perfecting the transport mechanism of the sewing machine. The linkages and the relationships, the interflowing bloodlines and the hybrid genetic inheritance between film and science are endless. Nevertheless, film in its short yet troubled history, has always aspired to be art.

Film historians are constantly declaring the peaks of the evolution of the moving image as those where it reached the heights of poetry and music. Yet, with the advent of new technologies, and especially the coming of the digital revolution, fears have been expressed that the muse in the cinema runs the risk of being brutalized and disfigured, dehumanized and devoured, by the monsters of technology. This fear and concern formed the main focus of a historic conference convened in The Hague in 1993.

Two seminal books have come out of this event, both collections of essays, by eminent filmologists, film historians and filmmakers. Cinema Futures: Cain Abel or Cable?, edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman, is for the enlightened layman, and I would prescribe it for all those with a heightened receptivity to film.

The other is a massive tome, a kind of Bible for the Digital future and spells out for professionals the future vocabulary of the moving image. Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, would certainly become our manual for the future.

I quote from its Preface by Peter Weibel, one of the co-authors, mainly because I see variations of the sentiments expressed therein being echoed frequently in the years to come.

“(The) emphasis on technical innovation does not imply the exclusion of artistic and ideological content. On the contrary we insist on the technical aspect because, artistic and ideological functions of cinema are according to the ‘apparatus’ theory of the 1970s, inscribed in the cinematographic apparatus.

The apparatus is our platform. Each change of the technical apparatus also allows new artistic and ideological options. The technical apparatus of the cinema is its instrument” Weibel is here drawing from the pronouncements made by the post-modernist guru Foucault, who declared: “There is no neutral technology. The machine is always social before it is technical.

We are back at the beginning, but re-locating our position within a different context. Hi technology is an integral part of the moving image. It is generated out of the interplay of scientific principles and processes. It is applied through technology and the product of such application conveyed to the public, once again, through technological apparatus.

Could its language and its creative vocabulary be independent of that technology? It is a complex question, and there can be no ready or simple answer. But l wish to conclude with a teaser.

If the validity of the moving image lay in its supreme and unique ability to obtain the truest possible imprint of time and space so far, let us not forget, that this ability is based on what Peter Mark Roget described as an inherent defect in the human eye. In Anthony R. Michaelis’ oft quoted and fine definition of the moving image, this aspect is clearly specified.

“A series of still and separate images recorded on the same continuous ribbon and exposed at standard intervals of time, to represent successive phases of movement, when exhibited in rapid sequence above the fusion frequency of human vision, the separate images persist long enough in the mind of the observer to reproduce the illusion of movement”.

Illusion, is the operative word here, because it is the still picture which gets animated due to that ‘inherent defect in the human eye’ as pronounced by Roget. Any process dependent on such circumstances of default, easily lends itself to distortion.

And this is what the digital revolution with its enormous facility for manipulation and pictorial corruption of the image has exposed film to. Is the moving image facing the erosion of its unquestionable validity as the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

This is precisely the fear and the concern expressed collectively at the conference at The Hague in 1993, and summarized by Thomas Elsaesser in his essay: Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time.

“Digital cinema in its requirement of an individual input brings back the manual application of craft and skill. It brings back the artist, and marks the return of expression as against reproduction. Whatever happens, are we ready to forego the indexical truth we expect the photographic image to deliver?”

Aren’t we suspended here, like that American Scientist, over an Himalayan void where the dividing line between heaven and earth had vanished? Is the imprint true any longer? Or is it a personal expression? Is film a science or an art? Thirty years ago I knew the answers. Now I don’t, and I don’t know why.