1. Mary Anne Doane argues that the manipulation of time primarily takes place off the screen. Time is mainly articulated "off-screen, between frames, in darkness" (190). Of course a director can slow down or speed up the frame rate in order to create a slow-motion or fast-forward effect. However, since time is bound to movement, during a long shot, the line of action of the film cannot make a temporal jump. It can be sped up and slowed down--dramatized--but there is no room for making direct jumps through time. It is not possible to go from event A to event C without passing through B. Thus, to actually crack the temporal plane and make it discontinuous, the director must resort to film editing. Through a montage of clips, one can recreate time, but in the way that the narrator/director intends for the audience to see it. Through parallel editing, viewers of movies are taught to accept the rules of cinematic time--that simultaneous events in "real time" can be represented by one scene following the other in "cinematic time." Ultimately, we gauge the duration of cinematic action based on the movements we observe. Within a single shot, cinematic time is usually equivalent to real time. However, to successfully manipulate time, Doane's observations are unavoidable. It is not what we see--the various camera shots--which tells us that the cinematic time has jumped. Instead, it is the the gap between the frames which signify the jump in cinematic time.
2. In The Life of an American Fireman, there are obvious temporal differences between the outdoor and indoor scenes of the fireman rescue. While some may view the timing difference as a mistake, Doane argues differently: "By repeating the scene, [the movie] reveals what was 'off' and formerly condensed, and 'reexpands' it (189). Here, Doane views the two scenes as a condensed version and an expanded version. Perhaps the film is trying to represent two points of view relative to the people. Perhaps the indoor scene experiences the time of a panicking person in the flaming house when time seems to fly by. Meanwhile, the outdoor scene could very well represent the eyes of a careless bystander, who experiences time in a calmer and slower way. In particular, I found it interesting how Doane uses the words "condensed" and "reexpands" to describe the two scenes. These two words suggest that time can in fact be divided into intervals as Zeno suggests. One cannot condense or reexpand something if that something has no beginning or end. Moreover, rexexpanding and condensing infer that intervals of an action on a given timeline can be removed and replaced at will. This is not possible in Bergsonian time, as movement is whole and cannot be divided into any sort of part.
3. While Doane is sympathetic to Bergson's ideas, she uses Deleuze to argue that his view is a "misrecognition of the cinema's true capabilities" (175). Rather than perceiving cinematic time as a variable of the camera, Deleuze argues that time should be gauged based on the viewers perception instead (175). In this way, the viewer does not actually see a series of phantasmagoric images, but movement itself. Through this, she argues that Deleuze shows that cinema actually refutes Zeno's theory. In essence, the camera is that which divides cinematic action into intervals. But according to Deleuze, only the viewer's point of view actually matters. This makes me question what else actually "matters." It seems that by going this route, Deleuze is merely trying to use a cheap play of words in order to justify the use of film while attempting to remain Bergsonian. Deleuze neither proves nor disproves. Instead, he simply ignores.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
In response to paragraph 3, I think Deleuze's argument about the subjectivity of action to the viewer can be elucidated by referring to the argument of Christian Metz which Doane presents following her discussion of Deleuze and Bergson. According to Metz, "Because movement is never material but is always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality" (p 123). Metz argues that the essence of motion lies in what Bergson would describe as "becoming." However, Metz veers from Bergson's analysis in asserting that this "becoming" is only real insofar as it is observable (kind of an 'if a tree falls in the woods and there is no one around to hear it...' argument). Nonetheless, Metz's argument lends creedence to Deleuze's intimation that motion is reliant on the viewer, not the projector, as it is the viewer who acknowledges changes from one frame to the next.
Even in the first line Norbert emphasizes how much goes unseen with cinematographical vision. With 40% of time in a time in a theater watching the "unperceived darkness" between still frames of a film, Bergson's argument, that motion occurs in the fractions between moments, becomes plausible. I read Doane's argument that the various shots do not add up to cinematic time and instead the gaps between the single frames. But I still do not really understand it. If man's technological vision is mathematical and calculated, then how can the NATURAL intermovemental pieces that were not captured add up to the MECHANICAL whole?
Another question that arose was with the Life of an American Fireman. The first of the 3 editing practices: repetition is used to show how what was once an unseen narrative realm becomes seen with the second out door view. But how is this vision complete? Yes it shows more than Edison's 50 foot short films, and is more complete technologically, but not realistically. Plus, in order to mimic the real, vision from only one angle is possible. Thus, from a more Bergsonian stand-point, editing through repetition and parallel editing takes cinematic vision even further from capturing real time. (But who ever said having a more complete, multi-perspectival view of some event was a bad thing?)
In Norbert's third paragraph, he discusses Deluze's opinion that the spectator creates movement in cinema by creating an intermediate image from a succession of photographs. This raised the question about how human perception works. Perhaps humans perceive movement in the same way that motion is produced in cinema - through the formation of an intermediate image from a series of still photographs. If this were the case, an object in motion would be captured by the eye as a series of instantaneous images along its trajectory. These images would travel to the brain, where they would be assimilated into an intermediate image that would mirror the way we think about motion.
Post a Comment