The Substance of Cinema

Abstract

shapes directly onto filmstrips, paradigmatically is. Currie judges that purely abstract film stands in the same relation to cinema as setting afire a canvas prepared for painting stands to painting.5 Such pyro-painting might have some artistic merit but it is not painting per se. Likewise, nonpictorial movies created entirely by nonphotographic techniques are not so much movies as they are multifarious things you can do with the cinematic apparatus.6 Cinematic art, on Currie's thesis, diverges from painting in that it is necessarily imagistic and ontologically precludes genuine abstraction, construed along the lines of nondepiction combined with lack of reference. This seems more a metaphysical assumption than a description. His thesis also implies that depictive but nonphotographic animation techniques-from manually scratching pictures into the film's emulsion to digital animation-are uncinematic for all their pyrotechnics. I wonder if he has not expelled too much art from cinema, and cinema from art. I suspect, as does Carroll, that Cur i takes the etiology of one sort of movie as defi ing cinema in general. Thus he misses the ontologically primitive commonalities of superficially different artifacts. Or so I argue below. Carroll realizes that choice of definitive causal conditions might say more about normative presuppositions regarding the nature of cinema than about the nature of cinema itself. His solution to this problem is anti-essentialist, ingenious, and big hearted. But I doubt it is successful. Stated roughly, Carroll identifies as cinematic any two-dimensional presented in a detached display, generated by a template technology, and produced by cinematic means.7 He takes pains, though, to dissociate imagery from depiction. Indeed, he prefers moving image for its wider application to pictorial works (made photographically or otherwise) as well as purely abstract ones (including those made by such heteroclite methods as editing together strips of clear and opaque leader).8 Display detachment concerns the way cinematic and other images perforce involve spatial dislocation.9 Just by looking at a movie of it, I cannot orient my body in the Grand Canyon's direction. Unlike windows, mirrors, and magnifying lenses, photographically-produced movie pictures do not connect us spatially with their depicta. Say I am watching a movie at a spatialtemporal location Li. Following Carroll, when a display, D, at L1 is a photographically (or nonphotographically) generated picture of some extra-cinematic referent, S, D is detached from S's own space-time location L such that I cannot orient myself bodily and in time relative to S merely by looking D-wards at Li. But what if I were watching closed-circuit, live images of happenings in the room next door? As Carroll notes, background knowledge of the imagery's connection to that room, not visual experience of the image, allows one to orient one's self spatially-temporally to those happenings.o A template is a physical storage, recording, exhibition, or transmission format by means of which a cinematic work is disseminated. When I watch The Player (Robert Altman, 1992), I could be viewing imagery produced from a DVD, videocassette, broadcast television signal, or 35mm film print. None of these items is identical to the work, The Player, though. The work consists of story, characterization, irony, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:28:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Ponech The Substance of Cinema 189 actors' performances, directorial decisions, and so forth-properties and events no traces of which are found within the template's molecules and electrons. Similarly, were my copy of The Player destroyed or the TV signal degraded, the work itself would not thereby be destroyed-only one particular token of its template. Moreover, screening the show requires I view a mechanical performance executed from this template. At a stage play, visiting a movie set, or attending a hockey game, I watch people as they perform their artistic or professional actions right before my eyes. When I view a play, film, or game on television or in a movie theater my proximal perceptual object, the detached display, results from something a machine is arationally doing in front of me. This mechanical performance facilitates my access to peoples' artistic and sporting actions, but it is not itself an artistic or sporting perform-