realism and memory

a childhood in the 20th century will fade away like mist. This is what makes the Blade Runner films so poignant, 'like tears in the rain'

Will jpegs matter? Will the mass image make it possible to keep a snapshot of 2019? This too has a precursor in Blade Runner: the recovery of microscopic detail, the ability to catch what was around a corner at some moment in the past.

As Bazin said, realism can be an apotropaic against death, but that - as in RW Paul's 1896 Blackfriars film - will be transformed by those who cannot remember a horse-drawn London. The true miracle is the coincidence of picture and memory - this is what Barthes doesn't want to admit. We recall the dead as much from a handful of pictures as we do from life.

Poignant then, but are pictures worth recall for anyone but those who lived through the actuality? And for those who strive to forget . . .

The proximity of (social) realism and unrelentingness (as Eliza Cubitt reminded me) is witness to what we do not want to recall. Realism as apotropaic involves the opposite: it recalls beauty; but Realism as a school constantly evokes not memory but the future, a political goal based on sharing what has been, till now, hidden: ordinary life, as Watt argued, but also life (and death) as ordinary, and painful.

Faithful verisimilitude, scientific objectivity, social realism, are all at odds with phenomenological-affective sensuality and its inescapable nostalgia.

The question then is how certain techniques - pictorial and sonic realism - catch up all four programs of realism – and probably more.

Anecdotal Evidence (first pass)

The dominant models of truth (and knowledge more broadly) in the 21st century do not include anecdotes. Anecdotal evidence is down-graded in common parlance, current affairs, and the neo-liberal university. Data (especially 'big data'), statistics and (with exceptions) models are more trusted. The anecdote, as the prized tool of humanities research, should not be cast as an inherited practice whose archives should be protected: it should be valued as a uniquely powerful method (and site) of analysis and interpretation. At some future date I want to do this properly, with chapter and verse from key concepts like Geertz's thick description, looking back to the vicissitudes of testimonio in Latin American literature, poring perhaps over the use of exempla in early modern literature, and the place of the anecdote among the ancients. Here just the beginnings of a thought.

In an earlier post on happiness, I cited Adorno's principle that 'the greater good' is always a means to defer, displace and deny the happiness of the here and now. We could also mention Derrida's idea that an ethical act only occurs when there is no code of ethics operating to instruct us: when, that is, we have to act on our own resources in the face of a specific situation. Whatever the place of rules (such as the laws of physics or the statistical likelihood of a utilitarian benefit), both happiness and ethical action occur in unique moments. Tolstoy's principle (Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way) should also reflect that happy families have their own uniqueness. Humanities research concerns itself, at least in part, with the unique constellation of happiness and unhappiness, and the unique moments of ethical action. My model here is Bresson's Au Hasard Balthasar.

In law, witnessing calls up the untrustworthy character of the witness. The anecdote must be told. It involves
the event observed
the observation
the recounting
and the situation of the recounting – its position in arguing a case

Thus there is a degree of performativity in the anecdote, at least as much as there is indexicality: its truth concerns both fidelity to the event and the observation, and to the account (the aesthetic form) and the situation of the account. The anecdote concerns the event, recasting an old event in terms of its importance to a new situation, one where an evaluation or decision is in process of being reached. The anecdote has the power to move through time – this is its ontological ground as fidelity.

We might be better thinking of photography – especially cinematography – as anecdote, rather than as datum.

We might be better placed considering a cultural moment (Geertz's example of a wink) or an artwork as an anecdote, whose meaning – whose relation to both past event and present situation – is not permanently fixed, not because there was no initiating event to be witnessed, but precisely because there was.

sight and sound poll

one of the hardest things ever is choosing the best films ever made. Here's my desert island viewing.

Pyaasa - Guru Dutt

La Regle du Jeu -- Jean Renoir

Infernal Affairs -- Andrew Lau and Alan Mak

Closely Observed Trains - Jiri Menzel

The General -- Buster Keaton

Histoire(s) du cinéma - Jean-Luc Godard

Yellow Earth - Chen Kaige

Princess Mononoke -- Hayao Miyazaki

Mothlight -- Stan Brakhage

The Wild Bunch - Sam Peckinpah

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So many others: Les Enfants du Paradis, Scorsese's The Departed, Makaveyev's Swtchboard Operator, Scott's Kingdom of Heaven . . . Cinema at its best has a fundamentally Romantic attitude, as in Goethe or Wordsworth: the effort to reconcile science, perception and the heart that makes it the defining medium of the modern.

The Freeze Frame in Source Code

(excerpted from a talk at St Andrews about David Jones' film Source Code. IMdB notes the cameras used in the film, analog and digital. The passage starts considering the properties of one of those)

The Phantom HD has a specific function in film production: the maximum speed of the Panasonic film camera is 50fps, that of the Phantom 555fps, giving it the capacity to record extremely small timespans, and to give the illusion of extreme slow motion on playback. This is the kind of technique used for filming fireballs of the kind repeatedly shown in Source Code, and almost certainly for the freeze frame that occurs at the climax. It is impossible not to evoke Laura Mulvey's critique of the digital freeze here: ‘film’s original moment of registration can suddenly burst through its narrative time ...The now-ness of story time gives way to the then-ness of the time when the movie was made...’ (Mulvey 2006: 30-31). Though I cannot do justice to her argument here, let's think through the function of the freeze in Source Code. Colter (the protagonist) has finally worked out how to fill his eight minutes: capturing the terrorist, wooing the girl, and creating a community (as much like the sing-song on the bus in Capra's It Happened One Night as it is like Groundhog Day) at peace and enjoying itself. A few minutes later, he will call this 'a perfect day'. The perfect moment – coinciding with the crisis back in the world of his mortal body – is arrested, almost certainly using the extreme speed of exposure of the Phantom. And yet, even at these extreme speeds, the structure of the image is bound to the clock function of the chip. Looking carefully at the language Mulvey uses, we can emphasise something explicit in the digital mode: she speaks of the time when the movie was made. This is not a moment, not a Husserlian Augenblick, instantaneous and whole. It is, most specifically, an image which is non-identical. Quite apart from its delivery as DVD or BluRay digital scan, even in the cinema, this shot is ontologically incomplete, even as it tries to capture the perfect moment perfectly executed. It is exactly time, time which can only exist as change, that is in the processes in which things become other than themselves.

Afrika Eye

Simon Bright's extraordinary powerful and deeply-felt documentary on the decline of Robert Mugabe premieres at the Afrika Eye festival tonight in Bristol: gutted I can't be there, but look out for screenings at LSE (28 November) and hopefully in Winchester, and at discerning cinemas near you

Imitation of Life, Truth and the Turing Test

Douglas Sirk's 1959 film opens when two young widows, one white one black, meet with their daughters. Lora prefers her career as an actress to her daughter Suzie or her lover. Her profession is an imitation. Her new best friend Annie is an Aunt Jemima who sacrifices her own welfare become Lora's housekeeper and to raise Lora's daughter. Her own daughter Sarah-Jane longs to be white, passes as white. Love interest Steve is a photographer whose images are just images (in the opening scene he appears to be trying to forge Weegee's famous 1937 shot of crowds on the beach at Coney Island). He is the object of a teenage crush from Lora's daughter. The whole thing is recounted in startling Technicolor, then as now a byword for gaudy and fraudulent colour.

John Gavin, who plays Steve the love interest, was half Mexican but passes here as authentically American, all-American. He would in later life be appointed ambassador to Mexico by another actor, Ronald Reagan, of whose presidency Gil Scott Heron would sing "This ain't really a life, ain't nothing but a movie". The real-life daughter of Lana Turner, who plays Lora, killed Turner's lover, though the inquest found she acted in self-defense, to the incredulity of Hollywood insiders and conspiracy nuts ever since. Turner herself had been, only a few years earlier, the target of a vitriolic attack by DH Lawrence on the faux sexuality of the 'sweater-girl'. All characters in the film are played by people who are not the people we see on the screen. Sirk's Brechtian heritage (as Detlef Sierck he was involved in the political theatre of Weimar) is all over their stilted performances, and the distances between them, filled with the things which fill up the spaces in which the characters' lives are not lived.

The problems only begin here. The soi-disant "truth" is that Sarah-Jane "is" black; and that Lora should have married Steve, so preventing the ghastly crush her daughter has on him. That is, the only available truth which they imitate is that of race and the Oedipal family. (That Annie and Lora are both widows suggests the Oedipal role of the dead father; and the suspicion that the same man might have fathered both daughters . . . ). But the finale at Annie funeral reveals that the only Truth is Death, and that truth is fatal. Except that we survive, weeping in the audience: we for whom the entire charade has been played out experience an imitation of emotion. And of course there is no Death, only a staged funeral with no body in the coffin. And we know it (je sais mais quand même): the only available truth is a disavowal, merely a Romantic willing suspension of disbelief, a conspiracy to act as if there were a truth, veiled underneath the appearances, underneath the ideologies. Truth is a projection, one we project as much as the cinematic apparatus does.

Nine years before Sirk's film's release, Alan Turing set out the terms of the Turing test. An interrogator in a room separated from a machine and a person asks questions, the answers to which are to prove which of the two unseen competitors is human and which a machine. In the cinema there is nothing behind the screen, only a loudspeaker. Not even a voice. Not even a recording of a voice, which is on the optical soundtrack up in the projection booth over our heads and behind our backs. The richness of this hall of mirrors and the cynical reading of the melodrama of manners that it reflects persuades us that an (authorial) intelligence inhabits it. Sadly it is also a remake - of a 1934 film by John Stahl.

In Imitation of Life, all the humans alive and dead, onscreen and in the auditorium, fail the Turing test, and only the filmic machine passes.

ship shape

High point of an excellent conference in Bristol on cinema and colour, , Steve Neale discusses mise en scene and skin tones in the race discourse of Sirk's Imitation of Life. The freeze on the white roses in the funeral scene - which I have never managed to watch without weeping - as the central argument over race in the film. Steve as ever persuasive, innovative and precise.

Ghost Dog

It is no longer possible to live a Homeric life.

This statement needs immediate qualification: from Ulysses and The Cantos to O Brother Where Art Thou, the Odyssey talks to modern life. What is not available to us Europeans is the Iliad. The word 'warrior appears in writings of Edgar Heap of Birds and Jummy Durham. First People have claims to the heroic which colonisers do not.

In Jim Jarmusch's film Ghost Dog the central character tries to live a Homeric life in contemporary New Jersey, and is as doomed as Achilles as a result. But his death is only a death. It is not, like the deaths of Achlles and hector, glorious. It is only a death among others.

The absurd effort to live by the samourai way has its own honour. What is most attractive about the film is that Jarmusch, in Homer's place, is unable to describe the glory without irony.

Observe the parallel positions of Ghost Dog, an African American mob murderer seeking the authenticity of the Way, and Jarmusch as auteur seeking an authenticity in his ironic telling: the trope of carrier pigeons as a refusal of contemporary communication, in a film you can watch in all the usual formats.

What we have lost sicne Homer is not presence. It is the authenticity of communication. Socrates was right to this extent: Homer stood in the ranks, bloodied and cruel. Many have stood in the same place, biut have not told us in the language of Homer. Most have been reporters, and wrote in the language of cliché. Homer had the luck of writing in an age when clichés could draw on a common speech which drew on telling nin all its dimensions: lexicon, syntax, metrics, narration. It is this mediation that Ghost Dog cannot access: his incommunicative milieu underlined by linguistic difference.

Authenticity demands not eye-witnessing but a worthy medium. Ghost Dog is a great movie because it reaches towards that state of a medium capable of heroism, only to recognise – with due modesty – that it is incapable of achieving it.