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Wilhelm Fink

Cinematography and the

Extended »Now«: From Bergson

to Video ArtElie During

Bergson’s famous analysis of the »cinematographic illusion« has often been criticized for missing the true nature of cin-ematographic motion. The paradox is that cinema for the most part seems to be a concrete realization of the Bergso-nian idea of »duration«, harnessing as it does the qualita-tive organization of temporal flow. Focusing on the cinematic representation of synchronous events helps us to understand the real problem Bergson actually wanted to address: not so much the artificial imitation of movement effected by the juxtaposition of discontinuous stills, but the presupposition of a global time illustrated, in the analogy, by the automa-tised mechanism by which film frames are run at a fixed rate across a beam of light. We will reexamine the issue in light of recent experiments by video artists such as VALIE EXPORT, Mark Lewis, and Christian Marclay.

The »cinematographical illusion«: Bergson

Bergson’s famous analysis of the »cinematographic illu-sion« underlying the common perception and conception of change has often been criticised for missing the true nature of cinemato-graphic motion. The paradox – pointed by Marcel L’Herbier, Béla Ba-lázs, Elie Faure, Jean Epstein, Sartre and more recently Deleuze –, is that cinema may rightly be described as a concrete realisation of the Bergsonian idea of »duration«, harnessing as it does the qualitative resources of the temporal f low in a way that challenges the primacy of the sensorimotor and optical organisation of space-time.1 In order to see this, one had only to turn to the doctrine of real movement (»mobility«) exposed earlier in Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896). Movement, Bergson explained, really unfolds in time, not in space. This bold thesis opened onto a very singular doctrine of the plurality of rhythms of duration within the evolving universe. It took Deleuze’s genius to realise that the cosmological implications of this doctrine could be the touchstone of a Bergso-nian re-evaluation of the whole cinematic experience. But this feat could only be achieved by moving beyond the scope of Bergson’s

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original criticism of the »cinematographic illusion«. When develop-ing his cinematographic analogy in the fourth chapter of Creative Evolution (originally published in 1907), Bergson had a precise target in mind: not so much cinema as we know it today – the art of mov-ing images –, as the particular mechanism at work in the projecting appliance known as the »cinematograph«2. In that respect, it is im-portant to remember that the cinematograph is in the position of a comparing element, not of an element being compared. The specific operation that Bergson brought to light in the cinematograph served as an analogon for a much more fundamental mechanism, that of an »inner cinematograph« which, according to him, directed our entire experience and thought of movement, down to its most elaborate constructions. Hence, reflecting on natural perception, Bergson ob-served that movement is spontaneously analysed in terms of the suc-cessive locations occupied by a moving object. The full expression of this tendency to strip out movement of its sheer mobility – to »spa-tialise« it as it were – is on display in the way motion is conceived and represented by physics, and this is of course what the whole analogy is ultimately about.

From that perspective, it is essential to bear in mind that the device described by Bergson in Creative Evolution is – as far as one can judge – completely automatised, with the hand surprisingly absent.3 This detail has not received much attention from commen-tators. In Bergson’s time, the dispositives available for the projec-tion of animated views were still massively hand-cranked. This is by no means peripheral. The nodal point of the analogy, what drives it from beginning to end, is the uniform character of the film run made possible by the automatisation of the apparatus. Bergson does not even need to mention the presence of a motor: the point is that the reels are set in uniform, continuous motion. This movement is »always the same«,4 indifferent to the variety of real movements re-produced on-screen. That is what the cinematograph is really about: not so much the discontinuity linked to the fragmentation of still frames and their »stroboscopic« (intermittent) reproduction at reg-ular intervals, as the artificial, seamless continuity of the uniform run, nowhere visible on screen but »hidden in the apparatus«.5 In fact, the neutralised duration of the underlying mechanism is the transcendental condition for the arbitrary cuts represented by the film frames. These would not make sense as photographic stills if they were not organised from the outset as a series, waiting to be ani-mated from outside. What the uniformity of the cinematographic

movement really stands for, in that respect, is the homogeneity of a time indifferent to what takes place in it, the empty form of repeti-tion acting as a connecting thread between every conceivable content. The cinematographic mechanism of thought similarly performs the extraction of a »single representation of becoming in general«6 out of the variety of effective becomings. Bergson states: »An infinite mul-tiplicity of becomings variously coloured, so to speak, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences of colour, that is to say, differences of state, beneath which there is supposed to f low, hidden from our view, a becoming always and everywhere the same, invariably colourless.«7

In the analogy of the cinematograph, the automated run of the reels analogises the positing of this becoming »in general«, an indefinite, undetermined becoming which is not the becoming of anything in particular but the universal medium of change. The passage that provides the key to Bergson’s philosophical montage states this idea very clearly: »The process […] consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinemato-graph.«8 And such is the illusion.

Frame-time

Again, Bergson’s concern is not primarily the one expressed in the often cited critique of Zeno’s paradoxes of movement – name-ly, the artificial composition of mobility out of immobile elements.9 What is at stake is the way the singular, differentiated durations that make up the variety of concrete becomings are collectively framed by positing an absolute and abstract time. The issue, then, is cosmo-logical in nature. It has to do with the way a multiplicity of temporal processes can be perceived as a whole, in extension. In that sense, the cinematograph illustrates the general operation of what may be called »frame-time«. It shows how a plurality of interlocking local durations can be considered together, in their simultaneous unfold-ing, without necessarily being counted as one.

Let us call »fibre-time« the concept of time instantiated by these local durations. A temporal fibre can be identified with the time-line of a process occurring in a limited neighbourhood of the world. From a qualitative point of view, it is characterized by a determinate

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each of

Cinematography and the Extended »Now«: From Bergson to Video ArtElie During

rhythm, a certain degree of tension of the duration associated with that process. Frame-time is what allows fibre-time to be collected in bundles. It can be characterised more precisely by two correlated op-erations. The first consists in bringing together temporal fibres in order to refer them to a global, common form of representation (ho-mogenisation). The second consists in laying out relations of simul-taneity across space (coordination). These two operations pertain to two related aspects of coexistence. In Bergson’s parlance, frame-time is what enables the problematic coexistence of f lows to be cashed out in terms of the coexistence of instants.10 As a result, the most hetero-geneous durations become commensurate: they are made to coex-ist in the form of the simultaneous. A given shading in the gradual transition from green to blue (qualitative change), a given step in the process of transformation of the flower into a fruit, of the larva into a nymph (evolutive change), a given phase in an activity such as drinking, eating, fighting (extensive change): all these metamorpho-ses, along with their corresponding durations, are extensively woven together at once, each appearing as a particular modulation of be-coming in general.11 This in turn allows the imagination to »freeze« duration and slice it into simultaneity planes, each of which provides a material realisation of the extended »now«. One can say such things as: »I rose up with the sun«, but also »The bird took off at the precise moment when I opened the window«, and the like. »Now« appears as wide as space itself, which is eventually confused with the true medium of coexistence.

What is the phenomenological significance of the cinemato-graphic analogy? Bergson’s point is that cinematographic movement is a movement without quality, a movement isolated from and indif-ferent to the plurality of real movements embedded in the projected images. As such, it must remain imperceptible. This is consistent with the fact that the time of physics is not primarily lived but con-ceived. But what about the phenomenology of film experience? My contention is that on this ground too there is something to be learned from Bergson, namely that there is no direct experience of the overall stream of images, unless it is confused with the concrete f low of the spectator’s consciousness acting as a substitute for ab-solute time. On that count at least, Bergson agrees Kant: we only perceive phenomena in time, not the process of time itself. In fact there is no such thing as the f low of time, or the passage of time in the abstract. Time is what essentially subsists, it does not change.12 The image of the line tracing itself should not mislead us: time may

well be represented by a line, it is itself essentially imageless. Yet again, time is not to be confused with »duration«. The former is the business of analytic and scientific understanding: its focus is on the abstract fact of succession and the possibility of establishing sim-ultaneity relations between distant events. The latter encapsulates the qualitative dimension of change, it concerns mobility – as an act, a progress in time – rather than movement – as a series of position occupied in space.

This does not mean, however, that one should not examine the interplay of local f lows of duration and frame-time. For there are many ways in which the frame-time can be refracted within the pro-jected image in order to yield a new image of time. Once it is agreed that there is no direct intuition of cinematographic frame-time, the question to ask is: how does the difference between frame-time and duration manifest itself in the cinematic image? The most obvious place to look at is the films or video works which manage to some-how circumvent the ban on the intuition of cinematographic frame-time by making room for an indirect representation of that time at another level. Several examples come to mind. One may think of Vertov’s staging of the editing table in a famous scene of Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Here, the director manages to make visible the very still frames that are supposed to make up the film being shown; but the way he achieves this is by stopping the reels and freezing the frames to insert an abrupt cut – or rather, by inter-spersing a shot in which this stoppage and this freezing are directly exhibited in the form of a didactic meta-commentary on the making of the film, thereby offering a nice illustration of cinematic »meta-lepsis«13. L’Homme à la manivelle (The Man with the Crank, ca. 1907), a gem of early cinema, does not even need to step out of the diegetic universe opened up by the film in order to reach a similar effect: in this short film, a hand-cranked camera manipulated by a facetious operator has the magical power of altering the pace of things at will. The trick classically relies on accelerated motion, it heralds the more sophisticated digital manipulation known as the »bullet-time« effect (because of its intensive use in The Matrix14, 1999). Douglas Gordon takes a different path with his anamorphosed rendition of Hitch-cock’s Psycho (24 hour Psycho, 1993): there, the erratic run of the original still frames is brought back to the surface and made visible by being considerably slowed down. Other examples would include the presence – and allegedly, the invention – of the countdown by Fritz Lang in Die Frau im Mond (1929), culminating in an emphatic

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Cinematography and the Extended »Now«: From Bergson to Video ArtElie During

»Jetzt!« – the intertitle standing for zero, marking off a moment of absolute simultaneity. One may also think of the running clock on display in the split-screen interludes punctuating the episodes of a series like 24. Clearly, displaying clocks or time-measuring devices within the frame is not enough: what is required in addition to the evocation of the insistent presence of global time in modern life, is a reference of some kind to the real time of the projection unfold-ing beneath the diegetic time of action or cinematic narration. The relation can be one of identity of durations (remember Cesare Za-vattini’s ideal of a film made from a single long take, describing one day in the life of a man), or else one of disruption, if not downright contradiction (as in the case of most pseudo-›real time‹ endeavours of the 24 type). Sometimes it is very subtle mix of the two. We shall see later how Christian Marclay achieves this in a virtuoso 24 hours montage aptly entitled The Clock.

Fibre-time

But let us come back once more to the cinematographical framing of time. This operation is best understood by contrast with another way of dealing with the multiplicity of durations – a solution which, although more painstaking, is better suited to the diversity of real movements and flows of duration. It points, as we shall see, to a vital component of the cinematic image. Considering the movement of a parade of soldiers, Bergson explains that one could »cut out jointed figures representing the soldiers, […] give to each of them the movement of marching, a movement varying from individual to individual«, and »throw the whole on the screen«,15 somewhat like in a shadow theatre.

This possibility – reminiscent of digital animation tech-niques – corresponds to a local or dynamic approach to our problem. In the language of physics, each line in the flow of movements could be described through a parameter of evolution. In space-time phys-ics, this corresponds to the notion of ›proper time‹, which provides an invariant measure of the concrete (causal) relation between events affecting a single portion of matter. The underlying distinction be-tween coordinate-time and parameter-time translates, on a purely quantitative level, the aforementioned distinction between frame-time and fibre-time. It points to two diverging approaches to tempo-ral matters, two ways of treating time as a dimension – or if one likes, as essentially measurable. These strategies can be described as local and global.16 The use of a time parameter amounts to conceiving

time as »flowing« along the trajectory described by the motion of a material system (itself ideally represented by a single point). The time coordinates associated with the time-axis, on the other hand, refer all local processes to a common notion of time, enabling simultaneity relations between distant events. One may say that the promotion of cinematographic time amounts in Bergson’s view to a shift from the local figure of time, surveying the nuances and inflections of change from place to place, to a global figure of time effecting the distribu-tion of time over space – a manoeuver that requires coordinating het-erogeneous durations by referring events to planes of simultaneity, or simultaneity »slices« (for example, maximal classes of simultaneous events, sharing the same time coordinate).

Since this analysis chiefly concerns the making of scien-tific time, and since, moreover, Bergson did not show much philo-sophical interest in the aesthetics of the moving image as such, one may still wonder in what sense his criticism of the cinematographi-cal mechanism can have any relevance to questions pertaining to the cinematic representation and production of movement. The answer depends on our readiness to adopt a Bergsonian perspective in ex-amining the fabric of time woven by the operations of the cinematic image. I say »Bergsonian«, and this is not necessarily to be taken as synonymous with »Deleuzian«. Deleuze, as mentioned earlier, em-phasised the not-so-original claim that cinema is a truly Bergsonian art, but by doing so he may have downplayed the significance of the cinematographic analogy in favour of other aspects of the doctrine. There is no point denying that Bergson’s conception of movement as the extensive manifestation of unfolding durations paved the way for an intensive exploration of the possibilities of the cinematic im-age in relation to memory and the nebulous states of the virtual. But wondering at the amazing resources of the »time-image« as a pur-veyor of purely spiritual movements should not spare us the effort of examining how the coexistence of durations is actually effected in relation to frame-time and its cinematic substitutes. As we shall see, most often the cinematic montage of durations involves both local and global time, in varying proportion. Linking the two in a unified form is by no means easy: it requires conjoined operations of deframing and reframing, synchronising and desynchronising. It takes the whole art of montage for frame-time to operate concretely on the plane of image. As Alain Badiou writes: »The technical in-frastructure [of cinema] governs a discrete and uniform unwinding, which it is the business of art to overlook. The units of cutting, like

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global

local

Cinematography and the Extended »Now«: From Bergson to Video ArtElie During

the shots or the sequences, are ultimately composed not through a time measurement, but in accordance with a principle of proximity, recall, insistence, or rupture. The real thinking of this principle is a topology rather than a movement. As though filtered by the compo-sitional space that is present as soon as filming begins, false move-ment, in which the idea is given only as passage imposes itself. We could say that there is an idea because there is a compositional space, and that there is a passage because this space offers or exposes itself as a global time.«17

Hence, it is the task of montage to foster a global move-ment, an effect of temporal course, and finally a global time result-ing from the meshing of myriads of local f lows and durations. The question we would like to raise is what part frame-time can play in this meshing of fibre-times, once it is acknowledged that the whole art of cinema is to conceal the mechanical movement involved in its technical infrastructure, in order to obtain what Badiou calls »false movements«. In the following, we would like to start unpacking this and related issues with reference to the works of three artists experi-menting with the cinematic image: Mark Lewis, VALIE EXPORT and Christian Marclay. Each of them may be said to reflect the ef-fectiveness of a particular strategy in achieving global time; each in-volves frame-time – or its substitutes – at some level.

Neighbouring space-times and distributed attention:

Mark Lewis

Airport (2003) and Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan (2005), two video works by Canadian artist Mark Lewis, provide a strik-ing illustration of what may be considered a strictly local approach to the constitution of global cinematic time. Frame-time as defined above seems indeed almost totally absent. Yet, as we shall see, in both cases a framing of some kind takes place.

Airport presents us with a lengthy (10:59 min) composi-tion of barely perceptible flows of duration associated with vehicles (airplanes, cars, carts, men) moving at various paces and in various directions across an apron [Fig. 1]. The whole scene is shot from an airport lounge: the activity taking place on the runway is contem-plated through overlooking bay windows which offer a panoramic and very pictorial view, while literally framing this multiplicity of movements as in a tableau vivant. The result is an abstract diagram of durations. The fixity of the camera is of course an essential ingre-dient in this long, mute take. After a while, our gaze stops focusing and allows itself to drift: figures dissolve or rather become indiffer-ent, the slowly moving patterns gradually lose touch with the ground, they seem to be floating across the image as particles of dust in the sunlight. It is as if the camera was strictly recording the interplay

1 Film still, from:

Mark Lewis, Airport,

2003.

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Cinematography and the Extended »Now«: From Bergson to Video ArtElie During

of kinetic intensities – minute differentials in speed, alternations of condensation and dispersion, tension and release –, in the same way varying shades and intensities of colour play against each other on the surface of a canvas. This, I believe, is not unlike what Bergson had in mind when thinking about pure movement – a movement sev-ered from something that moves, as well as from an underlying space. And yet the temporal span of the experience is somehow framed so that these neighbouring durations are finally brought together rather than left to their natural state of dispersion.

Granted, the operating principle behind this extensive weaving of durations remains uncertain. Christine Ross describes the window structure as »an interface between the frozen (hence more photographic) foreground and the active (hence more filmic) background«.18 The tension resulting from the conflicting tempo-ralities of these two media19 certainly plays a role in the slightly hypnotic and very effective montage of durations which Airport achieves in the lived present of the spectator’s gaze, and so does the »soft monochromic greyness of the whole, which endows the scene with an ethereal dimension«.20 All these factors, along with the state of unfocused attention mentioned earlier, »can be said to envelop the photographic and filmic tensions to provide a sense of duration to the scene«.21 Yet what makes it possible to speak of one overall sense of duration? It certainly does not hinge on any par-ticular movement exhibited within the frame. Nor does it involve an overarching camera movement, a pan or tracking shot, or even the kind of slow, almost sensuous breathing of the image induced by the reverse dolly shot in Brass Rail (2003).

Other works display more traditional techniques for or-ganizing the coexistence of heterogeneous durations. Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan gives up the game in its very title [Fig. 2]. This subtle composition consists in a three-fold deployment correspond-ing to three somewhat loosely connected peri-urban sites. The film lasts 4:28 minutes; constructed out of two different but seamlessly joined shots, it alternates sweeping camera moves and seemingly fro-zen frames exhibiting a variety of space-times, some of them folded or nested within each other – see the insect finding its way around a red plastic cup by a muddy patch filmed in close-up framing –, others merely juxtaposed in a disconnected fashion – the swamp, a parking lot, the landscape of what may possibly be downtown Toronto, a car parked by a warehouse space, a railway track. To which one should add the variety of movements occurring within the frames in these

successive settings: the insect’s erratic moves, a car strangely ma-noeuvring in reverse motion, shrouded by a cloud of dust, the smooth and slightly unreal translatory motion of a merchandise train, etc.

The interlocking or merely contiguous spheres of exist-ence involve incommensurable scales and motions, they differ in content and overall tonality, sometimes like night and day, dusk and morning. From the scale relations between the successive set-tings, one may infer the deployment of a foreground, middle ground and background, yet this does not really help making sense of this hybrid, disunified space. The fact that the film is shown in reverse is almost imperceptible, but it certainly fuels the overall sense of uncertainty that pervades this highly contrived composition. And since no all-embracing, embedding space is readily available to host the heterogeneous durations unfolding in these different milieus, the only way to go is to actually try and string them together piece-meal by moving – like insects or butterflies – across overlapping and yet seemingly disconnected neighbourhoods. The unlikely cohabita-tion of all these perspectives in a single take stands comparison with the multifarious animal worlds or Umwelten described by Jakob von Uexküll. The use of the pan shot brings to mind what Kracauer had to say about »cross-section« films such as Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 symphonic depiction of Berlin, the Großstadt22, except that in the case of Lewis’ Downtown the City has almost totally vanished as a unifying element, surviving only as a pictorial, photographic and even postcard-like reminiscence in the form of a cityscape placed in the background. The film happens to be shot at the outskirts of the city, literally in its fringes – a typical instance of »non-place«23. The question it raises is one of ecological and even cosmological magni-tude. It can be roughly put this way: in the absence of a ready-made embedding space – call it »nature« or »urban space« –, in what sense do these local durations belong to the same world? How can they be totalised, if not by connecting them one at a time? And what does it take to connect them, besides the camera moves (»pan, tilt and zoom«) and the natural montage effect obtained by sweeping across the motley scenery?

Mark Lewis himself does not offer any authoritative an-swer to the question of how to achieve a sense of global time on such premises, but he certainly shares a common concern with Bergson who acknowledged, besides the simultaneity of two instants, and anterior to it, the simultaneity of two or more f lows between which our attention »can be divided without being split up«.24 He writes:

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Cinematography and the Extended »Now«: From Bergson to Video ArtElie During

2a, b Film stills,

from: Mark Lewis,

Downtown: Tilt,

Zoom and Pan, 2005.

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Cinematography and the Extended »Now«: From Bergson to Video ArtElie During

»When we are seated on the bank of a river, the f lowing of the water, the gliding of a boat or the f light of a bird, the ceaseless murmur in our life’s deeps are for us three separate things or only one, as we choose. We can interiorise the whole, dealing with a single percep-tion that carries along the three f lows, mingled in its course; or we can leave the first two outside and then divide our attention between the inner and the outer; or, better yet, we can do both at one and the same time, our attention uniting and yet differentiating the three f lows, thanks to its singular privilege of being one and several«.25

Clearly, what Bergson is suggesting here is a method for reaching global time in a local manner, without framing. The unique capacity of consciousness to divide itself without splitting up, and more interestingly to unite and differentiate at once what falls within its field of perception, underlies what is sometimes called unfocused or distributed attention. Thus, temporal unification can be achieved in a local fashion, by patching together limited regions of space-time which our consciousness holds together and differentiates in the same stroke. Yet the limit of Bergson’s analysis, if one wants to ap-ply it to the cinematic experience, is that the temporal unity of the film itself cannot be entirely predicated upon the alleged unity of the spectator’s lived duration. For the latter is in turn continuously mod-ulated by filmic duration, and framed accordingly. So the logic of distributed attention must be pitched against the generic procedures by which cinema achieves new forms of temporal unification.

Cinema has often been described as that art which conju-gates the capture of unfolding movements in the sequence shot with the composition of parallel durations and simultaneities through the unlimited resources of parallel editing or cross-cutting. The f low of images on the screen, the f luidity of the tracking shot, bear a dialecti-cal relation with the disjunctive power of the cut and the underlying, virtual presence of the still-frame. But the truth conveyed by Lewis’ cinematic experiments, the particular tension it installs between the duration of the filmic and that of the photographic image, is that the operations of the long take and the tracking shot are themselves constantly challenged by the unresolved heterogeneity of the local durations they strive to string together, that the kind of temporal framing effected by the shot cannot be separated from a process of continuous »reframing« (Mitry) or »unframing« (Bonitzer) whereby the cinematic image can be said to embed a virtual infinity of con-flicting images. Attention does not split up, but it can rest in a state of prolonged dispersion.

In the midst of this dispersion, Mark Lewis manages to pic-ture or at least convey a fractured experience of simultaneity – the unlikely coexistence of the insect, the train and the dust cloud. He does this without immediately conjuring up the conception of the extended »now«, and yet here is a strange sense of global togetherness to the scene, a sense of simultaneity without synchronicity.26 »I am interested in thinking about how film might be able to inscribe dif-ferent times simultaneously in the same sequences of images«, Lewis writes.27 But can this be accomplished without framing in any sense? Does the film rely solely on the multiplicity of overlapping or discon-nected local »nows« captured by the pan, tilt and zoom? Despite the obvious cinematic dimensions of his productions, it is important to remember that Lewis is a video artist. When the global situation of his work is taken into account, one may suspect that the loop repeti-tion of a relatively short film, combined with the experience of wan-dering in the projection room, restores a sense of unity that acts as a substitute for frame-time. To conclude, one may want to side-step frame-time altogether through the disjunctive use of a shot cutting across an unresolved heterogeneity of coexistent durations. This procedure may well reveal the essence of the travelling shot. But the framing, as we have suggested, is bound to take place at another level.

Adjoined dislocations: VALIE EXPORT

Let us now turn to a more formalised version of the prob-lem. Adjungierte Dislokationen (1973), a piece by Austrian perfor-mance artist VALIE EXPORT, presents itself as a triple projection. Three separate sequences of images are juxtaposed in the space of a large rectangle: on the right, two superimposed 8 mm projections; on the left, a single projection equal in height to the ones on the right, in 16 mm. The large image reveals the organizing principle of the performance. The artist has strapped two cameras to her body, which functions as a mobile tripod: the first looks out straight ahead, from the level of her collarbone; the other is placed in the middle of her back, pointing in the opposite direction. These are the two 8 mm cameras whose footage is projected on the right part of the screen. At first, VALIE EXPORT walks about in an anonymous urban en-vironment: a city square, streets, the courtyard of a building; then through more bucolic surroundings, climbing the slope of a low hill, crossing a field, and so on.

The title of the work speaks of »adjoined« or »conjoined dislocations« [Fig. 3]. But what exactly has been dislocated here?

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The

t

Hence

Cinematography and the Extended »Now«: From Bergson to Video ArtElie During

The answer becomes obvious when, after a few minutes of split (or distributed) attention, the viewer realises that the overall feeling of simultaneity he naturally expected to obtain between the three im-ages is broken and dislocated in a thousand ways. First of all, the small image at the top right is not synchronised with the one below it; nor do the two images taken together seem to correspond in any systematic fashion to the large image on the left. The sense of dislo-cation becomes more pronounced as the film goes on. Apart from two or three moments of apparent coincidence or symmetry, there is no way whatsoever to reconstruct, on the basis of these queerly conjoined segments, anything like the sort of coherent sequence shot one might otherwise expect to obtain by combining the two small images and the large one to create an improbable 360° per-spective. »Dis-lokation« in this case also signifies that any attempt to reconstitute the continuous movement documented by these im-ages is hindered at each instant so that the overall features of the surrounding space, and indeed the form of time itself, the very sense

of a continuous route traced in space-time, ends up being hopelessly blurred. There is no way to recover the sense of an unfolding trajec-tory, with its particular rhythm of duration. In place of the expected effect of a global temporal course, one is left with a rhapsodic succes-sion of increasingly abstract shots, albeit with episodic synchronisa-tions and occasional points of reconnection.

Yet perhaps the most surprising thing about this montage is not so much the discrepancy or deliberate dislocation of the 8 mm shots in respect of each other as the relationship that they both enjoy with the larger image to their left. This larger view, one soon deduces, is filmed by a third camera that never appears in any of the 8 mm shots. In principle, this large image should be the key of the whole performance, and it does fulfil this function to the extent that it shows us how the exercise was carried out: it reveals, from an encom-passing vantage point that seems somehow to be exempt from the play of shifting perspectives – like a blind-spot –, the mobile site from which the smaller projections look out upon the world, in opposite

3a, b Film stills,

from: VALIE EXPORT,

Adjungierte Disloka-

tionen, 1973.

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Cinematography and the Extended »Now«: From Bergson to Video ArtElie During

directions. In that respect, it amounts to framing of the overall situa-tion. Yet the framing turns out to be merely formal: from a temporal perspective, it only emphasises the dislocation of simultaneities dis-played by the two smaller lateral views.

To conjoin forward- and backward-looking perspectives whose lines of sight never intersect, and then to f latten them, so to speak, by aligning them on the same plane – the wall of a gallery – is already a splendid idea, and by no means a simple one. But to re-late the progressive dislocation of the two smaller views to a blind witness-image, a central perspective that in reality witnesses noth-ing at all, apart from the performance itself, amounts to plunging the whole composition into a state of complete indeterminacy with regard to the ›natural‹ space-time coordinates of filmic experience. The cinematic journey, it would seem, remains utterly unframable. Cinematic perspectives do not fit together in any obvious way; glob-al time, absolute simultaneity, and the very sense of an extended »now« are irremediably absent, or at any rate relativized, just as in relativity physics.

Pseudo real-time: Christian Marclay

By contrast, Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour cinematic montage navigating across the multifarious landscape of movie culture, seems entirely guided by a principle of convergence that tends to smooth out temporal disruptions [Fig. 4]. The proto-col consists, very simply, in installing a more or less strict one-to-one correspondence between the time in the image (staged time, refracted through watches, clocks and the like) and the time of the

image (as indicated by the time-measuring devices available in the projecting room). In order to achieve this, Marclay and his crew collected clips from hundreds of different sources. »I see The Clock as a structural film«, Marclay writes. »I have 60 minutes to fill in an hour, and if a clock in a clip reads 5:06, I can only put the clip in that minute of that hour. It’s not a scientific clock, there is a little f luctuation – never more than a minute or so – although if I had for example two clocks with the seconds visible I couldn’t reverse the order of the clocks, so there’s a certain logic there. But a minute is a long amount of time in which many things can happen, so I could put a clip at the beginning or at the end or in the middle of the min-ute, and that position would be dictated by the action, and how the different narratives fit together. Certain actions can only precede others. In a way it was full of limitations.«28

Much has been written on the phenomenological aspects of the almost hallucinogenic experience of watching several hours of Marclay’s ›film‹, sometimes late in the night.29 The result is at once very effective and very intriguing from a formal point of view. The first thing to observe is that Marclay’s The Clock is itself a clock in a very literal sense, although not a very accurate one, as the artist acknowledges. The viewer’s attention is constantly drawn to the fact that events are unfolding not so much in ›real time‹ – at any rate in the usual sense of that expression, involving a continuous narra-tive thread whose duration is supposed to coincide with that of the viewer –, but in literal synchrony with the actual time of the projec-tion, the ›unwinding of the reel‹. Thus, every indication of time on screen (the glimpse of a watch or a clock face, the minute hand of a

4 Film still, from:

Christian Marclay,

The Clock, 2010.

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clock shown in close-up, the ringing of a bell, voices telling the time, etc.), matches the time the spectator can read off his watch. Such a correspondence involves more than a mere equality of durations: what the actual display of digits and clock readings are meant to convey is, more precisely, a sense of simultaneity – the simultaneity of instants, as Bergson would put it. Thus each frame of Marclay’s film seems to cry out »Jetzt!«, dramatizing the sheer evidence of an absolute »now« effecting at each moment the coordination of simultaneous lines of action – that is, coordinating them with one another and with the time of the spectacle itself. As Zadie Smith nicely puts it, »you don’t feel that you are watching a film, you feel you are existing alongside a film«.30

There is no doubt that the insistent recurrence of seemingly synchronised clocks within the image is instrumental in conveying the sense of an overarching global time virtually marking off every instant of the film experience, even though in most cases the specta-tor completely loses track of time after a while. In that respect, Mar-clay is right in claiming that part of The Clock’s seduction lies in the fact that the viewer’s »own time becomes part of the work«: »What cinema usually does is to transport viewers to a different or abstract time where everything is compressed and someone’s whole life can pass by in two hours. We accept that even though we know it’s an illusion, but in The Clock, when everything’s happening in real time, it’s an illusion that also enters into reality.«31 However, one cannot overlook the fact that the global framing effected by the cinematic clock required editing a huge amount of fragments which, considered in isolation, do not have anything to offer but hints and cues for a vir-tual frame-time that could only be actualised if the source-films were shown in full instead of being cut-up and spliced. In other words, the global frame-time attached to the film’s total run – the time that is so often described as ›real time‹ – turns out to be a complete artefact. Its presence is somewhat spectral: although its traces are disseminated everywhere, displayed in every shot, it is never shown in person, so to speak. Frame-time is really the result of a push-and-pull between two sets of limitations: those of universal time (the external time marked off by actual clocks in our environment), and those of the ac-tion, unfolding here in a multiplicity of disconnected narrative cells that are somehow fitted together in spite of their bearing a priori no relation to each other. To use a Kantian concept, what is at work here is an instance of free play between understanding and imagination. The inflexible measure imposed by universal time (global time) must

compose with the necessity of inventing creative bridges between non-measured, heterogeneous durations (local time).

In the end product, the movie-clips are so nicely knit and paced that the whole 24 hours feel like a real feature film, instead of presenting us with an utterly staggered, fragmented and dispersed time. Marclay cuts seamlessly through dozen of films and organises them in what appears like a single sequence. Thematic threads are suggested by relations of contiguity and resemblance, enhanced by shot reverse shot effects and occasional cross-cuttings between two or more sequences borrowed from different sources: guns or phones in one film meeting guns or phones in another, etc. All these tricks conspire in conveying a sense of overall continuity – and sometimes community – in spite of ceaseless jump cuts. In that respect, one might say that Marclay has invented his own variety of the »cinemat-ographical illusion«: an illusion of ›real time‹ superimposed upon a tapestry of local durations that never truly communicate beneath the network of analogies and counterpoint relations achieved through editing, yet somehow manage to sustain the continuous feeling of an overarching global flow. Fictitious as it is, this global framing proves effective; it accounts for the peculiar experience of viewing The Clock according to its own duration, as one single film. It is as if the gap between the invisible cinematographic frame-time and the motley fabric woven from innumerable cinematic temporal threads was be-ing performed at every minute at the surface of the screen; as if the screen itself was an interface mediating between external clock-time and internal cinematic duration. The result is at once captivating and unsettling. Time is not out of joint, it is f loating.

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Endnoten Endnoten/Abbildungsnachweis

22 See Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the Ger-

man Film, Princeton 2004, p. 182–185.

23 See Marc Augé, Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Lon-

don 1995.

24 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity (as note 11), p. 35.

25 Ibid. Italics are ours.

26 In that respect it is interesting to compare Lewis’ work with the dispersive spaces in-

stalled by Aernout Mik. 3 Laughing and 4 Crying (1998), for example, stages non-total-

isable and probably unframable multiplicities of wandering, inorganic affects. See Elie

During, Schockwellen – Zu 3 Laughing And 4 Crying, in: Leontine Coelewij, Sabine

Maria Schmidt (ed.), Aernout Mik – Communitas, Essen 2011, p. 11–16 [catalogue to

the exhibition »Aernout Mik – Communitas «, Jeu de Paume, Paris et al. 2011–2013].

27 Yilmaz Dziewior, Conversation with Mark Lewis, in: idem (ed.), Mark Lewis, exhibi-

tion catalogue Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg 2005, p. 58–66, p. 61.

28 Andrew Maerkle, Christian Marclay: The Clock, interview for ART iT, 12/24/2010, go to:

http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_feature_e/yvKBQHCwb9cmLxYnEO2l/?lang=en

[3/19/2013].

29 See Zadie Smith, Killing Orson Welles at Midnight. The Clock a film by Christian

Marclay, in: The New York Review of Books 58/7, 4/28/2011, go to: http://www.

nybooks.com/art icles /archives /2011/apr/28/ki l l ing-orson-wel les-midnight/

[4/30/2013].

30 Ibid.

31 Maerkle, Christian Marclay: The Clock (as note 29).

Abbildungsnachweis 1 Film still, from: Mark Lewis, Airport, 2003, Super 35 mm transferred to DVD, 10'59",

single screen projection. Courtesy and copyright the artist.

2a, b Film still, from: Mark Lewis, Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan, 2005, Super 35 mm

transferred to High Definition, 4'28", single screen projection. Courtesy and copy-

right the artist.

3a, b Film stills, from: VALIE EXPORT, Adjungierte Dislokationen, 1973, one 16 mm and

two 8 mm film projections, in: Joachim Jäger, Gabriele Knapstein, Annette Hüsch (ed.),

Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection. Films, Videos and Installations from 1965 to

2005, exhibition catalogue Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2006, Hamburg 2006, p. 65.

4 Film still, from: Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010, in: The Clock – Christian Mar-

clay, with a text by Darian Leader, exhibition catalogue White Cube, London 2010,

London 2010, no pagination.

1 Hence, as early as in 1924, Sartre could write: »Cinema provides the formula for a Berg-

sonian art. It inaugurates mobility in aesthetics.« Jean-Paul Sartre, Écrits de jeunesse,

ed. by Michel Contat, Michel Rybalka, Paris 1990, p. 389.

2 In fact, the cinematograph was first mentioned by Bergson in the 1902–1903 Collège de

France lectures devoted to »the history of the idea of time«, alongside other optical

appliances such as the magic lantern. In what follows I shall refer to Henri Bergson,

Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, London 1911.

3 I have elaborated on this point elsewhere. See Elie During, Vie et mort du cinéma-

tographe: de L’Évolution créatrice à Durée et Simultanéité, in: Camille Riquier (ed.),

Bergson, Paris 2012, p. 139–162; Elie During, Note on the Bergsonian Cinemato-

graph, in: François Albera, Maria Tortajada (ed.), Cine-dispositives. Essay in Episte-

mology across Media, Amsterdam 2013, forthcoming.

4 Bergson, Creative Evolution (as note 3), p. 330.

5 Ibid.

6 Bergson, Creative Evolution (as note 3), p. 324.

7 Bergson, Creative Evolution (as note 3), p. 321.

8 Bergson, Creative Evolution (as note 3), p. 322.

9 On this point I disagree with several otherwise excellent accounts of Bergson’s place

and significance within the context of early cinematic practices and dispositives. See

Maria Tortajada, Photography/Cinema: Complementary Paradigms in the Early

Twentieth Century, in: Laurent Guido, Olivier Lugon (ed.), Between Still and Mov-

ing Images. Photography and Cinema in the 20th Century, Herts 2012, p. 33–46; Ji-

mena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History, Chicago 2009; Mary Ann Doane, The

Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Cambridge,

MA 2002.

10 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobson, Manchester 1999, p. 36.

11 Bergson, Creative Evolution (as note 3), p. 320.

12 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B 225–226.

13 Gérard Genette, Métalepse, De la figure à la fiction, Paris 2004. The device whereby

the author manages to transgress the boundaries between narrative levels.

14 See Elie During, Is there an Exit from ›Virtual Reality‹?: Grid and Network from

Tron to The Matrix, in: Myriam Diocaretz, Stefan Herbrechter (ed.), The Matrix in

Theory, Amsterdam 2006, p. 131–150. On slow-motion more generally, see Elie Dur-

ing, Zeitlupen: Von Vertov bis Matrix, in: Emmanuel Alloa (ed.), Erscheinung und

Ereignis. Zur Zeitlichkeit des Bildes, München 2013, forthcoming.

15 Bergson, Creative Evolution (as note 3), p. 321.

16 In science, this distinction is indicative of a duality of tendencies, a difference in ori-

entation, rather than an incompatibility. On these questions, see Peter Kroes, Time:

Its Structure and Role in Physical Theories, Dordrecht 1985. This problem is at the

heart of Duration and Simultaneity (1922), the book in which Bergson addresses the

philosophical issues of relativity theory. It is no surprise that the cinematographical

analogy should find its natural place in that context (see chapter VI devoted to »space-

time«). Bergson’s contentious claim is that the purpose of the space-time presentation

of relativity physics is to set up a vast »cinematography of the universe«. See Bergson,

Duration and Simultaneity (as note 11), p. 108.

17 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano, Stanford 2005, p. 81

(modified translation).

18 Christine Ross, The Past is the Present: It’s the Future Too. The Temporal Turn in

Contemporary Art, London/New York 2012, p. 137.

19 Lewis’ video works are generally filmed in 35 mm before being transferred to DVD or

HD.

20 Christine Ross, The Past is the Present: It’s the Future Too (as note 19), p. 137.

21 Ibid.

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