THE DISPOSABLE CAMERA: IMAGE, ENERGY, … Disposable Camera: Image, Energy, Environment ......
Transcript of THE DISPOSABLE CAMERA: IMAGE, ENERGY, … Disposable Camera: Image, Energy, Environment ......
THE DISPOSABLE CAMERA: IMAGE, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT
by
Nadia Bozak
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Nadia Bozak 2008
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The Disposable Camera: Image, Energy, Environment
Nadia Bozak
Doctor of Philosophy
Comparative Literature University of Toronto
2008
Abstract
“The Disposable Camera” theorizes the relationship between the cinematic image and energy
resources. Framed by the emergent carbon-neutral cinema, the recent UCLA report on the film
industry’s environmental footprint, as well as common perceptions about digital sustainability,
“The Disposable Camera” posits that cinema has always been aware of its connection to the
environment, the realm from which it sources its power, raw materials and, often enough, subject
matter. But because the natural environment is so inextricably embedded within film’s basic
means of production, distribution and reception, its effects remain as overlooked as they are
complex.
“The Disposable Camera” argues that cinematic history and theory can and indeed ought
to be reappraised against the emerging ascendancy of environmental politics, all films; as such,
all cinema could logically be included within the analytical parameters of this project. Primary
focus, however, is given to documentary cinema, as well as notable experimental and narrative
films. Selected texts do not overtly represent an environmental issue; rather, they reflexively
engage with and theorize themselves as films, thus addressing the technological, industrial, and
resource-derived essence of the moving image. Of import here are films that reveal how specific
formal or aesthetic choices evidence and critique the ideology attached to resource consumption
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and/ or abuse. While it composes a distinctly environmental trajectory of the cinematic image,
this project likewise historicizes and critiques these same stages and also challenges the utopian
and/ or apocalyptical tendencies challenging eco-politics. Additionally, “The Disposable
Camera” is committed to mapping out the shift from a distinctly tangible celluloid-based
cinematic infrastructure to the ostensibly immaterial form of digital filmmaking. Indeed, the
tension that now pits cinema’s material past against its immaterial future corresponds with the
decline of natural reality on the one hand and the rise of cyber realities on the other, a parallel
condition that fully evidences the increasingly palpable overlap between environmental and
cinematic politics.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Energy 20
Chapter Two: Resource 84
Chapter Three: Extraction 144
Chapter Four: Excess 202
Chapter Five: Waste 259
Conclusion 319
Works Cited 323
Filmography 331
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Introduction: Cinema Neutralized
Industrialization, mass-production and the reproduced image, as Walter
Benjamin’s famous essay maintained, are mutually informing social determinants. Even
before the explicit need surfaced, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” set the foundations necessary to connect cinema, the environment and the
global citizen. Take, for example, Benjamin’s evocation of Paul Valéry. The poet and
philosopher contributes to Benjamin’s arguments by expressing the possibilities inherent
in the velocity of technological change, while for the contemporary reader he also
predicts and encapsulates – and in very literal terms – the conditions that determine
industrial resource-based images and the image-culture their profusion has engendered.
As Valéry wrote, and Benjamin quotes, “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought
into our homes from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we
shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear with a
simple movement of the hand” (219). Arguing that mass production at once democratized
the image and aestheticized politics, Benjamin’s focus is on the terms of a work of art’s
reproduction and transmission and, specifically, the ways in which these processes dictate
aesthetic parameters and reception, finally contributing to the political organization and
ideological ordering of society at large. But before these dimensions are explicitly
registered, the terms and ideologies embedded in the very systems that produce,
reproduce, transmit and receive the work of art and/or image must first of all be identified
and accounted for. Indeed, what are the basic terms that facilitate mechanical image
production and reproduction? By what process are such images received? With “a
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minimal effort,” it was and is still assumed, thanks to the energy resources such as gas
and fuel and electricity that were in Valéry’s 1930s being mainlined into the home. Of
immediate importance here is, first, that Benjamin foregrounds how the terms of industry
are embedded in the image itself and, second, that, as Valéry foresaw, having access to an
image supply, which also means tapping into a hidden industry, has long been as
thoughtlessly simple as receiving water, gas and electricity. But, as the limitless
availability of such resources is radically challenged, the question that emerges, and with
some urgency, is how this will affect not only industry and culture in general, but the
image industry and image culture in particular.
The image, cinematic, photographic, digital or analog, is not only inseparable
from the politics and culture of resource extraction and therefore the environment, it is
now virtually inseparable from the current environmental movement and the broad
agenda of forging a new eco-conscious society. Emphatic it is, then, that former US Vice
President Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his commitment
to educating global citizens about the earth’s mounting environmental imperilments. The
prize, to be shared with the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
is the second major award that Gore has received of late – An Inconvenient Truth, the
film based on his lecture tours, was recognized as Best Documentary Feature by the
Academy Awards in 2006. Notable too is that as the film’s popularity has continued to
escalate, Gore has begun to recruit volunteers who tour their immediate geographic area
and present on his behalf. An Inconvenient Truth confirms, as does the steady rise of
environmental documentaries (many of them now replete with large budgets, Hollywood
producers and celebrity participation), that the image and digital technology (from DVDs
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to internet forums to the operating logistics of Gore’s PowerPoint slide show) is proving
an auspicious way to educate and agitate, and ultimately spur into action, a global
population that is not just sprawling or divergent, but represents every conceivable
difference. Indeed, because the environment and its problems are seemingly all-inclusive,
how else to target and inform its citizens about what can be a complex scientific issue if
not through visual media and the penetrating appeal of the moving image specifically?
Engaging the universal problem that is climate change requires a universal language. As
such, An Inconvenient Truth might ideally represent a significant moment of cultural
dissemination, where every citizen is targeted, inclusive of social strata or ethnicity, and
is then mobilized to respond to, if not alter, the hastening conditions of global warming.
The digital democracy makes this ambition wholly possible – or at least in those specific
realms where the image is, in Valéry’s terms, as cheap and available as water or
electricity.
So it is that the import of An Inconvenient Truth resides less in the nature of the
film or the particulars of Gore’s idealized agenda than in the way that it exemplifies how
digital technology, cinema, and ecological politics are yielding a long-coming
convergence. It is becoming easy to see how the rise of digital cinema (otherwise known
as the digital democracy) finds a parallel in the decline of natural realities; moreover, that
they are direct correlates and thus mutually inclusive is less than patent. And yet what
does digital technology, indeed all technology, represent if not the processes of
industrialization which continue to perpetuate the myriad problems that come with global
warming? As such, the cinema and the image, like any other facet of our culture, simply
cannot (as yet) unplug from the energy economy that is both the means and ends of
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current human existence. But, as the popularization and politicization of digitally
rendered and often independently produced documentaries attests, the digital mode of
expression and communication that is the pinnacle of industrialization might also play an
integral role in challenging our culture’s pernicious ecological habits. Indeed, Gore’s film
has been more than successful in its ability to reach, communicate with and ultimately
convince a sizable demographic of the importance of his message, however factually
flawed its content might be. And yet however sophisticated digital’s technology becomes,
and however politically affecting as a result, it remains plugged into a turn-of-the-century
system of energy generation so outdated it should long ago have been declared, like the
commodities it has yielded, not just thoroughly inadequate and antiquated, but obsolete.
Notably, the internal combustion engine has also not changed significantly since its
standardization: as a result, the average car sold in the US today yields under 20 miles to
a gallon of gasoline, less than the ninety-nine-year old Model T Ford did in its heyday
(Kolbert 90). So long as it remains mobilized and energized, the cinema will be
inextricably connected with these same unsustainable systems of resource consumption
and energy production. As such, beyond the obvious politics of representation found in
such eco-conscious films as An Inconvenient Truth, cinema is, and has always been,
environmentally determined and determining; and, once this is recognized and harnessed
responsibly, cinema – all cinema – can be seen as an ecological practice and ecology
equally as a cinematic one.
What Susan Sontag in 1973 called the “ecology of the image” concludes On
Photography; this concept resonates with fresh significance, not only as it overlaps with
the current ascendancy of eco-consciousness, but also because her ecological analogy
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confirms that behaviour towards the image has direct impact on conduct in everyday life.
The glutted, flooded image economy, Sontag argued, ought to be reined in and restrained;
in its place an ecology would be installed, premised on limitation and appreciation rather
than unbridled consumption and, therefore, image devaluation. But, as she argued three
decades later in Regarding the Pain of Others, such mandated responsibility is idealistic
and therefore unattainable. And yet the larger point remains, namely, that how we see and
appreciate the image depends first of all on how many images we are exposed to. The
ethics that attend the image are the same as those that determine behaviour towards any
commodity or resource, informing the consumer as to whether it is useful or useless, to
be retained or wasted.
But what does this mean in practical terms? In The Death of Cinema, Paolo
Cherchi Usai argues, not unlike Sontag, for a “moral image.” The preservationist
contends that, paradoxically, the cinema is indeed threatened with death, but only
because it is thriving. In other words, the overabundance of images that the digital
firestorm has engendered deprives the image of its uniqueness and thus diminishes its
cultural, historical and ontological value. It is the responsibility of the individual to view
images selectively, therefore, and thus to resist our culture’s dominant instinct to over-
indulge. But considering the hastening rate of global warming and the rapid erosion of
the earth’s ecological totality, limiting image consumption might not be a choice but
rather an imposition. US President George W. Bush has at least nominally eased his
decidedly regressive stance on environmental politics and acknowledged the reality of
global warming; similarly, even the usual skeptics are beginning to concede the fact that
the world is facing an oil crisis. Indeed, what is now debated are the timelines of crisis,
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the quantity of resources that do remain, and, unless alternative energies are introduced
and expansively implemented, just how long it will be before post-industrial culture shuts
down, burns up, or succumbs to famine. Of course, the tenor of fear that accompanies
environmentalism and its politics ought to be subjected to productive critique, but to
invest time and energy in further theorizing the probability of environmental disaster is
nothing less than a privileged indulgence in cynicism. Indeed, as the recent fires in
Southern California and the flooding in Mexico attest, though its doses are as yet
manageable, its temper more measured than popular consciousness might imagine,
disaster is already upon us. The question of present focus is as broadly political and
cultural as it is expressively cinematic and ecological and can be formulated as such:
what does the planet’s tenuous ecological future mean for cinema and/or image making,
as a technology, an aesthetic and our culture’s dominant means of mass communication?
During the question and answer period following the panel discussion on
sustainable or carbon-neutral filmmaking at this year’s Planet in Focus Film and Video
Festival, a documentary filmmaker, citing the very sharp increase in oil prices, presented
a direct challenge to the panelists and their assorted efforts to ecologize film production.
As the documentarian argued, and with palpable emotion, an oil crisis is too imminent
(his figure was thirteen years) and its promised fallout too thorough and damaging to
justify the panacea that sustainable production practices represent. Indeed, with
transportation and electricity suddenly unavailable, the filmmaker claimed, human
culture will implode and the panelists’ collective eco-conscious mandate will no longer
matter. After a stretch of silence, the lone and particularly resonant response came from a
freelance environmental advisor who asked, somewhat rhetorically, given the calamitous
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terms thus outlined, would not filmmaking be the first thing to go? Indeed, will not a full-
blown energy crisis and/or environmental disaster simply deem the cinema expendable?
Though a clear answer was not forthcoming, it might have reasonably been a reluctant
yes; but only if the cinematic image is assumed to be a luxury and not a cultural necessity.
This exchange between the documentary filmmaker and the carbon neutrality advocate
frames the problems that “The Disposable Camera” intends to address: namely, assuming
it is an essential means of communication, education and socialization, can we really
dispense with film? If, indeed, film is a necessary medium, the question must be
reformulated, and we should ask instead how film can avert its own disaster and learn to
exist without resource-dependence. How, then, can cinema separate itself from
conventional means of energy and resources? Can film exist without film, its resource-
bound support surfaces and infrastructures? Responding to these questions does not
require speculation so much as retrospection. Assuming an environmental framework by
which to regard film theory, history and practice, precedents and models emerge that
make an autonomous and sustainable cinema not just a possibility but a reality. The
digital democracy is of tremendous significance here, for it is at this moment, when
digital cinema has as yet been fully consolidated, that it could be reconfigured into a truly
“film-less,” self-sufficient and ecological mode of expression and communication. As it
is, however, digital technology is merely contributing to the problem, and further
entrenching patterns of resource saturation and over-consumption which are, arguably,
the root cause of environmental depreciation. But, when the crisis comes, what if cinema
does not have a plug to pull? Would this mean that the world has already solved its
energy problems and the point is no longer relevant, or would it mean that the cinema
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would provide culture at large with a model for ecological practice and responsible
environmental behavior? The problems that digital technology possesses (system failure,
the precariousness of archiving, continual format migration, the disappearance of “born
digital” information, the electronic waste epidemic) proves that the digital is as yet fragile
and, therefore, malleable, capable of transformation.
After oil refining, the production of motion pictures is Los Angeles’ worst
environmental offender. Such is the conclusion reached by UCLA’s Institute of the
Environment’s “Southern California Environmental Report Card” for 2006. The report
includes an assessment of the film and television industry’s (FTI) direct and indirect
contribution to environmental pollution in the US, in California and in metropolitan Los
Angeles in terms of pollution generation, energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions
and hazardous waste production. Weighing the impacts and practices of five other
dominant industries (aerospace, apparel, hotel, petroleum refining and semiconductor
production) against those of the film and television sector, the report sought to “provide
estimates of chemical emissions in specific categories (air pollutants and greenhouse gases)
associated with FTI activities”; to draw attention to examples of “beneficial practices
adopted by the industry to manage environmental impacts”; and to “review the
industry’s major trade publications to gauge the level of attention being paid to
environmental issues.” Finally, the report provided the FTI a “tentative grading” (the
industry as a whole earned a “C”) which intended to reflect “the achievements, and
remaining obstacles, in reducing the environmental impacts” of what it calls the “complex
enterprise” of moving image production (5). The FTI section of the UCLA Report Card is
derived from a much more extensive document, “Sustainability in the Motion Picture
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Industry,” produced in 2006 for the Institute by California’s Integrated Waste
Management Board. The authors of the CIWMB report, Charles Corbet and Richard
Turco, acknowledge certain limitations within their methodology and caution that their
findings are tentative. The geographical boundaries of the study, for example, were
confined to a 30-mile radius in metropolitan Los Angeles, the “most heavily filmed area
in the world” where 75% of all film and television production takes place (23).
Nevertheless, Corbet and Turco manage to conclude authoritatively that “the main
environmental impact of the motion picture and television industry is associated with its
energy usage” (19). Notably, the authors write that what mattered less to their evaluation
were “visible” streams of environmental impact, such as solid or hazardous waste, for
these, they argue, have already received attention within the industry, evidenced by
certain reduction and recycling initiatives duly noted in their report. But energy
consumption, they write, is mostly intangible and invisible. It thus achieves its
significance when “aggregated over the many individuals and firms active in the
industry” who engage, for example, in profligate amounts of generator use or vehicle
driving and idling during production (19). Indeed, what motivated the Institute of the
Environment at UCLA to commission the report was to make visible the fact that film
and television production is indeed an industry and that it is, therefore, dependent on a
complex series of environmental relations.
The UCLA Report Card is consistently referred to by carbon-neutral film
initiatives and organizations (Greencode Project, the Planet in Focus Film Festival, Green
Screen) which also assume as role models those films noted in what Corbet and Turco
call their “Best Practices” section. The conventional example is Roland Emmerlich’s The
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Day After Tomorrow, a film that grossed $186 million, had a budget of $125 million, and
boasted one of the highest box-office sales of films released in the US in 2004 (Corbet
and Turco 36). Because its plot engages the fallout of abrupt climate change, director and
co-writer Emmerlich sought to ensure, first, that production “would not be inconsistent
with the film’s message,” and, second, to “prevent the film from contributing to global
warming” (36). So it was that Emmerlich contracted with Future Forests, a carbon-offsets
provider which planted trees and/or invested in “climate-friendly” technology to
counteract the CO2 emissions generated by the film’s production (149). (Depending on
the level of purchase, emissions can be partially offset or completely “neutralized.”)
Future Forests estimated that the “10,000 tons of CO2 emissions generated by The Day
After Tomorrow would cost $229,000 to offset (37); notably Emmerich paid for this
personally and “no mention is made of 20th Century Fox being involved or publicly
supporting Emmerlich’s decision to make this film carbon-neutral” (37). Stephan
Gaghan’s Syriana (2005) is a more recent carbon-neutral film. Encouragingly, the actual
film company rather than the private producer paid the $24,500 required to offset 2,040
tons of CO2 (38). A questionable practice on several levels, carbon offsets purchasing is
criticized for being little more than a means for industry and corporations to absolve guilt
or fulfill mandated obligations instead of systemically changing detrimental practices,
thus further entrenching patterns of consumption directly responsible for resource
depletion and environmental degradation. But perhaps this critique overlooks a certain
inherent complexity, for purchasing carbon emission credits seems a direct solution to a
problem that is, of course, defined as much, if not more, by the state of the future rather
than that of the present. But though the moment of absolution might be scorned as the
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moment of commercial transaction, direct, immediate, but ultimately fleeting, the carbon
offsets economy can be credited for thinking beyond our earth’s current geological
moment. Because of the amount of time required to replace forest or develop and
implement solar technology, for example, the offsets initiatives which the film and
television industry finances are at least implicitly demonstrative of a challenge to the
entrenched anthropocentric sensibility that takes for granted the durability of the human
epoch. Popular environmental awareness seems to be coming to terms with a geologically
broadened awareness of time. Post-anthropocentric thinking reconsiders time, and the
planet, without including ourselves; the carbon-neutral project might then exemplify how
time is more readily conceptualized in terms of the planet’s lifespan and not, for example,
the film director’s. That the introduction of such a radical conceptual shift is found in
filmmaking is further confirmation that cinema is an ecological practice which is, in turn,
culturally and socially determining.
Acknowledging the shortcomings of ecological commerce, the report goes on to cite
industry case studies demonstrative of environmentally responsible behaviour. The most
interesting is Re-Use People, a non-profit organization that dismantles and recycles film
sets. Pointing to the immense resource consumption and resultant waste typically
generated by a big-budget film, the report explains how the two Matrix sequels, both
released in 2003 (excessive in itself), were shot on three separate sets as well as on the
streets of Oakland and Alameda Point. One set was constructed out of “90 tons of
material, wood and polystyrene blocks”; a second consisted of 300 tons of material,
representing 8 building fronts”; while a “freeway set consisted of more than 7,700 tons of
concrete, 1,500 tons of structural steel and 1,500 tons of lumber” (50-51). Summoning
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terms of praise, Corbet and Turco declare that as a “result of a joint project between
Warner Brothers, the city of Alameda, the Alameda County Waste Management
Authority, and The ReUse People, 97.5 percent of all the set material was recycled” (50).
And yet, as illustrative as these examples are of the film sector’s shifts towards ecological
balance, the report remains objective, if not neutral, and so resists levying critique or
suggesting further modifications. Indeed, UCLA’S report (and its CIWMB source) is
premised on the current mainstream film industry being a viable model, so it takes for
granted that in order to render cinema an ecological practice, and ecology a cinematic one,
one must heed those examples of sustainable filmmaking that are already, and often in
spite of themselves, extant. But now, more than ever, cinema exceeds the conventional
Hollywood model. What is more, it is not just the producer that must be held accountable,
but also the consumer. Digital democracy, for example, is still in the midst of radically
altering the film industry; indeed, what its democratic dimension implies is that images are
increasingly produced and circulated independently, by the individual, transforming the
consumer into the practitioner and vice versa. The glaring omission in the report is the
role of the consumer of film and television, and particularly as digital technology
continues to transfer the power and responsibility of production and distribution onto the
private individual. As Michel de Certeau has argued, the conventional association between
consumption and “inertia” perpetuates the opposition between an elite set of producers
and a passive mass of consumers. Indeed, the consumer/producer distinction, or lack
thereof, weighs heavy with political associations. The intention here is not to engage the
large and heated debate about consumerism and consumer movements, but rather to
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distinctly use the terms as a way to describe the way in which the image is produced and
consumed by users in general.
Taking the hermeneutics of reading as an example, de Certeau maintains that the
everyday encounter with texts (written or imagistic) is anything but neutral. Rather, as
each reader and each reading produces a text unique from its author’s intentions, such acts
of culture and/or information reception are inherently creative and active. Such recognition
liberates the so-called non-producer and ultimately destabilizes the binary opposition
between production and consumption, bestowing agency (and responsibility) upon the
heretofore inert consumer (167). Ideally, then, digital democracy hastens just such an
upending of social and political stratification, and particularly so when accompanied by
an eco-politics which likewise turns the producer into the consumer (of resources or,
alternately, of carbon offsets) and the consumer into the producer (of image-resources,
carbon emissions, e-waste and other forms of environmental residue). What is more,
consumers of images are a collectivity, a mass. Add to this the fact that, though digital
technology might encourage social withdrawal, in its ideal form it is a tool of civic
connectivity. But again, independent consumers and producers of images, even if they
gather as a collective and purchase significant amounts of carbon-offsets, still perpetuate
the loop of commerce and consumption. Altering the detrimental habits of everyday life
rather than erasing their wake is surely a more sustainable choice. So, while carbon
emissions trading is a potentially important part of minimizing global warming, more can
be accomplished by altering routine patterns of resource consumption, and by reducing
reliance on mechanized transportation such as the automobile (Saunders 54). And is not
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the cinema also a form of mechanized mobility? According to the ecology of the image,
cinema – as a necessity and a privilege – ought to be conserved, its energies cached,
reserved for when its dissemination capabilities are needed, if not demanded.
But what such conservation endorses is nothing radical or new, rather it simply
reformulates the daily living requirements (rather than the lifestyle choices) of most
global citizens. This highlights, first, being able to choose not to drive is now as much an
indication of privilege as being able to purchase one commodity (a carbon credit) in order
to neutralize another (an airline ticket) and, second, that models of so-called sustainable
living are already in existence. Likewise, theorizing the cinema as an ecological practice,
and ecology as its cinematic correlate, finds precedents not only within the history of
cinema but also in some of its current (perhaps less privileged) applications, as well as in
other modes of expression, such as painting, photography, philosophy, literature and,
indeed, in the very act of seeing. Reevaluating these modes and moments in the history,
theory and practice of the cinema demonstrates how cinema and the image have always
been environmentally determined (and determining) and also how film, like life, can be
more proactively or intentionally ecological.
Throughout the chapters that follow, some of the more invisible or indirect
relationships between the image and the environment are considered. Ultimately “The
Disposable Camera” posits that cinema has always been aware of its connection to the
environment, the realm from which it derives its power, raw materials and, often enough,
subject matter. But because the natural environment is so inextricably embedded within
film’s basic means of production, distribution and reception, its effects remain as
overlooked as they are complex. This project’s intention is to theorize the intimate and
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often invisible relations between the consumption of natural resources and film’s
ontological, aesthetic and political dimensions. Because “The Disposable Camera”
argues that cinematic history and theory can and, indeed, ought to be reappraised in light
of the emerging ascendancy of environmental politics, all films, all cinema, could
logically be included within the analytical parameters of this project. Primary focus,
however, is given to documentary cinema, as well as notable experimental films, certain
narrative features, as well as examples (photography and installation art) that are not
conventionally cinematic. Selected texts do not overtly represent an environmental issue;
rather, they reflexively engage with and theorize themselves as films, thus addressing the
technological, industrial, and resource-derived essence of the moving image. Of import
here are films that reveal how specific formal or aesthetic choices (the duration of a take,
the amount of natural light that is used, the stasis or activity of the camera) reveal and
critique the ideology attached to resource consumption and/or abuse.
As it is modeled after one of its core texts, Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a
Movie Camera, this project, like Vertov’s film, employs a determinedly materialist
methodology. Chapter divisions, for example, correspond to select conceptual and
practical procedures that transform resources (light, film stock, labor) into the cinematic
image and, ultimately, now, the expendable digital image – companion to the disposable
(digital) camera. But while it composes a distinctly environmental trajectory of the
cinematic image, this project likewise historicizes, theorizes and critiques these same
stages and also challenges the utopian and/ or apocalyptical tensions produced by the
polarizing tendencies of eco-politics. Additionally, “The Disposable Camera” is
committed to mapping out the shift from a distinctly tangible celluloid-based cinematic
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infrastructure to the ostensibly immaterial form of digital filmmaking. Indeed, the tension
that now pits cinema’s material past against its immaterial future corresponds with the
decline of natural reality on the one hand and the rise of cyber realities on the other, a
parallel condition that fully evinces the increasingly palpable overlap between
environmental and cinematic politics.
Chapter One, “Energy,” considers the cinematic image as fossilized light, thus
practically and metaphorically equating cinema with the geological dimensions of the
naturally derived fuels (fossilized sunlight) that continue to enable industrial society and
culture. This chapter engages with Bazin’s theory of the mummy complex and,
specifically, the ideal image as an unmediated inscription of reality and embalming of
time. The films included here are ones that reveal the cinema’s essences (energy, light,
motion) through their pronounced absence. From Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Sans Soleil,
to Lev Kuleshov’s experimental “films without film,” these films exemplify an entropic,
“sunless” cinema and are the pillars of what might be considered a distinct body of post-
cinematic filmmaking. The relationship between the natural resource and the image
resource frames the concerns of Chapter Two, “Resource.” While interrogating digital
democracy’s roles and contributions to the war in Iraq, this chapter focuses on
establishing the cinematic image as a material resource that is converted into political and
ideological weaponry. The centralizing argument here is that the war over oil finds a
counterpart in its dominant mode of cinematic representation. Digital images of the Iraq
conflict reveal that the real objectives of oil greed is not the fuel itself, but what it
facilitates, namely the privileges of industrial and post-industrial culture, the digital
innovations that are its current apogeal achievement and thus the speed and ubiquity of
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the digital image itself. Chapter Three, “Extraction,” focuses on how Jennifer Baichwal’s
Manufactured Landscapes contemplates the ways in which cinema and photography
directly and indirectly formulate landscape as a category and a physical reality. Engaging
Baichwal and her immediate subject, the photographer Edward Burtynsky, this chapter
posits a relationship between the long-take tracking shot, landscape images (photographic
and cinematic) and the decay of the environment itself. How the moving camera contrasts,
complements and also represents still photography is the subject of analysis, as is how
they both, together and separately, manufacture landscapes and environments. This
chapter maps the relation between nineteenth-century photography’s search for pristine
natural vistas and digital cinema’s invention of virtual spaces, both of which offer utopian
alternatives to an increasingly industrialized and/ or uninhabitable world. The resultant
paradox this chapter analyzes is how the image fabricates idealized perceptions of natural
landscapes while the means of its technological and industrial logistics actively erode
them. Chapter Four, “Excess,” theorizes the long take as an exhibition of waste.
Beginning with Georges Bataille’s theory of economic excess, this chapter establishes a
concept called “The Cinematic Pyramid” and posits that Andy Warhol’s exemplary use
of the long take in his Empire functions as a codified expression of industrial culture’s
access to and exploitation of time, space, and, significantly, material abundance.
Meanwhile, the democratization of digital cinema has inaugurated the prevalence of the
long take (this mode’s shot of choice, exemplified by Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark)
and resultant gluttony of images, which, this chapter argues, is symptomatic of consumer
culture’s profligate resource abuse. “Waste,” Chapter Five, focuses on what happens to
accumulated and expended excess and does so via a theoretical and practical concept
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described as “secondhand cinema.” Beginning with Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I,
this chapter considers how cinema both creates waste (images, equipment, the residual
effects of producing, distributing and receiving film images) and also makes use of it.
Digital cinema is weighed against analog, and the tension that emerges between material
conservationist trends and digital ephemerality is used to analyze the impossibility of
both digital archiving and celluloid preservation. The bio-politics of disposability are also
foregrounded, specifically in terms of how the fates of the marginalized human subject
and the unwanted image are both directly linked to consumer culture’s ideology of
expendability and the paradoxical logic that creates the disposable, impermanent object
out of durable, permanent materials.
The goal of this project is not to rein in, frame or otherwise contain ecology and
cinema within a definitive narrative or theory. There is no true beginning here, nor
middle nor end. To supply an arc or a resolution would defeat the ways in which
ecological degradation is rendering vulnerable every connection and dimension that holds
together our daily lives and planetary future. It cannot contain the ecology it questions,
because ecology, by its very definition, is unrestricted; that is, to say where nature stops
and culture begins, or vice versa, only further extends the essentialist ideology that has
produced the ecological problems our culture and this project are now confronting.
Engaging a topic that modifies and indeed broadens its terms almost daily, this work
accepts itself as malleable, subject to change and addendum, and so must the reader. The
ambition here is to set the conditions necessary to continue dialogue and debate. What
does remain intractable, however, is the template this project attempts to provide, namely
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ways in which cinematic history can be revisited so that one can understand that history
as environmentally determined, and as having determined the environment in turn.
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Chapter One: Energy
Kristen Horton’s “Crowd”, an interactive art installation and part of Toronto’s
recent Nuit Blanche arts festival, reduces cinema down to an essence so basic as to render
it almost unrecognizable and so doing exemplifies, paradoxically, a fuel-dependent and
also “film-less” or neutral cinema. In addition to scaffolding, smoke machine, sound
system, speakers, and a configuration of powerful flood lights, the essential ingredient in
“Crowd” is the crowd itself, the humans that congregate around this exhibition and
puzzle over its luminosity, for, indeed, other than its light there is nothing to see. The
piece is composed of illusion and expectation; its structure is structure itself, the smoke,
light and sound that condition the atmosphere, and nothing else. As such, Horton creates
what he calls a “light environment,” and he does so by use of generated electrical power.
Indeed, contrary to what is claimed, the entire “Nuit Blanche” event is premised not so
much on the celebration of night but rather on what enables the event in the first place –
electricity. The original meaning of “white night”, a natural lengthening of summer
nights in northern reaches, now more accurately describes the grey zone between dusk
and dawn when populous areas are saturated with the excess of artificially generated light.
In other words, the city at night is already white, and detrimentally so, for electrification
comes at the expense of hastening the disappearance of naturally occurring darkness. As
David Owen points out, superfluous amounts of inadequately designed outdoor
illumination not only squander electric power but also “imperils human health and safety,
disturbs natural habitats,” and, significantly, “deprives us of a direct relationship with the
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nighttime sky” (28). Evocative of some of these concerns, Horton’s “Crowd” foregrounds
Nuit Blanche as a lighting indulgence and it does so by drawing attention to the
electricity that supplies this installation (and the event) in particular and cultural
production in general. In the centre of the scaffold structure that supports the piece’s
blazing floodlights, a large power generator, shrouded by a common plastic tarpaulin,
indecorously vibrates and hums. What is not quite clear is whether Horton has attempted
to disguise the cumbersome motor that is providing “Crowd’s” atmosphere and, if so
whether his decision was based on aesthetic considerations or discursive ones. Are we
being asked, in other words, to ignore this machine, or, conversely, to give it our attention?
In any case, the piece is not so much about the crowd, but its composition, and thus the
technological construct that compels the viewer to confront the emptiness of light and
also its unmatched cultural, aesthetic and economic value.
“Crowd” is an exercise in the cinematic imagination; a filmic experience
rendered without a movie camera or a support surface with which to record it. In large
part, it relies on the viewer’s cinematic expectations – for example, his or her ability to
recognize the soundtrack playing over the sound system as extractions from the science
fiction film canon. As Horton describes it, “Crowd” “juxtaposes the stationary with the
transitory”; and so it captures the essence of cinema – that which is still (stationary) and
ephemeral (transitory). Because “Crowd” is a demonstration of control or management of
the viewer’s perceptions and level of interaction, what it “captures” is the cinematic
imagination, and it does so without the utilization of film, camera, or the presence of a
director/ practitioner. This, then, is a new inscription of cinema: cinema rendered without
camera, cameraman, or support surface. And it is utterly wasteful and indulgent. As the
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piece was intended to run for twelve hours straight, creating nothing but pure illusion at
the cost of an excessive amount of power and energy, it is the opposite of carbon
neutrality. So Horton articulates what is at the heart of the current moment of cinematic
and environmental convergence; weighing the expenditure of power and energy against
the need to continue our way of seeing the universe – in terms that are, as Horton is
showing us, thoroughly and indelibly cinematic.
The recent emergence of carbon-neutral cinema formally and incontrovertibly
recognizes the relations between filmmaking and environmentalism. But that these
connections have only lately been detected takes for granted that cinema is inherently
ecological. Indeed, making a film or watching one is not a neutral practice in any sense.
As popular consciousness is increasingly alerted to the ecological impacts of our
behaviour, less effort is required to perceive how all human activity, industrial, social, or
cultural, is inextricably connected with our civilization’s subsistence resources which
have until only recently been considered ceaseless in supply. So it is that the theory,
history and practice of film now assume an explicit rather than presumed environmental
politics. The measure of anxiety that attends the formal or organized carbon-neutral
cinema exemplifies how environmental relationships and/or dependencies are typically
revealed by situations of imminent crisis. However cursory or idealistic some of its
gestures, carbon neutrality retains its significance in that it forces cinema to be
recognized as an industry, a technology, and therefore burdens practitioners and
consumers alike with environmental responsibility that extends film beyond the
immediate realm of established cinematic spaces and into the practical politics of
everyday living. Importantly, carbon neutrality arises before crisis hits, recognizing how
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cinema will not just be affected by an ecologically precarious future, but might also be
contributing to the crisis itself. But carbon neutrality does not go far enough to embroil
filmmaking with industry and or posit that cinematic production will, like all industrial
activity, be impeded or even immobilized by unsustainable levels of energy consumption.
As historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out, what enabled the electrification of the
industrial world was the centralization of electricity supplies. But while the power and
reach of generating stations was extended such that whole regions were drawn into their
service instead of single towns, the real consequence of what amounts to an entrenched
dependency is felt only when the supply fails and “paralysis” sets in (Schivelbusch 67).
Without electrical power and the artificial light it supplies, cinema would not have
developed as it has; that is, it would not have become an industry and, by extension,
would not be characterized by a dependence on the centralized power supplies that
facilitate almost all dimensions of industrial life. The question that needs to be asked,
then, and for both theoretical and practical purposes, is the extent to which cinema, if
denied what are our industrial culture’s necessary resources (from fuel to the electricity it
generates), would be disabled.
Because carbon neutrality locates cinema within a circuitry of resource
consumption and waste generation, the concept also foregrounds the connections that
bind the image to the industry that produced it. But what needs to be included within the
parameters of this shift is the question of what produced that industry itself. This could
mean revisiting the project that Noël Burch assumes in Life to those Shadows, namely the
denaturalization of dominant cinematic modes via the revelation of the capitalist system
which, he argues, determined the cinematic apparatus and therefore film’s form and
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aesthetic. Indeed, when the connections between industry, capitalism and the
environment are pointed out, and this is done with increasing efficiency, the cinema as an
industry likewise comes to bear intimate links with the converging relationship of
economy and ecology. But there is something more specific embedded within the history
of cinema which, once foregrounded, clarifies and even magnifies the economic and
ecological, both as distinct from and also connected with the cinematic image.
The cinema did not become an industry until it was in complete control of an
access to light. As an example of this, it was because of slow film stocks and inadequate
amounts of sunlight available to East Coast film companies that cinematic pioneers were
compelled to relocate to California where they could yield a more reliable harvest of light
(Enticknap 39). Though this move did indeed render outdoor, location shooting more
auspicious, it was not until artificial sun, in the form of arc light technology, was fully
implemented within the controlled environment of the studio that cinema became
comparable to the factory – spaces that are also artificially illuminated so as to extend
levels of productivity (Schivelbusch 8). Though foundational and indisputably necessary,
the relationship between cinema technology and light (natural and artificial) is not always
obvious; what is more, the film industry’s intractable need for sun/light is less so. And
the fact that it is the sun that provides the fossil fuels that power industry, and therefore
culture, is an even more opaque relation. But when the presence of the sun within the
history and very material composition of the cinematic image is located and then
theorized it becomes possible to understand film as intractably luminous. Each frame is a
measure of our civilization’s control of the sun, but in the form of the fossilized sun or
carbon that we have managed to capture, refine and duly exploit. The cinematic image, in
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other words, literalizes, and in incontrovertible terms, how industry, the images of
industrial culture and the earth’s natural ecology are, together and on their own terms,
categorically derived from the power that emanates from the sun.
As a term, carbon neutrality is loaded with discursive possibility. When pushed to
its literal and metaphorical limits, what it implies is a cinema that does not leave a residue,
a cinema, therefore, without a permanent infrastructure or, perhaps, an infrastructure at
all. The carbon that the initiative aims to neutralize is carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas
that “keeps the planet warm by trapping solar rays reflected off the earth’s surface”
(McNeil 52) – anthropogenic sources of carbon-dioxide emissions are, for example,
deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels (52). As such, a carbon-neutral cinema would
directly and indirectly trap significantly less sun. In its cinematic dimension not only does
carbon neutrality ask what might a cinema that does not leave behind an environmental
footprint look like but also questions how carbon neutrality might alter cinema’s
relationship with light and the sun. Taking the term as literal is not overindulgent, for
unpacking its rich rhetorical implications gets at the heart of the impulses that our culture
is currently negotiating, namely, the rise of digital immateriality on the one hand and the
push for the ecologically neutral on the other. Both these preoccupations converge in a
shared sense of the ephemeral, an industrial culture and its apogeal form of
communication and expression both of which leave behind little or no evidence that they
existed – neither in the form of carbon dioxide nor in the longevity of the medium’s
images. The carbon-neutral cinema might seem compatible with the ascendancy of digital
filmmaking – that increasingly dominant mode of cinematic production that is at least
ostensibly immaterial and, therefore, seemingly residue-free. Digitization and the current
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“end-of-celluloid” moment, real or perceived, corresponds not only with carbon
neutrality but also with environmentalism’s recent popularization of the idea that
ecological salvation will only be achievable in a “post-human” era, when our species
expires. Thinking about the planet subtracted of humankind is one way that the life
sciences are teaching our culture how to recognize and then move beyond
anthropocentric conceptions of time, space and ecology. This shift, together with carbon
neutrality, bears striking consequences when applied to the way cinema is both theorized
and practiced. Though all films, from production to projection, are necessarily bound by a
dependency on sun/light, certain examples specifically target, first, the relationship
between image and sun, and, second, the way that cinema might operate without this
essential ingredient. The post-human planet is the latest, perhaps final, utopia, and its
theoretical implications for cinematic production offer an equivalent in the post-cinematic.
Here is a utopian cinema which exceeds its material self; here is film-without-film, film
that is carbon-neutral, if not carbon-free. Here is an ecologically benign film, film that
exists autonomously, without the interference of human mechanisms and thus without
impacting the environment. While such a literal line of reasoning might seem over-
extended, its extremity is necessary for it manages to probe the feasibility and
consequences of our culture’s convergent drives to become both digitally immaterial and
ecologically neutral.
Before cinema is “neutralized” or forced, like a post-human ecology, to think
beyond its own existence or temporal register, it must acknowledge light as its life source.
What environmentalists, ecological scientists, natural historians and journalists continue
to point out is that, directly or indirectly, the energy that our civilization has consumed,
27
and at what are increasingly unsustainable rates is, of course, sourced back to compressed
energy derived from fossilized sunlight. But in order to better manage it, many
environmentalists maintain, we must harvest it directly, in the form of solar energy, rather
than extract it from its non-renewable manifestations. Alan Weisman’s recent bestseller,
The World Without Us, assumes a perspective that scientists have long acknowledged,
that human civilization will inevitably end, and through this post-human framework,
explores the relationship between the earth and its sun. It is a powerful and resonant idea,
bearing enormous implications wherein human culture suddenly assumes a distinct
fragility, replacing a naturalized sense of permanence with inevitable limitation. Not
unlike the post-human imagination that Weisman’s book attempts to impart, films that
highlight natural and/or artificial illumination, or else radically deprive themselves of this
basic ingredient, inherently foreground their own resource-dependent fragility and
attendant ephemerality. Indeed, any film could be included here, for all cinema is, of
course, literally composed of trapped light or what might be called fossilized sun. And
yet certain exemplary films make overt attempts to conceptualize a cinema that functions
“neutrally”, “post-cinematically” or “film-less-ly,” that is, without its necessary resources
and supplies. In order to interrogate carbon neutrality and its correlate, the post-cinematic,
it is first necessary to locate the sun in cinema. This involves theorizing the “fossil
image,” that is, the intersection between geology, industrial civilization and cinematic
history, an enterprise enabled by foregrounding their indelible fusion – the light (and
energy) that comes from the sun.
Victor Erice’s Dream of Light (1992) exemplifies the relationship between
cinema, convergent histories of pictorial representation and the management of sun and
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light. Indeed, the film is quite literally a portrait of how cinema is actively dependent on
light. As it meditates upon the way light falls upon a quince tree, it likewise contemplates
how each and every cinematic image tells the implicit story of its light source, and its
subsequent capture. But as Erice theorizes cinema’s relationship to the sun and its light,
he does so by means of locating cinema and the procurement of light within the broader
continuum of painting and pictorial representation, thus highlighting the technological
dimensions, and their implications, that distinguish the modes by which humans have
derived solar energy and conducted its eminence. Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and its
correlate Sans Soleil (1982) are, conversely, “sunless,” for they highlight the absence of
light and sun. By depriving cinema of its essential illusion (movement), Marker evokes
what might be called a cinematic “primitivism,” by which he is able to theorize how a
post-apocalyptic space is equally post-cinematic. What is more, this aesthetic of
primitivism directly challenges and denaturalizes established viewing conditions, thus
asking, as carbon neutrality will implicitly do, how resource deprivation might alter not
only the way film is made but also how it is perceived. Michael Haneke’s Time of the
Wolf (2003), also an example of a “sunless” cinema, espouses an aesthetic of darkness
and/or natural light in order to complement his film’s post-apocalyptic narrative. By
stubbornly submitting to the cinematic equivalent of the climate of scarcity that descends
upon his characters, Haneke also evokes a formula of cinematic primitivism which forces
the viewer to physically respond to the frustrations of low-light conditions. Like Marker,
Haneke uses an absence of light in order to upend the assumed, and for Haneke,
privileged, viewing conditions of dominant cinema; a return to a primitive cinematic
space corresponds with his depiction of primitive modes of human behaviour, both of
29
which are latent and thus, he argues, destined to reemerge. Like Horton’s theorization of
a cinema which exceeds itself, this primitivism poses an implicit critique of the saturation
of digital imaging technology. Indeed, digital might seem the apotheosis of a sunless
cinema, composed as it is of numerical data rather than the imprint of refracted light on
chemically sensitive paper. But this, of course, is illusory, for digital compensates for its
lack of direct dependence on light with an indirect one: instead of inscribing patterns of
luminosity on its celluloid support surface, digital puts all its weight into harnessing the
energy derived from the fossil fuels needed to supply the electricity that powers the
operating systems which manipulate digital images. Along with questions of digital
technology’s solar relations, the films of Erice, Marker, Haneke and Horton confront the
fact that the foundation of cinema is not movement itself (for this is a perceptual illusion),
but what powers that illusion, namely the energy that is necessarily, directly or indirectly,
derived from the sun.
Post-Human Ecology and Film without Film
Following the example of atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, whose research on
ozone depletion earned him a Nobel Prize, earth scientists, environmentalists and
journalists are adapting a new terminology to describe the earth’s current interval of
geological time. Instead of categorizing the last 10,000 years as the Holocene (“recent
epoch”), the more accurate but also inherently political Anthropocene (“human epoch”) is
employed with increasing habituation (Crosby 159). As geologist Alfred Crosby explains,
the term clearly and precisely confronts the fact that the human ability to derive colossal
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amounts of power from fossil fuels is the principle determinant of how the biosphere has
come to function, or, better to say, malfunction (159). Science journalist Alan Weisman
takes the significance attached to this semantic shift as his point of entry into an
exploration of whether or not (or for how long) the Anthropocene would endure if
humanity were suddenly removed from the earth. Attempting to envision the dimensions
of a post-anthropocentric future, the central question guiding Weisman’s narrative is
whether or not the earth can thoroughly recover from the pernicious legacies of the
Anthropocene. As he details the reclamation and reversal of humanity’s ecological
imperialism, the post-human perspective Weisman attempts to assume often suggest the
non-anthropocentric creation myths of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics or Olaf Stapledon’s
Starmarker. Importantly, as he contemplates the quality of the planet’s dehumanized
future, Weisman asks if our sturdiest and most durable infrastructures would in fact decay.
Inevitably, Weisman argues, cataloguing as he does the erosion of our homes, bridges,
fences and nuclear power stations and pronouncing, for example, the submission of
domestic dogs to predators and the ascendancy of the common house cat. The real
concern, though, is the danger our volatile infrastructures will introduce if we are not
present to monitor their erosion. For example, if abandoned, will the pipes of the Texas
Oil Patch eventually succumb to pressurization, combust, and trigger an unimaginable
holocaust, thus imperiling the flora and fauna that would otherwise be reclaiming the
formerly anthropogenic landscape? Underlying the novelty of Weisman’s conceit and its
ability to appeal to environmental anxieties that are coming to dominate the marketplace
and popular imagination (the bestselling The World without Us is a model instance of this)
is a profound philosophical, ethical and political question. Is it possible, Weisman seems
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to be asking, to think about environmentalism altruistically; not for the benefit of future
humanity, but for the future of the planet? That is, can we posit a non-anthropocentric
environmentalism in which the planet’s health, and not our own, is the primary
motivation? In a striking example, Weisman describes Poland’s famous Bialowieza
Puszcza old growth forest and specifically the Soviet-built security fence along its
Belorussian border. This “remnant of the Cold War” divides the area’s bison herd,
prevents natural migrations and mating, therefore restricting its gene-pool to what might
prove a mortal extent. “Unless,” Weisman writes, “humans remember to remove this iron
curtain bisecting the forest, the bison might continue to be endangered in a post-human
world” (14). Though Weisman consistently implies that environmentalism ought to
embrace a formal initiative by which to erase rather than minimize such indications of
our presence, he is reluctant to overtly endorse what is as yet a radical conceptual shift
away from the present and toward the future.
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement argues that the reduction of human
existence is a viable way to return the earth to its natural state before we succumb to
inevitable disaster and our species is snuffed out (Weisman 243). VHEMT is part of a
current of trans-humanist thinking which exemplifies how life without humans is
becoming the latest utopia. To posit the scientific or narrative parameters of a post-human
world is indeed possible; Weisman, like Calvino and Stapledon, proves as such. However,
to actively and practically avoid what might be thought of as an anthropocentric
perspective or ideology outside the realm of science or fiction presents a monumental
challenge. Indeed, it reverses the anthropocentric primacy of Cartesian philosophy and
essentially undoes the intellectual and ideological foundations of Western civilization
32
since the Enlightenment. Though Weisman’s narrative is more concerned with imagining
the earth without earthlings than with clarifying the terms of the new environmentalism
(and, perhaps, utopianism) he is actively conditioning, the implications of his
contributions are indeed productive. As Weisman attempts to remove or “disappear”
humans from the planet, his text epitomizes Paul Virilio’s defining theories of
disappearance. Likewise, Weisman’s accessible bestseller is popularizing a post-human
system of narration and an aesthetic, wherein absolutist human perspective is, at least
ideally, subtracted from conventional narrative form itself. Objectivity is not at issue;
instead, the narrative achieves a sense of the unmediated, representation assumes
autonomy and then becomes its own prime mover. How, then, might we do away with
devices and infrastructures of representation but still “represent”? How might one write
without writing? Paint without painting? Render a film without a movie camera? Be a
human but not think as one? The challenge is at the foundation of the art of storytelling,
wherein an author ideally attempts to capture the subjectivity of an “other,” but with
minimal interference from the author’s own social, cultural and political trappings. The
storyteller, then, at least ideally, has long attempted to neutralize him or herself. And so
the last damnable, culturally determined perspective we might attempt to eschew is
anthropocentricism; from dismantling the male gaze to denaturalizing the colonial
imagination, the suggestion is that we must now think beyond our own sense of
geological domination and biospherical entitlement. This is not a new impulse, but rather
a return to a spiritual and philosophical mindset that was transformed by modernity. As
Zygmunt Bauman argues, what modernity and its attendant humanism, rationalism and
habitual secularity ushered in was an end of infinity – a concept that determined how
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humans made sense of life on earth and, more importantly, of the earth itself. Human
weakness in the face of what Bauman calls the “unperturbed solidity of the world” has
determined human perceptions and experience since history began (96). Indeed, as
Bauman articulates it, until the entrenchment of modernity, “life was a daily
confrontation between the transience of [humans] and the duration of [the earth]” (96).
As such, in the quest for longevity, “all odds were on the side of the world” because it
was inherently and divinely equipped to “outlive every human individual” (96). But when,
Bauman argues, humans began inventing ways by which to harness and then dominate
nature, “melt[ing] all that is solid,” the endurance of infinity went with it; left in its wake
was “liquid modernity.” The emphasis thus shifted from the perpetuity of the earth to that
of the individual human, but it came at the sacrifice of how both fellow humans and the
natural environment were treated. “If,” Bauman argues, “the premodern life was a daily
rehearsal of the infinite duration of everything except mortal life, the liquid mortal life is
a daily rehearsal of transience.” The result of this, then, is that “nothing is bound to last,
let alone last forever” (96). Indeed, systems of planned technological obsolescence are
the current apotheosis of the “liquid modernity” Bauman describes. The difference now,
however, is that the conditions of industrial culture’s over-consumption, including the
lingering toxicity of waste and pollution, are proving that the “melting of all that is solid”
(in literal terms, refining fuels or harvesting forest) undermines the same sense of human
longevity it once consolidated. The heightening concern over the increasingly palpable
realities of global warming and endemic pollution is triggering a cultural response,
exemplified by Weisman’s book, which in various degrees of sincerity calls for a return
to a “pre-liquid” perception that considers the earth as infinite and humanity as transient.
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It is the job of culture, however, “the greatest of human inventions,” according to
Bauman, to enable us to think about human transience, mortality, or eternity (97).
Because of language and the ability to tell stories represent other realities and create a
fictional elsewhere, we can experience realms where we cannot be present. As Bauman
continues, he anticipates what is becoming a more coherent shift towards a post-human
(and pre-liquid) mindset, wherein language and cultural production can establish a “world
that does not contain us” (101) because, perhaps, we have been expunged. Such indeed is
the job of The World Without Us. But perhaps, in cynical terms, the book is merely
representative of yet another transient “liquid” moment in that its novelty will only
temporarily appeal to a burgeoning Green consumer base and the marketplace of
mainstream non-fiction. Or perhaps it is the inauguration of a quasi-primitive or religious
environmentalism that reintroduces the solidity of eternity, thus harnessing culture and
the imagination in order to begin undoing the anthropocentric dominance over the
biosphere, culture and geological time.
According to the theories of Paul Virilio, André Bazin, and Dziga Vertov, the
removal of the human from cinema – industrial and now post-industrial culture’s
dominant mode of language, representation and storytelling – is an impulse that film
theory has long been negotiating. Though the ideological intentions of these film theorists
are radically divergent, the inclusive, even trans-political, nature of the post-human
impulse they share ultimately supercedes their differences. What these three theorists
envision is a cinema subtracted of the human as intermediary and thus deprived of the
(“man-made”) cinematic apparatus itself; a cinema that is its own prime mover, wherein
film is made without “film” and cinema simply is, rather than is produced.
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André Bazin’s mythological utopia of cinematic realism and Paul Virilio’s
political dystopia of unadulterated cinematic vision can both be reduced to the same
terms: the necessary disappearance of the sight prosthesis or the “hand of man” that
mediates the image. According to Bazin’s “myth of total cinema”, the idea or essence of
cinema precedes its invention: that idea or essence is the means by which to satisfy the
primordial desire to capture an authentic and unadulterated reflection of reality. Until it
can be rendered without the interference of the “hand of man,” cinematic realism will
remain only an ideal, but one that is as old as humanity. As such, “every new
development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its
origins” (21) – to the idea itself. Pure cinema, true realism, as Bazin argued, is the goal
and purpose of cinema and it exists as yet only in the imagination. An unattainable utopia,
then, “the cinema,” as Bazin wrote in 1963, “has yet to be invented” (21). This paragon
of a seamless, imperceptible satisfaction of humanity’s “obsession with realism” (12)
bears striking formal (as opposed to political) resemblance to Virilio’s description of how
human sight and the material image are evolving into one another. Ultimately, Virilio
maintains, the two will converge within a total state, finally “abolishing” the differences
between eye and its prosthesis, the camera (Motor, 67). As Virilio describes it, cinema is,
not unlike Bazin’s conception, the technological satisfaction of a primitive urge, “a sort
of primordial mixing of the human soul and the languages of the motor-soul” (105). Also
in similar terms, what Virilio sees as a “decomposition” in which “the dominant
philosophies and arts” finally meld together, Bazin understands as the logical
accumulation of other pictorial and representational arts. What connects these otherwise
36
contradistinctive theorists, then, is the evocation of cinema as something primitive,
essential; it is a component of the human condition rather than its result.
Embalming, sculpture, painting, and now cinema, Bazin argues, originate in what
he calls “the mummy complex,” which equates the survival of the human spirit with the
“preservation of the corporeal body” (9). The Egyptian mummy, Bazin posits, was “the
first statue” and a means of reproduction and preservation that took the initial step
towards what would (or will) eventually be realized in the cinema. Importantly, however,
Bazin points out that “today the making of images no longer shares an anthropocentric,
utilitarian purpose” (10). That is, instead of being a means of achieving “survival after
death,” the photographically rendered image achieves a more benign or selfless goal,
namely, “the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real” (10). Likewise,
according to Paolo Cherchi Usai, the cinematic purpose is not the capture of reality but
the inscription of movement. As such, according to the film archivist’s timeline of the
history of the moving image, the initial manifestation of this desire is found in the casting
of Chinese shadows, a practice which dates back to 180 B.C. (23). Like the cinematic
ideal (or nightmare) articulated by Bazin and Virilio, Cherchi Usai’s conception of
“perfect vision” is both constant and imperceptible, for it has “no duration” and neither is
it “durable” (29). Pure, unadulterated sight, then, seems to be the apotheosis of what are
otherwise politically incompatible streams of film theory.
For Virilio, the maintenance of dominant society’s ideological needs will remain a
mediator of vision, and will thus provide the energy needed to keep the machine in
motion and the human subject susceptible to its manipulation of reality (not just its
representation). Indeed, Virilio’s connections between the camera and systems of
37
surveillance, weaponry, and the politics of information distribution infuse his arguments
with the caution that a hegemony of seeing will become the last “invisible” man-made
lens to dictate how we connect with and manage the external world. This is the post-
human cinema for Virilio; its misanthropy is measured by the amount of control the
human film viewer or filmmaker is able to retain over the reality the camera does not
capture so much as produce. Bazin’s concern, conversely, is not apolitical, though it is
weighed towards the spiritual satisfaction of humanity rather than its political undoing.
Dziga Vertov’s theory of a total cinema achieves a balance between Virilio’s dystopian
portents and Bazin’s utopian standard. Among other constrictions that have separated
pure vision from extant reality, the “mechanical eye,” Vertov writes, is “free of human
immobility” and “limits of space and time” (17). As the operator is absorbed by the
camera at the conclusion of the filmmaker’s monumental 1929 documentary, Man with a
Movie Camera, the cinematic apparatus exceeds its human dependency and acquires the
status of the heroic. While the images the camera generates, meanwhile, become
indistinguishable from the universe in which they were sourced, Vertov ambiguously
insists, like Bazin and Virilio, that the future of cinema sees the camera and its
accompanying apparatuses evolving into an ocular immateriality, the kino-eye, which
cannot be extracted from the reality it likewise creates and represents.
From Vertov’s autonomous camera to Virilio’s vision machine, Bazin’s film
realism to Cherchi Usai’s film preservation, the point of confluence is that film can or
will in the future exist without a material form; film can or will be rendered without the
apparatus of “film” itself. Though ideology indeed imposes contextual boundaries
between Bazin, Virilio, Vertov and Cherchi Usai, these thinkers all argue in some form
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that the cinema begins where the camera ends. The more obvious or overt the cinematic
prosthesis, they all insist, the more visible its infrastructure and its operative residues, the
less ideally cinematic it becomes. Indeed, achieving a balance between what is
represented and the means of representation, or between reality and human/machine
apparatus, is suggestive of the goal which characterizes both carbon neutrality and post-
humanism: a residue-free, ecologically benign state of environmental symbiosis that
exceeds the boundaries of physical materiality. The impulse towards realism and
attendant diminution and eventual disappearance of cinematic infrastructure is strikingly
reconfigured within the rhetoric of carbon neutrality. This film-less film, this ecology of
the image, like the shift away from anthropocentricity, of which carbon neutrality is an
essential dimension, presents a state of equilibrium between the energy it captures and the
energy it emits. Like the balanced ecosystem that post-human and carbon-neutral
initiatives envision, the ideal of a sustainable cinema needs neither human nor refined
fuel to exist but only, like the Chinese shadows of 2000 years ago, the consistent
presence of the light and/or sun.
The Carbon-Neutral Redwood Tree
In a recent interview with the film distribution company Criterion, filmmaker
Jean-Pierre Gorin discusses two films by his elusive colleague Chris Marker, La Jetée
and Sans Soleil. Attempting to articulate the foundational motivation behind Marker’s
infinitely complex cinematic career and his most well-known pair of films, Gorin
elucidates how La Jetée is, like cinema has always been, obsessed with the scientific
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procedure of “carbon dating.” Gorin’s suggestion that film would supercede memory and
provide physical, tangible proof of when, where, and how an event took place is nothing
if not Bazinian: the cinematic image is a mummification of time, a fossilization of place,
and a document not of history proper, but, rather, of the human desire to ascertain history
as it might have been. The cross-sectioned redwood tree which plays a prominent
discursive role in the earlier La Jetée reappears in Sans Soleil and is only one instance
that links the two films together. The sectioned tree, like cinema itself, are ways in which
human culture attempts to stabilize memory, and so orient a sense of time and, therefore,
of history. Innovation and technological evolution compose the difference between
counting tree rings as a way to map time and its modern equivalent, cinematic indulgence;
the means have altered, but the urge and the result remain the same. It is not just
convenient that the analogy Gorin uses to explain a primary obsession of cinema (using
compressed carbon to ascertain dates) also frames filmmaking within an environmental
rhetoric. Carbon is, indeed, a naturally occurring chemical element and the basis of all
planetary life. But a carbon-neutral cinema seems incongruous with what Gorin names as
Marker’s and cinema’s foundational urge and unattainable goal: to preserve time in
material, tangible form so as to evoke and then revisit it. What carbon-neutral cinema
suggests is that the production of the moving image achieves an ecological balance: like
the redwood tree or any other organism apart from industrialized humans, carbon neutral
practice absorbs as much carbon (dioxide) as it emits and thus eliminates any residue or
carboniferous imprint. The suggestion, then, is a cinema that will decompose, like the
redwood tree, however slowly, and leave behind no residue or manifestation of carbon
that will in the future document and/ or verify the occurrence of cinema itself. By
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semantics alone, carbon-neutral cinema insists upon a fundamentally immaterial cinema,
a designation that seems to be compatible with the imaging capabilities of digital
technology. Indeed, home cinema and the Internet have eroded the former strongholds of
the movie theatre, television and the video store; it is not unreasonable to imagine even
further dissolutions of cinematic materially, but so far, as opposed to popular perceptions,
this evolution is not transpiring in an ecologically sustainable way.
Represented both by big budget Hollywood and community-based independents,
the carbon-neutral initiative promotes digital filmmaking because of its minimal need for
film crews, transportation, or even, via computer generated imagery, direct interaction
with an external world. It also endorses the purchase of carbon offsets as a way to lighten,
if not erase, the film industry’s environmental footprint. But in its extremity carbon-
neutral cinema is a film-less, incorporeal cinema: not cinema proper, but instead an
ontological question. Does eliminating the traces of cinema entail erasing cinema itself?
Indeed, without the umbilical cords of technology (and fuel consumption) to support
them, time is not kind the photographic or cinematographic image. Take for example the
world’s largest collection of photographs, owned by Corbis, a photograph licensing
company. Housed in a former limestone mine in Pennsylvania, and buried within 200
hundred feet of geological layering, the climactic conditions of this time/image capsule,
guarantees the integrity of the Corbis archive for 1000 years. As Weisman points out, this
vain and anthropocentric initiative takes for granted the survival of the power generators
that energize the dehumidifiers needed to create this false environment, as well as the
supply of fossil fuels needed to run them (248). Because of this precarious dependency,
what is really being fossilized for posterity, then, is the preservation system itself, not the
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images. So it is that the Corbis mine will eventually be empty of two kinds of resources,
one natural (raw stone) and the other manufactured (celluloid images). And while the
celluloid image eventually submits to natural decomposition, digital is limited by the fact
that most commercial disks will last only 2-5 years. Another challenge to the image’s
endurance is readability; what Leo Enticknap calls “continuous format migration” (231)
describes how it is that digital images will be accessible only if updated to a new system
each time existing technology becomes obsolete. The longevity of home movies and
news footage is particularly brief as this “born digital” imagery will likely never be
consistently converted (229). Indeed, as the archivist points out, “In a generation’s time
we may well find ourselves in the strange position whereby film records from the
twentieth century have survived intact, but our digital moving record of the early twenty-
first has largely disappeared” (231). So, intersecting Enticknap’s post-image scenario
with the conceits of Weisman’s post-humanist one, we can posit that, as it is now, if our
cinematic culture suddenly ceases to exist and/or function, what will remain for posterity
will be its infrastructure: cameras, generators, cranes, monitors, and other equipment. Its
renderings, meanwhile, will fade away. But without the infrastructure either, the film sets
and e-waste that carbon neutrality aims to minimize, the ideal of a residue-free cultural
expression will be transformed into nothing less than cinema’s own eraser. The carbon-
neutral cinema, therefore, as it attempts to circumvent its environmentally deleterious
effects, must likewise acknowledge its contribution to sealing its fate as an ephemeral
mode of expression and documentation. Recognizing the ephemera of the image, then, is
part of acknowledging the transience of human culture and life on earth.
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Though cinema’s obsession might be, as Gorin argues, the definitive ascertaining
of a moment in time, La Jetée does not betray that its filmmaker believes such permanent
documentation is possible. Because Marker’s film is composed of still images, he
deprives it of movement and thus highlights cinema technology’s illusory quality. As
Enticknap unequivocally states, “Images don’t move on their own. They have to be made
to move – or appear to move – by technology, invented and developed by human beings
with the purpose of tricking the human brain into thinking that its sees a continuously
moving…picture” (1). La Jetée turns cinema itself into a fable, a fabulous invention; it
indulges its foundational illusion while also declining to espouse it. What is more,
because the dreamer of La Jetée cannot locate his own time or place within the rings of
the redwood trunk, the film challenges the feasibility of retaining a permanent image –
whether it is inscribed in memory or captured in the illusion of flickering light. Lost in
the future, La Jetée’s dreamer returns to the past in order to reclaim an image, we are told,
that has “obsessed him since childhood.” The film can thus be read as a parable for the
ephemeral nature of the image and the inherently unproductive enterprise of image
archiving and restoration. As Cherchi Usai maintains, image expiration is organic and
thus far unavoidable. The acknowledgment of this should be liberating; similar perhaps to
an insistence that human culture is indeed transient in the face of Bauman’s durable
natural order. Cherchi Usai articulates some of La Jetée’s conundrums when he declares
that the goal of film history, “to recapture the experience of its first viewers,” is
incompatible with its subject, “the destruction of the moving image” (25). If the
“empirical impossibility” of reconstructing the past were put into place, the past, as
history, would be “obliterated” (25). In other words, like achieving the goals of utopia, if
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the reclamation of the past were realized, the past would lose its relevance. The idea of
carbon neutrality, likewise, introduces the conditions necessary to consider a cinema
whose images are lost to time and the decay induced by exposure to oxygen, just as the
woman’s face is inevitably lost to the dreamer despite the technological possibility
traveling through time in an attempt to relive and reclaim it. Confirming Cherchi Usai’s
theories of preservation, Marker’s film argues that to salvage history is also obliterate it.
According to the same principle, treading heavily and leaving behind a trail of toxic,
irreversible footprints is one way we are retaining a permanent record of our civilization.
But ecological burdens also, paradoxically, diminish the possibility of our endurance
precisely because they imperil the planet’s ecological fortitude and, therefore, the terms
of our own posterity.
In his introduction to Cherchi Usai’s Death of Cinema, Martin Scorsese
accurately describes how the science of film preservation is being exploited by
commercial interests. The potential profits derived from repackaging and reissuing lost
“classics”, the director maintains, comes at the expense of losing less marketable films to
the inevitability of decay. Scorsese becomes the analog of La Jetée’s dreamer when he
describes the ordeal he had locating a film that was determined to be negligible by the
commercial cannon, but was for the esteemed director a lost memory from his childhood.
Fair Wind to Java, a “B” rated feature, was in a state of deterioration and at the time of
his writing was being professionally restored. The idea that this film (or his memory of it)
could have vanished incited the director’s frustration and compelled him into furthering
his crusade against the commercial cooption of film preservation. Scorsese goes on to
articulate how Cherchi Usai’s “portrait of a culture ignoring the loss of its own image” is
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a “devastating moral tale”; our culture, he claims, is “taught to dismiss the art of seeing as
something ephemeral and negligible (Cherchi Usai “Preface”). But what carbon
neutrality, and, indeed, Cherchi Usai’s own text promote, is that the cinematic image, like
memory, is inherently, necessarily ephemeral. The transience of cinema is inscribed in its
basic chemical and/ or informational structure. But this intractable feature does not
preclude Cherchi Usai, Scorsese or Chris Marker from striving towards the unrealizable
utopia of film and/or memory preservation. To do otherwise would be irresponsible. Such
a balanced ecology of the image Cherchi Usai calls the “Moral Image”; the term
articulates how the value ascribed to the image must be reordered to include its flaws and
the potential of its erosion. The fragility of cinema or its temporal limitations does not
preclude treating it with a lesser degree of care, but simply reconfiguring our desires so
that film is preserved for its own sake, not for our anthropocentric pleasures.
The Moral Image is an ecology of the image and comparable to post-human
environmental ideology, particularly as the acceptance of transience could be seen as an
endorsement of ecological irresponsibility rather its reversal. It would be easy, and
cynical, to conclude that because images or humanity are temporally limited they can be
further neglected or abused. But an ethical ecology that accepts limitation, and even
enforces it, might in fact extend the death-date of human civilization and the image alike.
For example, as Weisman points out, certain strains of environmentalism argue that the
only way for humanity to mend environmental damage and thus survive into the next
century is to universally limit population growth until we achieve parity with pre-
industrialization conditions. Transhumanists, for example, notable philosophers and
scientist among them, hope to “colonize virtual space by developing software to upload
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their minds” and thus jettison the physical body that our “technological minds have
outgrown” (243). Not dissimilarly, the ideal “image ecology” that closes Susan Sontag’s
On Photography, like the Moral Image posited by Cherchi Usai, argues for an ethics of
conservation: rather than tax our mental and physical environments with a glut of under-
appreciated consumer or image goods, a solution to image surfeit is to forcefully restrain
production numbers, thus improving the “living” conditions of the images that remain. So
it is that the lifespan and quality of the image, like the physical environment, is ideally
achieved by means of limiting its indulgence. Again, that cinema is an ecological practice,
and ecology is a cinematic practice, sees that conservative standards in one realm
necessarily spill over into the other. However idealized and problematic both theories
might be (i.e. the politics of deciding what is worthy of conservation), they resonate,
together and separately, as attempts to practically manage the pernicious effects of over
consumption through the radical strategy of enforced restraint.
For, indeed, the endless availability and consumption of images is increasingly
built into how they are produced, marketed, received, and often disposed of. But even in
a climate of image scarcity – decaying historical films, for example, are only available in
a limited amount – the temporary nature of the image is inscribed in its very essence.
This, indeed, is what distinguishes cinema from other art forms. The idea of a post-
cinematic cinema (like a post-human planet) does not cheapen or compromise quality,
but it does change the priorities of its practitioners and viewers. If the survival of the
planet depends on the reduction of its human inhabitants, an ecological cinema might
adapt a similar theory and practice of enforced down-sizing and minimization. Though
the UCLA report card extols big-budget enterprises for recycling their sets or paying
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environmental debts by planting trees, carbon neutrality ought to counter ecological
damage before production, not after. But as practical amendments will inevitable
manifest within the final film product, the expectations of the viewer/ consumer must also
come to accept what might be significant alteration.
In the same way environmental scientists are increasingly attempting to distance
their discipline from anthropocentricity, so too might cinema embrace the image’s
ephemerality. What will survive us (but not our planet) are the cinema’s durable
machines, the plastic, metal, and glass that compose the cameras, monitors and theatres
of cinematic infrastructure. As Weisman points out, once again trying to challenge the
privileging of our current historical (and geological) moment, 95% of all artwork ever
made is no longer in existence (247). In terms of moving images, between 50 and 80
percent of all commercial film and television output in the developed world has been lost
(Enticknap 188). But human culture has always attempted to think beyond itself: indeed,
cultural production is motivated by the desire to leave a legacy or at least a residue,
something by which to affirmatively carbon-date our time and place within the rings of
the redwood tree. Notably, Cherchi Usai’s text opens with an image of the Rosetta Stone,
which dates back to 196 B.C. In terms of preserving human culture and information, the
rudimentary chiseled stone suddenly seems a far cleverer means of preservation than the
disposable data produced by digital technology’s sophistication. What will last, then, of
our monuments is what is inscribed in stone rather than what is painted in light or saved
as binary code.
As The World Without Us implies throughout, our culture must relinquish the
urge for legacy and reverse the detrimental infrastructures that will leave as the indelible
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mark of the Anthropocene an irreparably malfunctioning earth. There is a tension, though,
wherein our cultural legacy will not be maintained by the “liquidity” of the image, but the
solidity of our infrastructure. Indeed, as Bauman points out, “the liquid modern life is a
daily rehearsal of universal transience” (96). Just as “Nothing in the world is bound to
last, let alone last forever. Today’s useful and indispensable objects,” he writes, “are
tomorrow’s waste” (96). What Bauman does not consider is the permanence of that waste
and the systems that produced it, for, factoring in the toxicity of its residual effects, the
degree of which the outcome is still not fully known, our transient “liquid” modernity is
indeed solid, though not intentionally so. Pollutants that accompany throw-away
disposable culture that no long succumbs to the “cosmic fear” (Bauman 46) of pre-
modernity, surely rivals the premoderns who carved their legacy into the slab of
grandodiorite stela housed in the British Museum and that is the frontispiece of a book,
The Death of Cinema, which, addressing this precise paradox, takes as part of its subtitle
“The Digital Dark Age.” For all the impermanence attached to the systems of immaterial
technologies and their instant obsolescence that Bauman descries, as long as carbon
emissions exceed rates of carbon absorption (and the stratosphere continues to trap
sunlight), the liquid nature of modernity will become a misconception.
Responding to lawyer Bernard Edelman’s contention that because of scientific
innovations humans have “become radically contingent” and “our markers as a species…
neutralized”, Virilio asks if the earth will become “humanity’s phantom limb” (Motor,
127). Ecological politics though, and, specifically, post-human ideology, reverse these
terms, revealing their anthropocentric dimension. The question, then, is whether
humanity will become the earth’s phantom limb – the wound that has been cut away but
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whose intractable legacy still dictates the body’s operations. Likewise, the theoretical
dimensions of carbon neutrality reveal how minimizing environmental impact concedes
to erasing the traces or legacies of what energy historian Vaclav Smil calls our
hydrocarbon culture. Adjusting our cultural behaviour towards the hydrocarbon
(photographic or cinematographic) image means reevaluating, first, the residual legacies
of its industrial means of production and, second, its inherently ephemeral nature. As a
Lumière is supposed to have so famously opined, the cinema has no future. A post-
human/ post-cinematic ecology of the image, like the Moral Image, argues that the only
way to respect the image is to preserve signs of decomposition within its very form. In
order for cinema to survive, according image ecologists (Cherchi Usai and Sontag, most
overtly) it must be allowed to decay; this entails replacing insurmountable glut with
manageable amounts of archives. That images are environmentally determined readjusts
and renders even more acute the same questions that image ecologists have long been
raising. How, then, might a carbon-neutral society simultaneously alter the way we live
and, therefore, the way we cinematically “capture” the world around us? How might this
force an adjustment of the ways in which the image is aesthetically perceived? Finally,
how might looking back at the history of cinema provide examples for achieving a
sustainable carbon-neutral cinema? For, indeed, carbon is inherently embedded in cinema,
and specifically in the shape of the solar energy that enables the image and is sourced
directly from the sun.
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The Fossil Image
Instead of the practitioner’s name, Sol fecit, (“the sun made it”) was commonly
inscribed on the earliest photographs. This convention, though short lived, acknowledges
how the formative moments of the photographic sensibility “regarded image-capture less
as man’s achievement than nature’s way of painting” (Bruce 5). Indeed, as the expression
is not explicitly characterized by anthropocentric assumptions, it would seem that what
Sol fecit represents is a relatively humble moment in industrial culture. William Fox
Talbot’s invention, the calotype or paper-negative processing, differed significantly from
the more impractical Daguerreotype which required an almost interminable exposure
time before the silver plate within the camera obscura manifested an image. So,
preceding the introduction of Talbot’s processing innovation “all of the energy that would
form the image in silver had to come from the sun,” (Shaaf 8). But by adding gallic acid
to his sensitizing solutions, Talbot found that the paper in his camera needed only a brief
exposure time in order to yield a “latent image” that could then be developed and
reproduced (9). The calotype thus allowed its inventor to make multiple prints from a
single negative; soon Talbot rendered thousands of images of nature, people, and
architectural monuments and so became what is now called a photographer. In 1844 he
assembled his images into book form and released The Pencil of Nature, the first
commercial record of photographic illustration (Shaaf 10). The collections’s title, like Sol
fecit, acknowledges the essential symbiosis between the image’s reproduction of nature
and a likewise dependence on the resources that it yields. Fittingly, however, The Pencil
of Nature was also Talbot’s undoing, for, as its primitive plates began to fade, his
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confidence in the feasibility of his own work also diminished (10). What the calotype
signifies, then, is not only the inherently ephemeral nature of the image, but also the way
in which the cultural production of photography and then cinematography has
industrialized the process of harvesting power from the sun. And, indeed, as the
procedure became more refined and industrialized, it was also rendered anthropocentric.
According to its conventional history, photography truly began when chemical
processing enabled Talbot to finally succeed in managing, and then crafting, the
provisions of solar energy.
What has facilitated the Anthropocene epoch is the way in which humans have
harnessed and ultimately exploited energy provided by the sun. Geologists such as Alfred
Crosby foreground the relationship between the gratuity of the sun and the desires of the
human as that factor which has turned our geological time span into a narrative of how
we have come to completely modify the biosphere in which we now live. Analogously,
and logically so, the history of the cinematic image and the photographic image from
which it derives is equally determined by the relationship between the technology of the
camera and the power of the sun. Indeed, the sun provides both the light which inscribes
the latent image upon on the properly sensitized support surface and it is also the source
of the fuel that energizes the prime movers (motors, generators) of cameras, projectors
and artificial lights. The sun is so intractably entrenched in industrial culture that
narrating the entirety of its trajectory up to this moment is succinctly and easily
accomplished via the medium of film; opening a camera’s aperture and randomly
trapping and thus fossilizing a fragment of light is all that is necessary in order to
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communicate the fundamentals and complexities of what has become the Anthropocene
epoch.
The history of humanity is the history of its exploitation of the sun. Sunlight, after
all, is the source of the elemental carbon that is transformed into the energy that births
organic life. As Crosby explains, the energy required to simply exist or to perform work,
moving our own muscles or empowering automobiles, “originates in the core of the Sun.”
Solar energy “travels as sunlight to Earth,” whereupon “photosynthetic plants” process it
into organic vegetation – the biomass that feeds animals and humans, energizing us with
requisite calories (xv). The significant move humans made towards what Crosby calls
“biosphere domination” was learning how to access the solar energy that is “concentrated
in biomass” (xv). The invention of fire and eventual burning of wood (a form of biomass)
was the initial method by which humans procured the energy of the sun (5). But the
energy density of such young biomass is low and so its yields become significantly
higher when sources are densified. But this is not an immediate process, for the “greatest
reductionist of all,” as Crosby explains, is time (61). Peat, coal, oil, and natural gas,
those fuels that have enabled our civilization to transform the Halocene into the
Anthropocene, are in fact intensely concentrated slews composed of “billions of
generations of animals and plants,” life forms which, like all life on earth, were the
product of sunlight (62). Having lived and died over eons, and having likewise absorbed
the sun, these organisms were buried in the earth and then subjected to the conditions
necessary to reduce them down to pure latent energy. Once extracted and refined, this
matter is converted into what are our primary sources of “natural” energy (Crosby 61).
And it is oil, precious because it is higher in density than other fuels, that Crosby terms
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“fossilized sunshine.” “Fossil fuels,” then, as Crosby summarizes, are compositionally
the “residue of immense quantities of plant matter” and other living organisms like
phytoplankton, which are living, dying, accumulating and likewise condensing in deep
“oxygen-deficient” spaces (62). The earth, though, has kept this biomass hidden. Buried
beneath the weight of oceans and ice, sand and rock, time reduces this raw compost so
thoroughly its energy yields are such that “an American gallon of gasoline corresponds to
about 90 tons of plant matter, the equivalent of 40 acres of wheat” (62). What is
embedded in industrialized culture, then, are coal, oil and natural gas, “the end products
of an immensity of exploitation of sunshine via photosynthesis” that have been
successfully harvested and summarily consumed (63). Almost as difficult to intellectually
manage as the unfathomable amounts of time and sunshine that composes the “bequest of
fossil fuel” upon which our culture depends is the amount of sunshine we have consumed
in what is our mere blip of geological time. Ecologist Jeffrey S. Dukes, for example, has
calculated that between 1751 and 1998 humans have burned as much as 13,300 years of
sunshine embedded in plant and animal life that had lived on planet earth (Crosby 160).
The immensity of this figure translates into enormous social, cultural, political, economic,
and environmental effects; the cinematic and photographic image can thus be understood
as an amazingly succinct visual correlate or manifestation of this process. Every
cinematic/ photographic image stands in for the basic terms of our civilization: dependent
on light and energy resources which are marshaled so as to create conditions that are
ultimately terminal.
Analogous to a fuel pump or, more optimistically, a solar panel, the camera is a
tool that captures, harvests and ultimately controls doses of light, which, when applied to
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the light-sensitive emulsion of raw film stock are fixed or fossilized into the latent image.
(Processing too is also accomplished by controlled exposure to specific amounts of light.)
As Enticknap defines it, photography and the cinematography it enabled, is the “creation
of a permanent record of the existence of light in a given place and at a given moment in
time” (7). Drawing from photographic technology and the optical toy industry, proto-
cinematic innovators, from Jules-Etienne Marey to Eadweard Muybridge to Thomas
Edison, spent the late 1880s and the first years of the 1890s, in varying degrees of
concentration, researching and experimenting with systems by which to transform a
series of still photographs into a stream of seemingly continuous movement. By1889 the
ingredients necessary to mass produce moving images had accumulated. These were, as
Enticknap enumerates, a mechanical device that could “induce the perception of
continuous movement,” the “photographic emulsions fast enough to produce the images
needed for these devices,” and “strong, flexible, and transparent film base to support
them on” (10). After working though a series of procedural and technical problems, by
1891, Thomas Edison and his employees had begun making short films; in the summer of
1892, Edison’s employees were operating “what we might call a modern motion picture
camera” (Musser 14) and by December the Edison company began constructing a self-
contained structure specifically designed and built to function as a motion picture studio.
The “Black Maria,” completed in 1893, was rectangular and “box-like” and measured
about 48 feet long and 12 feet wide (Musser 14). Covered in black tar paper, the entire
construct turned on its axis so as to follow the path of the sun throughout the day; its light,
when available, entered through a retractable roof, and illuminated the performance stage
located at one of its ends (14). A photograph of the Black Maria taken on Edison’s
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grounds in West Orange, New Jersey in 1894 finds the studio’s roof opened up in order
to glean what it can of the sun that, as the foggy grey of the picture suggests, seems in
scarce supply. Employees appear to be engaged in structural reparations or modifications
– one man, for instance, is perched on top of the slanted roof while his colleagues below
are ambiguously poised with tools, their sleeves appropriately rolled. The photograph
affirms in visible and incontrovertible terms that cinema’s most basic need is for light.
Historian of early cinema Charles Musser points out that visible in the foreground is the
chicken coop that “houses the birds that will star in Cock Fight,” one of Edison’s first
films (21). But what dominates the background, Musser, according to his concerns, does
not acknowledge. Tucked just behind the Black Maria, and rivaling the movie studio for
position of greater prominence, is a factory. Complete with belching smokestack, and
crowned with what appears to be a water tower or silo, this edifice competes with the
Black Maria just as surely as it reflects it; together they suggest, if not attest to, the
relationship between cinema, industry, and the energy derived from the sun. Here, then,
in this photograph is an encapsulation of cinema’s most basic conditions: the roof of the
Black Maria pulled back, allowing it to swallow up the sun’s available light; the
smokestack just beyond it, meanwhile, emits the residues of some indeterminate
industrial process that, like cinema, converts energy resources into a commodity item –
an object or an image.
The cinema originated, at least in part, within the same imagination as the electric
light bulb (1879); Edison’s contribution of the electric power generating station (1882) is
also notable here. What underlies all this, however, is the huge drive for electrification
that closed the nineteenth century and inaugurated the twentieth (Crosby 110) and to
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which Edison, among many others, contributed a significant part. The industrialization of
light directly impacted the way cinema operated. Indeed, what marks the industrialization
of cinema is its attempt to better exploit the resources of the sun and eventually to shift
away from its dependence on natural sunlight altogether. The Black Maria, for example,
was replaced by glass structures (greenhouses) whose roof and walls were later covered
over to enable the use of artificial light (Bordwell and Thompson 69). Instead of
obeisance to the whims of the sun and weather, the expansion and consolidation of an
industrial filmmaking process in the United States was in part facilitated by its use of
“dark studios,” wherein the sun was blocked out and scenes were illuminated by artificial
lights. By the 1920s, such was the common practice of major producers (147). Just as
artificial light “emancipated the working day from its dependence on natural daylight”
(Schivelbusch 8) and thus increased the productivity of labor forces and industry in
general, so too was filmmaking able to capitalize on its independence from the sun and
eventually produce films around the clock (Epstein 7). Indeed, what impressed French
director Henri Diamant-Berger about the Hollywood model was the way light was
controlled. As he noted in 1918, “effects are sought and achieved in America by the
addition of strong light sources, and not, as in France, by the suppression of other
sources” (Bordwell and Thompson 87). Whereas French filmmakers were still bathing
sets in sunlight and then blocking off the excess so as to create acceptably darkened
patches in which to shoot, “American directors had more flexibility, eliminating sunlight
altogether and creating exactly the effects they wanted with artificial light” (87). The
efficiency of the Hollywood studio and its conversion to artificial lighting is one way in
which the making of film in California became industrialized and centralized, that is,
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geographically confined to the space of the studio and, when necessary, the natural
environment of the back lot. Industrialized cinema of course derived an advantage from
dependence on artificial light derivations; but replacing sunshine means converting to
energy supplied by another industry, namely that which produces and sells power.
Electrification and attendant industrialization of light likewise announced the end of an
“autonomous energy supply,” wherein industrial citizens were compelled to depend on
centralized sources of electricity generated by distant “high-capacity power stations”
(Schivelbusch 74). For example, a house connected to one of Edison’s remote generators
was no longer “self-sufficiently producing its own heat and light” but instead
“inextricably tied to an industrial energy producer” (28). The capabilities of studio
filmmaking, likewise, were consolidated by eschewing the sun; but the studio also
became harnessed to technological infrastructures and necessary systems of externally
generated power, rendering industrialized cinema less and not more self-sufficient.
Indeed, compared to artificial forms, natural light is, according to John Bellamy Foster
“inexhaustible” (92) and, as Bataille argues, the only resource that gives energy without
demanding reciprocity. “The origin and the essence of our wealth,” Bataille writes, “are
given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy – wealth – without any return.
The sun gives without ever receiving” (28-29). But solar power must first be sourced,
converted and mediated, bought and sold. What is more, it is also “limited at any given
time and place,” (Bellamy Foster 92) and is thus not completely gratuitous in its yielding.
And yet, solar power retains a utopian dimension in that the source itself cannot be
fundamentally withheld from the world or citizen at large. Though intermittent and by
most industrialized standards relatively moderate in its energy yield, because it functions
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on several registers – from panels on a private rooftop to large-scale glass and
photovoltaic (PV) structures and the “mile-wide arrays” of PV cells found in the Mojave
desert – solar is essentially “decentralized” (Roberts 193). That is, instead of being
mediated by “centralized corporate or state-owned utilities,” solar’s completely
emissions-free energy is harvested and managed locally, often by the private individual
(193). Such is the way that solar power, as yet, best functions: on an individual, low-scale
level, meeting the relatively temperate demands of the private producer/consumer or a
moderately sized geographical area. Not surprising, then, that an inherently decentralized
power source has yet to be truly commodified; nor is it unreasonable to see how in order
to prosper as an industry, filmmaking, like any other enterprise, was forced to transfer its
dependence on a variable source of light and/or energy to one that was consistent, stable,
and accountable.
So it is, then, that conversion to the closed studio and artificial light did not
subtract sunlight from the cinematic equation. Rather, as it replaced raw sun with
electricity, the studio entrenched a greater dependency on sunlight, though in a different,
less overt form. The energy fuels used to generate the power needed to electrify studios
and sets, lights, motors and the other miscellany of necessary production equipment is, in
geological terms, nothing less than fossilized sunlight – but this is of a kind that is not
inexhaustible and is destined to become even more unyielding than what pure solar
supplies. Early cinema, then, might be taken as an exemplar of a proto-solar cinema. Its
productions, according to these terms, can be regarded as studies in natural light and
textbooks for an ecologically conscious cinematic practice; the Black Maria, for instance,
becomes a model for how natural sunlight is managed and manipulated. As Bazin argued,
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the photographic (and then cinematic) image “affects us like a phenomenon in nature,
like a flower or snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of
their beauty” (13). Indeed, the use of light is embedded in the very form and aesthetic of
all films, but our awareness of its presence and its source is minimal compared to earlier
moments in cinematic history. As Diamant-Berger saw it in 1918, use of light is what
defined Hollywood as an industry and an aesthetic. “In America,” he wrote, where light
was artificially derived “lighting effects [were] created,” but “in France,” where the sun
was blocked out “shadow effects” were the result (87). The relationship between sun and
cinema, light and the film environment, is made especially apparent when cinema is
categorized in accordance with current environmental rhetoric, which ultimately fuses the
fossil fuel with the fossil image, both manifestations, mummifications, of captured light.
Dividing cinematic modes between the pre-industrial use of sunlight and its
industrialization and/ or electricification has both theoretical and practical value; this
demarcation introduces historical precedents which, if refined and reintroduced, are
perhaps more radical and effective than the purchase of carbon credits as a way to offset
the waste produced by big budget filmmaking. Indeed, the UCLA report might be a more
a serviceable guide to sustainable filmmaking if it were to derive some of its “Best
Practices” case studies from pre-industrial cinematic history rather than Warner Brothers,
the production company behind the ostensibly carbon-neutral Syriana. “The future of the
movies” said Abel Gance (according to Virilio), “is a sun in each image” (Disappearance,
54). In this provocative statement, the filmmaker is referring to his own Napoleon (1927)
in which visual excess “stuffed the spectator’s eye,” and thus overpowered and felled the
viewer. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, in addition to being used rationally and
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economically as a way by which to extend the hours of the working day, light has long
been employed as a means of conspicuous consumption (7-8). So it would seem that the
luminosity of Hollywood that so impressed Diamant-Berger assumes ideological
proportions, attesting to its own economic, technological and cultural might. The control
of false light declared economic and technological triumph over both the sun and other
national film industries. Indeed, what Gance and/or Virilio attest to is the ideological
power of the image to, like the sun, impress, dominate, and even blind the viewer with its
potent splendor. But, taken literally and put in more practical, historical terms, the words
of Gance better serve as a metaphor for the way in which the cinema might yet minimize,
and not further aggrandize, returning to its most elemental solar origins.
Shooting the Sun
Cinema, according to cinematographer John Alton, is “painting with light.”
Indeed, there are numerous metaphors by which to articulate the intricate and complex
relationship between the photographic/ cinematographic image and the light that is its
essence and its medium. Because film forges its representations by harnessing light as a
tool, a medium, and an instrument in and of itself, this light-dependent mode of
expression and representation reflexively and inherently narrates the necessary relation
between ways of seeing and the availability of illumination.
According to Bazin, the emergence of photography and the cinema finally began
to satisfy the human obsession with realism and objectivity and thus freed the painter,
who “no matter how skilled” was always bound by “an inescapable subjectivity” (12) to
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pursue more abstract means of expression. What Bazin called the “crisis in realism” thus
emancipated modern art from the “resemblance complex” (13), its dictates of accurate
representation, and, as a by-product, the study of light. So, it might be said, the capacity
of photography and cinematography for realism eliminated the sun from what became the
twentieth century’s dominant mode of painting for, unlike landscape, portraiture or still
life, the abstract painting of ideas, theories, or dreams did not need a source of light by
which to illuminate a given subject. In 1909 Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla produced
Street Light. The painting marks the transition from realism to abstraction and also
exemplifies Balla’s obsession with the analysis of the perception of movement produced
by humans, sound, machines, and, here specifically, electrified light. As Richard
Humphries points out, the painting was inspired by one of the first electric streetlights
installed in Rome where Balla lived and, as such, the painter was directly responding to
the “contemporary electrification” of his city, his country and his culture’s imagination
(20). What is notable about the painting’s subject is how the lamp’s vitality is contrasted
with the “weakness” of the moon, which is depicted as a mere sliver (Humphries 20).
Whether thought of in terms of how Street Light is discoursing on the ascendancy of
“man-made” or “masculine” light over the “feminine power of the moon” (20), or, in
more direct terms, industry over nature, the painting clearly articulates the new polarities
introduced by industrialization in general and electrification in particular. While the
darkness of night recedes into the painting’s outer limits, the encroaching rays of the
lamp extend their powerful reach, and they do so actively, in motion. Balla’s study
resonates both thematically and also because of its contradictory values. While the
dynamism it achieves is almost cinematic (captured movement, or illusion thereof) its
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means are almost stubbornly painterly and somehow conservative; the naïve and almost
primitive quality of the work directly conflicts with the progress and innovation implied
by the subject.
Not dissimilarly, Paul Cézanne’s paintings are informed by the evaluation of light;
many of his still lives and landscapes from the period 1880-1906 for which he is most
famous foreground the relationship between sunlight, how it alters the surface quality of
his subjects, and, importantly, the way the painter sees his subject. This last quality is
evidenced in the subjectivity or abstraction that separates his work from that of his
contemporaries who were, in Bazin’s terms, enslaved by the “resemblance complex.”
Indeed, as Robert Hughes points out, Cézanne’s paintings are distinct in part because,
rather than being about the representation of a given subject, each one is about a
particular motif (the play of light on a leaf, the shadow on a mountain) and, importantly,
the variable process of seeing it (18). With this radical emphasis on procedure, Cézanne
took his viewer “backstage,” highlighting that it was not the final form that mattered (the
“triumph of illusion”) but making comprehensible the way the artist had transcribed his
vision (18). Before Cézanne, it was the artist’s responsibility to find conclusiveness in
what he or she saw. Suddenly, however, “doubt [became] part of the painting’s subject”;
and it is this doubt, Hughes argues, that is an essential component of modernity itself.
The pictorial representation no longer made a declaration – “this is what I see” – but
asked a question – “is this what I see?” (18). The Impressionist movement is
characterized by just such a goal, namely the self-conscious and almost materialist
preoccupation with the study of the process of seeing rather representing a definitive
subject or perspective thereof. Claude Monet was in particular consumed by the study of
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sunlight and how it affected both the subject and the painter, altering his perspective and,
as a result, his methods. What distinguishes Monet is, like Cézanne, the attention to a
single motif, but also that he painted that motif over and over, as serials which might be
thought of as a proto-cinematic. The fifteen paintings that composed Haystacks (1891)
were the first series Monet exhibited, and are particularly notable here for, as Hughes
points out, the haystacks were for Monet “neutral receptacles for light” (118). The
intention that governed Haystacks was to reveal fifteen of the “infinite varieties of light
effects that could be drawn from a motif at different times of the day, in different
weathers” (118). Indeed, the serialization of the same image reproduced in variation
further entrenches the dimension of doubt that characterizes modernity’s relationship
with vision, diffusing it, celebrating it, in multifarious form. As Hughes goes on, he
describes the importance of Monet’s famous series Waterlilies as a “vision of energy
manifesting itself in a continuous field of nuances,” – what this implies, and strikingly so,
is something suggestively cinematic, especially as the work corresponds temporally with
cinema’s primitive or scientific stages. Monet’s signature – the serialized motif –
highlights the impulse that prevailed in both the scientific and artistic domains of
modernity, namely the desire to “seize the indefinite; to fix what is unstable; to give form
and location” to what is fleeting and fugitive (124). Indeed, such is the ambition of
modernism in painting and, eventually, in the cinematic imagination.
But of course what differentiates cinema from Impressionism is, among other
things, the mechanistic apparatus that not only removed the “hand of man” from the
process of representation but also tied the image and its producer to industry. And a
striking example of the conversion to what was becoming modernity’s specifically
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industrial imagination is Giacomo Balla’s Street Light (1909). Standing at the cusp of
electrification and thus modernity’s transformation of vision, Balla’s painting points both
ahead and behind, informed as it is by its painterly past and also anticipating the
cinematic future. So, with the electrification of culture and society in general, the image-
rendering process was liberated of the need to obey the sun or season (or time, therefore).
What is more, light could be actively manipulated by the painter, photographer,
cinematographer, or urban citizen whose streets, studios and homes, were being
transformed by both the incandescent light bulb and the generating stations that supplied
whole regions with requisite power. Balla and the Futurists were witness to what they
considered the electrification of humanity itself, and set about not only documenting the
process but also attempting to guide it towards a political and social utopia. Fitting it is,
then, that the first Futurist Manifesto commences with a testimony to the electric lights
that allowed the artists to defy the dark of night and compose the guidelines by which
they would both anticipate and document the rush towards the future. As Marinetti
capably and feverishly describes it, “We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under
hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits,
shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts” (Apollonio 19). The
electricity that enabled the Futurists’ nocturnal labour would also be the subject of much
of their art. “Primitive” in its means, but industrial or modern in its imagination, the
obsessive analytical detail of Street Light was composed the same year as the first
Manifesto and it is remarkable for the way it pinpoints the overlap of static painting and
moving images as the means by which to produce pictures of light. Ultimately, what
preoccupies Street Light is the process of studying light through motion and studying
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motion through light. As painting and cinematic technology converged, the Futurists
were able to solve the problem of transcribing their society’s velocity through the concept
of Photodynamism. The chronophotographic apparatuses designed by Marey were
intended to “analytically decompose” the energy economy of the body (Rabinbach 87),
and their frame-by-frame inscriptions of physical activity were embraced by the Futurists,
who used them to break down “light acting as movement, and hence the movement of
light” (Apollonio 43). Indeed, such is a basic distillation of the science and the illusion of
cinema: light, movement and the industrial energy economy that fuses them together.
Just as Balla forges a connection between the gaslight of the past, the electrified
future and resultant effects on pictorial representation, Victor Erice’s 1992 documentary
Dream of Light is likewise obsessively invested in theorizing these same historical,
technological, cultural and even geological relations. Erice’s work, however, is further
enriched and even burdened by the cinematic history that, for Balla, was only beginning
to be forged. The narrative premise of Erice’s remarkable film is simple: the
documentation of a painter’s attempt to depict how the sun transforms a quince tree
growing in the courtyard of his Madrid studio. The film accurately informs the viewer of
the passage of time – day turning into week, week into month – and so functions as
something of a diary of both Garcia’s process as well as of the change of the season (and
so the position of the sun). As fastidiously committed to detail as Balla’s study of the
light emitted by what now seems to be a simple the street lamp, Garcia submits himself
completely to the light he can derive from the frustratingly variable qualities of the sun.
His physical position is kept constant by a pair of nails hammered into the earth, just the
right distance from the tree, and against which the painter buttresses his toes, lest he shift
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his stance and, therefore, his perspective. What is more, each time Garcia moves his gaze
from one point of the tree to another, he marks the spot directly, be it on leaf or fruit, with
a tiny horizontal stroke of paint; thereby, by the end of his labour, he transforms the tree
into an analog or map of how his sight (and the sun’s light) has traveled. There are in
Dream of Light three paintings of the quince tree: one captured depicted on Garcia’s
canvas, another on Erice’s celluloid, and a third within the tree itself, transformed as it is
by sun, eye, lens, and Garcia’s directly applied brush strokes.
The inflexibility Garcia imposes upon himself – legs as stable as a tripod, eyes as
accurate as a lens – sets the metaphoric conditions for the film’s final sequence. Against
the voiceover of Garcia describing a dream, Erice (though we never see him) returns at
night to the artist’s courtyard and the quince tree, but the filmmaker replaces the painter
with an autonomous movie camera; what is more, standing in for the sun are arc lamps
and, thus, artificial light. Because the process of filmmaking itself corresponds so closely
with Garcia’s study of the sun and thus the tree, the two finally conflate into a single
vision, united and likewise equalized by the dependence of both cinema and painting
upon the availability of light. Indeed, the dynamics of this relationship are literally and
figuratively captured in Erice’s film, particularly as Garcia’s negotiations with the sun are
not easy. Rather, painting the tree in obeisance to the sun becomes something of a contest.
Continually shrouded with cloud or else altering its position, the sun ultimately refuses to
remain as accurate and consistent as Garcia himself, and so the painter gives up his effort,
shutting the painting in his cellar. So it is the camera that finally achieves what the
painter cannot, for the film itself is the only portrait that is completed. Perhaps the most
vital aspect of the autonomous camera that supplants Garcia is that it occurs at night.
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Electricity is what generates the cinematic image of the tree, but it is an image that is
forged in a light that is completely distinctive and, for Garcia, not at all ideal. Garcia’s
narration of his dream describes how the light he sees (generated by the lamp,
illuminating the tree) is neither of night, twilight, or dawn. What is more, under this light,
we are told, the fallen fruit of the quince tree is rotting. The light, which he is unable to
accurately describe, is “clear, yet dark” the kind of light that “changes all into metal and
dust.” Erice’s climatic scenario overtly gestures towards the final moments of Dziga
Vertov’s definitive documentary in which an autonomous camera also supersedes the
filmmaker and sets off into an undetermined future. Joining Vertov, Erice extends the
discourse on the process of representation, ways of seeing and the continual
industrialization of the artist and the eye. And he does so while preserving the same
admirable measure doubt or ambiguity that concludes the earlier film, wherein the viewer,
like filmmaker, does not declare that she/he sees an autonomous camera but asks whether,
and what means, such a thing could be possible. With an air of reluctance, then, Erice’s
film argues that what has frustrated the painter Garcia all along is not only losing his
contest with the sun, but also, and less explicitly, resigning himself to the camera that he
is unable to imitate. Indeed, along with fugitive light, what Garcia cannot stabilize is his
own system of seeing. Dream of Light plays out the crisis of representation that Bazin
pointed to as splitting abstraction from realism – an essential cultural shift that Balla’s
painting articulates in visual terms. But Erice’s film resists simply extolling technological
vision over that of the artist’s eye, or favoring the “authenticity” of the human’s
unmediated vision. Instead, it is concerned with representing a shared desire to, like the
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modernists that inform both painter and filmmaker, arrest what is fleeting and to give
shape to transience.
And what is fleeting and fugitive to the cinematic image is light. What Erice’s
film finally articulates, then, is not the triumph of the camera over the artist, but its ability
to generate and control its own sun and thus, at least ostensibly, to function without its
power. As the autonomous camera comes out at night, Dream of Light might function as
an epilogue to Vertov’s earlier film. Man with a Movie Camera begins at dawn and ends
before the sun has set; Erice, six decades later, elongates the waking and working day and
thus further propagates the ascendancy of the camera wherein rendering it nocturnal
affectively consolidates its power. Operating seemingly on its own and in the darkness of
night, what Erice’s Vertovian epilogue makes clear is that the autonomy of this camera is
false, generated as it is by the power of electricity, the primer mover of the unmanned
camera and the artificial light. The image no longer has to be derived from the human,
and it no longer must be saturated by the sun; the solar image is replaced by the electric
one.
The Sunless Image
Though the capture, processing and projection of the image depend on the
availability of light, the technology of cinema relies equally upon the dark. In what
Schivelbusch calls “light-based media” the “power of artificial light to create its own
reality only reveals itself in darkness” (221). Indeed, celluloid stock’s light sensitivity
requires it to be sealed tightly away, protecting it from exposure. From the darkroom to
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the aperture to the projection booth, light and its power to alter if not ruin the film strip,
raw or developed, is managed by the careful application of neutralizing darkness.
As Bazin points out, photography behaves as a process of “molding” or the
“taking of an impression” (not unlike a death mask), which is accomplished by the
“manipulation of light” (12). First, however, light must be sequestered. This is part of the
process of its manipulation – the transformation of what is fugitive into what is frozen,
and then rendered in the image of fossilized light. But when the process itself, the trap
that is darkness, overpowers the light source itself, dimming or even depriving cinema of
its essential ingredient, the material basis of cinema, a light-based media, is made readily,
self-reflexively, apparent. And what this reveals is cinema’s fragility and its inherent
limitations, not only to infinitely retain memories or impressions, but also to function
without industrial society to sustain it. Just as Victor Erice discursively saturates his film
with light so as to underscore the essential relationship between representation and the
manipulation of illumination, the same can be accomplished by withholding light sources
and thus foregrounding how the constant availability of this cinematic ingredient has
become naturalized as part of viewing expectations. Looking back at the early history of
film, Noël Burch attempts to denaturalize the established conventions of “cinematic
language” – what he calls the Institutional Mode of Representation – and situate them not
as organic or latent, but ideologically marked by the historical, cultural and political
moment from which they arose. In order to accomplish this, Burch contrasts what is
naturalized film language with early cinema’s means of expression, the Primitive Mode
of Representation. What Burch finds in filmmaking pre-1909, before editing continuity
was established or lighting systems were industrialized, is an unregulated mode of
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making moving pictures and thus a way by which to defy the perception that film form is
neutral, and specifically for Burch, somehow devoid of dominant (capitalist) ideology.
By contrasting Institutional viewing conditions against Primitive ones, Burch attempts to
reveal that what is natural or organic about film development into its present formal state
is anything but; exposing the conditions that produced cinema renders what seems
intractably inherent or pre-ordained as illusory and, therefore, vulnerable to challenge.
Burch is particularly instructive here, first, because of how he rationalizes his
methodology and, second because of his evocation of Primitivism as implicit resistance
to the established mode of representation. As Burch points out, though he is reassessing
cinematic history he is not imposing a political agenda or set of intentions upon works
that do not espouse them. “Many films,” he writes, with no ambitions to ‘deconstruct’ the
codes of institutional narrativity….are nonetheless the bearers of a host of meanings other
than those repeated over and over by the [Institutional Mode of Representation] as such”
(3). But, as Burch contends, language is not neutral and neither is cinema, and therefore
all cinema, like language, can be situated as a socio-historical construct. This logic is
what gives Burch his critical license, allowing him to determine that all cinema,
consciously or otherwise, is always about, first, cinema itself and, second, the conditions
that produced it. Likewise, cinema cannot but be about the terms and limits of its own
materiality, and in particular the light that makes it possible. Chris Marker’s La Jetée and
Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf can both be situated within a similar methodological
framework for this pair of films, first, critique the naturalized presence and/or stability of
light in cinema and, second, accomplish as such by imposing upon themselves a
distinctly and intentionally primitive form and aesthetic. Both directors, then, evoke the
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terms that make Burch’s methodology so instructive, revealing the illusory, fragile
character of cinema by thinning out its sources of light (and movement, therefore). What
remains is an aesthetic that relies less upon light and more upon dark – a “sunless”
cinema in other words.
Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (2003) envisions the post-industrial world
suddenly become post-apocalyptic. An unnamed conflict immobilizes contemporary
Europe, depriving it of resources, electricity and water, specifically, and forcing citizens
of all classes and races to resort to basic and desperate means by which to endure. As the
bourgeois family at the centre of the narrative travels cross country by bike and foot,
following a set of train tracks which it hopes will lead eventually to a place of safety, it is
forced to negotiate new codes of survival and, with them, new social positions. The
discursive values attached to the train rails and the illusive and impassive locomotive
loom over the film, but ultimately are matched by the constrictive imposition of darkness
that is Time of the Wolf’s truly dominant metaphoric and structuring device. The darkness
the film exudes is particularly potent because it is produced, and explored for all its
political nuance, by the form of the film, thus drawing self-conscious attention to the
presence of the cinematic apparatus itself. As this formerly privileged world reverts back
to rudimentary sources of light, heat and energy, Haneke’s evocation of primitivism is
manifested not only in the social conduct of this world’s resource-poor citizens, but also
in its means of light. Haneke’s decision to espouse the low-light conditions his characters
endure literally obscures them from each other and from the viewer; the filmmaker
challenges his spectator, therefore, forcing him or her to likewise experience the
alienation and discomfort induced when the privilege of artificial light is removed.
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Haneke equates the audience with the bourgeois society his work so thoroughly
undermines, and he does so by turning the cinema against the viewer just as the world has
turned against his otherwise advantaged characters. Entitlement to natural resources and
their conveniences is radically denaturalized in Time of the Wolf, but so is entitlement to
the cinema as a source of enlightenment (literally, metaphorically) and also, therefore, of
comfort. Without the ability to make out and so orient the action occurring within the
darkened scenes, the medium itself becomes as fragile, sensitive and limited as the world
it depicts. All systems in Time of the Wolf are subject to breakdown and failure, including
that of the cinema itself. Here is our privileged world without its natural mechanisms of
power and structure, and here is our light-based media, deprived of its electrical supply.
The viewer, then, is as destabilized as the oblique and unyielding representation of this
darkened primitive world. But Haneke’s darkness is neither inexpert nor unwieldy. It
obscures his subjects, indeed, but does so as deliberately as carefully filtered light might
otherwise reveal them. Rather than revert, say, to the raw or amateur qualities associated
with a handheld camera in order to balance the form of the film with its uncertain and
even chaotic narrative content, Haneke employs what is an uncompromisingly solid, if
not severe, cinematic infrastructure and so maintains his signature stability and restraint.
Time of the Wolf’s penultimate image is of an immense bonfire burning in the
night, laid out across the wayward train tracks, a strategy devised to force the locomotive
to stop when, and if, it should once again thunder past. The semiotic values here are
productive indeed, granting the primitive light source the impossible task of stopping the
elusive, fugitive train and enabling what it so lucidly embodies – the deliverance of
civilization. But the final sequence, however, is a radical and even shocking contrast to
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the one that precedes it. Shot from the perspective of a train in motion, the images travel
from right to left and depict the steady flow of uninterrupted forest, bathed in the full
light of day. The source of the point of view is utterly and frustratingly indefinite, as is
the train’s origin or destination. It seems, then, that the train is an abstraction, and, as
such, it belongs less to the narrative of the film than to its political and aesthetic discourse.
In purely narrative terms Haneke’s suggestion might be the return to civilization,
however hopeful or ominous this might be. But the train also foregrounds Haneke’s
deliberate attempt to denaturalize the privileged viewing conditions that the institution of
cinema, and its viewers, takes for granted. In terms of cinematic history, the absence of
light coupled with the presence of the train is surely evocative. The first cinematic images
presented to a public audience were of a train, the illusion of which, though
comparatively “primitive,” powerfully and physically affected the audience, and in a way
that cannot be fully appreciated today. Because the birth of cinema is so indelibly
connected with the image of the locomotive and its associations, the sense is that
Haneke’s final images return cinema to its earliest moments, further wrenching away
from the viewer the assumed comforts that this medium has come to supply. Haneke,
then, dismantles the cinematic apparatus as an entitlement and a zone of bourgeois repose,
and he does so according to conditions similar to Noël Burch’s methodology. Where the
theorist revisits the history of early cinema and draws out what is a “primitive” challenge
to established conventions, Haneke invents his own system of cinematic primitivism, and
does so by means of his formal codes and aesthetic decisions. By destabilizing the
expectations of cinematic viewing conditions, the question that this ultimately posits is
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how altered production conditions, willed or imposed, force the viewer to respond
differently to, and even question, the inherited terms of the cinematic image.
Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) is in even more radical terms an evocation of
cinematic primitivism and a challenge to the natural illusions upon which viewing
expectations depend. One of the film’s first images is of, what we are told, is a “frozen
sun.” Light, then, is held in limbo, and so is the energy it provides. Indeed, this frozen
sun has direct bearing on the form of the film itself, for it is, so famously, composed of
still images. As Marker explains in the brief personal essay “The Pathéorama,” since his
first childhood attempt to construct cinema, he was never able to understand why film
needed movement in order to be considered cinematic. Indeed, what Marker implies here
is that, like Bazin’s conviction that the idea of cinema precedes it essence, the cinema
exists in its ideal form in the imagination. There is no need for a camera in order for there
to be cinema, in other words, and so there is no need for light or, by extension, for
movement. The sense of motion that cinema provides is just that, a sense, or an illusion.
Thirty years after being told that “nobody can do a movie with still images,”
Marker made La Jeteé (17-18). Revisiting his childhood conviction that cinema could be
made using some imagination and what was “within [his] reach” (17), Marker renders his
film out of an approximation, a memory of moving pictures; there is a suggestion of
motion, but the pictures do not “move” themselves. As Enticknap explains, “There is no
such thing as a moving image. No means has ever been devised of continually recording
the sequence of changing light over an extended period of time as it is perceived by the
human optical and nervous system” (6). Two processes are necessary in order to create
the illusion of motion. The first is the ability of the camera to record a sequence of
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images (frames) at a rate fast enough that “a distinct difference between two individual
frames cannot be perceived by the viewer” when they are project at the same speed (6).
Secondly, the transition between each frame has to be achieved invisibly, that is “without
perceptible fluctuation in light level or ‘flicker,’ when it is reproduced by a displaying
device” (6). “Persistence of vision” was long thought to explain both these processes, but
theorists have more recently begun to see this inclusive category as flawed. As Bordwell
and Thompson explain, the more recent two-part theory of “critical flicker fusion” and
“apparent motion” is the most widely accepted account of how the eye is tricked into
turning broken, rapidly changing frames into the illusion of continuity and movement (2-
3). Whether or not they succeed in explaining the illusion accomplished by cinema
technology, these terms themselves are richly suggestive and theoretically provocative.
Indeed, as Marker’s film puts forth, vision is indeed persistent, for the cinematic
imagination, despite an absence of the apparatus necessary to render a conventional,
moving film is still able to construct a work of cinema. Film, according to La Jetée, does
not need “film” to transcribe it, but only the willingness to believe in the illusion it
supplies. Foregrounding illusion as the film image’s true support surface foregrounds
cinema as materially fragile and, at the same time, ethereally durable.
Where Haneke constructs a Europe in the midst of a resource scarcity that results
from and/or produces some form of conflict, Marker’s Cold War-era film envisions a
post-apocalyptic planet earth. The narrative originates underground, beneath the
radioactive streets of Paris, and thus the black and white film is characterized by heavy
shrouds of darkness which are punctuated by beams of light from powerful, single source
lamps. The film’s lack of the expected motion suggests that this is a cinema that comes
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from a time and place deprived of the means necessary to create the moving picture’s
conventional illusion. The cinema of the future, then, is neo-primitive and thus resembles
the cinema of the past. The film forces the viewer to use the imagination to invent cinema
again, to find the idea that preceded the essence (or the apparatus) that has come to
establish a set of what might be abnormally prescriptive cinematic expectations. Indeed,
just as the film’s protagonist, the dreamer who is sent into Time in search of food,
medicine and sources of energy, is chosen because of his obsession with an image from
the past, so too is the viewer forced to recreate the cinema itself, the correlate of the
viewer’s lost image, trying to remember the roles and rules that make the cinema what it
is or was.
As a series of photographic images, La Jetée is the fossilization of light; but it is
also a fossilization of cinema itself. What remains for the film’s diegetic future (post-
apocalyptic Paris, the dreamer’s present) is an artifact, the static residues of some other
“illusory” mode of cinema that is no longer possible to render in this resource-deprived,
subterranean and (importantly) darkened world. The artifacts of the still images are
accumulated and displayed in the museum that is La Jetée; such a self-reflexive gesture
connects the film we are watching with the consistent references to things petrified (the
redwood tree), stuffed (the animals in the natural history museum), chiseled from rock
and stone (the statues the dreamer sees in the Parisian past and also which litter the halls
of the galleries that compose the underground world) or frozen, like the sun. The
proliferation of these forms or representations of life that are, like the film, rendered static,
constantly reinforce the idea that in order to supply them with their former energy the
imaginative power of memory must be harnessed and even manipulated, not unlike the
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fugitive essence of cinema, its light. And like Haneke, Marker’s film operates according
to a primitive formal system and aesthetic that, like Burch’s explicit evocation of the
same term, forces the viewer to think about cinema both before its language or mode of
representation was naturalized. But, like Haneke, La Jetée also imagines the future of a
cinema deprived of that which facilitates its illusion; firm certainty is replaced by
palpable doubt, thus reinstating the terms of perception inaugurated by Cézanne and
Impressionism and the study of the variability of human sight and natural light.
Sans Soleil, made in 1982, twenty years after La Jetée, is in more ways than can
be explored here a companion to Marker’s earlier film. The link that connects them both
within the present framework of a primitive, post-cinematic filmmaking is the way in
which it too posits that film can be rendered without film, and specifically, without the
presence of a light source, namely the sun. Commencing as it does with several seconds
of black leader, the film can be located within the same inert luminosity that emanated
from La Jetée’s frozen sun. Building upon this, the film’s more obvious gesture of
obscuration, Sans Soleil subtly and consistently eschews the direct sourcing of light by
incorporating extant images, taken from television, video games and other films into a
complex formal and narrative fabric. One of the films that Sans Soleil embeds within its
own porous framework is La Jetée. Its presence is explicitly visual, suggestively
metaphoric, as well as obliquely referential. Perhaps the most resonant gesture Marker
makes towards his earlier film occurs when Sans Soleil’s itinerant cameraman Sandor
Krasna describes his plan for an imaginary film, one that fits the description of La Jetée,
but which he “will not make.” And yet he is making it, for he is continually “collecting
[its] sets,” “inventing [its] twists” and “putting in his favorite creatures.” “Sunless,” for so
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the diegetic film is called, exists in Krasna’s mind. And so the imaginary film is the idea
that precedes the cinematic apparatus; the impulse to capture a reality that Bazin
maintains has always obsessed humanity, and whose first material rendering Cherchi
Usai posits is as old and as basic as the blocked passage of light that generates a shadow.
This then, is Sans Soleil, a truly “sun-less” cinema, and a means of making films without
its essential ingredients, light and thus motion; without, also, the active presence of the
filmmaker/protagonist who disappears behind his images, into his letters and who is also
absorbed by the voice of the woman who reads them. But as Marker harnesses Krasnor,
and Krasnor likewise harnesses Marker, the result is as means by which to generate film
without the use of a camera; thus, coupled with the use of existing images, Marker takes
for his medium reflexivity, referentiality and the capabilities of the pure, raw imagination.
And if all film is derived first of all from the imagination, the idea and the urge to
represent a picture of reality, it does not need the sun and it does not need a camera.
Indeed, Sans Soleil, like cinematic essays tend to do, bears reference to Dziga Vertov’s
seminal Man with a Movie Camera, the text from which this obscure and difficult genre
arose. Like Vertov’s cameraman hero, Marker’s Krasnor assumes the self-referential role
of the filmmaker whose movie apparatus is the means by which he negotiates a changing
world and, along the way, creates one of his own. But because of the parameters the film
sets, creating a film instinctively rather than directly or actively, Krasnor is cast as the
evolutionary outcome of Vertov’s man with a movie camera – the man without a movie
camera. In both cases, the result is the satisfaction of the myth that Bazin posited – a total
cinema, a medium that bears no seams between itself, its user or the external world.
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Cinema, Virilio writes, was first understood by Méliès not as “the seventh art but
the art that combines all of the others” (Disappearance, 107). So, for Virilio, just as other
modes of representation have “decomposed” or disappeared into cinema (107), cinematic
history is nothing less than the narrative of its own disappearance, wherein a total
“synergy” between eye and motor, operator and apparatus, finally abolishes their
differences (57). As Virilio has consistently argued, the movie apparatus becomes the
prosthesis for a perfect, unadulterated vision; after dispensing with the crane, dolly or
tripod, and then the operator, it becomes indistinguishable from the images it produces.
Having, then, assumed a form that is both indistinct and imperceptible, allowing it to
survey without interruption or interference, the camera achieves its total autonomy and
finally disappears. Given the ubiquity and thus invisibility that digital imaging
technology is ever more rapidly consolidating, Virilio’s arguments become less indulgent
and increasingly prescient. Indeed, like Virilio, the focus here is on the disappearance of
the camera; but that vision technology has become so perfected it is rendered
imperceptible is only one dimension of what is growing into a precarious social and
ecological condition. But to remain a powerful theoretical category, disappearance
requires amendment: what must be included and accounted for is how the current height
of cinematic technology, the digital camera and its attendant parts, is measured not by a
true disappearance, as Virilio understands it, but a false one, namely disposability. The
dystopian evolution that Virilio charts, shrinking the camera into an invisibility, ends not
in indefectible triumph but in failure; because the camera (no matter how sleek or small)
is composed of such durable materials, decomposition and, therefore, disappearance are
precluded. Putting disappearance in literal and then environmental terms does not
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disingenuously misrepresent the context or style of Virilio’s arguments, for, indeed, given
Virilio’s politics he would not object to a malfunction within the system he is not
responsible for creating but is instead actively critiquing. Disposability as flawed
disappearance might be recognizable as a failure, but it is one that continues to work, or it
will until economies built on technological obsolescence and the attendant entitlement to
freely discard are held accountable for the residues they leave behind. Digital technology
has “disappeared” the differences between imaging modes, frames and screens, and has
also drastically shortened the temporal increment between the latest innovation and the
most recently outmoded. The disposable camera is the falsely disappearing one; in order
to impede or at least denaturalize what has become the ease with which the material of
cinema is subtracted from established theory, history and viewing conditions, instruction
can be taken from the primitive aesthetics of Haneke and Marker, among others. Though
strategies, formal practices and socio-political contexts are of course divergent, the
intention and the result of these filmmakers and their works is what matters in the present
framework; making cinema less obvious, depriving it of its illusory values which leave it
unassailable, intractable, and incapable of change. By “disappearing” the camera and/or
the broader cinematic apparatus, Haneke and Marker render it more, not less,
conspicuous. Such is the paradox the “sunless cinema” both exploits and perpetuates. La
Jetée is here particularly notable, for its system bears an intentional flaw. As Marker
inserts a single quiver of movement (blinking eyes, what might be thought of as the
primordial editing device) into an otherwise static film, the filmmaker not only offers the
hope that cinema can in fact revivify the past, but also, more importantly, he inscribes an
essential element of doubt into his own position. The viewer is therefore compelled to
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question not La Jetée so much as to confront the element flicker – the blink – that is at
the root of both human and cinematic perceptions.
Luminous Data
If it were to be formally marked, the ascendancy of the digital cinema, its
democratization and the raw or amateur aesthetic commonly attached to it, might be said
to have been initiated by the Dogme95 collective. Lead by Lars von Trier, the group took
advantage of his presence at the 1995 conference held in Paris honouring cinema’s
centennial year to publicly declare the beginning of a radical new anti-cinema that would,
via the possibilities of the digital camera, eradicate the “cosmeticised” illusion that 100
years of filmmaking had achieved. The goal of the collective was not only to wrench the
camera away from the exclusivity and privilege of the auteur, but to essentially politicize
cinema by making it both universal and conspicuous in its presence. As the Manifesto
declared, “Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate
democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies.” But to make
certifiable Dogme movies, a filmmaker had to take a Vow of Chastity requiring him or
her, to, among other things, use only a hand-held camera (i.e. digital), dispense with any
optical tricks and employ only available means of sound, setting and lighting. Though the
movement was officially declared defunct in 2002, under claims it had grown into a
predicable, vacuous aesthetic and a “genre formula,” filmmakers can still take the
chastity vow and obtain official Dogme certification (there are at present a total of 219
officially recognized films in existence).
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A decade later and Dogme95 takes on a new relevance, for it is in these
production strictures that carbon-neutral cinema seems to have already found a model.
Indeed, both are premised on a technology which does not require the same dependence
on chemicals or cumbersome infrastructure as the comparatively labor and resource
intensive, and thus expensive, celluloid-based cinema. Though an ideology of
democratized technology defines the two initiatives, it is for reasons of literal rather than
political purity that carbon-neutral cinema commonly touts digital as the future of
environmentally-benign filmmaking. And perhaps what is held to be its inherently
ecological character is encapsulated by its relationship with light. Instead of inscribing
the impression of light, physically rendering it captured carbon, digital technology
translates received signals of light and movement into a binary code which is then re-
converted back into an image. As Enticknap explains, “the pattern of silver salts on
photographic film is an analog of the pattern of light which existed at the time and in the
place a photograph was taken” (203). Conversely, though, digital does not “represent a
continuous process of change,” but instead “represents that process as information,”
(203). Micro-processors are then used to “encode” images as digital data, which are
changed back into an “analog signal which can be displayed on a screen” (203). While
this conversion introduces an extra step, digital retains as its advantage the fact that by
representing recorded images as numbers, reproduction is rendered with complete
accuracy. Included with this, though, is further distance or separation between the image
and its origin, screened picture and light source. The economic and cultural desire for
perfect reproduction masks what is a critical diminution of image quality; the “purity”
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that digital facilitates, then, is not cinematographic, but ideologically and politically
intentioned.
While analog depends on a weighty infrastructure in order to turn light into latent
image and then, after processing, into a strip of film, in fact, the only machine necessary
to read the processed image is the human eye (203). Digital, however, because of its extra
step of conversion, renders the image less accessible, dependent as it is on “very
sophisticated mechanical and electronic engineering…to produce the hardware which can
reproduce the recording as meaningful images” (203). While the digital image might be
at least ostensibly more immaterial than its analog counterpart (and thus, as is assumed,
less likely to leave environmental residues), the celluloid cinema does not require the
same wholesale technological infrastructure in order to watch or improve the quality of
its pictures. Indeed, cinema’s earliest films could still be shown today, with only minimal
modification (Enticknap 26). Digital, conversely, requires the retooling of its entire
microprocessing system in order to keep in pace with the images that are being produced
(27). The tension, then, that exists between digital and analog is the weight and longevity
of the hardware or software each one requires. In terms of economies of scale, analog
filmmaking is indeed a better value, for it is initially more expensive, the price of
constantly upgrading the machines by which to read digital information is economically
prohibitive and ecologically abusive.
Cinematic production, such as it is, is characterized by an imbalance that values
the machine over the image. In its title alone, Virilio’s Art of the Motor testifies to this
counter-intuitive equation. And it is rare indeed that Virilio’s theory of film and speed
(these are for him intractably connected) will pay heed to what the image depicts, and
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neither will he recount even a fraction of a plot or narrative. The “art” of cinema and its
images is given over to the motor itself. Theorizing cinema, then, is done without regard
for its images, for these it seems, are secondary, ephemeral, the means to the end of the
“vision machine” that is the apogee of Virilio’s theorization. “A sun for visual truth, 24
times a second,” as Virilio imagines Gance might have articulated it (55). But as Bataille
points out, the sun “is the most abstract object, since it is impossible to look at it fixedly”
(57); though all revolves around it, the source itself is inherently repellent to the eye.
Thus, the “truth” or reality that is attached to cinematic representation is as illusory as it
is unattainable. But as Virilio has so consistently attempted to expose the motor and thus
the motivations behind cinema – the ideology embedded in the technology that generates
the image – ecological questions demand that materialist inquiries are pushed back even
further when searching for the image’s origins. It is not reductive to insist that the
evocation of the cinematic motor must also account for what drives the motor, the fuels
and the energy that are not organically or endlessly available and whose politics only
adds complexity to Virilio’s already compelling theoretical inquiries. The focus on
apparatus, in other words, must be accompanied by a focus on its fuels.
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Chapter Two: Resource
Industrial war and cinema are mutually informing and inextricably related. Paul
Virilio’s seminal War and Cinema both narrates and theorizes the patterns of
development that have merged war and cinema into a single techno-ideological regime of
surveillance and, by extension, cultural management. But Virilio’s intention is not just to
prove how entrenched war is in cinema, or cinema in war; rather, the theorist of speed
provides the tools with which to regard war and cinema as two symbiotically related
entities that modify each other in accordance with the political needs and technological
capabilities of a given cultural, societal or historical moment. For as long as war exists,
Virilio’s study remains relevant and adaptable and therefore not only welcomes
addendum in accordance with the changing economies of war and cinema, it solicits it as
such. And it is now, at a moment when war and cinema are again converging in radical
and terrifying ways that Virilio’s project facilitates the reevaluation and adjustment of his
own theoretical material.
The current war in Iraq bears witness to how modes of both combat and cinematic
representation are intimately and essentially linked. The obvious difference between the
1991 war with Iraq (Gulf War I) and the present conflict (Gulf War II) is the digitization
of its media coverage and, even more so, its representation in digital documentaries and
random, user-generated and/or putatively “open” internet forums such as YouTube.
Added to this, however, is the specificity of the war itself, the essential root of its cause,
and how this informs and then reforms the very ontology of cinema and the larger
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category of the mechanically and now digitally produced image. As David Harvey
argues, by extending its presence beyond Iraq into Iran, and from there to the central
Asian republics and eventually to the oil riches contained in the Caspian Basin, the US
would come to control the “global oil spigot” and thus ward off political competition
from other economic heavyweights dependent on oil imports, including Europe, Japan,
East and South-East Asia (24-25). What is more, according to Harvey, the essential
dimension of this resource-driven US Imperialism is that its sustenance depends largely
on literally fueling its military’s might. Gulf War II, in other words, is an oil war, a battle
fought both with and for resources.
The military, according to Harvey, “runs on oil” (25); its energy capacitates the
Iraq war’s weaponry just as surely as it founds the political and economic desires of
Coalition invaders. But because the weaponry and ideology of war are inextricably linked
to the means and ends of cinematic vision, what thus emerges is a conflation between and
the categories of “resource” and “image.” Additionally, this war is more overtly than ever
an environmental war; and not only in terms of how the battle itself impinges upon Iraqi
terrain and infects the operative ecology of that country and indeed the globe, the war’s
oil stakes are unavoidably linked to what is escalating into a full-scale environmental
crisis. What is made legible, then, via the representation of Iraq’s incomparable
devastation and horror is the convergence and even conflict between war and digital
media and, as a necessary extension, the environmental impacts of both.
Taken together, Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992) and Deborah
Scranton’s War Tapes (2006) capture the differences between how celluloid cinema and
digital video behave towards and interact with the specifics of an overtly resource-driven
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war. Connecting these films on a more overt level is their discursive engagement with
environmental decay, a looming energy crisis and attendant challenge to the cultures of
mobility and transportation from which their cinematic mode ultimately springs. But
what renders these documents of resource war truly fit for comparison is not their similar
traits but rather their inherent differences – the most obvious of which is their
technologies of representation: Herzog’s analog film as opposed to Scranton’ digital
project. What is more, taken together, these films foreground how the already convergent
technological histories of cinema and warfare are being reframed by the dominant lens of
environmental politics. It is necessary to burden cinema and the image with a specific set
of environmental concerns; digital video (DV) especially so, since its aesthetic values and
technological capabilities are increasingly converging with the new-growth ideology of
environmentalism. Indeed, the digital complements the environmental just as readily as it
counters it. The conflict resides in DV’s ability to facilitate political activism while at the
same time perpetuating the cycles of consumption and waste that the new cinema of
“digital dissent” targets as anathema to political and social equality and environmental
stability. What happens when separating out and then reformulating the basic discursive
units of a digitally-imaged resource war is this: not only do digitization and militarization
become increasingly inseparable, both aesthetically and ideologically, but environmental
rhetoric and the politics of resource consumption emerge as the heretofore obscured
dimension that links war and cinema within an ecology of the image. Though Iraqi-
generated images are in some cases included, most examples taken here are non-Iraqi
(Coalition-sided) documentaries. The monumental differences between these two
categories is indeed relevant, but if engaged here would prove a distraction. Indeed, the
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present focus is on the images of the Iraq War as a totality and an accumulation, the very
point being to highlight the way digital conflates soldiers and insurgents, images of oil
war and the oil upon which both war and cinema depend.
Disabling the enemy is determined by tactics of sight manipulation. “The history
of battle,” Virilio declares, “is primarily the history of radically changing fields of
perception” (War 7). As such, “war consists not so much in scoring the territorial,
economic or other material victories as in appropriating the ‘immateriality’ of perceptual
fields” (7). Virilio’s subtle move calls attention to how vision and the image are not
merely conceptual counterparts to material resources, they are themselves resources, and
for strategic value alone outweigh the typical spoils of warfare. Virilio’s inquiry and his
process of theorization provide the groundwork necessary to inaugurate the image-as-
resource as a distinct discursive category which facilitates a resource-conscious history of
war’s impact on the development of the cinematic image. Virilio’s understanding of the
mutuality between cinematic and military development, however, takes for granted that
film resources are readily available and so is focused on the privileged cinema, the
cinema of excess rather than the “underprivileged” cinema that emerges from those zones
where scarcity rather than surfeit is the economic dominant. War and Cinema, then, is
characterized by a centricity that ignores how the disadvantaged, war-torn filmmaker
manages when dispossessed of a steady or reliable means of representation. As the
narrative of early Soviet cinematic history reminds us, deprivation does not preclude
cinematic production or innovation. Indeed, the integral Soviet-derived editing practices
that provide an essential basis for both narrative and non-narrative cinema as we know it
are rooted in a civil war economy impoverished of both basic life provisions as well as
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the resources necessary to make films. Thus, the cinematic experiments performed by the
filmmakers and theoreticians of early Soviet cinema (filming without film, in particular )
confirm the image as a resource but also reframe the digital videos that now flow out of
Iraq as a cinema that is as much about political subversion as it is about material scarcity.
Buttressed against the politics of resource deprivation, the current glut of Iraq-war images
signals a coming impoverishment rather than further enrichment. The war, like the level
of energy it consumes and the pollutants thus generated, is unsustainable. The question
that this end-of-oil/ end-of-cinema narrative ultimately posits is how filmmaking might
manage to operate when dispossessed of the very energy and industrial materials over
which the conflict – or one side of it – is being fought.
War Zones and Image Rations
Russia’s cinema shortage began during that country’s unstable post-revolutionary
period of War Communism (1918-1920). As Bordwell and Thompson note, what became
or was becoming the USSR did not manufacture either raw stock or film equipment and
so, with production companies having either fled the country or hording whatever
supplies remained, this period of filmmaking was defined by consistent resource
shortages (120-121). But in a sprawling and mostly illiterate country, the cinema was
recognized as a potent instrument of propaganda and education and so production and
dissemination continued by whatever means possible. Notably, the discovery of
numerous tsarist films in 1919 provided the country with a limited supply source and
enabled the subsequent nationalization of the film industry (122). But that production
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remained low was not reflected in the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the newsreels and
agit-films that Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov, later pillars of the montage movement,
were actively creating out of whatever raw stock and recyclable bits they could muster.
As Alexander Kaun has noted “the flourishing phase” of early Soviet cinema “coincided
with the lowest ebb of public well-being in Russia – years of civil war, intervention,
blockade, [and] famine” (qtd. in Leyda 148). This exceptional conflation of enthusiasm
and impoverishment is exemplified by what has become a legendary moment in film
history. In 1919 a copy of Griffith’s Intolerance was smuggled past the anti-Soviet
blockade and the film became a textbook for deprived and industrious Russian
filmmakers who screened it with obsessive repetition, cutting and reediting sequences to
thus discover, and manipulate, Griffiths’ techniques (Leyda 143). An even more stunning
example of cinematic thrift is Kuleshov’s famous “film without film” experiments. The
director of the newly inaugurated Moscow Film School instructed his students by cutting
and re-editing extant films and also staging cinematic skits and montage sequences using
curtained “frames” intended to simulate the experience of both producing and viewing
images (Bordwell and Thompson 122). What is more, the Soviet practice of film was
accompanied by the rigor of measured considerations, guidelines and justifications for the
images themselves; manifested now as film theory, the filmmaker’s written philosophical
accounts of cinematic form and practice are arguably a further instance of “film without
film.”
The war economy and ideological fervor that forced cinema to survive in the
absence of source materials is manifested in an editing style and a cinematic aesthetic that
is economical and thus laconic (Mast and Kawin 158). In view of the relationship
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between the aesthetics a film and the availability of necessary supplies, Eisenstein’s
characteristic repetition of a single shot defines how cinema has long been informed by
an awareness of the image as a valuable, finite resource. In a further example, Kuleshov’s
experiments discovered that a single cut could and must function simultaneously on three
levels – narrative, emotional, and intellectual (160); this conclusion inscribed the space
between shots with as much discursive and aesthetic value as possible. The political
imperative to use the image to create a new society is what primarily informs this febrile
and incredibly influential period of image production. But when resources and their
scarcity are introduced as an evaluative framework it is not difficult to situate early
Soviet filmmaking as a model of resource consciousness, forced as it was to defer to
principles of recycling and reuse as well as an ideology of lack rather than one of excess.
The imagination does not need to overindulge in order to conceptualize the
networks that configure cinema as both resource and resource-dependent. The cinematic
image, digitized or celluloid-based, behaves as a resource in and of itself. It is a
manufactured or “unnatural” resource and, as such, its construction is dependent on other
external resources – fossil fuel, for example as well as the resource-based processes by
which technologies industries manufacture imaging equipment. As Giles Slade insists,
there is no way to separate the manufacture of technology from the so-called “natural”
world that supplies the sources necessary for its sustenance. “Technological literacy”
(278), as Slade calls it, must extend beyond interaction with electronic equipment and
include a consumer-oriented understanding of the material politics compressed in the
technological devices that lend so many contemporary lives unparalleled convenience.
For example, global demand for coltan (colombo-tantalum ore) the essential ingredient in
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the tantalum capacitors used in laptops, cell phones, personal organizers and their
numerous variations has produced “social and geopolitical chaos in West Africa, where
[this resource] is most plentiful” (278). Slade also makes passing note of the life risks
taken by the miners (the human resources) who are in the employ of an industry infamous
for dangerous work conditions and exploitative labor policy. Such are the social, political
and material realities embedded in visual culture. The images and information that a
simple mineral, once mined and refined, help to inscribe and then convey are not as
ethereal and intangible as we might imagine. But the relationship between the consumer
and the digitized image and/or piece of information is not neutral, and
images/information are themselves not weightless. This, of course, this is precisely
because that incorporeal mass that composes the electronic or digital environment is
loaded with the complexities and burdens of social, environmental and cultural politics.
Slade’s inquiry focuses on the history of planned obsolescence within technology
industries and from there establishes this basic production principle as the root of the
global crisis of electronic waste. But what the technology itself produces – photographs
and emails, for example – must also be included within the larger problem of resource
extraction and e-waste pollution. The material politics – including human injustice and
environmental negligence – that Slade argues is embedded in the plastic and metals of
contemporary mediation tools is equally applicable to the cultural and personal
information these devices are intended to manufacture and convey. So, though
technology has rendered information almost weightless, its production and transference is
accomplished only by means of a mechanized infrastructure that remains as material and
tangible as ever. It is because of the mythology of immateriality increasingly associated
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with the digital that cinema continues to eschew its increasingly topical associations as a
“constructed” or “manufactured” resource – a material, in other words. So it remains that
the more directly “material” form of celluloid cinema (with its film stock, cumbersome
canisters, projectors, screens and public theatres) much more firmly and directly situates
the cinema, both in terms of the image itself and its technology, within the category of the
resource. But because the digital yields a different set of media-specific problems and
complexities, it must be pulled down from the ether of the incorporeal and affixed with
the ontological, environmental and cultural designations that are appropriate for all
resource-derived commodities.
But whether contemplating either digital or celluloid cinema, the foundational
question remains: if the impoverished economy of war and subsequent rationing of film
resources are the circumstances that ultimately structured Soviet montage and much of
the editing practice that came after, what does the digitization of the war in Iraq do to
inscribe that medium’s as yet inchoate and malleable aesthetics and practices with a
specific set of ideologies and behaviors? Additionally, how might such models of
cinematic scarcity inform carbon-neutral or sustainable filmmaking practices? What
grounds a comparison between the Soviets and Iraq-war digital imaging is not only the
shared conditions of an economy of war but also that the cinematic media specific to each
moment are found in a relatively early stage of development and so are shaped in direct
relation to an availability or lack of resources. The sheer abundance of digital videos that
intend to exploit or explore the Iraq war forms a critical mass of what Megan Boler
considers a “viral” front of anti-war “digital dissidence.” At the same time, however,
what this incredible deluge of unmanaged user-generated political engagement represents
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is a privileged consumer-culture ideology of overabundance, surfeit and excess. A
dialectic tension thus emerges from out of the unfortunate and unavoidable irony that
sees dissident cinema’s good intentions infected by this mode’s inherent and defining
capacity for profuse excess. Thus, the swelling category of anti-establishment, counter-
Coalition DV dissidence is rendered a further example of what its practitioners are
attempting to dismantle: the ideology of consumption, waste and disposability, and even
the surfeit of technological speed itself, that is both the means and ends of the resource
war raging in Iraq. What Charles Musser calls digital documentary’s “aesthetics of
honesty” apologizes for the amateur and gratuitous stylistics that the democratization of
digital video and its myriad of broadcast forums have enabled to proliferate. Indeed, the
urgency of the situation and the stress of the circumstances are part of what accounts for
the unpolished production values that characterize the majority of the films and videos
Musser is considering. War and digitality are generating a new aesthetic which requires
the viewer to likewise adjust his or her cinematic expectations. But as Jon Alpert and
Matthew O’Neill’s HBO documentary series Baghdad ER (2006) exemplifies, rough
production values seem to absolve the filmmaker of the obligation to control the camera
and engage directly with the politics of war. The text is completely “open”; devoid of
narration, the only words spoken are those of the medics, physicians and soldiers whose
chaos and pain unfold before us without the obvious interference of authorial or editorial
intrusion. This post-ideological Direct Cinema approach renders the camera and the
operator seemingly, dangerously, neutral. But this neutrality is a silence and like all
deliberate silence it speaks loudly, in this case testifying to a lack of political literacy and
an inability to even attempt to map out the causes or consequences of the war itself. The
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impotency of Baghdad ER further testifies how the resource image is seemingly
incapable of being sourced back to its material origin, just as the war it represents is
rendered similarly amorphous, alien and strangely apolitical.
Iraq-war documentaries, almost exclusively digital, rely predominantly on
principles of Direct Cinema (or Cinema Verité). For example, the most salient feature of
DV and Direct Cinema is the long take, a formal choice characterized by a seemingly
random, roaming camera and accidental, ambulatory aesthetic, and which is now easily
facilitated by digital’s lightweight equipment and abundant capacity for uninterrupted
recording. What the long take represents on an ideological level produces a distinct set of
problems, especially when the resource-based economics of DV excess are juxtaposed
with the Soviet model of celluloid conservation and image rationing. What is ultimately
at stake in situating the Direct Cinema style of anti-war documentaries alongside the
Soviet example of cinematic scarcity is the inherent conflict of interest between form,
content, and intent, wherein the pairing foregrounds and then complicates some of the
utopian dimensions attributed to the political possibilities of digital video. Read as a
signal of material excess and an ideology of material decadence, DV’s long take
capacities (the camera effectively left to idle) represent, if not perpetuate, habits of waste
and over-consumption. There is, then, something insidious about these very strategies,
for, when employed to represent and also ideally resist the war’s hubris they often
entrench rather than subvert the patterns of over-consumption that are at the heart of the
US presence in Iraq.
The politics of disposability are a further dimension that informs the aesthetic of
the Iraq-war digital documentary. Understood as a measurement of both waste and
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technological development, disposability is the end-point of a trajectory of technological
innovation and, ostensibly, perfection. Consumer culture’s design and production
ideology dictates that the final stage of a product’s developmental evolution is marked
not by its longevity or endurance but, rather, by when it is rendered gloriously
expendable and can thus, seemingly, disappear. Mass production and what Vance
Packard called the “waste-maker” society depends on the expedient and endless circuitry
of consumption wherein the affordable commodity wears out, is thrown out and is then
duly replaced by its identical equivalent. Such is the ecology and the economy of planned
obsolescence. As Slade argues, the earliest phase of intentionally rendering products
obsolete occurred in 1913, with the introduction of the electric starter in the automobile
engine, the upshot of which was the outmoding of all the cars that came before it (4).
Technological obsolescence, then, is the product of innovation (4). But innovation is
attended by death-dating: creativity is matched by destruction and perfection, likewise, is
measured by how well a product anticipates its own end. So it is that the defining
assumptions and behaviors of digital culture are legible not only in the expendability of
its technology, but also, necessarily, in the formal practices and principles of the
“disposable” digital image. The digital image is, after all, fated to fade. As information
scientist Howard Besser argues, unlike film, a “relatively long-lasting storage medium”
digital retention is inherently precarious (5). As Besser explains, the maintenance of
digital image and/or information “requires periodic refreshing,” or continual format
migration, “because the physical storage strata decays.” Digital has acquired the
“illusion” that preservation can be taken for granted because unlike “analog storage
formats (such as film and video), a digital copy is ostensibly an exact replica of what was
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copied” (5). But not only are the images “saved” on external disks only intended to last
between two and five years, the real problem of digital preservation is that the speed of
technological obsolescence renders stored digital holdings inaccessible. Thus, while we
can still “study 3,000 year old cave paintings…we're unable to even decipher any of the
contents of an electronic file on an 8-inch floppy disk from only 20 years ago” (1). What,
then, of DV conflicts such as Iraq? That so much of its coverage is “born digital” means
that the technology that makes the war accessible also dictates that the media documents
that would otherwise serve as historical records will in fact prove ephemeral. How
thoroughly disposable, then, will digital technology render contemporary war? Indeed,
the scarcity of images that informed the early Soviet cinema’s civil war years is
outmatched by digital’s technological flaw; an image scarcity, then, will come not during
the conflict, but after, when these specific images have disappeared. So it is that hidden
within digital’s image glut is its opposite: the potential for deprivation and a total, utter
lack.
The Pipeline: Image as Resource
Not surprisingly, as the Internet supplants print, radio, and televisual news sources,
CNN’s coverage of the war in Iraq is increasingly accessed on-line. Given its origins as a
TV network, it is to be expected that little negotiation with the written word is involved
when using its website to learn the latest about the conflict. Visual information competes
with juxtaposed advertisements and is conveyed through uploaded digital videos that
flow down what CNN calls its “Pipeline.” Of course, pipeline bears with it two accepted
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definitions: first, as a conduit for the transportation of petroleum or natural gas and,
second, as a channel of news and/or information. The metaphorical value here is
significant, and not only as it describes news and information as resources, it also
ironically aligns CNN’s live images of Iraqi horrors with the same petroleum politics that
are the rationale for the US invasion. This rhetorical choice unintentionally but richly
fosters new possibility for how the image of war is conceptualized: before it is refined by
editors and technicians, cut and presented according to editorial and advertising criteria,
and finally pumped down the pipeline and into the marketplace of Internet broadcasting,
the image must be extracted from the rawness of the world at large. By equating the
process of retrieving, refining and then disseminating news and information with the
transportation of petroleum, CNN’s “Pipeline” exemplifies how resource consciousness
has seeped into the conceptual and aesthetic terrain of image culture. It is not even
entirely necessary to note the fact that “Pipeline” is dominated by such intersecting and
conflating news items as the “energy debate,” the crisis in American car manufacturing,
pollution, global warming, and, of course, resource warfare. Indeed, it is a gratuitous
dimension that only magnifies how petroleum resources cannot be separated from a
single facet of industrial culture or the images that it produces.
As Chalmers Johnson argues, the nature of contemporary warfare has shifted such
that the total war that characterized the Cold War period has been replaced by the even
more entrenched and insidious form of US imperial expansion which he calls an “Empire
of Bases.” The multitude of US military bases abroad, some 725 acknowledged by the
Defense Department, are positioned in areas accessed during World War Two and the
Cold War but extended in scope once the Soviet Union collapsed and its former oil-rich
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territories opened up for imperial expansion (Johnson 22). This new “political culture” is
premised on the business of rationalizing and maintaining active and deactivated military
and thus perpetuating its vast networks of what has become the nebulously termed
“military-industrial complex” (Johnson 146). The Empire of Bases exists to support an
inactive or seemingly dormant state of permanent war designed to drain foreign territories
of their resources. Justifying its foreign presence under the guise of “humanitarian
initiatives” or “disarming Iraq,” chief among the real, predatory goals of post Cold War
military, is to consume the product it is structured around securing (151-152). Emptying
its energy reserves in order to refill them, the means and ends of oil war are the same.
The resource-based conflict and/or imperial incursion is thus engaged in an endogamous,
and self-defeating circuitry that is determined by the same petroleum it must consume in
order to operate.
Indeed, as political geographer Phillipe LeBillon argues, “armed conflict in the
post-Cold War period is increasingly characterised by a specific political ecology closely
linked to the geography and political economy of natural resources” (561). Resources,
however, are not immanent. Rather, their creation of resources “from the earth’s natural
endowment is a historical process of social construction” (564). Resources, then, do not
exist, they become as such” (564). It is through the production and “manipulation of signs
and symbols” that societies manufacture the values that transform rocks into gems, cows
into beef, or raw crude into energizing fuel (564). Diamonds, for instance, exemplify how
“a useless material” becomes constructed both economically and discursively, as
“industrial cutting” and other stages of refinement combine with the power of marketing
to transform it into a valuable commodity (564). From this, it is not difficult to see how
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the specific production of the desire to be not just mechanized by increasingly mobile has
rendered oil’s energy density so valuable and transformed this fuel into a resource. What
is “natural” about petroleum reserves does not extend beyond the basic fact it exists in
nature; industrial culture, however, is defined by and thrives upon the manufacture of
“unnatural” resources. LeBillon, for example, points to how Japan, a country relatively
poor in naturally occurring resources has built a globally expansive economy through
technological innovation and the manufacture of consumer goods (564); these are
artificial resources, in other words, but resources all the same.
Cultural and material constructs, the image and the determinants of its technology
are the manufactured resources of the industrial and now post-industrial age. The image-
as-resource both practically and metaphorically alters how cinematic, specifically digital,
representations of the chaos that is Iraq might be received. Affixing the designation
image-as-resource to the war documentary or news item complicates the conflict for it
undermines and even demystifies the naturalized, normalized categories that resource
wars both produce and keep separate. According to LeBillon’s description of the
“political ecology of war,” it is the availability of resources that determines a nation’s
likelihood for conflict (565). Engagement in that conflict is, of course, sustained by
resources (fuel, food, soldiers), which in turn determined how extensively the
environment will be tapped and ultimately drained, thus necessitating or inviting further
conflict. War, in other words, has a two-fold dependency on resources – their abundance
facilitates belligerent greed-driven conflict, while their scarcity rationalizes need-driven
aggression (562). In industrialized warfare, petroleum resources have functioned to
physically mobilize forces, manufacture and then transport arms, render weaponry
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operative, and so on. Warfare conducted by so-called post-industrial nations obviously
still requires the availability of naturally occurring resources; indeed, just such an
exigency is both the means and ends of the US war in Iraq. As both Baudrillard and
Virilio have suggested, Gulf War I was the war that saw the image explicitly weaponized.
Virilio writes, for example, that not only was the image employed as a tool of strategic
surveillance, missile guidance and propaganda, the screen became a “substitute for the
battlefield” (Unknown Quantity 41). The Coalition side of the war was facilitated by
means of image-based technology which, first, allowed its forces to fight virtually, that is,
from afar and, second, enabled news broadcasters, CNN most famously, to manipulate
and exploit their images within the zone of ideological warfare. Winning a war, CNN’s
urgent live broadcasts proved, meant controlling public perception through visual
representation. Indeed, Virilio’s opus of criticism is largely founded on the idea that
“weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception” (War 6). Arguing for
the inherent reciprocity between innovation in technology and visual mediation, Virilio
conflates systems of vision and weapons. Unearthing the residues of military usage
within the seemingly innocuous technology of civil society’s cinematic production, the
image is situated as an extension of war’s strategic refinement of human sight capacity
and has thus, according to Virilio, always been weaponized. But what distinguished the
first war in the Gulf, Virilio maintains, was the speed that imaging technology had
acquired; the “lightning” rapidity with which images of Desert Storm were disseminated
corresponded directly to the conflict’s short-lived duration, thus rendering it undetectable
and invisible (Desert Screen 44) – the war “that did not take place” as Baudrillard
similarly assessed it. What is different now, however, as Henry Giroux points out, is that
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access to an excess of digital and new media resources characterizes both sides of the
conflict. “In the war of images,” he writes, “video technology has become a primary tool
used by terrorists” (50) whose “regime of spectacle” he posits is not tainted with
consumer society’s over-saturated image economy because of the sway of its political
intentions (51). But as Giroux points out, this anti-US spectacle of terror is “perfectly
matched for a media constantly in search of higher ratings” (51). That the violent nature
of the insurgent video product is concordant with so-called Western tastes is what grants
them potency and value in this war’s image economy and thus demands that they be
equated with and not separated from, say, the images broadcast by CNN of the War on
Terror. Indeed, there is no essentialist claim to ownership where the “unnatural” resource
of imaging is concerned: when both sides are thus armed they are equally advantaged and
disadvantaged by the apparent democracy of digital technology.
Ten Cameras Are Better than None: The Absent Filmmaker
Werner Herzog’s 1992 documentary Lessons of Darkness is structured around the
Kuwaiti oil fires that signaled the conclusion of Gulf War I. The film enjoys a singular, if
not notorious, reputation both for its intrepid subject matter as well as its unconventional
and ultimately genre-bending strategies of documentation. Herzog’s dictum of the
“ecstatic truth” conflates non-fiction and fiction, real-world with the imaginary, in order
to capture a sense of veracity that is only obtainable when the bounds of representational
accuracy are exceeded. Lessons of Darkness behaves as a science-fictional repositioning
of the 1991 oil war wherein the operations of Desert Shield/ Storm are kept anonymous
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and instead are rendered a future intergalactic event. It is a heady work, one in which
Herzog evokes and then abuses an impressive arsenal of documentary rhetoric and
conventions; the intention of his efforts is to wrest the events of Iraqi’s withdraw from
Kuwait away from the discursive dominance of CNN and challenge the over-saturated
sensibilities of its viewership. The film, then, determines to turn warfare back into an
unspeakable monument to horror and despair. Lessons of Darkness’ technological means
are conservative, and stubbornly so. As such, Herzog’s sententious document polarizes
itself against the digitizing video-game aesthetic that characterized 1991’s war in Kuwait
and thus remains almost archaic in its decision to avoid what was then the emergent new
media technology utilized by both the US military and the media to create a spectacular
onslaught of urgency, present-tense liveness and maximum efficiency.
While Herzog’s analog film had few competitors and came at the close of the
1991 war, Deborah Scranton’s War Tapes (2006) is but one of a growing genre of digital
documentaries emerging from the current war zone of Iraq. Despite the title’s
anachronistic reference to tape recording, and so an earlier mode of cinematic
technology, Scranton’s contribution to the representation of this, the globe’s second
grandiose resource war, embraces the innovations of digital technology that are the
common currency of journalists, documentary filmmakers, snipers, suicide bombers, as
well as the US soldiers who harness it to both correspond with the home front and survey
the enemy. And with these multiple, often conflicting user groups comes the attendant
conflation of production and reception forums and the defining erosion of the distinctions
between news broadcast, professional documentary, insurgent video and YouTube
upload.
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The juxtaposition of the analog Herzog and the digital Scranton, yesterday’s
Desert Storm to today’s Enduring Freedom, exposes how ideological dimensions
implicated in these shifts is manifested in each mode’s technological capabilities –
including the limitations of a single camera versus the multi-camera strategies of digital
Verité – and its ability to manufacture pictures of war. On behalf of articulating the newly
emerging temporality of deferred destruction that characterized 1991’s Gulf conflict,
Lessons of Darkness takes for it subject the wasted terrain and suffering eco-system of an
unnamed planet. The film is premised upon exploiting the First Gulf War’s heavy-handed
abstraction, wherein desert is washed out by deliberately spilled oil, petroleum fields are
turned into infernos and human life forms are rendered nothing less than extraterrestrial
beings. The seeming purity and cleanliness of “the war that was not a war,” with its
minimum of US casualties, and end to hand-to-hand combat, is hyperbolized by Herzog’s
science-fictional documentary as it strategically removes the soldier from the war and
transforms the casualty of combat from the human being to the natural environment.
Scranton’s War Tapes, however, like the war she is representing, operates in stark
opposition to the putative non-event that was Operation Shield/ Storm and reinstates the
soldier into the zones of battle and cinema alike.
It was with the permission of the US military that Scranton equipped 10 willing
GIs with digital video equipment before their unit shipped out for a one-year tour of duty
in Baghdad. Shifting camera power from the expert (documentarian) to the amateur (foot
soldier), Scranton’s film is premised on expediting the disappearance and indeed
obsolescence of the actual or “firsthand” filmmaker herself. Using e-mail and text
messaging in order to provide advice and technical assistance, Scranton was able to
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collect 800 hours of footage during the course of the year; these were electronically
transmitted from Iraq to Scranton who then edited them into the resultant War Tapes. The
film has been called a “virtual embed,” (Silverman) wherein the soldier is transformed
into a variant of the journalist, particularly as some of the footage shot for Scranton was
later acquired by CNN. As Philip Knightly points out, this has been the most deadly war
for journalists ever (537). Unlike Vietnam, for “unilateral” journalists covering what is
predominantly urban warfare, retreating into the safe haven of the city is not an option;
combat journalists are thus becoming scarce and the (digital) film and photos used by
news media are often captured by Iraqi stringers, and now US soldiers. According to
“Frontline” producer Martin Smith, as opposed to the Vietnam War, “TV coverage of
Iraq has been severely constrained by war's danger and unpredictability…. There is no
place you can retreat from the danger.” As such, “print journalists and photojournalists
are relying heavily on Iraqi and Arab stringers to do the work" (qtd. in Silverman).
Indeed, when some of the more sensational footage gathered by one of Scranton’s
soldiers was appropriated by CNN, that particular soldier-cameraman was left feeling
both “proud” and “exploited” (Silverman). But that the few journalists in Iraq are
increasingly hindered by an exceedingly dangerous war zone does not correspond with a
scarcity of images. The democratization of digital video, the outsourcing of image
extraction to Iraqi citizens and US soldiers, as well as the determination of a significant
number of independent documentary filmmakers has resulted in an abundance of visual
material devoted to both representing and dismantling this resource war.
Enabled by the ease and affordability of the digital camera, as well as the fact that
these soldiers were already more than familiar with how to use them, War Tapes is an
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example of “participatory” journalism (Silverman). So it is that Scranton shoots the war
virtually, by technological proxy; digital imaging and recording devices do not abstract
the war so much as they abstract the filmmaker, and all the while War Tapes attempts to
confine its focus to US basic infantry and the tedium of soldiering. In exchange for the
stark desert environment that characterized the 1991 conflict, this is a predominantly
urban war and a ground war, war fought with hands and feet –its reality is characterized
by a distinct sloppiness and not the First Gulf War’s detached virtual precision.
Scranton’s soldiers occupy the entirety of the screen, and their collective physical
presence dominates the competing spaces of back and middle ground; likewise, the
messy, amateur associations of this war are manifested in the aesthetic logic of its digital
representation. Scranton’s film exemplifies how the image-currency of Iraq’s war
economy, including that which is acquired by mainstream news sources, is increasingly
dominated by untrained camera operators. What War Tapes articulates, then, is not only
that this warfare is inherently, irreversibly digital but that it is also amateur, instinctive
and largely unguided. The disorder of Iraq and the unpolished rawness of its cinema
challenge the precision, cleanliness, mystifying complexity so often associated with
digital as a technology. The velocity that characterized Gulf War I’s image-weapons
complemented its quick duration and is now even more definitively located in the very
medium that has turned Iraq into the DV war: notable is not only DV’s quick-release
capacity but also the progressive scanning camera’s 60 frames per second which inscribes
images at twice celluloid’s 24 fps rate. Herein resides an inherent an essential conflict
wherein the immaterial, ineffable speed and “purity” of DV competes against the base,
corporeal dirt of Iraq’s interminable occupation just as readily as it attempts to capture it.
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As far as camera work is concerned—that is, the actual, literal labor of capturing
footage – Scranton and Herzog’s films have in common, at least in part, the filmmaker’s
absence. Scheduling urgencies and entrance visas dictated that much of the aerial,
helicopter portions of Lessons of Darkness were executed before Herzog’s arrival in
Kuwait, and so his voiceover was later dubbed in to create the impression of the
filmmaker’s omniscience and omnivoyance (Herzog 246). But while Lessons of Darkness
exploits the director’s authorial presence, the legitimacy implied by Scranton’s physical
detachment is the very premise of her enterprise. With Scranton’s strategic withdraw
from the firsthand, footage-gathering stage of filmmaking, War Tapes can be read as a
challenge to the conflict’s failed and much criticized promotion of embedded journalism
and the degree to which it erodes the chances of producing critical insights rather than
sanitized, sanctioned views of military operations. An example of Boler’s “digital
dissent” and the “aesthetic of honesty” Musser ascribes to DV anti-war activism,
Scranton’s film is both evenhanded and inherently critical of the war in Iraq. Through the
careful editing of soldier monologues, what emerges is a critique of the conflict’s
privatization and what seem lavish living conditions enjoyed by the employees of US
contractors, particularly when compared to the underpaid and ill-equipped troops who are
charged with extracting her images. But exposing the shameful reliance on private
contracting via the soldiers’ videos, the director unintentionally builds a self-reflexive
irony into the “virtuality” of her enterprise. Indeed, while preserving her safety and
claims to objectivity, what Scranton herself is doing, consciously or otherwise, is
outsourcing the labor of wartime documentary filmmaking, rendering it privatized,
commodified, not to mention militarized; Scranton thus inadvertently demonstrates how
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digital technology enables the possibility of contracting-out the work of the film crew,
not only to private industry, but to the military and citizens themselves. The film is thus
hinged upon the implicit and explicit portrayal of competing systems of labor: the
lavishly-paid private contractor is pitted against the slavishly exploited GI and, by
extension, the absent filmmaker is situated in opposition to the unpaid soldier-journalist.
Indeed, in a revealing post-tour interview, one of the ten soldiers cynically acknowledges
the business opportunities military conflict creates; not only do Haliburton and other
private conglomerates profit from, first, providing and maintaining the infrastructure of
warfare and, second, the extraction and transportation of petroleum resources, but so does
he, by earning his soldier’s wage and education credits. And so does Scranton, he
cynically insists, by means of the film he imagines she will profit from.
So what renders Scranton’s film remarkable is how it betrays its own intentions,
situating itself not apart from but as part of the oil-war’s shifting categories of the
resource and the image; for example, the politicization of oil resources, the privatization
of the military, the militarization and digitization of journalism and the out-sourcing of
filmmaking. What is more, the film is remarkable because even more than other Iraq-War
documentaries, its ten-camera strategy makes explicit digital technology’s capacity for
excess, glut, resource abuse and the inevitable waste thus generated. Scranton’s film
represents an assumption about resource availability and entitlement – not always
directly, in terms of the war’s procurement of natural resources, but indirectly, through
the ideology of resource excess, and access, that the digitally-equipped soldier/
filmmaker harnesses and transforms into a distinct aesthetic which characterizes digital
cinema on the battlefield and beyond.
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Eschewing studios, freeze frames or zooms and relying whenever possible on a
stationary camera, Herzog “holds onto his images with vulturous patience” and avoids
both “flashy tricks” and “excess of cuts” (Bissell 75). Rather than adapt to what has
become the industry standard of approaching a scene or shot with multiple cameras,
Herzog has acquired a reputation for stubbornly relying upon a single camera to capture a
staged scene or a live event (Bissell 75). A lone camera reduces the amount of footage an
editor has to work with; such limited resources can result in having to accommodate or
even include inconsistencies or imperfections (Zalewski 127). Obviously there are
generational and cultural reasons for Herzog’s stubborn aesthetic of conservation. As he
has articulated in his own Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) and My Best Fiend (1999),
Herzog’s psyche is informed by the poverty of post-war Germany and so possesses a
resource consciousness likely unknown to those who have not experienced a war
economy’s scarcity. Coupled with this are Herzog’s instincts for a celluloid-based, analog
cinema and its associations of the finite and the material rather than the ostensibly
expendable infinitude of DV immateriality. As a direct contrast to the limitations of the
comparatively cumbersome and expensive celluloid-based cinema, Scranton’s digital
embed easily sources from ten cameras and ten separate operators to gain ostensibly
privileged access to the war in Iraq. The resultant film is only 90 minutes long; thus, we
might wonder not only what happened to the other 710 hours but also whether ten
cameras provided any greater sense of clarity or insight than three or four, or one, might
have done. Of course, because the footage accumulated by these 10 cameras is ostensibly
immaterial it is not conceptualized as overtly wasteful, unlike the discards that would
have been generated by its incontestably material-based and thus tangible analog
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counterpart. And yet the symbolic logic of Scranton’s substitution of ten cameras for her
single self still destabilizes digital’s mythologies of thrift and economy. Replete as the
film is with overt implications of glut and patterns of over-consumption, the most
insidious example is self-reflexive and resides in how she herself engages in the same
consumer-cultural behavior and aesthetic of over-abundance, the very foundation of the
oil war that she and her soldiers are representing and often critiquing.
As Virilio noted some months after the 1991 war, “a third golden rule common to
both war and ‘post-industrial’ commerce” is that “one must innovate to conquer” (Desert
Screen 131). And so cinematic representation must innovate and reinvent, not only in
terms of accommodating the benefits of new technology, but also in terms of its ability to
use that same technology to criticize and theorize, self-reflexively or otherwise, the very
systems and structures from whence it comes. Adequate critique of resource war
demands acknowledgement of the inherent, and insidious, connectivity between cinema’s
digital dimensions and what it is representing. Anything less and it is doomed to become
complicit with its subject, reinstating that which is problematic rather than challenging it.
There is an ideology in the technology, in other words. The ability to over use, waste
and/or dispose of a technology, whether that happens in accordance with the ten-camera
aesthetic or the single-use shot, ought to signal instances of the kind of cultural behaviour
that contributes to the inextricably linked environmental crisis and the crisis that is the
war in Iraq.
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The Absent Story: Information as Resource
Harper’s recently reported that in the year 2006 the “weight, in ounces, of all the
information that passed through the Internet” was a mere 0.00004 (11). As Virilio argues,
the conveyance of information is industrial and now post-industrial warfare’s most potent
means of combat; visual or linguistic, information is facilitated by technology’s systems
of rapid transference and has assumed a velocity so fierce and encompassing it has
effectively merged with the very speed of its conduction. Just as “communications tools”
and weaponry are engaged in a “joint race for ubiquity and instantaneity” (Art of the
Motor 7) “the reality of information,” like a bomb’s destruction, “is entirely contained in
the speed of its dissemination” (140). When information is absorbed by its means of
dissemination the result is an immateriality and an invisibility; the information source
itself is subject to disappearance, and so is its referent. Virilio’s theorization of an
“aesthetics of disappearance” and his politics of speed (“dromology”) privilege the idea
that technological capabilities will only accelerate further and will therefore continue to
render information increasingly immaterial; these convictions, though, succumb to the
utopian ideal that does not acknowledge the very real and hazardous material
manifestations of our culture’s electrified and digitized systems of communication and
information production. In other words, while Virilio consistently argues for a symbiosis
between speed and technology, a more accurate materialist assessment of the velocity
that characterizes post-industrial culture would have to include fuel and energy within the
theoretical and political networks of its geography. The result, then, dismantles the terms
Virilio ascribed to the First Gulf War – a “war at the speed of light” (Desert Screen 44) –
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and modifies them so as to reconfigures the current energy-war in Iraq as a battle fought
over nothing less than the right to generate speed and create artificial, electric light.
Digital media promise ever more pure, effortless, and purportedly energy-efficient
means of paperless mass communication, while at the same time ruling out how its
technological innovations contribute to a crisis of techno-trash, electronic waste and, by
extension, global environmental decay. “Immateriality,” “invisibility,” “disappearance,”
these are privileged categories, defined by a self-perpetuating and self-defeating
decadence that reflects not only the ideology of screen culture’s technology but much of
the theorizing that has accompanied it. The ascendancy of digital cinema is matched by
the rise of environmental politics (and, of course, ecological decline) and together
represent a curiously conflictive moment in contemporary culture wherein digital
immateriality (“pure,” efficient and ephemeral) and environmental materiality (the
pernicious residues of technological obsolescence, disposability, and waste) are at once
converging and also canceling each other out. Much of the continuing integrity of
Virilio’s essays on the First Gulf War is due to his use of the “meteorological” as a way
to describe what he saw would be the deferred manifestations of environmental
devastation. The real war would unleash itself slowly, he argued, in the form of residual
toxicity, pollution and other unknowable instances of ecological damage. But this
important conception must now encompass the environmental consequences of
“disappearance,” “dromology” and the “information bomb,” thus rendering visible and
material what Virilio has long theorized as the real components of technology’s invisible
arsenal: speed, images and ideology. Ecologizing the image, situating it within a network
of unnatural and natural resources means that the immaterial or built environment
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contained within images is causally linked to the material, global environment upon
which “disappearing” post-industrialized cultures depend, and by extension, destroy.
Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” captures something of the idea that
information is not unlike a manufactured resource; largely expendable, it is characterized
by the same principle of planned obsolescence that informs technological innovation and
perpetuates systems of disposability and waste accumulation. “The value of information,”
Benjamin writes, “does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that
moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any
time” (90). But as opposed to time-sensitive information, a story “does not expend itself.
It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long
time” (90). Industrialized warfare erodes the capacity to tell stories; after World War I,
Benjamin notes, the men who returned from war had “grown silent”; they were not
“richer – but poorer in communicable experience” (84). Benjamin’s essay thus
anticipates the age of information’s challenge to narrative (from its formal linearity to the
diminished linguistic literacy of techno-centric citizens), while also suggesting, like
Virilio, the reciprocity between military innovations and the evolution of communication
technologies. Stories, Benjamin argues, depend on nothing but men and experience;
novels and cinema are different in that their existence is premised upon a technology –
the printing press or the camera – and so assume a means of mediation as part of their
essence. Benjamin’s conception of information as expendable and the story as durable is
both timely and essential for it provides a framework capable of rethinking the ecological
ontology of the digital documentaries, news reports and YouTube uploads devoted to
representing the war over Iraq’s rich oil resources. Part of what can be extracted from
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Benjamin’s essay is that information comes to the reader or viewer already analyzed,
filtered through an alembic of subjective argumentation, “shot-through with meaning and
interpretation” (89), and thus in ready anticipation of its disposal. That information has
value only if it “does not survive the moment in which it was new” both describes and
challenges our culture’s increasing reliance on a knowledge base that is fleeting,
throwaway, and ultimately disposable. The trash heap of history is made, at least in part,
literal, assuming the formlessness of accumulated information and the creative waste of
digital imagery.
Information, Benjamin writes, must “surrender completely to [its generating]
moment and explain itself without losing any time” (90). Benjamin’s contention is
nothing if not a prescient description of the technological failure of “born digital” images
trapped within inaccessible operating systems. Indeed, the complications of such death-
dating is what characterizes the digital documentary form; the sub-genre devoted to the
Iraq war is exemplary here, for the medium, content and dissemination of such films are
characterized by an aesthetic of urgency that capitulates only to the present moment and
its immediate context. The born digital Internet upload and independent quick release
DVD are fated to expire with their technological genetics, and so are ultimately little
more than single-use, disposable news items. Indeed, the value of information, as
Benjamin argues, is that it does not outlast itself; but if the documentation of events
becomes too dependent on digital forums which are not responsibly migrated to durable
support surfaces, the tangible memory of the event itself is fundamentally compromised.
But digital technology and new media are premised upon liveness, immediacy and
ostensible fidelity to the political context of the moment, a fact which renders the
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straight-to-DVD dissident documentary expendable. Thus, beyond the good intentions of
some to challenge the war, the output of the DV war seems ready to be defined by its
own impermanence – the inability to transcend the moment of its context. Digital images
of the war are, like its energy spoils, characterized by over consumption and inevitable
expiration; that images of Iraq might very well become trapped within unreadable storage
spaces further frames the DV war as ill-equipped to survive the short-term moment of our
culture’s and thus our history’s digital memory.
Particularly as their technology and information is essentially expendable, the
prodigious growth of the Iraq-war sub-genre asks whether its digital documents can
effectively challenge the conflict or merely and momentarily represent its excessive
horrors. As one of a voluminous number of independently-produced quick-releases, what
makes Scranton’s film remarkable is how unremarkable it is. Indeed, the film is a text
worthy of more than just fleeting attention precisely because it naturalizes the Iraq
conflict by adhering to familiar narrative codes and aesthetics shared not only with
YouTube shorts uploaded by US soldiers, CNN reports, or the TV series Over There, but
also the expansive body of Iraqi insurgent videos. Understood in terms of the limited
shelf-life of digital dissidence as well as Benjamin’s informational expendability, War
Tapes and its colleagues represent not only a specific subset or even genre of Iraq-war
cinema but a new category of conflict representation in general – the disposable war
documentary. The very possibility of this conception is reflective of the war itself, and
not only as the Iraq war is premised on the further extraction and consumption of fuel
resources – that is, the search for the next momentary energy fix. There is also an
attendant critical cynicism evidenced in media and governmental rhetoric that degrades
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this war as something lesser: not a war at all, Iraq has euphemistically been popularized
as a “conflict”, an “occupation,” a “mission” or an “operation.” It is fitting that a war that
is a part of an imperialistic “presence” is equated with a technology in possession of an
almost infinite capacity for shooting and storage. Though batteries have limited energy
and must be replaced or recharged, a DV camera’s storage space does not deplete nearly
as rapidly as does a reel of celluloid film stock. It is a technological innovation that
corresponds to Virilio’s theory of total war, pure war, war that is spatially and temporally
continuous, as well as to Chalmers Johnson’s thesis on the empire of bases, also
conceived of as a state of total war – diffused, thinly spread, inherently insidious. While
Gulf War I was decreed to be invisible, post-human, and, apart from the enemy, almost
without casualty, the present war is characterized by its increasingly sluggish tempo. Its
violence, though, – thanks to digital technology – is now, as opposed to the so-called
purity of 1991, visible, accessible, and graphic. And so, like 1991, this is a war that is not
a war; not because it is a quick-tempo “war at the speed of light” but rather because it is
retaining the means to supply an empire with the energy necessary to perpetuate what it
intends to be an enduring presence.
Ecologized War: The Meteorological Image and the Constructed, Destructed
Environment
“Homeland Security is strengthening our northern and southern borders.
Unfortunately, the biggest threat we face may come from the east.” So reads an ad in a
recent edition of New Yorker magazine – the warning is featured as a full-page spread,
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three-quarters of which is dominated by bold, militaristic typeface. What the richly
layered implications and metaphors contained therein exemplify is a crisis in the
representation of the temporal and spatial shifts initiated by post-industrial, digitized
war’s environmental manifestations. Interconnecting resource war, the “built”
environment of the screen image and the “natural” or real environment that sustains war
and image alike, the ad foregrounds colliding categories of ambient warfare, digitized/
militarized time and space, and resultant manifestations in what can be called the
“meteorological image.”
Paid for by Protecting America, a Washington-based advocacy group dedicated to
“protecting America from catastrophe,” the advertisement declares that the real “eastern”
threat to American security is not, as we might imagine, Middle Eastern terrorism, but
meteorological imbalance. The fine print explains how the Atlantic Ocean, as scientists
have proven, is heating up, resulting in a record number of increasingly devastating
hurricanes. “We can’t afford to leave ourselves exposed like this any longer,” the
message warns, urging Americans to “strengthen [their] defenses by demanding Congress
“create a financially responsible solutions to prepare and protect Americans from future
natural catastrophes.” Trading on the metaphorical value of a thinly veiled foreign
category of weather-related threat, the ad’s rhetorical choices do something to both
exemplify and literalize what Mike Davis calls the “ecology of fear.” Writing in 1998
Davis described how the “cultural immune system” of disaster-prone California is
equipped to deal with localized environmental traumas such as forest fire, earthquakes
and floods but “automatically rejects the equally inevitable probability of tornadoes and
occasional hurricanes” (155). These, he argued, were “categorized as exotic events whose
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existence requires radically different environmental contexts” (155). The terrorist menace
now seems to have filled in the blank of this peregrine meteorological other and so
Davis’s prescient assertion that environmental perceptions are ideologically determined
takes on a new relevance. Exceeding his immediate focus on how California’s
relationship to environmental menace are symptomatic of the “larger ethical universe of
competing social groups” (208), it now assumes a broader scope. Conceptualizing how
global warming is being transformed into an ideological thermometer, the ecology of fear
implicitly suggests the discursive overlaps between the anxious anticipation of
environmental disaster and the panic generated by the “War on Terror.” Categories of
fear are thus shifted; the environment assumes the role of the homeland’s chief menace,
the invisible intruder that will not be deterred by fences or defeated by conventional
weaponry. With all the implicit associations between oil wars and so-called “natural”
disasters like Hurricane Katrina firmly suppressed, Protecting America proceeds to
suggest erecting a defense system in the form of a “financial backstop” (using insurance
premiums and not tax dollars) to thus assist US citizens better prepare for coming
weather “events.” The ad’s text concludes with suggestions for taking action; visiting the
Protecting America website is the first step toward “urg[ing] Congress to get our country
ready for the next big attack.”
According to the imagination of the advertisement, weather “events” or
meteorological threats are not localized but generalized, bred somewhere vaguely
understood as offshore. They remain irrational and indiscriminate; rooted in nothing, they
arrive bearing no discernable episteme, just an inert, and innate, sense of ill-will. Just as
Davis’s arguments situate California’s precarious environmental conditions within the
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larger framework of race and class politics, America’s current sense of meteorological
hazard is both personified and reduced to the very basic essence of “east.” The twentieth-
first century’s tropical storm is thus cast as the terrorist other, disguised, however, not as
an immigrant at the border, but as brutal winds, torrential floods and sweeping tidal
waves. This new warfare is environmental, and as such it assumes a temporality that is
continuous, its leaking physicality exceeds borders and thus cannot be contained (or
detained, imprisoned, or questioned).
Protecting America’s strategies perpetuate a culture of planned obsolescence and
intentional disposability; anticipating “at least a decade” of devastating hurricanes, the
organization proposes a post-industrial Noah’s Ark scenario, wherein existing
infrastructure is simply sacrificed and then rebuilt after it is inevitably and totally
destroyed by the coming storms. Investing capital in fortifying homes and public
infrastructure in anticipation of their total devastation amounts to a grand act of
disposability in that this architecture of waste is made to break so as to be thrown-away
and then replaced. Indeed, it was real estate broker Bernard London who proposed the
planned obsolescence of architectural infrastructure as a way to stimulate America’s
severely depressed economy (Slade 74). London wrote in 1932 that government ought to
step in and “assign a lease of life to…homes and machines, to all products of
manufacture” and thus enforce, for example, that “the life of an automobile shall be not
more than 5 years, or the life of this building shall not last more than 25 years” (qtd. in
Slade 74-75). Once legally “dead,” products would be destroyed and then replaced by
new commodities and thus ensure that the “wheels of industry” remain in motion (74-75).
Indeed, as Lisa Rochon has argued, contemporary architecture is not intended for
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permanence. “Given the money, the determination and the generosity of the private
sector” significant institutions “will continue to be the subject of dramatic
reconfigurations every two or three decades.” Indeed, Southern California’s recent
devastating wild fires were embraced by economists and the real estate industry as having
the potential to revitalize the collapsing US housing market. From the disposable image
to the expendable family home, conceptions of longevity and durability are proving ever
more fictitious.
But beyond blatant capitulation to the expendability of infrastructure, what makes
the Protecting America spread remarkable is that the image that represents the menace
gathering strength in the east is as small as it is ambiguous. With all the distanced
impartiality of meteorological representation, there is nothing immediately menacing
about the white swirl that indicates a gathering storm; indeed, without the accompanying
text the satellite image of planet earth would appear benign, even innocuous. Perhaps a
rising tidal wave or an image of post-Katrina New Orleans would have been more
visually arresting, complementing the alarmist rhetoric that so clearly broadcasts the ad’s
agitational intentions. But, of course, the task was to convey the idea of “threat”, the
disaster that looms, rather than that which has already occurred: this is something
completely new, this “eastern” menace, decidedly foreign, not homegrown. That which
has no immediacy, without an apparent episteme or telos, without a discernable face or
race, this image, inert, innocuous, perhaps miscast, therefore, introduces a larger problem,
the inability to represent the space and time of “the meteorological” and, by extension,
the chronic rather than acute manifestations of environmental collapse.
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How, then, to visually frame an invisible threat? How also to make a film about a
war that is not a war? The most innovative critics of Gulf War I, from Herzog to
Baudrillard to Virilio indulged in the war’s defining strategy of deterrence in order to
subvert it. Baudrillard’s Gulf War essays, like Virilio’s Desert Screen, attempted to
implement theories of simulacra (for the former) and the “aesthetics of disappearance”
and “speed and politics” (for the latter), wherein the event and its image were
conceptualized as either rootless, or indivisible, and ultimately fated to disappear. The
essays these thinkers produced demanded that theorists, critics and citizens rethink the
cultural and political repercussions of what was then a new warfare; with its pilotless
planes and camera-guided missiles, this war of deterrence could not be constructively
protested unless the public at large was likewise critically retrained in the changing fields
of perception.
Virilio’s conception “pure war,” was informed by the Cold War’s total-peace,
dissuasive strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction. Understood as an all-logistical war
that completely integrates weaponry and communication media, pure war is perpetual,
physically and visually undetectable; it renders war indistinguishable from whatever its
opposite might once have been. The defining essence of Virilio’s theories is an end of
polarities and a “final abolition of differences” (Aesthetics 92). Not unlike recent theories
of empire, pure war is no longer the total “cold” war of the Soviet era but an
“occupation” and its presence, however vague, is defined by and inscribed in the ambient
nature of its digital video representations. But as the continuing relevance of Herzog’s
Lessons of Darkness and Virilio’s Desert Screen testify, 1991’s transition to an
ecological warfare means that pure war is not clean war; blood and gore must now be
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reconsidered as dirt and pollution. The devastation wrought by this new eco-war is
prolonged and invisible; its residual effects are mostly chronic rather than acute, deferred
until the next decade, lifetime or generation rather than made immediately palpable. “A
vision of the future,” writes Virilio, “when this conflict is forgotten, we will still have
news from the front.” But the reports will not come via CNN, but as “meteorological
updates,…showing us, above Kuwait, or Iraq or Saudi Arabia, the dirty war in real time”
(Desert Screen 94). Indeed, “Operation Desert Storm,” as the offensive was called,
implicitly framed itself as a component of the environment. A storm is natural,
indiscriminate; its devastation can only be fully measured in terms of the unforeseen
aftermaths of its effects. Virilio’s meteorological references are no longer merely
metaphorical or prognostic, for they point out both the strategic targeting of the enemy’s
environment and resources as well as war’s dependence on oil to facilitate the flow of its
mobility and weaponry, thus diminishing necessary fuel supplies, and irreversibly so,
before they run dry.
Because Lessons of Darkness is science fictional, it refuses to submit to the
context of 1991 politics and the aesthetics of its warfare. Herzog exploits the spectacle of
Kuwait’s oil spills and burning wells on behalf of exploding the idea of war, both in itself
and specifically this new “speed of light” war of non-aggressive aggression and bloodless,
body-less victims. By insisting on a futuristic environmental war, a war waged against
the no-man’s-landscape, Herzog’s film essentially anticipates and then thinks through the
consequences of Gulf War I before they were manifest. The documentary, like Virilio’s
responses contained in Desert Screen, posits that post-industrial war is defined by a
principle of deference, wherein the casualties, environmental, as well as human, surface
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later, after the conflict has been forgotten, and thus take on a burden of invisibility. So,
beyond the virtuality of the coalition’s electronic warfare there loomed the real
repercussions of Iraqi aggression: destroying the enemy’s land and natural resources.
Iraqi soldiers withdrawing from Kuwait systematically polluted the region, “in the wake
of various oil slicks,…nearly 500 oil-producing wells [were] the victims of the
flames,…this atmospheric pollution extend[ed] for over 40,000 square kilometres”
(Virilio, Desert Screen 94). Lessons of Darkness visualizes what Virilio described as the
future of this war, “pure” (sterile, bloodless, trans-human) in the sense that the casualties
were as yet undetected. And indeed the environment remains a favored target of Middle
Eastern warfare. Because it is specifically connected to oil production, and so the entirety
of a nation’s industry and economy, intentionally ravaging an enemy’s fuel industry
and/or supplies renders petroleum a malevolent and dangerous force precisely because
the outgrowth of the effects are incalculable. A recent such example is Israel’s 2006
bombing of Beirut’s power plants and petroleum tanks. The massive oil spillage resulted
in a devastation of Lebanon’s Mediterranean shore and ecosystem that was so extensive
its manifestations spread as far as Turkey and Greece. Indeed, as 1991’s fires and spills
testify, petroleum can be harnessed as an insidious and devastating weapon, its
consequences measured in their aftermath’s chronic longevity and uncontainable reach.
Perhaps best understood when articulated as an illness, caused by repeated or sustained
exposure to toxicity, the idea of visually representing the non-event of environmental
devastation is facilitated by the near-infinite storage capacities of digital cinema, but is
also undermined by the impatience, impulsiveness and urgency that characterize DV war
imagery.
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Indeed, the effects of 1991 are still with us, environmentally, politically and, for
many, psychologically; deterred manifestations, for example, now include Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder and Gulf War Syndrome. Like chronic environmental effects, war injury
is rendered invisible, an illness rather than a visible wounding, often not manifest in
tangible, corporeal signs. As a way to manage the cinematic representation of visually
deficient injury, it seems the prolonged release of narrative films about 1991 reflects the
fact that the war’s 760 direct casualties had by May 2002 taken an additional 8,306, with
159,705 more reported injured or ill from exposures suffered during the operations
(Johnson 100). So it seems the intangible, immaterial nature of digital media corresponds
to emerging categories of invisible injury, exemplified by Jonathan Demme’s recent
adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) as well as John Maybury’s The Jacket
(2005) both premised on the psychological injuries of Gulf War I, finally manifested after
10 years. In Demme’s adaptation the hero’s dilemma remains the inability to provide
physical evidence that his body has been infected and thus injured. And because it is a
remake of a Cold War text, the film also suggests that the temporal and spatial continuum
of Virilio’s “pure war” remains relevant; defined by its own logic, the conception sprawls
into the present moment and, as an implicit warning, beyond it as well. Indeed, in terms
of cinematic or literary representations, there are relatively few examples of Gulf War I;
no doubt the “non-event” of the war-that-was-not-a-war corresponds to the slim interest
cultural practitioners have given it. A few examples, though, have emerged relatively
recently: in addition to the films of Demme and Maybury, David O. Russell’s Three
Kings (1999), and Sam Mendes’s Jarhead (2005) are notable examples. This belated
response is not only attributable how the current Gulf War inspires 1991’s conflict with
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fresh topicality, but can also be seen as an extension of Gulf War I’s “futuristic” temporal
reconfigurations. What is more, as Virilio insists, a given mode of warfare and the
particularities of its weaponry inform and are informed by in turn the specificity of its
viewing technology. If the Vietnam War was the TV war and the First Gulf War was
CNN’s video-game “war-that-was-not-a-war,” the current war in Iraq is the DV war; the
Coalition “presence” in Iraq is evident not only in the war’s images but also in the
precise, ostensibly immaterial, technology of digital dominance. And because DV cinema
is generated so quickly, cheaply, with production and dissemination times kept absolutely
minimal, Iraq-war images feverishly accumulate. While representations of the First Gulf
War were largely confined to and defined by CNN’s urgent live-feed ticker-tape
broadcasts, the current war lacks the same broadcasting limitations. Indeed, digital video
lends Iraq a breadth rather than a depth, extending coverage and representations over any
number of screening forums.
As opposed to the touchless, trans-human precision of the First Gulf War’s smart
bombs and pilotless aircraft, the current war sees an almost regressive transference from
remote-controlled aerial-based sighting devices to hand-held cameras; detached causality-
free attacks meanwhile are replaced with hand-to-hand combat undertaken by foot
soldiers, barely organized into ground-force patrol units. With the reemergence of ground
war, Virilio’s “war at the speed of light” has slowed down, decelerated, though without
intending to do so. Unlike Herzog, whose slow-motion meditations stalled CNN-
conventionalized images of the burning Kuwaiti oil fields, Virilio argues in Desert
Screen, as he does elsewhere, that we will never decelerate, slowness can never be
reinvented (44). And yet we now see a return of the foot soldier, just as we see a return to
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hand-held imaging technology. But the foundation of all this is fuel resources. Indeed, oil
facilitated the “speed of light” war as much as energy interests and petro-dollars were its
cause: the means and the ends are the same. Now the battle has shifted to a war for speed
and for light. Indeed, the increasing limitation of non-renewable fossil fuel seems to have
slackened (metaphorically and/or literally) the tempo of this resource war into an
“occupation.” As Gulf War II drags on, the return to the rudimentary ground war suggests
that oil is both too cheap and too precious to burn. This twist of decadence is depicted in
the final chapter of Lessons of Darkness, wherein an extinguished oil fire is indulgently
reignited in order to derive pleasure from its display of waste and therefore wealth. The
consumptive appetite and combative gratuitousness captured in Herzog’s critique of the
First Gulf War could now be read as a prognosis for how the return to terrestrial warfare
and the ambulatory soldier is ultimately attributable to the disappearance of oil. An air-
force, as Harvey points out, is useless without jet fuel (24). Herzog’s portrait of a
decadent planet thus marks the beginning of the fall from the air to the earth, from wings
to feet, from overhead shots to hand-held close-ups and from aerial strikes to hand-to-
hand combat. The disappearance of oil renders this war logistically unsustainable and so
inscribes it with a palpable desperation, one that is inseparable from how it is
increasingly fought with the primitivism of hands and feet.
And though its spheres of interest and sites of reception have expanded, in many
ways the oil war, it seems, has shrunk – from the desert to the city, from the movie-screen
to the DVD, from the large-scale weaponry of the missile, to the down-sized Humvee
patrol. As opposed to endless breadth of desert Herzog captures in Lessons of Darkness,
the environment that characterizes today’s war in the Gulf is closed and claustrophobic, a
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situation that is inscribed in the anxious and almost aggressive aesthetic of the small-
format, hand-held DV camera. The mostly urban battlefields of contemporary war
likewise corresponds with a shift in how war is visually (digitally) represented. Not only
does the war’s rhetoric render it a spatially and temporally continuous (an “occupation”),
but its interconnections with the politics, economies, and environment of the entire globe
also defy definite or mappable distinctions. Similarly, images of Iraq exceed typical sites
of reception. As Musser claims, more frequently accessed on websites than on television
news channels, “dissident” documentaries typically circumvent mainstream channels of
distribution and go straight to video stores or else are circulated through festivals and
private community screenings; meanwhile, the underground distribution of snuff, sniper
and corpse exploitation videos are readily available for download or rental to those who
seek them out (Giroux 51). The war in Iraq thus becomes what Zygmunt Bauman might
call a “perceptual liquidity”; environmentally dissipated it occupies the screens of home
theaters and computer work stations, morphing between information source and
entertainment spectacle. The war surrounds, sprawls, and is defined by a permanence that
renders it, ultimately, a reliable consistency. What is more, the democratization and
subsequent ubiquity of digital images and forums has eroded earlier associations of
privilege, rendering it an affordable and readily available feature of the everyday. Easily
accessed and utilized by an increasing amount of global citizens, here is a mode of
representation that perhaps over-facilitates cinematic practice. A multitude of cameras
and forums thus magnifies the raw horrors of this war, putting on digital display all and
sundry injuries and humiliation contained in prodigious amounts of dissident
documentaries, news broadcasts, insurgent videos and random images from such
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spectacles and debacles as the prisoner abuse at Abu Grahib prison. DV’s ubiquity results
in an abundance of representations that unfailingly reiterate the physicality of this war.
Such continuous and frustrated over-saturation ensures that despite its distinctly bloody
and corporeal nature, this conflict is characterized by an invisibility – the result of its
continuous, naturalized and digitized presence.
The question that emerges is not whether it is possible to represent the invisible
and/or deferred effects of post-industrial warfare and its environmental destruction, but
whether it is even necessary. That is, because total warfare and globalization have
militarized everyday life, war necessarily seeps into and indelibly stains all facets of
culture and cultural production. Quite simply, oil war is ubiquitous; but its pervasiveness
is often defined negatively, by its very absence. The global environment is likewise
omnipresent, totalizing and inclusive; as such, all cinematic images necessarily engage
environmental issues, indirectly or otherwise. The definitive ambience of war and
ecology is not only achieved by the ways in which these concerns are represented and
broadcasted; rather, ambience is embedded in the very character of these inescapable
universal realities. Representing the politics of war or ecology can be done without direct
interaction or representation. Indeed, by its very nature the ubiquity of digitality
complements the uncontainable sprawl that infuses the globe’s most dominant and
inherently interconnected crises: Iraq, resource depletion, the environment and their
accelerating spillover.
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Ambience: Digitized, Militarized, Ecologized
Habituated within the collective breadth of screen culture this war has breached
the boundaries of specificity on multiple fronts and finally gone ambient. Taking a site-
specific approach to television and screen culture, Anna McCarthy uses “ambience” as a
way to theorize the various roles TV performs in specifically non-domestic environments.
The term can be utilized to describe how a lack of specific or acceptable sites of
perception diffuses the war to the point it absorbs and is absorbed by the cultural and
sensory environment. Ambience, then, applies not only to mediation devices, but also the
actual flow, dissemination and reception of information itself. Understood as that which
surrounds, McCarthy approaches media in terms that are distinctly environmental;
television, for example, comes burdened with associations of pollution and
contamination, especially when imported to non-domestic viewing sites (4). Though
digital and new media gained true ascendancy after McCarthy’s study, her terms remain
useful, setting a precedent for understanding visual media within an environmental
discourse. Indeed, digital culture complicates her stance for its very ontology inherently
disorganizes expectations of site-specificity and upends television itself as a place, a
space and a forum. Just as McCarthy was intent on demonstrating how the ubiquity of
television outside its conventional reception sites eroded the distinction between screen
and environment, modes of digital imaging have now absorbed the slippery and insidious
dominion of television within the broad heterogeneity of screen culture. Thus, digital’s
essential capacity for ambience is achieved by a spatial and temporal fluidity that
transcends both physical geographies and media categories and, with each new shape and
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capability it assumes, continues to eschew the limitations of production, dissemination or
reception.
It is worth noting the attempt that was made to render the Iraq war as both a live
event and fictionalized representation. Chris Gerolmo and Mikael Salomon’s Over There
(2005) was the first scripted TV series set in a current military operation involving the
United States. While its fictional assumptions infect a real-time war with a disturbing
affect of artifice, the show plays an interesting game with the naturalization of the Iraq
war’s physical environment. Particularly fitting is that the Iraq scenes were shot in the
California desert, once a major site of oil production, while the home front bits were
staged in Los Angeles. Intentionally or otherwise, the show thus does not distance home
front and battlefield; although it displaces military conflict, it also resituates it –
especially in terms of environmental detriment – “over here,” at home, rather than within
the zone of the geographical other. Rich with instances of unintentional self-annihilating
rhetoric, Over There collapses the viewing spaces of “home” within the new, digitized
war environment of the DV “occupation.” The sense of liveness and concurrence with
real events that was the show’s pretense suggest a totality of war wherein the event and
its representation merge into a single temporal unit. What is more, the privileging of the
present moment does not allow for a future of war or the manifestation of its
consequence: cause and effect are thus eradicated by the ability to offer an impatient
viewership the satisfaction of the false real-life moment. What is more, Over There
shares War Tapes’ formal habit of filling the frame with close-ups – a feature that
characterizes Iraq-war documentaries and effectively denies the viewer a sense of spatial
orientation. Both are also accurately aligned with surveillance-based, deadline-sensitive
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Reality Television; War Tapes especially employs this genre’s basic conventions wherein
participants attempt to serve out a deadline-oriented task and survive until its end, endure
unusual physical challenges, reconcile personality clashes as well as deal with external,
unforeseen conflicts. As one form clearly appropriates from another, the suggestions of
Reality Television tropes in Scranton’s film are disturbingly derivative. When war is thus
mediated, when the “real” environment of the war zone conforms to the built
environment of a television show, what ought to be alarming is how mediation and
attempts at representation, however good intentioned, can deny the subject matter
potency and render the most earnest attempts at political protest less than effective.
As Jay Bookman asked in 2002, before the current war even began: “Why does
the (Bush) administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once
Saddam is toppled? Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United
States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the
Middle East”(qtd. in Johnson 237). As Johnson points out, America’s vast Empire of
Bases depends in part on the perpetuation of normalized existence for the personnel
stationed in its myriad of sequestered outposts. Indeed, “Ensuring that members of the
military and their families live comfortably and are well entertained while living abroad”
is as essential to maintaining global military “preponderance” as “eavesdropping on the
communications of its citizens” and “controlling as many fossil fuel sources as possible”
(151-152). Dismantling the difference between home fronts and zones of military activity
thus enforces a sense of spatial and temporal continuity and so erodes to the point of
obsolescence what might once have been war’s opposite. As the war drags on, and as
digital capacities gain in velocity and their images in intensity, digital cinema and new
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media are forced to grapple not only with occupation as a political category, but as an
aesthetic one as well. What Herzog’s film had in its favor was that it was clearly
witnessing the conclusion of 1991’s military operations; the ending was in the works,
foreseeable, thus providing a closed frame and an ostensibly finite boundary within
which to narrate what he posits is the impossibility of a war’s definitive end.
Nicholas Mirzoeff’s reading of the Iraq conflict adapts and reformulates Hannah
Arendt’s “banality of the image” in order to argue for the naturalization of this war
through the abundance of its specifically digital representation. What Mirzoeff intends to
posit is not unlike Lessons of Darkness’s earlier challenge to the 1991 war and the way
the media liquefied its horror, spectacle and violence via the over-saturation of images.
What is important to note, however, is that Mirzoeff’s idea of banality is not reserved for
the frequency of the war image, but applies to the nature of what is put on display. In
Scranton’s film, for example, war is a job, routine labor, and daily performances of a
mundane and sometimes predictable set of tasks. Indeed, the numerous documentaries on
Gulf War II are theatres not only of violence and danger, but also of the frivolous tedium
of armed conflict; the occupier patrols the streets, manages the population, and slogs
through the requirements of the working day. The Gulf War I that-was-not-a-war was
also characterized by tedium, as the recent Jarhead points out, but this was veiled by
CNN’s urgent live-feed as well as the spectacular technological showcase that was the
US military’s aesthetic and strategic framework. Thus, the issue is no longer that the
viewing public is inured to the grandiosity of the first Gulf War’s firepower as Herzog
feared but that there is “no longer anything spectacular about this updated society of the
spectacle” (Mirzoeff 67). Herein lies the essence, and the moral cynicism, of the ambient
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war, depicted as it is in terms of permanence and lingering laboriousness wherein
America’s side of the conflict is rendered a steady grind rather than an unthinkable crisis.
While Mirzoeff argues that “the relative anonymity of the war images must be
understood as a direct consequence of the media saturation” he acknowledges only a
partial account of how digital excess renders war a naturalized feature of the media
environment. “In the second Gulf War,” he writes, “more images were created to less
effect than any other period in human history” (67). But by simply blaming profit-driven
media outlets and audience passivity for this climate of over-saturation, Mirzoeff fails to
acknowledge how the democratization of digital technology and its vast storage
capabilities presupposes the availability and thus banality of the Iraq war’s flood of visual
representation. The overriding ideology of resource gluttony and over-abundance that
founds this war must be located in the camera itself, not just in the images its
practitioners generate and we, the viewer, consumes. We see war grow newly “mundane”
in large part because the more selective, expensive and cumbersome constraints of
celluloid filmmaking would simply not provide the necessary conditions for cultivating
the same level of habituation.
The manufacturing of images has become not a spectacle but an expectation, a
performative duty in which the camera-equipped soldier readily engages. What is more,
this conflict has been stripped of alienating features. Urban, as opposed to being zoned
within a specialized battlefield or combat area, the Coalition supplies its troops with
home front leisure activities and indulges consumer culture habits as a necessary
dimension of militarizing the day-to-day. The Humvee tour the roads of war and the
streets at home, the car bomb is manufactured with items purchased at the local hardware
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store, while digital technology is used as a device to both track the enemy and to capture
domestic life: these examples demonstrate how war is being shifted away from zones of
geographical, cultural and technological otherness in favour of an ambient continuity that
merges battlefield with the home front. Dissident digital culture is thus defined by an
exigent and necessary need to make the war visually available and expose to criticism its
tragic ineptitude, but at the same time DV’s capacity to expose also neutralizes the
urgency that the efficiency and ubiquity of its technology is equipped to convey. There is
a danger in demystifying warfare, turning it into something real, everyday and therefore
manageable, rather than to preserve it as monumental and unimaginable; the difference is
articulated in Herzog’s merging of fact and fiction, wherein truth is found in artifice
rather than in the artificiality of having obtained a truth. The ubiquity of digital video,
screen culture’s dominant means and ends of representation, mediation and ambient
presence, is what fundamentally preserves war as natural. Digital technology thus
becomes the ideal companion to Virilio’s theory of “pure war”: non site-specific,
diffused, split between screens, more ambient, and total, therefore.
The Internal Combustion of War
So it was that at the ostensible conclusion of the First Gulf War, CNN’s real-time
coverage made a constant spectacle of the near apocalyptic fires ravaging as many as 500
Kuwaiti oil fields. Set by retreating Iraqi soldiers, this final, last-ditch attack waged
against the enemy’s resource-based economy was a grandiose demonstration that turned
ecological damage into a functioning metaphor and a visual weapon. As Paul Virilio
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notes in War and Cinema, war has always been visual, imagistic, deceptively perceptive:
“war can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to
produce that spectacle…the force of arms is not brute force but spiritual force” (5). The
power of the oil inferno was psychic, economic, and environmental. While the coalition
forces relied on a touchless, informational war that was automated electronically and
from afar, Iraq engaged in the spectacle of resource burning. Assuming a stance as
reserved as Desert Storm’s military strategy, Herzog reconceptualizes and reshapes the
destruction of the fires, rendering it an ambiguous weapon that refuses to function on
behalf of either of the war’s participants. The film’s operative is to disguise itself, making
its motives as stealthy as the coalition’s weaponry, smuggling into the documentary form
a condemnation, not of Iraq, CNN or the coalition forces, but of the viewing public’s easy
ingestion of images of war. The challenge forces the film’s audience to remember the
power of the fires that burned Kuwait, wasted the world’s oil and polluted its atmosphere
in turn. Internalizing the war’s point of view, Herzog decidedly merges with his subject
matter in order to undermine it. Lessons of Darkness, for example, makes extensive use
of helicopter traveling shots, thus ingesting the mechanics and mechanisms of that war’s
aerial preoccupations. Like an automobile engine, or like the burning wells we see on
screen, Herzog views war through the lens of war; burning it with its own flames, until it
combusts – thus, driving itself forward at the very moment it also is destroyed. The idea
is not to engage with the enemy or the object of critique, but to consume it, become it,
alter and then invert it. It is the operative logic of the essay as form, as Adorno
understands it (22), a strategy with which Herzog’s film, as cinematic essay, necessarily
negotiates. This same dissolution between the content of cultural production and its form
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is what preoccupies Virilio’s theorization of the collapse of subject and object, human
eye and camera motor, war and peace, time that is “real” and time that is fabricated,
weapons that are cinematic and those that are automatic. From “the field of battle to the
field of perception” (Virilio, Desert 136), the Gulf War work of Virilio, Baudrillard and
Herzog testifies that a new war demands a new mode of theoretical engagement. How
then might criticism of the current conflict espouse or detract from the means and ends,
strategies and tactics, of the war itself? This war, of course, is consistently prodded and
attacked, successfully or otherwise, by dissident digital videos. As Giroux points out, the
violent image, typified by independent circulation on user-generated web-sites, is
supplanting print or broadcast news forums as a source of information (73); likewise, as
the Direct Cinema tendencies of the DV documentaries emerging from Iraq relentlessly
testify there is an unwillingness to engage with the political fundamentals of this conflict
beyond opening the aperture and then uploading the results. What Musser defends as an
“aesthetic of honesty” gives too much responsibility to the camera itself and not nearly
enough to the filmmaker. The potential for digital video to be politically disruptive, a
challenge to the hegemony of established media networks, does not guarantee translation
into informed, sustained critique beyond the representation of horror and violence. How,
then, to dismantle the new politics of war, resource abuse and ecology without
succumbing to their same ideological dimensions?
As Virilio contends, the “capacity for war is the capacity for movement” (War 10).
Factor this into the Gulf and what is apparent is that this was/is not just an oil war.
Situating post-industrial resource conflict as the maintenance of our culture’s speed and
light posits that war itself is oil; it is fuel; it is flying and driving, motion and mobility at
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whatever measure of speed, as long as it is increasing. Lessons of Darkness’ “Chapter
Five” is thus read as subtle portrait of cinema as told in a sky reflected in a lake of oil.
Transitory and illusory, the oil-portrait reveals that the essence of cinema is mobility, and
therefore depends, like industrial society, its culture and its warfare, on a disappearing
non-renewable resource. The oil-reflection, as cinema’s self-reflection, demands
reflection on a cognitive level. If cinema is derived from war and war is dependent on the
shrinking oil resources that it fights for, the futurism of Herzog’s vision implies a
reevaluation of cinema, and not just as a renegotiation of the status of the image, but
reconsidered as an industry and a technology. Herzog’s film thus managed to turn
reflectivity into its own entity: not a reflection, the film is reflection itself. Lessons of
Darkness is a subtly arranged discourse on the nature of disguise, a formal and thematic
conflation of what might otherwise be distinct parts. Herzog’s Chapter Five, “Satan’s
National Park,” uses extended traveling shots, facilitated by a helicopter, to capture the
lakes of oil spilled throughout an area, now desert, that had once been forest. Herzog’s
voiceover describes how “Ponds and lakes are treacherous because it looks like the sky –
oil is trying to disguise itself as water.” The ponds and lakes unfolding beneath the
helicopter would be almost unremarkable if Herzog did not point out how unusual and
singular all of this is. What is more, oil and water repel and therefore cancel each other
out, negate each other, and make each other disappear. Likewise, the sky, reflected in the
oil-water, disappears into its liquified representation. What we see on the screen is not as
it appears. The viewer is tricked into looking at sky when in fact, as Herzog tells us, it is a
reflection. The camera then pulls back, and the viewer is again oriented – or disoriented –
as the world is inverted: sky for the earth, earth for the sky. Again, distinctions are
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fleeting, fluid, as Herzog continues to find ways to makes disappearance visible. Sky
dissolves into the water, which then vanishes into oil. War disappears into its image,
becoming indistinguishable from its representation.
Lessons of Darkness is founded on conflation, confusions, and transgression; it is
a meditation on the collapse of binary distinctions and the dissolution of cinematic
conventions, and thus, also, audience expectations. The film opens with a quote
attributed to mystical French philosopher Blaise Pascal: “The collapse of the stellar
universe will occur like its creation – in grandiose splendor.” Capturing the paradoxical
proximity between the beginning of the world and its end, this rich expression is
evocative of Benjamin’s contention that modernity has alienated humanity from itself so
thoroughly that it can “experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first
order” (244). Like inverting a tactic of slash and burn, destroying one’s own land and
agricultural resources in order to thwart, frighten, and/or deprive the advancing enemy,
images of oil war offer more than a glimpse of how industrial culture has turned this
basic military strategy against itself. Lessons of Darkness’s portrait of the burning,
spilling, exploding, and leaching of petroleum aestheticizes the self-sacrificial, self-
reflective and rhetorically internalized practice of internal combustion. Demonstrating on
a visual level the cultural logic of resource consumption, combustion, and, ultimately,
two-sided, mutually-assured destruction, the film manages to make literal and
metaphorical both the means and the ends of where industrialization has taken the globe,
its environment and its humanity. So it is that the image of the oil war prefigures a
coming climate of deprivation and so a return to something like the early Soviet model of
a cinema of scarcity. The proposed stricture of carbon-neutral filmmaking likewise
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anticipates such a shift, and no image more lucidly condenses the intricately tangled
dimensions of cinema, resource availability and ecological sustainability than those
coming out of Iraq.
News media, the public and even government are increasingly willing to regard
the conflict in Iraq as a resource war, a belligerent and shoddily disguised strategy to
guarantee fuel supplies for the world’s largest consumer and importer of oil. The invasion
turned occupation then conflict and now civil war is characterized by a sense of
entitlement to the natural resources necessary to maintain industrial civilization’s systems
of speed and physical mobility and by extension the increasing velocity of perceptive,
psychic, and cognitive mobility as well. Internal combustion and oil resources have
facilitated the advance of physical mobility, the industrial infrastructure and processes
upon which image production depends, as well as the very perception of movement, the
defining feature of internal combustion culture. What is more, not only is mobility the
essence of war (Virilio, War 10) but “felling” the enemy is accomplished through the
manipulation of his perception, by “captivating him” on a visual level, through the
(moving) image (4). So, what contributes to the image’s value is not just its tactical
possibilities, but its ideological value which equally weaponizes the image, thus
producing and maintaining the psychic, social, political, cultural needs for going to war.
But mobility, movement, cine itself, with all its mythological, metaphorical and
perceptual attendants and associations, is the supremely insidious ideological dimension
with which the war in Iraq is negotiating: whether on the road or in front of a screen, in
warfare, and even in theory itself, keeping mobile is what is ultimately at stake. The
suggestion here is that Virilio’s “warfare of perception” is taken literally; resource
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consciousness brings to the fore the irony that dictates that wars are fought over speed
and perception rather than just by means of them. This is a war over the entitlement to
speed itself. Virilio becomes complicit in his own critique, for his theories are as
dependent on internal combustion and resource consumption as the velocity and mobility
that are his preoccupation.
The First Gulf War, Virilio notes, was equally reliant on the “lightening” of
bombing and the “lighting” used in cinematic production (War 84). Again, the reliance
on the former term’s meteorological associations frames the natural environment as
industrialized warfare’s source of fuel and thus of its system of weaponry as well.
Though it does not share 1991’s display of spectacle and grandeur, the current conflict in
Iraq is characterized by an equally devastating visual logic which is also based on
resources, internal combustion and mobility. As Mike Davis points out in his history of
the car bomb, the use of the automobile as a weapon has only recently become a refined
system of destruction. It was in 1972 when the IRA gathered together common industrial
ingredients and accidentally discovered that ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel oil
(AFNO) was as deadly as it was available that “urban terrorism” was raised from “the
artisinal to the industrial level” (Buda’s Wagon 5). Inexpensive, effective, simple to
organize and “highly anonymous,” car bombs have become as “generically global as
iPods” (6). As such, this is the do-it-yourself weapon of choice not only of Iraqi
insurgents, but of those numerous groups in cities around the world engaging in forms of
undeclared, sporadic, almost casual, warfare. The frequency of car bombs, Davis explains,
is increasing at a terrifying, exponential rate, turning Iraq into a “relentless inferno”
which has amassed more than 9,000 casualties between 2003 and 2005 (6). Always urban,
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the car bomb interrupts infrastructures of mobility, delivery and transport, transforming
the ostensibly innocuous automobile into a weapon of “indiscriminate” destruction.
While roadside bombs or IEDs are reserved for targeting US mobile units, car bombs
proliferate in Iraqi cities in particular and are “instigating an apocalyptic sectarian war”
(6).
What Davis describes not only suggests 1991’s culminating oil inferno, it also
clearly corresponds to the other DIY dissent strategy that defines the conflict in Iraq –
digital video. As “globalized as iPods,” Davis writes; the rhetoric of cost-efficiency and
availability, typically ascribed to DV, is similarly applied to the car bomb, rendering both
tools of insurgency essentially “democratized,” equalized and somehow liberated. Like
the car, the DV camera and its images are exploded and dispersed; harnessing these
technologies and turning them into weaponry hyperbolizes what they are – expendable
commodities, inherently disposable and intended for destruction. The pervasiveness of
DV technology allows for the proliferation of amateur, homemade images, enabled by
relatively inexpensive “domesticated” equipment; the concordance between this
description and the car bomb thus supports Virilio’s contention that war and cinema, civil,
urban, occupation-based or otherwise, are mutually informing. Once uploaded onto the
Internet or released on DVD, bypassing typical routes of distribution (and potential
censorship roadblocks), the digital image of war, like the moment of the car bomb’s
detonation, cannot be tracked or contained, the numbers of those affected, the collateral
damage of viewer and victim, are indiscriminate and unforeseen. The similarities
between the “high-tech” digital camera and the “low-tech” car bomb do something to
align the former instrument with Vertov’s theory of filmmaking which conceived of the
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camera as capable of dismantling life just as surely as it could construct it. Mediated,
mechanized vision, in other words, retains a destructive force, particularly when it has
been domesticated: the dissident digital video, like the car bomb, capitalizes on the very
associations that otherwise cast it as benign or innocuous. And like the car bomb and
IEDs, the DV image is capable of being random and spontaneous. Catching life
“unawares,” was Vertov’s way of engaging militaristic rhetoric in order to describe how
embedding the camera within the surrounding environment rendered it “invisible” and
enabled the “lightening attack” upon the unsuspecting subject (162). The digital image is
ambient in the sense that the role of DV is, like the car bomb and Vertov’s kino-eye,
often defined by how seamlessly it is smuggled into random, non-specific spaces and
then remains unnoticed until its detonation. What is more, the immaterial, erasable digital
image, like the moment of the car-bomb’s destruction, is fleeting, random, so quickly
“disappeared” as to become as expendable as it is uncontainable. Meanwhile, the bomber
is also the victim of his own violence, just as consumers of digital images are equally
their producers and viewers; these identities/roles are not only conflated, but both
bomber/victim and filmmaker/viewer are concealed, rendered anonymous, within the car
bomb’s total destruction and the digital image’s potentially untraceable origin.
Speed is a surfeit of mobility, an over-consumption of motion and so is nothing if
not a form of excess. But car bombs embody a symbolic logic that destroys speed itself;
operating according to a principle of internal combustion, they simultaneously present
this IC engine system with a metaphorical challenge, exploding as they do the ultimate
symbols of consumer culture – the automobile and the fuel that drives it. A feature of
occupations rather than anything as short-lived as an attack or as total as an enemy’s
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annihilation, car bombs refuse the temporal designations of this century’s resource war.
On the one hand, they belong to a war of ambient occupation, while on the other hand,
the weapons themselves operate according a logic of the momentary, fleeting, brief, but
often irreversibly interfering with infrastructure, puncturing holes in the operations of the
urban landscape. But as a collectivity, as Davis’s history points out, the concerted
strategy of the car bomb renders an “inferno” and a single, uncontainable mass. So it is
that both oil wars make spectacles out of consuming, combusting and destroying the
basic ideology and sense of entitlement that is at the heart of these greed and now need-
driven resource wars. Lessons of Darkness’s portrait of the profligate waste that
characterized Desert Storm’s deliberate oil spills and infernos is now transferred to the
symbol of the exploding automobile. So expendable as to be decimated and then shoveled
up and discarded, the automobile’s disposability is used against itself, rendering the very
idea of car culture and internal combustion not only inherently dangerous, and on any
number of levels, but defined by the capacity, if not the destiny, not only to destroy
others, but to destroy itself. Like the invention of the internal combustion engine, the
inherently unsustainable nature of war sees that its beginning is little more than the
anticipation of its own end.
As the DV war in Iraq testifies, the gauge of its development and progress is
disposability, the capacity to be thrown out and replaced. By means of cheap fuel and
cheaper cars, the resource war is a unilateral, endogamous contest that reserves for its
prize the maintenance of ideologies of speed and expectations of mobility. Indivisible
from this is the technological dimension of obsolescence that sees the digital camera
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quickly becoming the disposable camera; this symbol, with its disposable images, shares
a similar developmental trajectory with the disposable, exploding automobile; as such
they reinforce and inform each other as complementary units within a cultural system of
resource waste and abuse. And it is in Iraq, the unfortunate theatre of these messy fusions
and interconnections, where the contest over the spoils of internal combustion and its
toxic residues of are painfully and angrily, not played out, but purely, totally, waged.
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Chapter Three: Extraction
The contemplation of the photographic image – digital or analog, moving or still –
is an encounter with industry, the ephemeral nature of the commodity and, by extension,
the accumulation of trash or waste, the byproducts of technological advance and its
correlate, resource-based consumption. Industrial culture’s present albeit belated
preoccupation with the ecological footprint and its minimization is in many ways a
prescription for the erasure of what has become the very mark of human culture. But
lessening amounts of trash, waste, and commodity glut also entails a reduction in the
image economy. As such, the burgeoning genre of the environmental documentary finds
itself in the curious position of being both a direct expositor of and indirect participant in
the open-flows of consumption and waste that are at the heart of what is broadly
described as a global environmental crisis.
Because it is as resource dependent as any other facet of industrial culture, all
cinema can be included in the category of the environmental and/or ecological. But those
films that consciously assume a politics of environmentalism are particularly instructive,
and never more so than when they also actively include the specificity of their medium
within the zone of immediate discourse. For the purposes of theorization, what univocally
locates the cinema as an ecological practice and ecology as a cinematic practice is the
film or image that is ecological not by procedural default, but by overt decision. Such
texts prove remarkably elucidating precisely because the terms of ecology and image-
making are foregrounded and resultantly provide rich layers of discursive suggestion.
Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 Manufactured Landscapes is an exemplar of the burgeoning
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sub-genre of the digitally derived environmental documentary. Though Baichwal’s film
is only one example of a profusion of eco-political documentaries, what distinguishes
Manufactured Landscapes is that it is above all an investigation of a photographer and,
therefore, a fixed meditation on both the nature of the image and its relationship to the
environment.
Manufactured Landscapes is an investigation of Edward Burtynsky’s monumental
photographic portraits of large scale industrial incursions. Depictions of mines, quarries
and landfills define Burtynsky’s career, which is devoted to making visible the ways in
which hydrocarbon culture is transforming what was once natural terrain into a
converging sprawl of artificial or anthropogenic landscapes. For the sake of establishing
the context and continuum of Edward Burtynsky’s work, the filmmaker does make
consistent reference to the photographer’s previous projects (one of which gives the
documentary its name), yet Baichwal’s primary focus is the photographer’s more recent
study: China’s momentous growth, its myriad of developmental transitions and its
resultant environmental degeneration. Tracking Burtynsky as he navigates his crew and
equipment through this country’s rural, urban and industrial zones in search of altered or
humanized landscapes, Baichwal’s film does not approach the photographer or his
intentions critically but instead espouses and considerably elucidates the political
dimensions of his project. What emerges from Baichwal’s representation of Burtynsky’s
photographic vision is a broad examination of the relationship between the environment
and the image, and, ultimately, the processes of industrialization that bind them,
inexorably, within a circuitry of mutual invention. By using her digital movie camera to
re-shoot the images generated by Burtynsky’s large-format, manual apparatus, Baichwal
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also meditates upon the ontological dimensions of her own medium and, specifically, its
ability to represent and/or absorb the photograph. As a necessary dimension of this,
Baichwal’s text is a striking representation of the ways in which the digital democracy is
reformulating the complex relations that link the image, technology and physicality of
nature. What is more, Manufactured Landscapes testifies to how entrenched digital
technology is in environmentalism – as a perpetuator of its problems and as their means
of representation; indeed, as the increasing number of environmental documentaries
confirms, the digital movie camera and ecological politics are now virtually inextricable.
Augmenting this fact is Manufactured Landscapes’ overall lack of separation between
Baichwal, her immediate subject (Burtynsky) and their shared common interest (the
environment), wherein Edward Burtynsky’s pictures of ecological incursion become less
the subject of a documentary than the protagonists of an essayistic narrative on the
politics of the landscape image. So it is that as Baichwal converges with her immediate
subject. The difference between her moving images conflate into a common discursive
enterprise: exposing our culture’s perhaps irreversible dependency on the industrial
processes of extraction, manufacture, consumption and, finally, disposal. But what is less
obvious and perhaps more problematic is that this self-reflexive film implies how this
same circuitry of resource consumption and waste production applies not just to the
conventional material good, but to the image-maker and his/her images alike.
As Baichwal’s digital camera is juxtaposed against the antiquated photographic
apparatus that Burtynsky favors, Manufactured Landscapes functions as a trajectory of
mechanical image-making from the late nineteenth century to the digital present.
Additionally, and as a direct result of this implied presentation of image history, the film
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functions as a way to interrogate how “landscape” has developed as a primary
photographic genre as well as an aesthetic, cultural and environmental category. The
processes of industrialization have inarguably altered the earth and continue to do so, but
they alone do not bear responsibility for the manufacture of landscape. Rather, it is the
image, personalized point of view and culturally inscribed vision that have formulated
landscape as a specific way of seeing and thinking about nature and, by extension,
managing it. Though Burtynsky and Baichwal acknowledge that landscape is a
fluctuating concept, what both take for granted is that it is a naturally occurring term. But
the images the camera yields cannot be neutral. As an industrial invention the camera is
intimately linked to the extractive process, and so its lens, that which represents land as
landscape, comes with a set of cultural ideologies inextricably built in. And yet even as
the politics of environment are so intimately linked with the digital democracy, the digital
medium that Baichwal uses to critique technology-based industry is only inferentially
inserted into the equation of how cultural forms and ideas also transform the environment.
The digital and the environmental, however, are not naturally occurring complements, but
rather the convergent result of the forward and unyielding thrust of technology and
industry – the default subject of Baichwal’s film.
Manufactured Landscapes is an inherently instructive text. Its presumed
detachment infuses it with ambiguities, oscillations, and suggestions, and from these,
several salient discourses emerge. Because of its implicit reference to the traditions and
innovations of the landscape photographer and motion picture progenitor Eadweard
Muybridge, the film functions as a narrative for the history of the mechanically and now
digitally produced image. Proceeding from this premise is an exploration of “land” and
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“geography” as they are specifically constructed by the image, the image-maker and the
formal and ideological processes of editing and/or framing. The Soviet montage principle
of creative geography is a particularly effective way to theorize the cinematic and/or
photographic “manufacture of landscape.” When juxtaposed with Burtynsky’s traditional
(analog) associations and Baichwal’s more innovative (digital) ones, creative geography
provides the conditions necessary to interrogate Manufactured Landscapes’ discourse of
encroachment, wherein the present and future are situated in opposition to the past –
specifically the digital usurpation of manual production modes. So, rendered as they are
by industrial processes and sensibilities, digital and analog images configure the idea of
landscape. But that the images and technology that yield landscape are located in the
zone of the disposable – the terminus of throw-away commodities – is what foregrounds
and also challenges the idea that the camera functions as a recycling implement that is
both capable of rejuvenating the discarded subjects it depicts and, perhaps, the physical
world beyond them. What ultimately binds Baichwal and Burtynsky’s various and
fluctuating currents of discourse is the conflation between documenting the “site” of
manufacture and also, as an unavoidable consequence, engaging in the manufacture of
sight. Furthermore, what distinguishes this critical relation and renders it almost insidious
is how the cultural perceptions of land and nature are created via images. These images
come to inform behaviour towards natural environments, which, in turn, dictate the
relations between the spectator, the environment and the image – and so the circuit goes.
The ideology of the camera, then, and the culture of its behaviour, is responsible for both
the “sight” and “site” of manufacture; how we see environment informs the real, physical
practice of how it is shaped, altered, and, therefore, manufactured by the image.
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From Yosemite Valley to Silicon Valley: The Trajectory of the Image
As critic Kenneth Baker points out, Burtynsky’s earlier series, “Railcuts,” is
strikingly suggestive of both Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson’s
photographic documentation of the American railway’s incursion into the Western
frontier. Importantly, however, whereas these nineteenth century photographers tended to
“point their cameras where the tracks led” into an implied “path of progress,” Burtynsky
refuses to heed such representational conventions as direction or horizon (45) and so
situates himself as an incursion upon movement itself. What Baker calls a “monumental
inertia” and a “stasis” effectively rebukes the progress suggested by the railroad and
forces the viewer to see the land in a way that the speeding train denies its passengers.
Such a bridling gesture confirms the conservative tendency within Burtynsky’s ostensibly
innovative work and renders the photographer resistant to his own technological future,
but also, curiously, to what was the future of the medium’s past. In other words, though
they inform his work aesthetically, Watkins, Jackson and Eadweard Muybridge were,
unlike Burtynsky, technological innovators. Muybridge in particular dedicated his life to
the invention and the creation of what would come after him and, indeed, as Rebecca
Solnit points out, his legacy has culminated in nothing less than motion pictures, Silicon
Valley and, by extension, the digital camera that Baichwal uses to frame the
photographer who is, compared to his predecessors, nothing if not regressive. So, though
Baichwal’s politics clearly sympathize with those of her subject, choosing to document
an austere and static image-making project with the buoyant innovation of digital
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technology, the filmmaker is in many ways less aligned with Burtynsky’s gestures toward
an imagined past than with China’s – and the world’s – unforeseeable future.
“Landscape” is an aesthetic category and a mode of representation that references
physical and often “natural” space. But Edward Burtynsky, the protagonist of Jennifer
Baichwal’s documentary, can be situated within traditions of both landscape and
industrial photography. Indeed, the complexity of Burtynsky’s work resides in the
collision between the mechanics, aesthetics, ideologies and cultural histories found in
these two modes. Landscape photography emerged in the late nineteenth century as a
response to an anxiety that rapid industrialization was eroding the natural world. As
Solnit describes it, Victorian industrial culture was conflicted by the urge to maintain
industry’s momentum and the craving to experience the natural realms it was actively
diminishing (22-23). Train excursions through as yet untouched countryside, as well as
the purchase of a proliferation of pristine photographic landscapes, were ways to alleviate
concern over the hastening decay of the natural world. But these same measures of
reassurance in fact contributed to the further erosion of environment. The train, for
example, which conveyed citizens on seemingly innocuous sight-seeing journeys, also
enabled the pernicious activities of the mining industry. As Lewis Mumford points out,
beginning in the1830s, “the environment of the mine….was universalized by the
railroad” such that “wherever the iron rails went, the mine and its debris went with them”
(451). The train, then, facilitated the erosion of the natural environment as it brought the
mine into closer proximity with rapidly populating industrial centers and effectively
degraded not only the immediate vicinity of the mine but also the terrain that had before
separated industry and the city. Additionally, trepidations about what was an
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unprecedented amount of environmental deterioration were assuaged by pictures of what
was still intact and also by the picture-taking excursion itself (Solnit 25). Train travel,
then, not only brought industry to the city, it also conveyed urban citizens and
photographers into the country and further entrenched the deleterious effects of the new
mode of transportation. And of course, the means of nature’s representation – the
seductive invention of the photograph – was not separate from but a direct result of the
industrial revolution and its extractive processes. As Barbara Novak points out, this
moment is characterized by a startling irony wherein the railway, photography and the
rhetoric of the “technological sublime” developed concurrently with an obsession for
those same natural spaces (167) that transportation suddenly made available (and
vulnerable, therefore) to the whims of human interests.
According to Solnit the “first-degree” impositions of photography upon the
natural world were attributable to the toxic chemicals, including mercury and cyanide,
used in the photographic process, as well as to the photographic factories that had come
into existence by the end of the nineteenth century (14). But what this narrative merely
suggests about the relationship between the technological image and the environment,
Burtynsky’s project considerably widens. The legacy of late the nineteenth-century
landscape photograph established a critical precedent that saw the image as a means to
divert anxieties away from ecological problems and replace them with an ideology of
limitless expansion that directly translated into more, not less, environmental abuse. This
is photography’s second degree impact on the natural world. It is also the paradox that
describes Muybridge’s seminal, genre-defining landscape photographs as well as Edward
Burtynsky’s consciously contradictory ones. In addition to the famous motion studies that
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eventually resulted in the invention of the moving image, Muybridge’s career is defined
by his photographic exploration of California’s Yosemite Valley. In 1851 the area was
opened up to developers and photographers alike, with Muybridge making his debut in
1867. Intersecting art, technology and commerce, photography in America’s West
became a burgeoning industry after the Civil War; as Solnit points out, however, most
was the result of commissioned government surveys which were paradoxically used to
guide further industrial development (42). The landscape image, then, directly
contributed to the depletion of the very spaces it was idealizing, diminishing them
physically while propping them up as a mythology. Yosemite was eventually sanctified
as a National Park, and thus acquired a protective framework that, like the mystique of
the iconic nature photograph, privileged one space while endorsing the abuse of others.
As Dean MacCannell argues, the National Park system is “symptomatic of guilt which
accompanies the impulse to destroy nature” (115). By confining “authentic” nature to
specific areas, he declares, “we assert our right to ruin everything that is not protected”
(115). Of course, as MacCannell continues, “great parks are not nature in any original
sense,” but are rather, like the landscape photograph, “marked-off, interpreted,
museumized nature” which effectively embellish the power to “stage, situate, limit and
control” the natural world (115). Indeed, the explicitly iconic photographs of Muybridge,
Watkins, and later Ansel Adams continue to shield Yosemite in particular, and the idea of
“landscape” in general, within a shroud of mystery that proves pernicious to those spaces
that have not been sanctified by the camera.
Like landscape painting, landscape photography’s creation and then cultivation of
idealized natural spaces was eventually invaded by glimpses of industry; a train, for
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example, would be visible in the distance of otherwise untouched terrain (Novak 172).
With Modernity, though, came full-scale enthrallment with industrial form and eventual
modification of the landscape’s conventional depiction. As Lori Pauli points out,
Burtynsky’s work bears a striking resemblance not only to that of early landscape
photographers but also to industrial photographers of the 1920s and ‘30s such as Charles
Weston and Margaret Bourke-White (18). This is not surprising since the industrial
landscape appropriated the same conventions as early landscape work, including those of
composition, framing, shot distance, and the absence of human figures. But whereas the
landscape painting and then the photograph initially located the inspiration of awe in
what was naturally occurring, the industrial image increasingly found majesty in
machines, the city, and its monuments of concrete and steel. The mountain gave way to
the bridge, the river made way for the roadway, and the landscape was transposed to the
cityscape, streetscape, or urban skyline. And so Edward Burtynsky’s industrial
landscapes occupy a middle ground; oscillating between and often conflating modernist
and romantic zones of interest, dismantling one, only to prop up the other.
But all photography and, by extension, all cinema, is industrial. Burtynsky’s
photographs and Baichwal’s digital images cannot document the ills of industrial
expansion without becoming implicated within the circuitry of those same techno-
industrial infrastructures. The images we see on the screen as well as those that
Burtynsky hangs on gallery walls and publishes in magazines are sustained by the same
plastics, metals and chemicals that render post-industrial culture’s electronic waste – one
of the film’s prime subjects – a serious environmental hazard. Choosing to focus on the
relationship between technology and nature, Manufactured Landscapes is inextricably
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bound by a particularly entrenched sense of self-reflexivity, intentional or otherwise. This
principle is not lost on Burtynsky but instead is articulated, with some variation, several
times over the course of the film. Within the first quarter, for example, Burtynsky’s
voiceover describes the moment of epiphany in which he realized how his medium and
therefore his environmentally committed projects were complicit with the same systems
he was attempting to expose. In was then that the photographer accepted there was no
route by which to circumvent industrial infrastructure. Citing everything from film
stock’s use of mined silver in its nitrate compound to the fuel his vehicles burned as he
pursued his desiccated subjects, every aspect of Burtynsky’s photographic enterprise
could be mapped back to the same deleterious processes he was determined to bring to
society’s attention. It was thus that Burtynsky turned to documenting the oil and energy
industries specifically; now, however, he was equipped with an awareness of their
insidiously entrenched presence both within everyday life and also in the photographic
image.
Because of Burtynsky’s implied references to Eadweard Muybridge,
Manufactured Landscapes is something of a trajectory for the development of image-
making technology – from Muybridge’s still camera to his motion studies, which
eventually resulted in the innovation of the movie camera, finally, most currently,
culminating in Baichwal’s digital medium. In her astute study of Muybridge’s
technological contributions to the development of the mythology of the American west,
Solnit narrates how Muybridge’s photographs of Yosemite, and his credentials as an
inventor, won him the challenge of using his high speed imaging techniques to determine
whether or not all four of a horse’s feet leave the ground while in full gallop. The horse’s
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owner was Leland Stanford, project sponsor, president of Central Pacific Rail and
Californian politician. The eponymous university that Stanford founded would later
generate the technologies industries concentrated in what became Silicon Valley. As the
network further unfolds, it was Muybridge’s motion studies which provided what was
necessary for the later invention of moving images, the Hollywood film industry, and
cinema as we know it. As Solnit argues, Silicon Valley and Hollywood are intimately
linked by the collaboration between these two men; the industries they inaugurated work
together to transform concrete realities into dematerialized representations, forged in light
and now in information (6). An epic network to be sure, and yet this same series of
connections – between digital culture, mechanically reproduced images, representations
of landscape and a nation’s industrial fever – resurface in Baichwal’s detached study of
an environmentally dedicated photographer and the relationship between culture,
technology and nature.
Creating Geography: Four Cameras, Two Films and the Manufacture of Landscape
Because she is filming a photographer and his images, Baichwal’s documentary
reframes still pictures within moving ones and so can be understood as a literal instance
of film-within-film. This is only one dimension that draws Dziga Vertov’s superlatively
self-reflexive 1929 Man with a Movie Camera into Manufactured Landscapes’ discursive
proximity. Given that China’s industrialization and its immense social, political and
physical energy is her subject matter, Baichwal’s project can be read parallel to with
Vertov’s vision of a similar moment in Soviet history. While Vertov’s film is in part an
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explosive celebration of industry, and Baichwal’s a restrained lamentation of the same
phenomenon, what unites these two films is that they capture two countries’ negotiations
with or anticipations of massive industrial, economic and cultural transformation. With
this in mind, points of comparison proliferate: urbanization; the transition from a local,
often manual, mode of production to one that is centralized and industrial; replacing non-
motorized transportation with vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, to name
but a few. But in addition to content, the formal and aesthetic strategies that inform
Manufactured Landscapes are explicitly suggestive of those used by Dziga Vertov, and
include montage techniques, consistent self-reflexivity, as well as fixation on certain
thematic tropes and editing tricks. These formal commonalities give way to a larger,
specifically theoretical, comparison from which emerges how the technology of the
moving image and its manipulation can transform inert ideas of space into contrived
“landscapes” or “geographies,” which then prove to be entirely distinct from what is real
or natural.
Man with a Movie Camera documents a day in the life of a cameraman as he
negotiates the new dimensions and experiences the fresh contours of an industrializing
Soviet Russia. All the while, the film is self-reflexively intent on revealing the creative
processes that convert the raw stuff of the image into an artificially derived cinematic city.
Baichwal, similarly, devotes her film to the scouting, reconnaissance and shooting
processes that transform various fragments of contemporary China into the latest of
Edward Burtynsky’s industrially-focused photographic essays. Burtynsky’s medium is of
course distinct from that of Vertov and his film’s eponymous cameraman; and yet,
equipped with their respective image apparatuses, tripod mounts and political vision,
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these heroic image-hunters share a symbolic logic that turns them into nothing less than
metaphors for industrial and now post-industrial civilization. Of course, because
Baichwal’s DV camera effectively replaces the still photographic images it depicts with
moving equivalents, the film absorbs Burtynsky on several levels and so distances him
from Vertov’s cameraman. Indeed, that Burtynsky is a photographer and not a filmmaker
lends an important dimension of friction to Baichwal’s cinematic project. Embracing a
discourse of legitimacy and authenticity, Burtynsky favours a manual, analog camera, a
preference which reflects the anxiety of industry that penetrates the surfaces of his work.
The effect of this challenges Baichwal’s use of the digital camera, a means of
representation that is, like the industrial landscape of Burtynsky’s photographs, invested
in rampant innovation.
Vertov and Baichwal’s films, then, attempt to map out, conceptualize and
ultimately predict the future of their moments’ industrial and technological change, and
they do so through the symbolically loaded vehicle of the image maker. Like Vertov’s
documentary, Baichwal’s film structures its portrait of image technology and one of its
practitioners around the idea of how space, both cinematic and physical, is constructed
and theorized. From the creation of composite “cinematic” environs to the more indirect
relationship between image technology and the transformation of the natural environment,
what ultimately forces these films at times to unite, and at other times to divide, is the
idea that making images, still or moving, both directly and indirectly alters the physical
environment as well as its conceptual counterparts – what is “landscape” for Burtynsky
and “geography” for Vertov.
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One of the montage experiments conducted at Lev Kuleshov’s famous Workshop
follows the image of a man in Moscow with an iconic shot of Washington, D.C, then
with another shot of the same man walking up a set of stairs. Though the stairs were
really located in a Moscow church, Kuleshov’s audience took for granted that this series
of images was continuous, inferring that the man’s ascent must have occurred in the
capital of the United States (Leyda 164). The conclusion drawn from this was that such
basic editing principles condition the possibility to create a spatial and temporal unity that
does not exist in reality. The construction of cinematic screen space, therefore, was
determined to be infinitely more flexible and therefore more important than espousing the
contours of “real” or referential space. As Vertov understood it, the filmmaker was quite
literally a geographer – the engineer of space rather than just its representative or
mediator. The kino-eye, then, was a “builder” of unique spatial realities which were
composed of shots perhaps taken in “various parts of the world” and/or at different times
(17). What came to be known as “creative geography,” then, is one of the fundamental
principles of Soviet montage which, in turn, assumed a significant role in the
development of conventional cinematic editing. While Kuleshov’s other montage
innovations carry specific political dimensions (“creative woman”’s fragmentation of the
female body is particularly resonant), it is the discursive weight of creative geography
that here solicits a revisitation from a specifically ecological perspective. Indeed, the
term’s semantic value alone suggests how landscape and environment are perhaps
nothing less than unnatural constructs and artificially derived categories. Baichwal’s
essayistic exploration of the manufactured landscape is a literalization of creative
geography containing a number of implications. First is the creation of cinematic spatial
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continuums which analogize and also directly contribute to the manufacture of the
concept of landscape and the idealization of physical terrain. Manufactured landscape and
creative geography are thus magnetized by an environmental rhetoric that forces film
theory to revisit these basic roots of Soviet montage through an analytic that relates the
productive, industrial essence of cinema to an external, physical environment. Second,
the term also describes how cinema extracts available images from the world at large and
then stitches them into cohesive and cognitively navigable space. Taken together, what
both terms imply is that a cinematic understanding of space must exceed the immaterial
or the conceptual, and also consider how the tangible external environment is shaped and
determined by the world of images.
Not unlike the conditions introduced by Burtynsky’s foundational epiphany,
Vertov’s documentary is premised on tracing the circuitry of relations that bind the image
to industry on the level of aesthetics, economics and basic technological mechanics. For
Vertov, the cinematic image was conceptualized as the connective tissue that glued the
cells of industry together. Relating all people and all parts across space and time, the
cinema thus established an idealized network of labour camaraderie that ideally kept the
industrial heart of the Soviet organism healthy and strong – its innovations matched only
by its level of productivity. The edited image, according to Man with a Movie Camera,
could negotiate the complexes of industrial culture, orient the citizen within its broad
topographies, and ultimately render Soviet society conceivable, functional and possible.
As the film continuously demonstrates, montage associations such as creative geography
relate the automobile to the factory, the factory to the street and the street to the camera.
All of them, including the universe at large and all its human citizens, are then traced
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back to the editing table and the film factory. Indeed, as Vertov’s film theorizes, the
cinema’s facility to create and thus manage geography would compose the new industrial
society’s sense of space and place, if not of the new society itself. What is more, just as
Edward Burtynsky insists all aspects of the photographic process are derived from the
lamentable practices of resource mining, Vertov’s kino-eye theorizes (documentary)
filmmaking as a process of extraction. The camera operator “gropes” through “the chaos
of visual events” (Vertov 19), mining and harvesting the raw material of images which
are then subjected to the processes of editing, refining and organizing into cohesive
bodies of discourse. As Vertov describes it, “if one films everything the eye has seen, the
result, of course, will be a jumble,” but if one “skillfully edits what has been
photographed, and “scraps bothersome waste,” what remains is not only a refined
approximation of reality, but an improved version (19). The result of this production
system is an impossibly artificial cinematic universe. The manufactured landscape that
Man with a Movie Camera effectively and self-reflexively constructs is a composite city,
as spatially continuous and temporally cohesive as it is politically idealized and even
utopian. Kuleshov’s basic experiment in creative geography is stretched to its limit,
ultimately creating a fluidity of constructed space from what would otherwise be a
random accumulation of images. Editing techniques thus create a spatial continuum on
behalf of forging political and ideological counterparts.
It is with enthusiasm that Vertov locates himself within Russia’s juggernaut of
political, social and industrial upheaval. Often termed a cinematic essay, Vertov’s film is
an argument about the undetermined but essential role that industrialized vision could
play within the futurism of the Soviet project. Man with a Movie Camera shrank spaces
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both visually and conceptually and also minimized divisions amongst, for example,
ethnic groups, ages, occupations and genders. Derived from footage of Kiev, Odessa, and
Moscow, and thus transformed into a composite city, Vertov oriented the viewer within a
single urban space and a shared vision for the future. The construction of the cinematic
universe thus begins with the extraction of the material image from the referential world,
but achieves its ideal intention when it functions as an ideological mediator. So it is that
the cinematic practice of creative geography articulates how the spatial categories of
industrialized, image-oriented culture do not occur naturally but rather are shaped,
processed and refined.
But the integral discursive conviction that informs Burtynsky’s projects – that his
medium and his subject matter are inextricably linked – emerges from his images only
implicitly. Precisely because of the ambiguity of this essential built-in reflexivity,
Baichwal’s film makes this dimension’s elucidation one of its defining tasks. An
overriding sense of detachment and abstraction is derived from Burtynsky’s consistent
spatial abstraction, and founds a sense of objectivity that effectively subtracts Burtynsky
and his medium from direct interaction with his landscapes. As Pauli points out, what
distinguishes Burtynsky from other portraitists of industrial sites is the lack of horizon
line – a subtle conventional challenge which produces in the viewer a sense of “vertigo”
(17). Vast shot distance, a flattening of dimensions and the absence of contextualizing
features are formal manipulations also consistently employed and which contribute to
Burtynsky’s subtle critique of and likewise participation in the production of landscape.
Baichwal, however, does not overtly reveal these strategies; her own expository project
arguably functions as just such a horizon line, reference point or provision of context.
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The abstract, aestheticized portraits of environmental devastation that are Burtynsky’s
signature do not moralize, nor do they assign blame. The attentive and privileged viewer,
though, might see the connection between him or herself and the lifestyle conveniences
provided by industrial processes, and so take on the moralizing that Burtynsky declines to
perform. Though it is this lack of didacticism that Baichwal claims attracted her to her
subject’s photographs, it also seems to frustrate her, for, indeed, her documentary
reverses many of Burtynsky’s neutral strategies. She minimizes Burtynsky’s detachment,
for example, granting her subject the space to comment on the intentions of his work.
What is more, the frequent use of close-ups radically reverses, if not compromises, the
photographer’s efforts to attain high vantage points. Meanwhile, and most obviously, the
animating factor of motion undermines Burtynsky’s static images and thus articulates the
connection between her distinct audience and what is seen though Burtynsky’s lens,
fundamentally altered by her own. Though she is sensitive to the even-handed or post-
ideological space of Burtynsky’s work, Baichwal’s portrait of the portraitist cannot do
other than denaturalize and de-neutralize Burtynsky’s photographs. Baichwal therefore
positions the photographer within the landscapes he is rendering and makes
incontrovertible the fact that without technological interface and human perspective, the
idea (and ideology) of “landscape” would not exist. So it is that the interdependency of
landscapes and industry also includes artistry, cultural production and the very ideology
of environmentalism. China is not alone in altering the natural world: both physically and
conceptually, Burtynsky also is fabricating landscapes, manufacturing the way in which
culture relates to the solidity of physical space. So it is that the final stage of industrial
incursion is not the abandoned quarry or the mountain of vulcanized tires, it is their
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representation via the painstaking framing and processing of the mechanically, and then
digitally, reproduced image. Man with a Movie Camera makes a similar annunciation, for
it too isolates the image as the final, idealized product of a new society’s industrial
capabilities. Indeed, both Baichwal and Vertov venture into the framework of their
respective cameramen and so document the physical labour that manufacturing involves,
including that of the factory employees, street workers and other toiling citizens,
including the cameramen and their assistants. This “meta” or self-reflexive level is vital
to both films, for it is here that space is actually created and the practitioner is irreversibly
embroiled within his own discursive framework. These behind-the-scenes exposures
pinpoint the origin of the image and so denaturalize it, therefore forcing the viewer to
consider how industrial spaces are borne within the image’s framework and its productive
manipulations.
Dziga Vertov’s idea of the film factory understands cinema as a process. The
theoretical and aesthetic legacy of Vertov’s film resides in how it simultaneously
constructs and deconstructs the cinema as a material system and does so by rendering a
film that in many ways is not a film: a film that puts itself together only on behalf of
taking itself apart. Soviet montage practice and the avant-garde Constructivist movement
which provided the basis for Vertov’s film theory and aesthetic were explicitly defined
by the demystification of the cultural object; concealing the seams and origins of the film
– the images that were its raw materials or building blocks – was anathema to the
aesthetic program of Vertov’s kino-eye. This ideological commitment bears particular
relevance when situated in proximity to Baichwal’s film, premised as it is in the
revelation of process and production. Baichwal and Vertov, then, are equally invested in
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overt and implicit exposition of industry and in revealing that which is invisibly
embedded within the images which are finally projected on screens and consumed
viewers.
But the demystification process at the heart of Man with a Movie Camera’s film-
factory logic should not terminate when the viewer is brought into the site of manufacture.
Establishing the provenance of the image is the foundation of Vertov’s film, and yet this
reverse-trajectory can be pushed back even further. The point of origin is not the image-
extraction process, but the rawness that is extracted – that which is literally derived from
the material, physical environment. Baichwal’s film is thus, like Vertov’s, about the
derivation of the image, but it forces the viewer to look beyond labour and urban and/or
industrial infrastructure when attempting to locate the image’s primary resource field.
What anchors Baichwal’s assessment of Burtynsky’s work comes early on, when the
photographer describes the moment of epiphany that allowed him to connect his
photographic medium to the extraction sites that compose his subject matter. It is a
revelation that resonates throughout Manufactured Landscapes and necessarily informs
how Baichwal’s camera is, like Burtynsky’s and Vertov’s, engaged in the circular process
of simultaneously dismantling that which the filmmaker is actively producing. Thus
grounded in the self-reflexive bind that Burtynsky vocalizes and visualizes within his
images, Baichwal’s film reconfigures the parameters of sourcing so that it asks not about
the origin of the images that make up Vertov’s composite city, but about the origin of the
city itself. From where and what is industrial culture derived? How do we obtain and then
maintain the roads, traffic, trolleys, goods, services and factories that Vertov captured on
film and edited into an artificial urbanism? In other words, working the image backwards
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in pursuit of its essential derivation, Vertov took his camera into the streets and then into
the factory and from there established cinematic materialism as an aesthetic and ideology
that could reveal the origin of the manufactured object. Baichwal, meanwhile, at the
beginning of a century that is becoming inseparable from environmental politics and
digital democracy, picks up Vertov’s documentary impulse. Embracing a similar
materialist strategy, but abandoning any overt ideology, Baichwal takes the camera
beyond the street and beyond the factory, and, as an addendum to Vertov’s 1929 film, all
the way back to the extraction pit where the image is forced to confront industry at the
site where hydrocarbon culture is derived.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s recent Our Daily Bread (2006) is a particularly notable
instance of materialism’s aesthetic convergence with the digital eco-conscious
documentary. Clearly reminiscent of those sequences in Vertov’s Kino-Eye (1924) which
use reverse motion to trace beef from the butcher back to the bull in the slaughterhouse
and then to the stockyard (and bread from the bakery back to the wheat field),
Geyrhalter’s film is notable for its silence, restraint and detachment. Unlike Kino-Eye,
this is not a celebration of collectivization but rather an exposure of the guts of what
might be considered quite the opposite – industrialized agri-business. What is remarkable
about Our Daily Bread is that as it isolates and then follows labourers through their
working day they are always shown consuming some form of the same daily bread that is
the subject of the film. And so Geyrhalter refrains from easy moralization for, indeed,
though the work itself is often as horrifyingly unappetizing as it is dehumanizing, these
farm hands and slaughterhouse employees must, like us all, eat. And so they do, sitting in
the field or in the factory cafeteria; and as they face Geyrhalter’s intimate camera and
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quietly consume whatever they have brought or bought for lunch the viewer effectively
joins them. The lesson that carbon-neutral and/or eco-conscious cinema can learn from
Our Daily Bread and Manufactured Landscapes is that the camera and the practitioner
are always on some level dependent upon or complicit in the very systems that a given
film might be critiquing. But thorough dismantling or subversion is not always possible
for we cannot live without bread. And neither would we adequately function if deprived
of the mechanically or digitally reproduced image – without this technology, how else
would the guts of industry be made visible? But working within the system, as
Geyrhalter’s film so carefully argues, biting the hand that feeds, such as it is, can be as
effective an enterprise as it is an inevitable one. Likewise, as Burtynsky and Baichwal
pursue and thus expose our industrial culture’s footprints, they inevitably leave behind a
set of their own. The so-called carbon calculators that environmental agencies and
advisors employ in order to measure the emissions and other residues incurred by human
behaviour might then have to factor in a given project’s cultural worth or political
significance when tallying up the final carbon audit – a contentious dimension, to be sure,
but perhaps also a necessary one. Our traces, in other words, like the meals and images
we consume, ought to be conscientious, informed and necessary.
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Old is New: The Encroaching Camera and the Incursive Image
Given the foundational and fundamental conservatism of Burtynsky’s choice of
apparatus, it seems almost curious that the artist would submit his images to the refractive
manipulation of a digital movie camera. Throughout the documentary Baichwal’s
medium challenges that of her subject, undercutting his aesthetic intentions even as she
espouses his political ones. As Pauli points out, Burtynsky favors the same large-format
viewfinder cameras as the nineteenth-century landscape photographers whom he claims
as his influences (13). His prints are unusually large as a result, typically 30-by-40 or 50-
by-60 inches and are defined by a hyper-realism achieved by his camera’s particular
capacity to “obtain clarity of focus and an abundance of detail” (13). The production of
large-format images is excessively sensitive to movement and so requires the use of a
tripod mount, forcing the photographer to “slow down his way of seeing.” The required
stasis, as well as “viewing the scene on a glass screen under a black cloth,” not only
“fosters a more contemplative approach” (13) but also, via Baichwal’s portrait, imbues
Burtynsky with the iconographic associations of the nineteenth century’s photographic
heroism. The sensitivity of the antiquated device is perhaps complemented by its
operative complexity, substantial physical weight, and cumbersome nature. Burtynsky
typically carries 150 pounds of gear to his sites, which have been carefully selected after
months of scouting and negotiations with corporate and/or government bodies (Segal).
Burtynsky’s need of a crew surely resonates with associations of a much earlier mode of
landscape photography, but his process is an improvement on the wet-plate method of the
1860s and ‘70s that demanded that all necessary chemicals and developing equipment
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accompany the camera. Carelton Watkins, Solnit points out, traveled through Yosemite’s
rugged mountains with 2,000 pounds of equipment; Muybridge, meanwhile, might have
been accompanied by four assistants as well as a pack train (43). And yet, not only does
Burtynsky align himself with photography’s earlier practitioners, but because his large-
scale photographs reference paintings rather than mechanically produced images (Pauli
17), he often exceeds them. The symbolic logic of Burtynsky’s antiquated apparatus thus
situates his process as well as his images squarely within the traditions of past centuries
and, as by extension, their ways of seeing. Burtynsky’s need for a crew might even
outmatch Muybridge’s – not so much to tote equipment, but to act as translators, organize
large groups of factory workers, and negotiate access rights with government and
industry officials. But while Muybridge and Watkins embraced the latest technology to
subdue nature within the image’s framework and thus positioned themselves as man-
against-nature, Burtynsky embraces their outdated medium in order to subdue
industrialization and thus position himself as man-against-technology. It seems a
regressive move, particularly as it conflicts with the fact that nineteenth century
photography was defined by its innovative thrust. The question the film implicitly posits,
then, is whether environmental practice is better aligned with manual processes or with
digital ones. Indeed, such is the tension that defines Manufactured Landscapes in
particular and ecological politics in general. Indeed, though engineering innovations
might introduce more energy efficient and thus less harmful technologies, their very
production, as John Bellamy Foster points out, not only requires the use of
petrochemicals and other toxins, but also perpetuates the capitalist circuitry of
consumption and obsolescence that are the heart of environmental degradation (92).
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Using Burtynsky almost as a malleable template, Baichwal negotiates these discords
throughout her film. For example, because of the ways in which Baichwal’s documentary
reveals the onsite processes of her subject’s enterprise, she both subverts and reinforces
the mythology of the heroic, lone frontier photographer. In other words, while his images
are digitalized and denaturalized and so, perhaps, compromised, Burtynsky’s almost
martyred mystique is reinforced as an act of compensation. Vertov’s documentary
negotiates a similar ambiguity, culminating in its final moments when technology
swallows the human cameraman and therefore marks the irreversible divide between
future and past. For all its ease, affordability and portability, the digital camera’s defining
spontaneity and procedural ease further degrades Burtynsky’s fastidious processes. As
David Segal points out, Burtynsky’s work is characterized by an excessive attention to
detail. Not only does he favour the fussy complexity of the large-format camera, he will
often shoot an image on several brands of film and then print each image on a selection
of different papers. From the resulting abundance of possibilities, the combination that
produces the richest depth and resolution is the one he selects (Segal). These conflicting
modes of image production pit Baichwal against Burtynsky and embody
environmentalism’s and cinema’s current defining tensions, namely whether the
dematerialized form of digital is more or less aesthetically sustainable and/ or
ecologically tenable than the solidity of analog.
Encroachment is one of Manufactured Landscapes’ most essential discursive
layers. The dimensions it works through include the imposition of man and industry upon
the natural environment, urban sprawl upon rural space, and the moralizing judgments of
Western post-industrial perspectives upon China’s industrializing ambitions. Burtynsky’s
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aesthetic, formal and mechanical choices situate him as a proponent of stasis rather than
motion and thus position his vintage conceits in opposition to what is current if not
futuristic: velocity, movement, and the cine that is at the heart of Muybridge and
Baichwal’s cameras, China’s idealized present and perhaps untenable future. So, what
emerges, however implicitly, and perhaps in opposition to Baichwal’s intentions, is that
part of what is being encroached upon is Burtynsky himself. As Baichwal’s gaze invites
the viewer to essentially invade Burtynsky’s privileged side of the camera, this overriding
theme is put into practical, literal terms. What is more, because the analog, manual, even
old-fashioned technology that is his medium weighs so heavy with tradition, when the
incontrovertible newness of Baichwal’s digital apparatus impinges upon the space of the
photographer’s own invasive perspective, the filmmaker ends up challenging the
antiquated dimensions of Burtynsky’s project and asks whether it is as even-handed and
post-ideological as is typically assumed. The rather unyielding dimensions of
Burtynsky’s venerable manual medium are concisely articulated by an image strategically
situated within the concluding moments of Baichwal’s film. A lone, dilapidated tenement
building stands in sharp contrast against the hard, freshly-chiseled edges of the Shanghai
cityscape built up in the distance. This dwelling is a singular reminder of the disappearing
residential centre that has been allowed to remain even this long due only to a lifetime
occupant who stubbornly refuses to concede her home to developers. As Baichwal’s
camera cuts inside for a closer look the defiant tenant is revealed to be a woman, elderly
and crippled, sitting in a cold concrete stairway, unwilling or unable to rise and meet
either the camera’s gaze or China’s future, both of which hover imposingly around her.
She is impassive but not immobile, for her hands are occupied, sewing fabric with a
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needle and thread. Baichwal devotes so much time to this near penultimate image that she
clearly demands that the viewer thoroughly consider its layers of suggestion. Indeed, the
image is more provocative than its subtlety at first allows, and so time must be allotted in
order to glean from this sequence what amounts to a compendium of one of analog
cinema’s and ecology’s dominant discourses that, simply put, renders innovation an
opponent of established tradition.
This image is first of all about tools, production and manufacture. Echoing a
similar pattern that structures Man with a Movie Camera, Baichwal repeats sequences
that feature close-ups of female hands as they either assemble or dissemble generic
techno-parts. She does so in an effort to map out the human labour that founds otherwise
nebulous networks of manufacture, and so this woman is a variation of the same trope.
But of course she also functions within the realm of encroachment, for, not unlike
Burtynsky’s manual camera, her mode of production is being eroded, becoming confined
to the realm of the artisinal rather than the everyday. Like the stubbornly implanted
elderly tenant, the stillness of the photographer’s image at least symbolically challenges
the monumental speed at which China’s global economic position and its physical
landscape are being transformed. A particularly illustrative anecdote describes how, in
order to accommodate Burtynsky’s request for a photograph, an entire chicken processing
plant was shut down, the conveyer belt stilled and the workers instructed by floor
managers to freeze their motion or risk blurring the inscription of their image (Segal).
Such instances of the photographer’s imposition of stillness are repeated several times in
Baichwal’s film – a particularly resonant example features Burtynsky assembling milling
crowds of factory for a group shot. Notably, this sequence immediately follows
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Baichwal’s monumental long-take plod across the same factory’s production floor, a
juxtaposition which exemplifies digital technology’s capacity to capture what
Burtynsky’s images eschew – random, unscripted movement. When the factory is thus
tranquilized by a technology as refined as it is outmoded, the implication positions the
photographer as an interventionist within the transformative march of China’s industrial
project. Unlike the digital camera, Burtynsky’s aged contraption is the tool of the artist
and artisan, and not of the amateur, who is better suited to Baichwal’s lightweight
instrument. The large format camera is, like the old woman’s manual task, a symbol of
defiance, embodying a reverence and a nostalgia for a time, and a medium, seemingly
less threatening to natural and human health than the digital technology that is for now
the crowning achievement of hydrocarbon civilization. But there is a rich complication
here, for as carbon neutrality searches for modes of sustainable film practice it could
conceivably revert back to earlier (analog or manual) forms. Indeed, because the essential
basis of the analog camera, printer and projector are basically unchanged since the 1890s,
nineteenth century films could be shown today with only minor modification (Enticknap
26). What is more, improving the quality of the image entails only the use of a new stock
and not, like digital, the retooling of the entire computer-based system. What is saved is
obviously huge amounts of electronic waste, as well as the energy and resources that are
consumed by the production of the technology itself. There is, then, the potential for
innovation in reversion; beyond aesthetic dimensions, harnessing extant or outmoded
technology can accomplish an ecological and thus political end.
While the digital camera’s moving pictures preserve the essential thrust of Asia’s
momentous industrial motion, Baichwal, a documentarian like Burtynsky, is also invested
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in framing, and thus containing, the speed of Chinese development. Of course
Burtynsky’s medium renders him particularly resistant, defined as it is by associations of
permanence and durability. What is more, Baichwal’s photographer-subject usually
abides by expected modes of exhibition – gallery spaces, book collections and private
displays. Thanks to Baichwal, however, the cinematic medium, its reproductive
capabilities and variety of dissemination possibilities have shifted Burtynsky’s work into
the realm of movement, impermanence and fluctuation, stamping it with the
indeterminacies that define digital culture. Baichwal’s cinematic project thus
compromises something of Burtynsky’s conservative ideology for it mobilizes what
amounts to his tranquilization of China’s transformation via the static space of the
photograph’s frame. Additionally, the photographs that Baichwal has been panning and
scanning and thus “unfreezing” or “animating” throughout her film are eventually
revealed to be located within a gallery exhibition. This, then, marks a further resistance to
industrialization’s myopic velocity and its deleterious environmental, cultural and
economic consequences. For example, as Baichwal leaves the elderly woman to her quiet
protest, she cuts to the adversary, scanning left to right in a mobile long take that tracks
along the fresh-birthed monolith of Shanghai’s new cityscape. She is in fact not capturing
the city firsthand but rather is zooming in on an extant Burtynsky image, a fact revealed
when she pulls back and transitions into the gallery exhibition of the photographer’s work.
By editing two separate shots together – Burtynsky’s still and her mobile one – Baichwal
is not merely defying industrialization’s encroachment on natural spaces, she is actively
encroaching on Burtynsky’s practical and ideological frameworks. Hers, then, is a
montage between modes of representation – manual to digital, still to moving – creating
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an artificial geography in the montage sense, and manufacturing a cinematic landscape
composed of Burtynsky’s photographic portraits.
The shot that opens Manufactured Landscapes defines the central ideological
ambiguity that frames the relations, first between Baichwal and Burtynsky, and second,
between both documentarians and the environmental politics they are together engaging.
The film commences with a mobile long take that is exceedingly, frustratingly extensive,
maintaining as it does an unbroken frame for over eight minutes. As she plods along a
factory’s production floor – the Factory of the World, as the viewer learns later –
Baichwal covers a surface space so vast and sprawling it becomes clear that combining a
moving camera and an open aperture is perhaps the only method capable of documenting
this expansive terrain while also embellishing its sense of limitless growth potential.
While Burtynsky chooses to capture this factory’s immense frontier by assembling
employees out of doors, Baichwal’s mobile camera is equipped to explore the factory’s
sprawl as it exists – indoors and in the moment, caught up in the throes of production. As
time passes and the shot continues, the viewer is forced to contemplate the complex
infrastructure and concentrated energy required to manufacture whatever nondescript
consumer gadget occupies the attention of the factory’s employees. The shot moves forth
steadily, tracking from right to left, one row of workers giving way to yet another in what
appears to be an endless conveyor belt of industry. The factory’s space refuses to yield an
end point and so the camera’s insistent pursuit of boundary is unsuccessful. But the fact
that Baichwal’s long take does not manage to establish the full scale of the factory’s
interior only heightens the magnitude of the industrial project of which this specific site is
only one example. Indeed, to do otherwise – to contain Chinese industry in a framework,
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even one that is mobile – would minimize the daunting immensity that Manufactured
Landscapes intends to foster; so too would a sense of orientation undermine the implicit
anxiety that escapes from both Burtynsky, the photographer, and Manufactured
Landscapes, the film. Indeed, the digital camera’s buoyancy and unlimited storage space
cannot manage China’s sprawl, but it can match it, thus proving itself a mode specifically
suited for negotiating the magnitude and velocity of industrial and post-industrial culture.
The point, then, is not to understand the Chinese industrial juggernaut, but to leave it
mystifying and defiant, and so the camera cuts away before the panorama of the factory is
fully determined. It is an aesthetic choice and an ideological one. Baichwal’s enormous
opening frame thus competes with the excess of China’s current moment of
industrialization. Not unlike Burtynsky’s unusually large prints and the images which
defy horizons and bleed beyond their frames, Baichwal’s film manages to situate rampant,
large scale development in the realm of decadence, surfeit and overabundance simply by
means of the ideological associations that exude from her equally excessive medium.
The discursive logic of Baichwal’s opening long take registers on the level of shot
space as well as camera movement. Indeed, that the shot is explicitly mobile captures the
factory’s productive momentum, but that it moves right to left produces a further layer of
ideological suggestion. For so-called Western viewers especially, there is something
uncomfortable in moving from right to left, for it counters the clock and challenges an
instinct or assumption that going forth means following the movement of the sun, the
direction in which Western languages are read, tires spin and conveyor belts roll.
Structured in accordance with the forward march of progression, Vertov’s film maintains
an expected left to right momentum by systematically repeating and then varying shots
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that eventually develop into a sense of forward propulsion. Indeed, because the film is a
day in the life of a city and a cameraman, Man with a Movie Camera obeys the clock and
therefore abides by the tendency to begin on the left side and terminate on the right. As
such, Vertov established a sense of movement through transition, building momentum in
accordance with a growing sense of exhilaration and enthusiasm for both cinematic and
social transformation. But Manufactured Lansdscapes’s right to left track moves
backwards and so interferes with this instinctual principle of movement, and so the film
opens in implicit opposition to the conventional direction of progress. Like the stillness of
the photograph, then, reversing the direction associated with advancement conflicts with
China’s industrial propulsion. But as it both challenges and espouses the photograph’s
stasis and China’s industry, the film is defiantly ambiguous in its retreat from definitively
favoring the motion of its digital medium or the immobility of its analog subject. What
emerges from Baichwal’s tropes of encroachment – new upon old, movement upon stasis
– is that Manufactured Landscapes is not only about the incursions of industry (and
culture) upon the environment but also about digital technology’s impingement upon
both Burtynsky’s manual medium and Baichwal’s sympathetic convictions. But whether
she intends to or not, Baichwal’s digital medium absorbs Burtynsky’s images and infuses
their stillness with motion, thus highlighting the tacit conviction that the analog
photographic camera is perhaps poorly equipped to adequately contend with the
complexities of current and future technological and ecological change. Environmental
politics, in other words, are inextricably linked to those of digitization. Because digital’s
technological development is necessarily informed by earlier analog forms, Baichwal’s
“new” and Burtynsky’s “old” converge within a synthesis of shared aesthetic, practical
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and political space. Such is the nature of cultural and technological dialectics. So it is that
viewing Burtynsky through Baichwal’s digital medium is not unlike looking through a
double lens of self-reflexivity which magnifies their shared critical perspective and
matches the lack of definitiveness that they insist is China’s only assessable feature. And
so they both retreat into a political and aesthetic frameworks? that the issues they address
can ill afford to assume – the post-ideological, pragmatic and non-committal. Cinema
remains an inherently environmental practice, but for environmentalism to be an affective
cinematic practice it must accomplish more than depicting itself and its impediments. To
do so, as Manufactured Landscapes tends, is to dissolve into ambivalence and a stasis of
self-reflection.
Outside In: The Interiorization of Cinematic Spaces
The pacing, duration, and subject matter of Baichwal’s opening establishes her
film’s basic rhetorical and ideological parameters, and does so by making fairly explicit
reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s similarly executed long take tracking shots. Even more
than the five plus minutes of traffic-jam that catapults his Weekend (1967) into the
morass of consumer-culture decadence, it is the controlled chaos of Tout va bien’s (1972)
supermarket sequence that informs the temporal and spatial sprawl Baichwal’s camera
attempts to negotiate. Notably, this reference again situates Baichwal within the realm of
Vertovian film theory. Indeed, Godard’s conception of the radical text, of which Tout va
bien is exemplary, was grounded in what he regarded in Vertov’s cinematic materialism
as film’s potential to function as the aesthetic extension of Marxist theorization. But this
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ideal is only realizable when the audience is palpably distanced or alienated from the film
object. The practitioner must therefore eliminate narrative in favor of a formal
organization committed to the demystification of the cinematic image and the consistent
revelation of itself as an artifice and a construct. Godard’s radical texts are intended to
operate, like Vertov’s, as sites (and sights) of production, wherein narrative is
subordinated to a film’s operating structures or means of production. Vertov’s films are
defined by the insistence that the camera is used to reveal the material derivation of life’s
essential goods. Whether a loaf of bread, a cut of meat, or the cinematic image, all were
thus traced back to their raw origins as Vertov followed them through the stages of
processing, dissemination, reception, consumption and finally death, all the while
refusing the audience any respite from the demanding task of active, participatory
viewing. Baichwal’s opening shot of the Factory of the World is especially resonant
when situated in proximity to the materialist strategies and intentions of Vertov’s use of
Soviet montage. Indeed, both Manufactured Landscapes and Man with a Movie Camera
assign their cameramen-heroes the task of guiding the viewer through an indeterminate
and inchoate world that the combined forces of industry and the camera lens are in the
midst of creating. Additionally, both Man with a Movie Camera and Manufactured
Landscapes ground themselves on the floor of production – the film factory for Vertov
and the Factory of the World for Baichwal. Indeed, Vertov might argue that these two
spaces are one and the same. Like the film workshop that is Man with a Movie Camera,
and like Godard’s conveyor belt tracking shots, Baichwal’s long-take interrogation of
“factory” forces the viewer to acknowledge a relation between the means of commodity
manufacture and construction of the cinematic image.
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Baichwal’s camera treats the interior of the? Factory of the World as if it were an
out-?of-?doors landscape. Thus, the vastness of the space as rendered by her extensive
long take track suggests that what Burtynsky calls “the landscape of our time” applies to
both the scenery located within and beyond the walls of architecture. Landscape is
architecture, and it is therefore outside and inside; indeed, Baichwal’s representation of
the Factory of the World argues for the transposition of landscape to an interior space.
The film’s opening shot, continuous and unbroken, captures what is an open, uncharted
terrain, its vista enhanced by Burtynsky’s voiceover as it describes how landscape is a
shifting category. Executed outdoors, Baichwal’s shot would be nothing less than a
panorama, a shot used to convey the immense sprawl of a mountain range or body of
water. Indeed, the tracking-shot cityscape that concludes Manufactured Landscapes
reiterates the film’s opening argument: the new skyline, vista, or horizon is anthropogenic
and industrial – a point further enforced when the shot is revealed to be of a Burtynsky
photograph displayed inside a gallery and not the firsthand outdoors of the city itself. But
what is really at stake in the concluding skyline resides in the fact that cityscapes have
never been about exterior space, but about interiors – the indoors and environments that
architecture creates. Conventional long shot representations of urban skylines do not just
foreground architecture’s visibility, but also the opposite: what is invisible – hidden
inside the structures that compose the horizon line.
Lewis Mumford’s theory of mining and/or extraction-based society is premised
on the concept of unbuilding: understood as a form of creative destruction, the term aptly
describes Burtynsky and Baichwal’s exploration of the manufactured landscape. That is,
because extraction-based civilization is sustained by non-renewable forms, it is
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characterized by discontinuous, counter-productive processes that unravel what it weaves
and thus condition what Mumford calls “an evolution downwards” (451). As The City in
History imagined it, unbuilding would see its final manifestation in the form of
underground cities, a shift that Mumford determined to be the logical contribution to
urban planning from a civilization “whose key inventions came out of the mine” (480).
(It is notable, then, that Burtynsky’s more recent project, which documents marble
quarries, refers to these spaces as “inverted architecture.”) And so, Mumford observed,
subterranean infrastructure begins with water pipes, gas mains, sewers, automobile
tunnels, subways and air raid shelters, and eventually attracts shops and restaurants,
which then give way to entire commercial zones and finally, communities. An “extension
and normalization” of the conditions that were “forced upon the miner,” the underground,
interior city was, according to Mumford, extraction society’s inevitable environment
(480). Additionally, what is effectively our civilization’s “premature burial” underground
is sustained by the “artificial light and artificial ventilation” that are, of course, generated
by nothing less than continued resource mining and extraction (480). But, Mumford
argues, life submerged in the earth sees its more refined and insidious equivalent above
ground, in the encapsulated skyscrapers and towers that are equipped with such artificial
environmental features as “air conditioning and all-day fluorescent lighting”; indeed, the
inverted mines Mumford describes vary little from their underground counterparts.
Similarly, Baichwal’s narrative consistently posits China as a country in the process of
physically sealing up. The dominant conceit that structures the Shanghai sequences that
end the film, for example, is a dichotomizing shift back and forth between the interior of
a real estate agent’s freshly constructed and comparatively lavish home, and what are the
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eroded and exposed dwellings of Shanghai’s labouring classes. Baichwal’s shots move
seamlessly between the self-consciously modern bourgeois household and the congested
backstreets of Shanghai – the target area of many of the agent’s developer clients.
Without windows, doors, and often walls, the residences are in such profound disrepair
that their interiors are visible from the outside, so there is little distinction between the
indoors of private living and the outdoors of the public street. Baichwal’s camera and her
editor’s skill register a bitter pun on the fashionable idea of the “open concept” room: the
real-estate agent’s description of her spacious, modern kitchen bridges over a shot of a
woman cooking at her stove, her home’s remaining two walls affording the casual
passerby and the film’s viewer an unobstructed view of her unprotected habitat.
Mumford’s theorization of the shift from aboveground to below ground and outside to in
finds a visual match in Baichwal’s representation of interiorized landscapes, especially
because documenting Burtynsky as he himself documents the changing landscape situates
him increasingly indoors. Indeed, because the building or manufacture of the landscape
image is not productive but destructive, it too must find replenishment either in a fresh
locale or else indoors, within an artificial realm.
The cultural and technological genealogy that connects Muybridge’s landscape
photographs to Burtynsky’s, and from there links Muybridge’s motion studies to the
movie camera, the Hollywood film industry and, via Silicon Valley, the proliferation of
the digital image, is both intricate and abstract. And yet is it is neatly, richly, contained
within the narrative framework of Manufactured Landscapes in general and its discursive
consideration of interior/exterior conflation in particular. Though the film industry that
would be Hollywood relocated to California partly to take advantage of abundant lighting
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resources and variation in landscapes, the Studio Era that remains the pinnacle of
Hollywood’s achievements is not characterized by outdoor, on-location shooting. Rather,
the industry standard was localized and on-site, and rather than contend with the
temperament of the sun, production was contained within manageable, controllable
interiors. The “studio,” then, was premised around the production of specifically nuanced
artificial environments. Soundstages, for example, relied on arc lamps for lighting;
artificial weather was produced by wind, rain and snow machines, while seas were
rendered with indoor pools. Back lots, meanwhile, took advantage of both sun and lamps,
and the extensive use of sets and props to create off-site, often exotic, locations (Epstein
7). Further aspects of this environmental apparatus included background projection and
animation cameras that imbued miniatures, puppets and other replicas with the illusion of
a full-scale reality (Epstein 7). Servicing the needs of any number of film projects, sets
were exchanged, revised and ultimately recycled from one picture to the next, and so the
studio’s back lot became a virtual schizophrenia of artificial geographies, shifting
between the backdrops of various locales, landscapes and terrains. Exemplary of this
factory system was MGM, which was, in 1947, Hollywood’s most prolific studio – a
status achieved by the employment of numerous soundstages to manufacture as many as
six different films at the same time (Epstein 7). The distinctive self-containment of the
studio thus describes how the film industry and the images associated with it have long
been premised on the idea of both the environment of manufacturing (the studio) and
manufactured environments (the image); that is, in order to render external the exterior
sights and landscapes that the moving image ultimately affords, studio cinema retreats
indoors, to the carefully controlled site of fabrication.
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As an industry, what came to be the Studio System represents a specifically
Fordist mode of production, wherein all its parts (locations, sets, equipment) and labour
(editors, actors, directors, stage hands) were localized within one studio, and all its stages
of manufacture were organized serially, from the image’s “extraction” (shooting on the
back lot) to its editing and other post-production needs. What is more, the sensitivity of
film stock to light, and sound film to noise demanded shooting in an environment where
light, sound, movement and camera distance could be strictly relegated. From the
carefully managed darkness of Edison’s Black Mariah to the luminous back lots and
studios of Hollywood, contemplating the final film product necessarily involves
understanding how cinema is defined by those simulated or manufactured habitats where
the raw stuff that will become an ideal image is initially extracted, processed and then
finally refined. Thus described, the analogy between cinema as an “environment
industry” and an “industry of environments” provides an instructive way to reformulate
film’s basic theoretical and practical terms. The interiorized extraction-based society that
Mumford describes combines with environmentalism’s current dominance and trickles
down to penetrate and finally alter entrenched assumptions that cultural expression might
somehow be environmentally neutral.
Cinema is an art and industry of light, for this is the resource (natural and artificial)
upon which image generation most essentially depends. As Richard Koszarki explains,
during the late teens and even into the twenties of the twentieth century, American films
were often shot in specifically built glass structures called greenhouses (153). The
practice was typical of film manufacture on the east coast, where sunlight was at a
premium, but less common in California, where open-air stages were conventional – at
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least until the introduction of sound cinema and its heightened sensitivities shifted
production to enclosed studio spaces (Koszarki 153). Greenhouse is indeed a useful term,
resonating as it does with its contemporary associations of environmentalism. But even
without this specific terminological fortuity it remains an instructive way to
conceptualize studio filmmaking. “Greenhouse,” then, describes the artificially derived
environment that fosters the cultivation of an organism or product onsite, and so
precludes having to import its equivalent from elsewhere. The term includes both
economic and climactic conditions, and is properly understood, like the Hollywood
Studio Era, in specifically Fordist terms. But the protective space of glass walls and roofs
has long been reconfigured by the post-Fordist transference of production to less
expensive intercontinental or overseas venues. Light conditions, proper climate and
setting remain necessary to offsite environmental simulation, but it is commerce and
globalized cultural networks that determine the standardization of film’s cross-border
activity. The diffusion of the manufacture of cinematic environments across borders,
languages, cultures, and terrain proves that Vertov’s ideal of using the singular film
factory to shrink time, space and cultural difference still resonates theoretically but is,
like Fordism, vastly outmoded.
Like studio filmmaking, Man with a Movie Camera articulates how cinematic
production is largely premised on the collapse of interior and exterior spaces. Indeed, at
its most foundational level Vertov’s film is about the creation of a composite
environment. This is achieved by means of the cinema’s basic processes of refinement:
editing raw material of the shot into the finished image product. But what for Vertov
constitutes “cinema” is not determined by the referential space where the image is
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extracted, but is instead derived from its various stages of production, none of which is so
valuable as the interior space that glues Man with a Movie Camera together – the film
factory that is the editing table in Svilova’s workshop. A studied exposition of the
cinema’s power to create artificial and/or composite spaces, Vertov’s film makes an
important contribution to the overlapping discourses of interior/exterior collapse and
industrialization’s violation of spaces otherwise considered natural. As anxiety heightens
over the disappearance of geography – coastlines swallowed by rising sea levels, forests
consumed by fires, fertile farmland receding into desert – cinema’s artificial spaces, so
often taken for granted, come to assume a distinctly utopian role: a barrier between the
post-industrial and industrial citizen and the consequences of unprecedented
environmental erosion. Like the landscape photographs of the nineteenth century, the
composite becomes the compensatory. The current dominance of eco-consciousness
might then read Vertov’s film factory within the dimensions of the meteorological,
privileging it as a vision of industrial culture’s potential to house or hide itself within the
architecture of cinematic space – the zone of the shot and the territory of the image.
Digital technology in particular facilitates an interiorization of cinematic culture,
for it consolidates the cinematic processes of production, dissemination, reception and
consumption into the single space of the privately-owned desktop computer. Digital
renders cinema geographically localized and removes the need to venture beyond the
domestic front in order to produce, reproduce or receive images. Invoking the image of a
“Fortress of Solitude,” Barbara Klinger argues that digital recording technology has
increasingly shifted cinema into the insular sphere of the private home. But this sense of
confinement is founded on paradox, disguising as it does how private image consumption
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is inextricably embroiled within a complex system of social, industrial and economic
relations (Klinger 9). Communications technologies exist in conjunction with the larger
forces of industrialization and modernization, and impact the private citizen by “opening
the home to the outside,” thereby collapsing distinctions between public and private (9).
And yet the digital democracy and proliferation of DVD culture also achieve the
converse, narrowing the physical space of cinema by confining it to the enclosed
domestic sphere, where its supplies are self-relegated and consumption is privately
managed. Indeed, “home film cultures,” as Klinger calls them, do not exist in isolation
from other external cultural forces (12), but as technology extends into the home, the
democratic possibilities of inclusion and open access prove constrictive if not oppressive;
this is especially so as communications technology transforms the private dwelling into a
job site and a marketplace. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri might argue, the
domestication of cinema is symptomatic of the capitalist economy’s insatiable search for
new consumer markets. “Capital,” they write, “constantly operates through a
reconfiguration of the boundaries of the inside and the outside” (221). This basic Marxist
observation sees that capitalism’s economic mode “does not function within the confines
of a fixed territory and population, but always overflows its borders and internalizes new
spaces” (221). As they understand it, economic expansion is always in need of an outside,
– a frontier to tap and subsume. “Limited” imperialist expansion drives capitalism
forward by means of maintaining an imbalance between the internalized capitalist
environment and the external, non-capitalist outside. In these specific economic terms,
then, what the physical interiorization of cinema – the confinement of the viewer and the
practitioner to the home via increasingly convenient and inexpensive mediation devices –
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represents is a fresh outside, a vast frontier just now in the midst of being developed. And
so their descriptions prove particularly conducive to the inclusion of both economics and
environment within the complex system of relations that new media technologies bring to
the production, reception and theorization of images. And when these dimensions are
allowed to interact, what emerges is that the outside space that capital needs in order to
grow finds a cinematic equivalent in environmental politics. Indeed, as carbon-neutral
filmmaking, the UCLA report and the veritable plethora of environmental documentaries
attest, ecology is the latest zone of intrigue and opportunity to which the independent
filmmaker and the nebulae of Hollywood turn their exploratory desires.
The interior, domestic cinema that digital technology facilitates is largely
determined by a new set of commercial interests. Indeed, the DVD is only the first step
towards what film industry executives consider the pinnacle of cinema’s expansion into
the domestic sphere. Epstein explains how, for example, the 2001 deal between Time
Warner and Sony was intended to transmit films directly into the home (99). Transferring
digitalized movies over the Internet meant that Time Warner and Sony could
“continuously rent out their vast libraries without having to deal with a physical product”
(99-100). An access code would then replace the actual, tangible good, thus rendering the
rental and purchase of the DVD, if not the DVD itself, obsolete. But because controlling
digital products has emerged as the industry’s latest self-produced problem, Time Warner,
Sony and other “entertainment empires” have formed a government lobby that would
force all manufacturers of digital equipment to encrypt their goods so as to prevent them
from being used without an authorizing signal obtained and paid for over the Internet
(100). What such an innovation entails is that studios retain control over the non-
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transferable image product even after it is purchased (100). The real upshot of this is that
when it is implemented the digital home-delivery system will introduce an economic and
cultural dimension that will challenge the so-called digital democracy by revealing its
true commercial premise, and so reverse the extant ideal of a consumer owned and
controlled home theater such as Klinger describes.
A further extension of digital technology’s environmental impact is, of course,
the computer generated image. Premised on the creation of artificial environments,
Hollywood film production is increasingly shifting towards the use of imagery that is not
just enhanced but completely engendered by the computer. The result might render both
the studio and the outside – the referential space of onsite and offsite locations – obsolete,
especially as the cost of this CGI technologies declines. Explaining how digitality
increasingly encroaches upon the material form of celluloid cinema, Epstein cites the fact
that more than two thirds of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy was in fact fabricated by the
employees of “autonomous computer-graphics houses” located in any number of off-
shore centers (22). And Lord of the Rings is only one example of the growing body of
films that make extensive use of digital effects, the result of which sees Hollywood
reformulated as both a geographic place and an established, localized culture (Epstein
351). Digital technology and the possibilities of CGI might then seem to preclude the
need to physically simulate not only light and weather, but also characters and setting.
This, then, circles back to suggest that CGI is equipped to replace the outsides – the
coastlines, countryside and waterfront cities – that global warming, urbanization and
industrial incursion are transforming, if not actually causing them to disappear. So, as
their real counterparts are claimed by erosion, putrefaction, and disappearance, screen
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environments are perfected within the simulation of the post-industrial digital greenhouse.
But to find a utopia in the digitization and thus fabrication of the very spaces that industry
is endangering, if not rendering extinct, is to subscribe to the myth of dematerialization
that fails to take into account the injurious physical impact that attends the processes of
technological innovation. Indeed, as Bellamy Foster points out, it is the post-industrial
dematerialized cultures that continue to register the most profound levels of waste flows
per capita (23). The reductions of “material” output typically cited as one of the
achievements of post-industrial advanced economies are in fact offset by increases in the
scale of economic growth and, therefore, rates of commodity and resource consumption
as well as the generation of waste (23). So it is that the wealth that attends a
dematerialized culture can, paradoxically, be measured in the amount of fossil fuel that it
manages to combust; what is left behind, then, in the form of toxic residues, is nothing if
not material. So, though the computer generated or animated film product itself might not
have directly impinged upon the atmosphere the way a conventional film shoot might,
big-budget cinema, increasingly CGI dependent, is rarely about the film itself and more
about its technology, packaging, accompanying commodities and promotional materials,
which, taken together, incontestably outweigh the ostensibly weightless, space-less
interior of the fabricated image.
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The Disposable Landscape and the Image Value of Garbage
Like Vertov’s film, Baichwal’s documentary and Burtynsky’s photographic
project are committed to tracking the stages of commodity production. Beginning with
the quarry, the extraction pit, and therefore the root of hydrocarbon culture’s
manufactured materials, Burtynsky and Baichwal together follow consumer goods to the
site of terminus – the yards and heaps where the spent and the outmoded are collected
and sorted, and where what is not fit for recycling is left to slowly disintegrate. Such are
the zones that Burtynsky has referred to as the “urban mine” (Pauli 24). In an earlier
investigation, the photographer tracked oil production from the field pump to the refinery,
where it culminated in piles of junked oil filters which Burtynsky considered “potential
resource[s]” in themselves, once recycled and outfitted with a new purpose (24). But
Burtynsky no longer represents such a closed loop circuitry as a potential impediment to
environmental degradation; the point that both Burtynsky’s China portraits and
Baichwal’s documentary are at pains to demonstrate is that large scale recycling further
entrenches rather than ameliorates the harm done by industry’s environmental and social
negligence.
Burtynsky’s work is premised on the idea that although cultural assumptions
infuse the idea of landscape with associations of pristine, untouched nature, industrially
structured terrain is being normalized as the new natural. Indeed, as Robert Hughes
points out, “we live in a world that we ourselves made” (324). But rather than
documenting the way technology industries have penetrated daily life, Burtynsky’s
current focus is devoted to the residues and leftovers that have been cast aside,
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marginalized and relegated to zones of obscurity. As an extension of this discourse, the
abandoned site of extraction is likewise shifted into the literal and conceptual realm of
waste: landscapes that are used up, broken down, then discarded are, according to
Burtynsky’s portraits, also a form of garbage. In other words, like any other good that is
manufactured according to the ideologies and processes of throw-away culture, the
landscape is also commodifed, and thus, when its use value is depleted, becomes
subjected to the conditions of disposal.
So, as Burtynsky and Manufactured Landscapes argue, the quarry or the mine site
loses worth once it has exhausted the limits of extraction and is thus rendered barren, no
longer able to yield either a natural resource or the image resource of a conventional
landscape composition. Having attained the status of the depleted, the landscape is
stripped of its function and value, and so it is tossed away and discarded. What
Burtynsky’s project manages to do so well is to reinvigorate waste by inscribing it with a
new value. Taking a picture of garbage is a transformative act, in so far as subject matter
becomes concretized as a picture – a new object in possession of a distinct function,
meaning and value. Reframed, recast, and ultimately re-commodified, waste is rendered a
photographic print, only to be (once again) reproduced within catalogues, magazines,
book plates and promotional advertisements, or digitally recorded by the documentary
filmmaker, and then projected on any number of theatre, television or computer screens.
Included in the equation of rendering the disposable both meaningful and valuable is, of
course, Burtynsky’s reputation as a respected, well-established, perhaps even canonical
photographer, a fact that has been determined by the pleasures afforded to the viewer by
means of his specific technical, aesthetic and political choices. His exposure of China’s
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industrial behaviors has granted the photographer increased recognition, resulting in a
heightened demand for his work. As such, not only does Burtynsky implicitly theorize
how an image’s transformative dimension can recycle waste into a new commodity, he
also participates in the same circuitry, rendering the referential site of extraction a
photographic print and therefore a tangible commodity item.
Burtynsky’s medium aligns him not only with the extraction process, but also
with his project’s few human subjects, the recyclers of electronic waste or the breakers of
oil-tankers. Because taking a picture of waste transforms it into something else – the
portrait of waste rendered an object to be displayed, exchanged, and/or purchased – it is
recycled and so is waste no longer. To an equal, if not greater degree, Burtynsky parallels
the inanimate objects that are his subjects – the disposed goods themselves. But by
aestheticizing waste, reframing an expanse of used tires as a desert or a heap of rusted
sprockets as a mountain range, Burtynsky performs a critical intervention, wherein his
photographs do not allow either trash or dispensable landscape to be finally discarded.
What Burtynsky’s project ultimately recycles is the image itself, infusing it with what is
an inherently ecological and economic dimension: the potential to recycle used
commodities and expired terrain simply by containing them in a framework and
objectifying them as a tangible, transferable, saleable good. As part of the project of
contextualizing Burtynsky’s work, Baichwal’s film frames the urban mine as the
photographer’s site of extraction – a place that is mined for discursive fodder and
aesthetic potential. But modern artists and filmmakers have long negotiated and critiqued
the industrial landscape, trawling it for leftovers and then transforming them into art and
film objects. Indeed, as Susan Sontag points out in On Photography, “we now make a
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history of our detritus….Our junk has become art. Our junk has become history” (68-69).
Baichwal’s documentation of Burtynsky’s work, then, is well situated alongside Agnès
Varda’s The Gleaners and I, since both films self-reflexively expose how the filmmaker
herself is an approximation of the trash and/or trash-pickers her images are depicting.
Burtynsky is a miner of images, as are Varda and Baichwal – the image thus minimizes
some of the differences between the Chinese recycler, the Parisian gleaner and the
Canadian image-maker. But, of course, they are not equals: the images that Varda,
Burtynsky and Baichwal yield do not allow for such a narrow conclusion. Indeed, the
camera that grants the documentarian access to the marginalized discard and disposable
human being is the tool of choice, and so Varda, Burtynsky and Baichwal recycle as a
privilege rather than out of necessity. The camera and the image, then, reinforce a distinct
continuity between the photographer, the filmmaker and the recycler, but also a
significant and inherent imbalance. The troublesome sense that emerges from this
formulation is that contemplating trash at this level of technological refinement and
aesthetic sophistication is shamefully privileged. The “disposable” humans that these
image-makers depict, whom Zygmunt Bauman calls the “wasted lives” of globalization,
represent the invisible labour dimension that enables consumer culture, and thus trash, to
heedlessly proliferate. Indeed, it is imperative to forge a critical relation with material
discards, but it is equally important to recognize the marginalized populations whose
labour produces the commodity items that end up in our dumps – and now on our screens,
on our walls and in our texts of cultural criticism.
Because the photographer’s camera and then the movie camera function to
mechanically record and then reproduce a potentially vast number of landscapes from a
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single negative, an inherent dimension of renewability is built into the ontology of
mechanized and now digitized image reproduction. And even if the number of
Burtynsky’s prints is kept to a minimum, ensuring they will deliver on the cost of their
lofty price tags, Baichwal’s digital intervention guarantees that the dissemination of his
images will rejuvenate his spent sites, for they are now and forever renewable,
commodifiable and limitlessly reproducible as digital images. But what remains essential
is that Burtynsky’s images are pictures of waste and so the discarded goods that are his
subjects are the ontological companions of the pictures that Burtynsky displays in
galleries, and sells to consumers. Images, in other words, do not just represent garbage:
they are equally embroiled in a circuitry of commodity consumption and waste
production. Beyond a dependency on resources and a fuel economy – a contingency that
Burtynsky readily addresses – images, as consumable and disposable entities, are directly
and indirectly implicated in the detrimental environmental behaviour addressed by
environmentalism and eco-cinema, of which Burtynsky and Baichwal are both exemplary.
Indeed, though his old-fashioned camera is now equated with the more restrained
sensibility of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his photography, as Sontag
argued in 1973, had become the “quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies
– and indispensable tool of…mass culture” (69). Again, the photograph, and by extension
image culture, acts at once as an agent of social and political critique as well as an
implied participant within the larger cultural and economic forces of industry and
modernity. And this is especially so when the subject is garbage, waste, or detritus, the
effluvia of waste-making civilization of which the mechanically and digitally reproduced
image is its dominant mode of artistic and cultural expression.
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Representation of the discarded has the capacity to function as an intervention and
a critical reversal of the fatalistic infrastructures of commodity culture’s systems of
planned obsolescence and intentionally generated waste. But there is a weak link at least
potentially built into this, and it is one that Baichwal’s digital medium might amend. The
photograph, like celluloid film stock, is, of course, an impermanent means of
representation. Photographs not only “antique reality” (Sontag 80) by turning it into an
instant past, but they themselves are also “instant antiques” (80), especially now that
manual processes have been radically outmoded by digital innovations. This ephemeral
dimension further imbues the analog photographic image with value, rendering early film
strips and vintage photographs as artifacts, and thus worthy of preservation. In other
words, certain images accumulate value with deterioration, but only when cultural
sensibilities intervene and transform into relics what might otherwise fit the description
of the exhausted or the expired. That photographic paper or film stock is in disrepair, and
perhaps ready for disposal, is also what could measure its perfection as an aesthetic
object and thus inscribe it with social and monetary value. As Klinger points out, the film
industry has exploited the cinema’s lost classics and thus created a mystique of limitation,
a climate of scarcity, and therefore, consumer demand (66). The time-sensitivity of the
original negative-less photograph likewise inscribes it with a monetary and emotional
value. This dimension of scarcity and non-renewability reformulates Walter Benjamin’s
theory of the mass-produced image in that the disintegrating photograph or film stock
achieves the distance necessary to infuse it with a sense of the auratic (Benjamin 223). As
they were invented before planned obsolescence took hold as one of industrialized
culture’s dominant features, the photograph and the film strip anticipated what has
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become an entrenched circuitry of manufactured impermanence. As film archivists point
out, film stocks (moving and still) and their printed manifestations have always been
fated with the inevitable destiny of expiration and eventual disposal. The technology of
industrial image-making and reproduction is, it appears, made to break, its
(re)productions intended to disintegrate. So it is that Burtynsky’s photographs are as
ephemeral as the dead-goods that are his subject matter. Seen in this way, photos of waste
are only temporarily salvaged, reenergized, and concretized as valuable art objects. Thus,
in its basic, unaided form, photography continues to bear the potential to preserve the
landscape that it likewise manufactures, though for a limited time only. The time-
sensitive nature of Burtynsky’s medium implies that he shall not manage to fully preserve
his subjects; rather, because images also succumb to a death-date, his interventionist
photographs and their necessary materials will contribute an additional layer to the
decaying terrains of consumer goods that compose his manufactured landscapes.
So it is that Baichwal’s images of Burtynsky’s fussy mechanical instrument
equate the photographer with the mountains of obsolete rotary dial telephones and vistas
of electronic wastes that are his subjects. But the manual process of photography parallels
not only the obsolete goods Burtynsky and Baichwal put on display, but also the crude
recycling practices that have grown into one of China’s most durable and important sub-
economies. Because of its human health risks and environmental dangers, much of
China’s recycling industry is sustained by an underclass, and is at least nominally illegal.
As Hardt and Negri point out, capitalism requires instability and imbalance, the “outside”
of non-capitalist environments (225) that are its “new frontiers” (227). This is particularly
the case in terms of resource extraction, wherein it is especially profitable to trade with
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societies and underclasses that “continue to function through noncapitalist relations”
(226). Baichwal highlights this essential economic imbalance as she continually employs
visual juxtaposition to capture the interdependent relationship between the outmoded and
the ultra-modern, the undeveloped and the developed. Images of bare hands and simple
tools dismantling the toxic electronic parts that were, until recently, considered high-tech,
make visible global capital’s necessary economic overlaps between worlds and modes of
production. It is an equation into which Burtynsky inserts himself, aligning his manual
mode of image-making with the manual labor of his recycler subjects.
From obsolete goods, to the transformative power of photography and recycling,
to the recycler herself, Baichwal clarifies how Burtynsky’s project signals a similarly
conflictive relation between the perceived perfection of the art object, and the inherently
disposable and recyclable nature of commodity culture’s consumer goods. Take, for
example, a recent issue of Walrus, its cover featuring an Edward Burtynsky photograph
of the Iberia marble quarry in Portugal. With some prior knowledge of the photographer’s
explorations of recycling, one is struck by the near inevitability that this image will
literally be recycled, perhaps numerous times over, once readers part with this throw-
away forum of information. On the level of aesthetics, then, images of garbage, waste
and/or recycling must be appreciated for their power to critique and transform but also to
re-commodify in accordance with the same systems of obsolescence and disposability
that will inevitably use them up and toss them away. Discussing Bill Keaggy’s photo-
essay “50 Sad Chairs,” Gay Hawkins argues for a new ethics of waste. Rather than
moralizing the negativity of waste and its typical associations of environmental detriment
and ecological disrepair, Hawkins contends there is inherent possibility in trash; but
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reversing the easy resentment of our garbage means learning to recognize its potential use
value, an acknowledgement which would ultimately disturb, and disrupt, the “shit end of
capitalism” which trash, and we, its progenitors, ultimately represent (54-55). Indeed, we
must learn to live with our reflection if we are to continue to live at all. But Hawkins’
critique is based upon looking at the chairs in the photograph, not at the photograph itself.
She argues that the photograph of trash is important because, reframed by a lens and an
aesthetic, the trash-object asserts itself, upends our conventional expectations and forces
the way we experience the “anterior physicality of the world” to fundamentally alter in
such a way that “exceeds our usual daily relation with the objects we use” (56). But the
photograph itself, the image’s support surface and all the physicality it represents, is
taken for granted, rendering it less valuable, perhaps, than the trash it depicts. As Walter
Benjamin’s famous and ceaselessly topical essay continues to point out, the photograph
and the moving picture as objects are defined by, and define in turn, the proliferation and
mass production of industrial culture. Indeed, these fifty photographs of fifty chairs are
effective because they are, like garbage, an accumulation. Waste, as a real problem and as
a theoretical concept, is based on collectivity and associations of excess – the tacit
expectation that what is used up will be restored. “Constant serial replacement,” Hawkins
argues, “is the backbone of commodity culture” (60). So, by looking only at fifty chairs
and not at fifty photographs, the question Hawkins foregrounds is whether the chair can
really be separated from the image. Indeed, the image commodifies: it is a commodity,
and it too is defined by serial replacement. Because the imagistic documentation of trash
and resultant critiques of such projects is now a burgeoning zone of interest, Hawkins’
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proposal for a new ethics of trash must include an ethics of the image, one that takes into
full account the material dimensions of the still or moving picture.
Part of what distinguishes the cinematic and photographic image from pre-
mechanical methods of reproduction is its potential to proliferate and therefore to create a
glut and an overabundance of visual material. The inherent contradiction of throw-away
industrial culture resides in the fact that the disposable is also the durable. As Barry Allen
points out, for example, the nature of trash is rapidly transforming, wherein industrial and
techno-scientific goods are so well made they will not break down (198). Garbage itself
is an obsolete term: leaving an appliance on the curb is a symbolic and ultimately empty
gesture – a ritual that no longer makes sense. Plastics, for example, are developed with
resilience and longevity in mind; they are then constructed into designs intended to break,
but not break down. Waste is discarded but does not disappear. The image, however, is
about preservation, but is, conversely, also destined to decay and disintegrate into little
more than illegible surfaces or empty bits of storage space. But it (the image) is also
about reproduction, and the digital image especially so. Built into this technology is the
capacity to continually rejuvenate itself, incrementally extending an image’s lifespan
each time it is reproduced and reissued. The “original” image might then be saved from
the fate of disintegration and disposal, but as consumers are beginning to discover, digital
photographs are vastly more time sensitive than manual photography’s paper counterparts.
Even when stored on disk, digital images will only endure for five to six years. A
possible recourse is to print digital images as hardcopies, though these too are fated to
fade. What is more, this diminishes an essential premise of the digital democracy – the
provision of durable and enduring storage capacity. But when Strasser points out that
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“discarding things is a demonstration of power” (9), the question becomes whether or not
techno-citizens really want to preserve their myriad of images. What is truly valuable
about digital imaging is not its capacity for storage or preservation, but for erasure.
Perhaps the thrill of the digital process resides more in throwing an image away than in
retaining it:? manipulation and exploitation of this, its most distinctive feature, means that
images can be reaped, gleaned and consumed and then deleted, gotten rid of and
discarded without much consequence. Like the “creative waste,” of graphic design – the
art of stylizing ephemeral commands – the value is not in longevity, but rather in
disposability and the anticipation of what will be consumed next. This, then, is the
current gauge of an image’s perfection. Freedom and ease, even democracy, are equated
with the potential for vast consumption and excessive disposability, an ideology that is
compressed within the form of the digital camera – the latest measure of the image’s total
perfection and total destruction.
Using disposability as an analytic, the final shots of Man with a Movie Camera
depict the film’s cameraman-cum-camera as a perfected innovation that is measured by a
self-annihilating capacity for autonomy and ubiquity. But though the camera has reached
a state of refinement, it is not rendered disposable. Rather, it is the human filmmaker who
becomes redundant and is essentially discarded, absorbed into the very form of the
technology he has helped develop. What is more ambiguously insidious is that as the
human becomes disposable, filmmaking as a distinct process is also discarded, usurped
by the ontology of the autonomous camera that is the kino-eye. Framed thus, cinema as a
category is rendered depleted and defunct, replaced only by what might or might not be
the disposable perfection of technologically derived vision. Baichwal, though, maintains
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the heroic, and human, dimension of the image-maker. The final shot of her subject finds
him astride a high peak, alone but for an assistant, the wind sweeping his hair and clothes
as Baichwal’s camera encircles him from above. It is a monumental image, reinstating
the photographer’s power to remain distinct from his images and his apparatus and to
maintain dominion over his subjects. However, that Baichwal’s image is rendered by a
digital camera reinforces a determined commonality with Vertov’s prognosis for a
disposable camera and cameraman. Manufactured Landscapes thus absorbs not only
Burtynsky’s mode of image-making but also the image-maker himself, rendering both a
digitalized proliferation and eventually, potentially, the residues and thus the resources
that compose the image mines of extraction-based culture.
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Chapter Four: Excess
The long take is a single uninterrupted exposure that occupies more cinematic
time and space than any other single shot unit. According to Barry Salt, the measurement
of a long take is a relative exercise, depending as it does on whether or not it is
“appreciably longer than the length of shots which are usually found in the films of the
period in question” (321). The implication, then, is that the execution of the long take
depends upon and is ultimately indicative of the capabilities of cinematic technology and
its availability to the practitioner. Concordant with this is how the long take’s growth,
from several minutes to several hours, is determined by the amount of raw celluloid a
camera’s magazine can hold before it runs out and the shot terminates. Apart from their
obviously divergent intentions, aesthetic, political or both, the difference between Alfred
Hitchcock’s prototypical single long take (Rope, 1948) and Alexander Sokurov’s record-
setting 96-minute digital run (Russian Ark, 2002) is first of all grounded in the
technology that was in existence and available to each director.
The measurement of the long take functions in part to map out the trajectory of
cinema’s material history, which is itself, by extension, a narrative of industrial culture’s
access to resources (“natural” and otherwise), their subsequent conversion into
technologies, and expendability as material wealth. Because cinema is technologically
and therefore materially determined (that is, resource-based), the filmic text and each of
its shots not only measure a duration, they also indicate, explicitly or otherwise, a
corresponding amount of raw stock or support surface consumed by the camera and the
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practitioner. Shot length, then, does something to gauge the relationship between a
filmmaker (and/or his or her culture) and the accessibility of materials, resources and, by
extension, some degree of wealth. As such, the long take can reasonably be understood as
a signal of excess, visualizing as it so often does the economic power of the culture that
ultimately produced it. Thus theorizing this specific formal decision – opening the
aperture indefinitely and seemingly indefatigably – proves an especially useful way to
establish a direct correspondence between cinema’s aesthetic conventions, audience
expectations, patterns of resource consumption and, concordantly, expressions of
environmental behavior. In other words, there is an ideology of limitlessness,
expansionism and unfettered expenditure built into the long take, and establishing this as
such, accounting for various dimensions, nuances and also deviations, testifies to how
cinema is, like all our cultural habituations, an inherently ecological practice.
Though the digital democracy sees the trend reversing radically, the long take in
the analog cinema is still a relatively rare occurrence, a fact, as Jeffrey Sward points out,
that is attributable to its organizational challenges, logistic intricacies and budgetary
feasibility. Particularly when mobilized by tracks, cranes, or vehicles the long take
requires “extensive technical coordination among the camera operators, lighting
technicians, and actors.” Such demands translate into high material and labor costs,
especially as the long take is “unforgiving of mistakes” and therefore necessitates that a
retake begin at the shot’s inception even if a flaw occurred at its end (Sward). What is
more, the feature film audience has come to expect and even prefer cuts in motion
pictures, so, as Sward argues, “there are no continuity reasons for long takes” only
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aesthetic ones (Sward). As such, the long take typically represents a gratuity, an opulence
of choice and an indulgence in materials, as well as in space, time, and energy.
As the ideological implications thus begin to surface, the long take assumes the trappings
of what George Bataille’s economic theory calls “excess” or “unproductive expenditures”
(118) that put wealth on display but only on behalf of destroying it (119).
According to Bataille, excess functions not unlike Thorstein Veblen’s influential notion
of conspicuous consumption: surplus that is excised or wasted through ritualized cultural
performances become naturalized within patterns and conventions of habitual (and
therefore inconspicuous) behaviour. Concordant with this is the fact that belying the
visual spectacle of the long take is an ideological gesture which signals resource
consumption, technological innovation, attendant material wealth. As Veblen’s Theory of
the Leisure Class asserted, what immediately differentiates the personal and political
freedom of one individual from another person’s restrictions is the ability to
conspicuously consume and, therefore, to conspicuously waste. The decision to indulge
the aperture and completely eschew editing makes Russian Ark exemplary here: a one-
day shoot required four years of planning, the organizational logistics of which escalated
the cost of production to the point that its lavishness embarrassed Alexander Sokurov, the
film’s otherwise modest director. But the extremity of Sokurov’s long take does not
translate into a universal rule, for indeed extended takes are notable in both amateur and
low-budget filmmaking as a way to obviate the costs of crews and equipment rather than,
like Sokurov, to indulge in them (Taves 340-341). And yet the long take of the B film or
the independent digital documentary still indicates inclusion within a larger economic
structure that allows for the open-aperture affect even as a deviation, thus signaling the
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essential inexpensiveness of stock and/or the technology itself. More notable for their
subversion of convention are those examples where the long take is defined by something
other than logistic or aesthetic need namely, self-conscious reflexivity and hence a
discursive ambiguity. Used against itself, the extensively bloated shot can be harnessed as
a means to undermine and critique the cultural behaviors that are manifested in the long
take’s conventional employment. This self-effacement foregrounds the long take in order
to undo it, hyperbolizing and thus upending a culturally dominant “aesthetic of excess”
by means of what might be called the over-extended long take or the long take in
extremis. Choosing to open the aperture and leave the camera running (walking away
from it, as Andy Warhol claimed to do) suggests a waste of both raw material and
operational energy. Such extreme cinematic behavior implies a deliberate indulgence
intended to foreground the ideology of consumption by means of it putting it on show.
This is what is at stake, and at odds, within extreme use of the long take: excess is
employed in order to denaturalize it, thus rendering its terms problematic if not grotesque.
The extreme long take is cannibalistic and self-destructive; undermining its own
structures and mechanisms, the image’s over-extended duration frustrates the audience’s
patience, forcing it to interact with the raw material body of cinema while likewise
stuffing the viewer with its defining (and defiant) superfluity.
Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) and Michael Haneke’s Caché (2006) both use the
excess of the long take in order to engage cinematic materiality within a broader
ideological discourse. While these films exploit the long take in divergent ways, both
manage to engage issues of surveillance, image glut, energy abuse and entropy, as well as
the relationship between architecture and film production. Warhol’s Empire inaugurated
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the 1960s’ technological excessiveness that was realized not only in Direct Cinema’s
politicized use of the long take but also, conversely, in the feature film industry’s
dramatic expansion of on-screen space. The film also functions as a self-contained
cinematic history, and one with direct relevance to our contemporary moment, for it
anticipates digital’s open-aperture aesthetic and the attendant realities of its practical
ecological manifestations. Michael Haneke’s use of digital and analog forms as well as
long take picks up Warhol’s (analog) lead; simply by engaging and then subverting the
naturalized expectations of the long take, the film critiques not only surveillance culture
but also the entitled opulence of Europe’s privileged class and indeed the mechanisms of
consumer culture that support it. Haneke’s analog and digital video deployment bridges
the technological difference that separates the celluloid cinema’s long take and the digital
one. Though historically the long take’s presence in feature films is, as Sward points out,
relatively spare, this fact is being upended by the digital camera; indeed, the open-
aperture aesthetic has come to dominate mainstream cinema’s peripheral realms – home
movies, YouTube shorts, news footage and innumerable independent documentaries. But
as the unrestrained long-take digital projects of Sokurov’s Russian Ark and Mike Figgis’
Time Code (2000) make clear, the digital democracy does not assuage the logistical or
economic burdens of the single, continuous shot but instead aggravates them. As such,
the indulgences that the long takes of these films broadcast are here juxtaposed with the
divergent efforts of Warhol and Haneke as a means by which to foreground different
registers of excess as well as digital’s easy embrace of the open aperture aesthetic. So it is
that digital’s ability to record until the camera’s batteries expire reconfigures the long
take in its various dimensions – practical, aesthetic and also theoretical, particularly in
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terms of how it affects Bazin’s ontology of the image and its relation to realism. In
anticipation of digital cinema’s long take capabilities, Bazin extolled the use of depth of
focus and attendant long take for its democratic tendencies. That is, as opposed to how
montage guides the viewer into accepting a predetermined meaning, what Bazin called
depth of focus allowed the eye to linger over an image as the viewer made sense of it. As
Bazin writes, depth of focus brings the spectator closer to reality because it requires a
“more active mental attitude” and a “more positive contribution on [the viewer’s] part to
the action in progress” (35-36). Likewise, it seems reasonable to conclude, as many are
wont to do, that the ease and ubiquity of digital filmmaking diminishes the cinematic
infrastructure, if not the presence of the camera itself. As such, digital might very well
finally remove the “hand of man” from the image and so facilitate the achievement of
Bazin’s mythical total cinema. But in fact the ease and liberation by which digital
captures a presumably pure, unadulterated reality is supported by a highly complex
production infrastructure and a consumerist ideology which are embedded in this
ostensibly “democratic” technology. In other words, what must accompany an
investigation of the long take, beginning with analog, concluding with digital, and all
along founded on Bazin’s evocation of cinema’s ideal democratization of vision, is the
desire to consume and consequently to waste. As the digital democracy makes up for
what preceding technology could not manage, and does so with even more decadence,
haste and excess, the simultaneous rise of environmental politics meanwhile challenges
digitization, its relationship with cinematic culture and, therefore, the theoretical and
practical value of the long take itself.
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The Measure of Excess
In “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” Kristin Thompson maps out the
development of an ambiguous and esoteric term – cinematic superfluity or “excess.” Her
primary imperative is to counter certain militant tendencies within Structuralist film
theory, specifically its mandate to resolve the irresolvable and finalize “meaning” through
application of external (Marxist, psychoanalytic) systems. The term’s theoretical origins,
Thompson argues, are located in Russian Formalism, specifically the conviction that
poetry’s incomprehensible layers are both inherent and necessary to the structure of a
given work’s very form, if not to the genre itself. The first proper use of excess as both
an aesthetic and cinematic term is found in Stephen Heath’s “Film Systems: Terms of
Analysis” which, Thompson contends, is itself likely informed by Roland Barthes’
analysis of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in “The Third Meaning.” Loosely understood as
those unmotivated, perhaps baffling, and seemingly gratuitous bits of stylistic flourish
that “puncture” or “exceed” a film’s otherwise homogeneous and comprehensible
structure, Thompson’s loose definition fuses aspects of Barthes and Heath from which
“excess” emerges as a specifically cinematic category. The value of excess for Thompson
is that the term itself is, like the cinematic texts it describes, stubbornly ambiguous and
necessarily irresolvable. Beyond its immediate intentions, Thompson’s essay is
instructive not only in its evocation of this potent and discursively rich term, but because
in doing so she places emphasis on “materiality” as the inherent determination of excess.
Though used vaguely, materiality seems to be understood as the cinematic apparatus and
the technological dimensions of image production, from equipment to editing – all those
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properties which the Classical Hollywood Cinema, for example, intended to conceal from
the viewing audience.
“At that point where motivation fails, excess begins” (517): such is Thompson’s
most comprehensive summation of the elusive term that is never fully resolved within the
space of her article. Indeed, its resistance to definition is what characterizes excess and so
precludes such an enterprise; and so it is defined negatively, by what it is not rather than
what it is. Excess, for example, does not simply mean an accumulation of gratuitous
formal indulgences. Rather, it is that which makes the viewer aware of the very
materiality of the film itself, drawing attention to itself as a consciously conceived system.
Indeed, in Heath’s terms, excess describes those incongruous parts which do not fit the
otherwise homogeneous filmic system, and it is this nuance that Thompson traces to
Roland Barthes’ evocation of “obtuse meaning.” Barthes’ ambiguous and flexible
concept (not unlike Camera Lucida’s “punctum”) is necessarily self-reflexive and self-
effacing (Thompson 514); importantly, then, what Thompson will come to call excess
actively subverts and thus challenges the very system from which it arises – not unlike
the long take in extremis.
Though divesting Barthes’ term of its political implications, Thompson’s
arguments are likewise focused on Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part I. Indeed, because
that film’s “style becomes foregrounded to an unusual degree, necessarily calling
attention to the material of the film” Ivan the Terrible is an exemplar of cinematic excess
(Thompson 517). Ivan is also a striking departure from Eisenstein’s pre-Stalin cinematic
practice and a lucid instance of how excess is hyperbolized and thus used against itself, in
extremis. But in contrast to Ivan, Eisenstein’s earlier career and the practice of Soviet
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montage that he informed and was informed by in turn, was laconic and marked by
brevity. As Richard Taylor points out, though the material strictures imposed by the post-
revolution Civil War could have proved otherwise, Soviet practitioners such as Eisenstein
managed to produce an impressive body of agitational films and from them a cinematic
language that was as passionate as it was didactic. Without the Civil War and its scarcity
of resources, film among them, the Soviet cinema would not have produced the “forceful,
distinctive, and revolutionary” style that remained its aesthetic foundation (Taylor 63). So
it was that the science and the political intention behind Eisenstein’s particularly rigid
editing system were committed to ensuring that the images and the political associations
were not ambiguous but instead incontrovertible. Subtlety and suggestion were luxurious;
in a climate of political transformation and material impoverishment nothing could be left
to randomness or chance. If the audience did not respond as predicted, the entire
enterprise would be lost to its anathema: gratuitousness, decadence, and thus the
bourgeois cinema’s narrative and cinematic dissipation.
For Thompson’s concerns, excess is specifically and homogeneously cinematic,
and yet the term is increasingly loaded with cultural and aesthetic associations, many of
which emanate from George Bataille’s essay in general economy. It is here in The
Accursed Share that Bataille describes how excess is a surplus of energy (also understood
as wealth) that humans and their societies strive to produce and then accumulate in
various material forms. But because there is a limitation to how much wealth can be
amassed without devaluing it, excess energy must be expended before it becomes
destructive. Once it is recognized that growth is limited, purging this surplus becomes
entirely necessary to maintaining levels of productivity; as such, requisite processes of
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disposal have mutated into socially and culturally inscribed behavior often systematized
as ideological visual displays. Important to note is that Bataille distinguishes between
different registers of wasting. One manifestation qualifies as “extension,” wherein surplus
or excess energy is transferred away, relocated off-site, and thus potentially engenders
growth elsewhere (Bataille 31). Removed rather than destroyed, extension is understood
as giving excess back to the system from which was it born, and thus what Bataille
describes is not negative but rather a positive expenditure of surplus, a productive form of
waste. Bataille’s taxonomy is nothing if not suggestive of what industrial ecology
describes as the “closed system” or symbiotic loop of consumption and waste. Its
converse, though, is what dominates industrial society: the linear or open model which,
though quick and efficient, is not sustainable “because the flows are all in one direction”
(Jelinski et al 793) – waste is fated for the landfill, in other words. Bataille’s
understanding of extension is somewhat analogous with an ecological ideal, wherein
resources and waste are mutually inclusive and “waste to one component of the system
represents resources to another” (793). Industrialization, as Susan Strasser argues, has
engrained the one-way route as the dominant direction – from earth to resource to
consumption to waste and its pernicious residues – and has consequently corrupted
former sustainable cycles (14). It is specifically because extracted resources are
industrially converted that waste cannot be reabsorbed by the system and thus destroys
rather than facilitates the potential for regeneration (Strasser 291) or, in Bataille’s terms,
extension. But of course Bataille’s essay is not concerned with describing models of
sustainable ecology, but rather with theorizing how societies capitulate to the economic
pressure of maintaining values by limiting growth. “Luxury” or “squandering” function
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not only to dispose of excess, but its spectacles also consolidate power: military
aggression, colonial and/or industrial expansion are conventional examples of such
gratuitous expenditures (Bataille 32-33). As Bataille’s flexible terms and examples are
drawn from the coded behavior of religious and/or cultural rituals, it is not difficult to
find contemporary equivalents of such ritualized wasting. But the point is that in order
for excess to accumulate, growth’s boundaries must be recognized: excess, in other words,
can only be as such when there are a set of limitations to breach. Cinematic excess
performs particularly well as a model of this same dialectical tension, articulating as it
does in visual and/or aesthetic terms how limitations are erected only on behalf of being
dismantled or destroyed.
So it is that Eisenstein’s Ivan exemplifies how the material and technological
possibilities of cinema can be harnessed in order to simultaneously exploit and display
excess. The film’s coronation scene, for example, and specifically those shots in which
Ivan is ritualistically showered with coins, use editing not to elide the temporal duration
of the narrative, but rather to extend it. In other words, because the same shots are
repeated, and gratuitously so, they formally accent the decadence of the diegetic event
itself, highlighting the power that is inherent in wealth itself and, more profoundly, in
symbolically wasting it. In Thompson’s terms this balance between form and content
might not be read as excessive; however, on a material level, the use of cinematic
resources to lengthen time rather than to faithfully espouse it signals a flourish and an
indulgence that exceeds considerations of style. This moment is particularly potent as it
points back to how Eisenstein’s own aesthetic was forged during a time of material
shortage and limited resources. So, though its practical beginnings are in celluloid
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rationing, the repetition of the image here is not done out of material necessity but rather
as a covert demonstration of the political decadence that Ivan the Terrible’s (and Stalin’s)
Russia would attain. Eisenstein’s use of repetition thus forges a political allegory on a
purely formal level.
According to Stephan Heath’s argument, a moment of excess is signaled when the
expected patterning of the conventional goal-oriented narrative is breached. Heath’s
model is Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and specifically that film’s unmotivated scenes or
narrative “gaps” which, in fact, could warrant its inclusion within Comolli and Narboni’s
Category E. As it is described in “Cinema/ Ideology/ Criticism,” the E category
encompasses films that would otherwise be regressively conventional or status quo
except that they contain some signal of “an internal criticism” which effectively “cracks
[them] apart at the seams” (817) and so declares some awareness of political subversion.
Before Barthes and Heath, then, the conceptual genealogy of cinematic excess had
already been firmly planted in the Cahiers du Cinéma’s post-May 1968 radicalization of
film criticism. Informed by this same system of categorization, the journal’s famous
essay on John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln cites numerous examples of Ford’s narrative and
formal excess and situates Ford’s film within this E or radicalized auteur category. The
inflexible structuralist-semiological reading of Ford’s film finds a specifically potent
moment of formal excess when Lincoln is washed in a “violent” amount of “brilliant”
light (524) – an unequivocal example of how the excess (as they term it) of the German
Expressionist lighting functions to undermine the film’s otherwise rigid formal system
and all its attendant ideology. The Cahiers editors argue that the “excesses of Ford’s
writing” cast Lincoln as an “intolerable figure” who is so “excessive and monstrous” as
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to surpass not only the ideology from which the film derives but its very subversion as
well (Cahiers 524). Here is the “struggle of opposing forces” that Thompson’s article
acknowledges as necessarily composing cinema’s basic ontological fabric (513-514).
But the necessary materiality that defines cinematic excess (moments of too much
light or a gratuitous use of repetition) signals such gestures as more than a way to extend
narrative dimensions. Rather, excess describes the relationship between the filmmaker,
the available technology and the attendant ideology that informs how cinematic resources
are harnessed and/or exploited. Cinematic excess acquires further relevance when
situated alongside Bataille’s insistence that wealth and power are located in the waste of
the ostensibly benign cultural display. Cinema has always functioned, then, as an exhibit
of technological progress, a demonstration of wealth and power, a squandering of
resources on something that is still so often considered a transitory, momentary,
disposable entertainment. And because of the hastening dominance of environmental
politics and accompanying consciousness about resource consumption, excess assumes, if
not a whole new meaning, then a new sensitivity, one that signals a pernicious and
unsustainable consumptive decadence. So it is that the introduction of oil politics and
attendant environmental contingencies completely renovates excess as both a cinematic
and a cultural category.
The long take is typically defined by its aesthetic and ontological dimensions
rather than its material value. It does far more, however, than measure real time; it is also
a gauge for the length of the reel, and so the celluloid, upon which the shot itself has been
recorded. As Bordwell and Thompson point out, films of cinema’s early period (1895-
1905) are characterized by a point-and-shoot formal practice and so usually consisted of a
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single shot of considerable duration (284). After the emergence of continuity editing
(1905- 1916) and accompanying technological advance, the shot was significantly
shortened; narratives, as a result, become more refined, and the development of plot/story
reflected the increasing sophistication of the cinematic medium. During the late 1910s
and early ‘20s, for example, the average shot length (ASL) was 5 seconds. After the
introduction of sound, however, this figure was lengthened to ten. Bordwell and
Thompson confine their focus to American films, but they concede that in the US as well
as abroad the mid-1930s saw “a tendency to increase the length of the shots.” But though
“long takes became a major resource for the filmmaker,” the factors that account for this
shift are “complex and not fully understood” and so it is assumed that the reasons were
simply practical, as a means to achieving narrative ends (Bordwell and Thompson 285).
But that increased shot length indicates cinema’s technological advancement –sound
cinema’s introduction of conversations, for example, necessitated longer shot lengths – in
turn signals that cinematic resources – from stock to lights to labor – were increasingly
available and that filmmaking had been consolidated as an industry. As Eisenstein’s Ivan
exemplifies, particularly when contrasted with the terseness of his earlier system of
dynamic montage, access to more than just the most basic materials effectively extended
and therefore liberated the duration of his shots. Likewise, the Direct Cinema movement
of the 1960s was in part made possible by the affordability of cinema’s raw materials,
film stock in particular. As Musser notes, not only were long takes indulged, but certain
filmmakers were able to be incredibly prolific in their documentary output. Somewhat
divergently, Russian Ark’s long-take is a particularly potent example of how the liberal
indulgence in technological innovation can showcase, and unequivocally so, the political,
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aesthetic and economic freedoms that come with it. Of course there are exceptions to this,
and so context prevents the mere presence of a long take from being a universal
indication of wealth and/or resource availability: that early cinema consisted mostly of
long takes does not imply that film stock or equipment was inexpensive, but rather that
cinema at that developmental juncture could not do much more than point and shoot. And
so it is a decrease in shot length (but increase in total shots) that corresponds with
(Hollywood) studio cinema’s industrialization and growing material abundance.
Barry Salt’s exhaustive, if not obsessive, study of the history of film style is
founded on the premise that above all else style is dictated by the advancement of
technological capabilities. The development of sound technology, for instance,
exemplifies how the introduction of a new technology can totally transform the way films
are manufactured, which in turn alters their aesthetic manifestation and, with this,
audience expectations. Salt’s history uses empirical evidence to, among other things,
chart how various technological factors contributed to the fluctuation of the average shot
length (ASL) of American and European films from 1895 to the 1980s. What is
exceptional about Salt’s study, apart from its incredible dedication to detail and
commitment to objectivity, is that it intends to resist the cultural and political factors
introduced by film theory in strict favour of technological determinism. Like most such
histories and surveys what Salt’s inquiry disregards, intentionally or otherwise, is the
economic value of cinematic technology and its requisite materials. The implication of
this is not that cost and the availability of resources are unimportant when assessing the
material reality of film, but that cinema, precisely because it is an industrial and then
post-industrial technology, a product of the so-called developed world, obviates
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consideration of how it might function in times of scarcity, rationing or limited access to
resources. Apart from early Soviet cinema’s Civil War period (excluded by Salt), the
telling assumption Salt makes is that cinema is privileged and inherently affixed to
systems which yield abundance. The question, then, is how cinema functions when
deprived of the means to which it has grown accustomed. Unlike any other art form, it is
assumed that cinema cannot exist without direct or indirect access to a technologically-
determined, resource-based infrastructure. If, as scientists, economists and
environmentalists continue to argue, oil commodities are going to radically diminish in as
few as fifteen years, every dimension of cinematic culture will be forced to modify.
Indeed, though it is a dimension that is consistently overlooked, the worse-case scenarios
presented by peak-oil statistics will render cinema as something that will have to be
expended. But, then, a look beyond the dominant mode of large-scale production does
something to ameliorate the otherwise fragile future of the cinematic medium. Thus it is
that an energy crisis does not threaten cinema with extinction, but it does challenge the
feasibility of dominant modes of filmmaking to continue in their current disproportionate
form. One of the dimensions that environmental and/or energy politics introduce to the
methodology of Salt’s empirical study is how film history and style will be altered not by
the introduction of new technology, but rather by its reduction and/or the transition to
modified, more sustainable versions.
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The Open Aperture Aesthetic
Andy Warhol’s Empire functions as a history of moving picture technology, and
it is one that proves as exhaustive, empirically based, and ostensibly objective as Salt’s.
Apart from the obvious, Warhol’s project differs from Salt’s in that it encourages rather
than prevents the competing factors of cinematic history – the social, the technological
and the aesthetic – to play out. And in the end Warhol refuses to side with a single
determinate, apart, perhaps, from sheer, frustrating ambiguity. And yet Salt’s study could
just as easily be named Empire, while Warhol’s film could bear Film History and
Technology: History and Analysis as a fitting title. A history of cinema’s existence and
essence, Empire is also a living exploration of the long take’s material, cultural and
aesthetic function – from early cinema to the capabilities of its own contemporary
cinematic technology. In addition to narrating the formal history of its medium, the film’s
static, long-take structure looks into the future of moving image technology and with
more than a little accuracy, foresees the glutinous recording capacities of the digital video
camera as well as its accompanying aesthetic of, first, abundance and, second,
surveillance.
As it was losing the competition with the ascendant medium of television and
faced with the fallout of an apostate audience, the feature film industry of the 1950s and
60s was forced to redefine itself. Espousing an imperative to outmuscle the
comparatively limited capabilities of television’s technological support systems, the
Hollywood film industry chose to conventionalized saturated color values, consolidate
widescreen pictures, and produce lengthier features, and in general engage those
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processes by which to exploit every spatial fraction and time dimension of on-screen
space. The expansion of screen space both in the 1950s and into the 60s is analogous with
the new spatial demands of North Americans and North America in general: while
widescreen technologies such as Cinerama and Cinemascope extended the girth of the
image, suburban sprawl was likewise beginning to increase the amount of space occupied
by individuals, municipalities, and transportation infrastructure. The drive to occupy and
exploit the screen’s physical width and perceptual depth indeed signals Hollywood’s
declining empire, but also locates it within the larger narrative of postwar economic and
spatial frontierism and, thus, material prosperity. The recent documentary Radiant City,
for example, is dedicated to assessing the perils of North America’s unsustainable middle
class lifestyles, specifically the inherently disproportionate nature of suburban growth.
Among the statistics used to expose and generalize the patterned decadence of post-
industrial society is the extension of floor space in the average North American home. If
unbridled amounts of consumption can be measured in terms of floor space, surely the
space of the shot takes on a similar set of implications. The point is that the amount of
time and space that the units of film occupy directly correspond with a consumption of
energy and resources that go into the production of what Barbara Klinger calls the “film
good” and which include the physical, tangible constituent parts (DVDs, promotional and
screening infrastructure) that accompany the cinematic image. The result of this is an
ideology of what might be called on-screen expansionism and it is what Warhol’s long-
take project thoroughly exploits, using its own excess to foreground and ultimately
upstage the film itself. Empire, bearing an appropriately expansionistic title, does not
make overtures towards the gloss, editing speed or technical endurance that were to come
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to characterize the 1960s film industry as it raced to fill up what was left of the cinematic
frontier. Instead, the film is unequivocally restrained and even austere in every aspect
except its length and its intentions, thus allowing the filmmaker to make ostentation plain,
and excess restrained, and therefore draws specific attention to its de-normalized
attributes.
As a trajectory of cinematic history and a compendium of Warhol’s contemporary
cinematic and cultural moment, Empire is everything the Hollywood the feature film
industry once was and, despite itself, would always be. Warhol’s open aperture opened
the 1960s and made the consumptive foundations of cinema conspicuous, signaling the
reversal of the Hollywood Studio System’s principles of Fordist conservation which
restricted innovation in style, rendered formal practice parsimonious and prospered by its
trademarks of quality and consistency. As such, like in any similarly inspired Fordist
system, there was no room for experiment within the Classical Hollywood Cinema. It is
in part because of this mode’s predictability that Salt is able to establish trends within
average shot length (and numerous other formal devices). Empire would of course
corrupt Salt’s search for reasonable, technical explanations as to why film style has
developed as it has. And indeed Warhol’s film falls outside the realm of the feature film,
and so would not be included in such an empirical measurement of Hollywood’s
evolution; yet it arguably represents this industry’s totality, conveniently compressing
roughly sixty years into eight hours of near stasis. After all, what has been called the
longest establishing shot in cinema’s history is a spectacular display of a basic
Hollywood principle of continuity editing. Empire is all continuity, therefore: eight
hours’ worth. As such, it is all Hollywood, too much Hollywood; Warhol’s open aperture
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relentlessly spotlights an aesthetic of excess and the culture that produced it and Warhol
himself, and for now continues to maintain and sustain both.
In an interview featured in Chuck Workman’s documentary Superstar, Warhol
laconically, if not reluctantly, explains to his interlocutor how his particular method of
filmmaking often consists of little more than turning the camera on and walking away
from it. Opening the aperture, leaving the camera to run while the operator entrusts his
work to the machine – such was the imperative behind Andy Warhol’s silent films of the
early 1960s. Combined with the insistently static camera, Warhol’s use of the long take
effectively forced cinema to reclaim its primary essence as a technology, and one whose
genius was not in how it reproduced reality but rather preserved the artist’s energy as it
did so. Thus, that the movie camera captured time mattered far less than that it saved it,
and in the most practical, banal sense, allowing the practitioner, or the viewer, to engage
in cinema while simultaneously doing something else. Consider, then, how cinematic
technology was harnessed by turn of the (twentieth) century industrialists as a way to
analyze human motility and then improve worker productivity (Taylor 29). Warhol’s
early “entropic” films not only return cinema to its essence – as a technology intended to
study the expenditure of energy – they radically reverse it. And they do the same for
excess itself – as a term, a word, and a concept. There is nothing ambiguous about
Warhol’s use of excess, for excess in Warhol is not a feature of his films’ discursive
fabric. Excess is not addendum. Excess here is total and its totality is excess, waste, that
which should or could be cut away and discarded. And yet the 1960s are not ultimately
characterized by the long take. In fact, as Salt’s exhaustive study points out, the converse
is true. James Monaco summarizes Salt’s findings and explains how ASL slowly
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decreased throughout the decade, culminating in the late 1960s when “American feature
films had reached the shortest average shot length in their history since the silent movies
of the 1920s” (87). The underlying reasons for this shift are attributable to a combination
of increasingly accurate editing devices as well as the ascendancy of the role of the editor
in the post-production process. The so-called New York School of editing is the
American feature film industry’s realization of Vertov’s insistence on the vital
contribution of the editor to the creation of the on-screen environment. With Dede
Allen’s virtuoso editing of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and resultant radicalization
of feature filmmaking’s conventions and expectations (Monaco 90-91), emphasis shifted
to the post-production stages and rendered the editor less a hack and more, in the spirit of
Vertov, a hero. Creativity in editing thus became acceptable, and the pacing and spacing
of a film was transformed into an aesthetic and an expressive device (Monaco 101).
So while feature films in the 1960s veered away from the open aperture, displays
of excess shifted to the editing commitments that would have trimmed the establishing
shot that is Empire from 8 hours to less than 8 seconds. Warhol’s superfluity would seem
like anathema to the New York School, yet the extremities of editing’s subtraction and
the long take’s extension function as complementary manifestations of excess. The rapid
edit epitomized by Sam Peckinpah, for example, is largely informed by a Warhol-esque
dedication to extravagance both in terms of resource indulgence and 1960s on-screen
expansionism. Rather than being measured strictly by what appears on-screen,
Peckinpah’s intemperance is defined negatively, by how much he cut away. Composed of
3,624 separate shots, the director’s 1969 The Wild Bunch set the record for number of
shots in a feature film and thus serves as a fitting contrast to Warhol’s single long take
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(Monaco 100). Peckinpah’s trademark editing style required an expansive amassment of
necessary infrastructure in order to achieve the weightlessness of his rapid cutting speed.
Not only did his system require the use of multiple cameras, but his editors paradoxically
extended shot length through slow motion, then sprawled these same images across a
widened screen and over the course of his films’ unusually long running times. The sheer
abundance of montage virtuosity thus complements rather than contrasts Warhol’s open
aperture as excessive display. Exploiting his available cinematic resources by ridding his
aesthetic of the waste that separates one shot from the next, The Wild Bunch is an orgy of
exudation, a monumental suggestion of paring down and then discarding the surplus
footage that does not contribute to a film’s hurried pace. The polarities represented by
Warhol’s opening of the 1960s and Peckinpah’s closing of the same decade are both
exemplary of an overuse of available techniques, as some editors at the time admitted,
and, correspondingly, of resources (Monaco 101).
Though obviously motivated by politics rather than by Warhol’s self-declared
total lack thereof, from formal tropes to displays of violence, Peckinpah was strategically
indulging surfeit in order to challenge the hubris of the dominant political order and its
corrupt foreign and domestic policies. Godard’s use of the extended traveling shot/ long
take in Weekend’s (1967) famous traffic jam sequence functions to bridge the unbridled
montage of Peckinpah and the restrained excess of Warhol. Godard’s long take indulged
excess, as did Peckinpah, in order to expose and then critique it, not only as the
foundation of cinema but as detrimental and decadent social behavior. Of course
Godard’s decidedly and self-consciously mobile camera departs from Warhol’s
stubbornly static one; yet the subjects of his famous sequence are indisputably as
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immobile as Warhol’s Empire State Building. While Warhol might be celebrating the
equation between the static cinema and his endurable subject, for Godard the cinema
must not be still, but keep moving, progressing, exceeding the morass of what are his
shot’s castrated vehicles. What is more, the mobile long take that Godard employs insists
on the presence of an operator, that unseen cameraman who remains in control of the
scene and its discourse and is therefore reluctant, unlike Warhol, to hand total
responsibility over to the machinery and technology of the cinematic apparatus. For
Godard, then, the excess of the long take is contoured and controlled because it is not
intended so much to reflect upon its own dimensions of consumptive display as to
enforce a separation between the static automobile (and all its attendant associations) and
the camera, maintaining that the cinema exists outside of the cultural impoverishment it is
depicting.
And indeed what the shortening of the shot in American feature films during the
1960s indicates is that this basic unit of film was absorbed by film technology’s
expansive capabilities. Technological refinement, as Virilio argues throughout his work,
corresponds with a decrease in its physical size, which will culminate, ultimately in its
disappearance into and/or saturation of all extensive realms. A dimension of this is how
the sophistication of a technology is gauged not by its longevity or endurance but rather
by how quickly it succumbs to obsolescence. “The paradox of the West” Virilio contends,
was epitomized by Lord Mountbatten during World War Two when he declared, “If it’s
working, it’s already obsolete” (Disappearance 93). Warhol’s attempt to remove editing
from the filmmaking process thus signals the obsolescence not only of editing, but of
cinema itself. That is to say, when a total amateur can make a film so easily and without
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any mistakes, as Warhol contended, the medium is suddenly democratized, demystified
and naturalized, integrated into the fabric of everyday life. Thus the casual point-and-
shoot aesthetic forges a link between the fate of cinema and the relative cheapness that
comes with its ubiquity, a logic that applies as much to an image as to any other
consumer good. As Leo Enticknap points out, beginning in the 1950s film camera
technology was motivated by the desire to reduce costs and improve efficiency for film
studios, the result of which spilled over into the broader realm of amateur and
independent filmmaking practices (38). So, while 35mm technology remained stagnant,
the portable and affordable 16mm camera flourished, particularly within television
production and eventually within documentary filmmaking – Direct Cinema in particular
(39). Both the new documentary style and live television approached editing, like Warhol,
in the moment rather than in post-production. As Enticknap’s technological survey goes
on to explain, the 16mm camera was replaced in the 1980s by video – an even more
accessible, user-friendly medium (39). And, following this technological narrative along,
video has now been superceded by digital technology and a cinema whose aesthetic is
characterized by the way in which editing is either over indulged or completely dismissed
(indulging it negatively). As such, the digital democracy is met with the same set of
assumptions that have accompanied the inclusiveness of amateur filmmaking: as the
medium is made more widely available and accessible, its quality is compromised, or at
least viewer expectations are forced to modify. Indeed, the Dogme95 collective
exemplifies this, and the carbon-neutral politics infusing filmmaking of the present seem
poised to catch up with this movement’s precedent of resource minimalism. As cinema is
down-sized, willingly, by technology itself, or by circumstantial necessity, viewer
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expectations also experience a shift, if not a complete renovation. Warhol’s excess clearly
celebrates the new democracy of the movie camera, and he duly makes a spectacle of the
material wealth that allows the sacred mythology and technology of cinema to be
manipulated by such amateur, unqualified hands (or, in his case, total lack thereof). And,
of course, Warhol always included himself as a happy participant in the culture he was
exposing, exploiting and exalting. The long take allowed Warhol to become embroiled in
his own critique, for the film is so self-consciously self-indulgent and naive that it
questions the justification of its own existence. In other words, as Warhol pushes the
“congruence of eye and motor” (Virilio, Disappearance 59) to its limit, he asks how
Empire can even be called cinema, and, by extension, how it could not be. That is, by
hyperbolizing all of cinema’s conceivable dimensions, the Empire project revitalizes
cinema as a material and a technology; more importantly, however, Empire argues that a
film can be a concept, thus rendering the physical undertaking of film production or the
images it yields secondary to the idea itself. As Warhol thus reduces cinema to a
ponderous subject, Warhol posits that the energy otherwise exuded by the industry,
filmmaker and then the viewer is offset by the mind’s capacity to imagine the image
rather than physically experience it. Film, then, because it can exist as an intention is
potentially sustainable and carbon-neutral.
The Cinematic Pyramid
As architecture and like architecture, as history and like history, Empire is
informed by all that preceded it and similarly anticipates what lay ahead. From the movie
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camera, film stock and the energy of the camera operator to concrete, glass, and labor
power, these are the materials that construct and embed excess within spectacles of
wealth, monuments of power, and displays of resource availability.
An unedited film, Empire takes for its structuring conceit the generation of waste
itself – all the stuff that Dede Allen or Vertov’s Svilova would snip off, casting into the
archives of stock footage or simply sweeping away. Empire, in other words, is a film to
be disposed of, a fact that seems to directly contrast with its subject’s solidity, longevity
and sense of permanence. The Empire State Building testifies to the material wealth that
is the result of a society’s access to a plentitude of material resources, labor and
technology. The building’s construction was part of New York City’s intense competition
for the title of tallest building. Unofficialy launched in the late 1920s, two other projects
fighting for the distinction, 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building, were still being
erected when work on Empire began. Completed just over a year after its ground was
broken, the Empire State Building outstripped its competitors in terms of height and the
speed of its construction. Officially opened on May 1, 1931, US President Hoover
marked the event by turning on the building's lights from a control switch located not in
New York but in Washington, D.C. But as the building’s opening coincided with the
beginning of the American Depression, its impracticality was further sharpened as the
majority of its available office space was left vacant. Not until 1950 would the Empire
finally turn a profit (Willis 90). But because economic downturn precluded other rivals
from joining the competition, the Depression in fact guaranteed the Empire State
Building’s retention of its superlative distinction as New York’s most iconic monument
of conspicuous consumption. As Bascomb points out, only in 1972 with the construction
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of the World Trade Center was the height of the Empire State Building surpassed, though
it would regain its former title in 2001 (8).
In its ideal pre-Depression moment, the Empire State Building’s monumental
loftiness and the speed of its construction functioned as a narcissistic assertion of power
and prestige, plainly and obviously symbolized by the ostentatious squandering of the
energy, labor, and resources required to finish the project and secure the title of the
biggest and, therefore, the best. But that the building was destined to stand for so long as
an empty shell of drained wealth and entropic energy transformed its symbolic power
into a fiction that radiates with unintended irony. That is, even if the building was not
burdened for so long with associations of lost prosperity, its moment remains an exultant
enactment of Bataille’s theory of the ritualized exudation of excess. The monument that
is Warhol’s film performs the same rite not only because wealth and power radiate from
the building itself (as the film’s subject) but because the actual form of the film matches
the Empire State Building in all its symbolic value. In other words, both the architectural
showpiece and the cinematic icon use the form of their material existence to make
symbolic their culture’s access to and conversion of natural resources into energy, wealth
and then excess.
Bataille’s theories are in part articulated using an architectural model, a logical
move since this mode of cultural expression requires the greatest investment of wealth,
energy and, at least traditionally, time before it can manifest. As Bataille maintained, the
pressure that accompanies the necessarily limited nature of growth results in the need to
release or exude enough surplus so as to liberate the space necessary to encourage
accretion but avoid inflation. Thus, like capitalism, creating wealth in order to consume
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and so destroy it, the indulgence in luxury and random squandering is the primary means
by which excess energy is necessarily and “uselessly” lost (Bataille 33). Both the Empire
State Building itself and the Warhol film are founded on a tension not unlike the one
Bataille outlines. Indeed, the island of Manhattan is itself characterized by the limitations
of its geographical surface space. The result, of course, is the Empire State Building and
the architectural genre of the sky scraper – those buildings that symbolize the precarious
terms of limitless growth as they occupy the only space left available, the air. The stock
market crash that turned the Empire State Building into a ghost of its former prosperity is
nothing if not an example of the restricted nature of economic expansion: without the
release of enough surplus, in other words, the system bursts its seams and collapses, its
self-destruction forged in the reluctance to waste usefully. So it is that the architectural
blockbuster that is the subject of Warhol’s film exemplifies the basic terms of Bataille’s
economic study. But Empire as a film points specifically to cinema’s lack of growth or
development. First of all, its structure is literally defined by only the most limited amount
of change or transition. Additionally, Empire emerged at a time when the American
feature film industry was caught in the throes of its own self-destruction. As Giannetti
and Eyman point out, the first years of the decade Hollywood competed with television
by producing fewer films, but ones which were monstrously ostentatious and costly
productions. In response to the dramatic loss of audience, funds were funneled into what
seemed distinctively cinematic enterprises. “The pictures got bigger and more expensive:
More of everything seemed to be the only solution the studios could come up with”
( Giannetti and Eyman 320). What proved to be a spectacularly failed strategy
precipitated the industry’s near economic collapse, but not before Warhol’s film managed
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to puncture a hole in the bloat that had come to characterize the feature film of the early
1960s. Thus wiping the slate clean, as Jonas Mekas pointed out, Warhol returned cinema
to its “origins, to the days of Lumière, for rejuvenation” (Picard 3) and inaugurated a
period of liberated, democratic filmmaking that countered and then radically altered the
dominant cinematic culture of the 1960s and beyond.
Bataille writes that the energy that emanates from the sun is “the origin and the
essence of our wealth.” But what distinguishes solar power is that it “dispenses energy –
wealth – without any return”; the sun, as Bataille describes it, “gives without ever
receiving” (28-29). Empire, however, challenges this philosopher’s ideal model of
altruistic energy transference. The pure selflessness of the sun’s nature to extend rather
than squander its energy is made impossible by Empire, a film in which the sun, the
source of life and wealth and cinema itself is present by an almost complete absence. As
the film’s duration is deliberately dictated by the disappearance and then reappearance of
the sun, Warhol’s only source of illumination is derived from the building’s artificially
generated floodlights. The building’s gratuitously illuminated exterior thus directly
corresponds to the open aperture of Warhol’s idling camera, matching the filmmaker’s
own display of conspicuously consuming (squandering) available excesses of energy. As
the film is about both the camera itself as well as the absence of light, Empire posits that
cinema does not need an operator and neither does it require the natural luminosity of the
sun. In other words, the limitless generosity of the sun is either completely replaced by
artificial means or it is harnessed by technological mediators – the camera or the
photovoltaic cell, for example – and so it no longer completely pure or, for that matter,
free.
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Indeed, The Empire State Building has made a career out of its light shows;
President Hoover’s method of christening set something of a precedent which continues
on in the building’s various seasonal and celebratory costume changes. From light to
images to operative energy, Empire is not only about the ability to artificially derive
resources, it also exalts in the spectacle of their squandering. As such, the extreme self-
consciousness of Empire deprives cinema and the building of its sense of “naturalness,”
deflating these monuments and replacing them over the course of eight hours with ones
that are exultantly artificial. Of course, what for our contemporary moment is
increasingly a glaring signal of wasted energy and environmental negligence did not have
the same resonance in 1964 when Empire was made. And yet the building, like the film,
is not innocent of the associations of waste and excess that our heightened ecological
awareness makes more apparent. Indeed, the point of reformulating excess as a term is
that it bridges cinema’s emergent environmental politics with the behaviors of the past;
the current moment has finally caught up to the environmental implications that both the
term excess and Empire possess.
The Empire State Building itself does not exude physical energy, though, like any
manufactured good, its value resides not in its particular use or function but in the labor
power that is concentrated in the very fact of its existence. And so the building remains
inanimate and therefore as seemingly lazy and lifeless as the fixed camera. But Empire is
premised on displaying a lack of energy in order to reveal energy’s totalizing presence in
culture at large. The film is dominated by a resource-conscious subtext to the point that
the availability of natural light dictates what might in another film be called a script. Shot
from dusk until dawn, the departure and arrival of light are the film’s only “events.”
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More importantly, the absence of natural light makes the film not about night or darkness
but about how technology precludes ever shutting down, allowing an energy source to
rest or restore itself. So, just as technology liberates the camera and makes Empire
possible, natural light has also been eclipsed by that which is artificially generated.
Fittingly, then, in terms of large-scale cinematic production, electric light is for now the
more cost-efficient method of illumination. As Monaco notes, “one would think that
available light was free of cost for a production shot on location.” But because it is much
more difficult to control natural light levels, the hermetic environment of the studio
minimizes the logistic and technical effort required to obtain the ideal shot and thus
proves the more economical choice. Because of this, dependence is placed on the non-
renewable resource. On a strictly formal level (for the film is nothing if not pure form), as
Empire narrates the passage of an artificial night it also showcases how cinema is, like
the Empire State Building, wholly dependent upon technologically produced resources. It
is excessive, this nocturnal long take that is fuelled by generated power and artificial light,
and we call it such, now and here, in our eco-conscious moment, precisely because these
feats of over-consumption, within cinema and in all spheres of life, are becoming totally
unfeasible.
The exudation of energy is not characterized by loss, but gain. Excess energy,
Bataille argues, is always disposed of through a display and thus requires both the
presence and attention of a spectator and/or rival, someone to both compete with and
impress. The purpose of gift-giving, Bataille contends, is to humiliate the recipient and
thus gain power through the so-called benevolence of loss; as such, what is wasted,
shared or given away is reconfigured as wealth by the observer. As he describes the
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importance of visualizing this process, Bataille argues that destroying or giving away a
material object renders the giver “rich” for having “ostentatiously consumed what is
wealth only if it is consumed” (69). And so the giver gains, but vicariously, because, as
Veblen argues, excess itself is never disposed of single-handedly or in isolation (180);
wasting needs and audience, in other words, it cannot exist on its own. So, what belies the
apparently innocuous gestures of wasting, giving, or throwing away is both the assertion
and the acquisition of stature. Susan Strasser similarly argues that “discarding things is a
demonstration of power” (9). Like Bataille, Strasser draws on Veblen’s theory of
conspicuous consumption (and its accompaniment, conspicuous waste) to show how
disposable consumer products are marketed for the social empowerment that is
engendered in the consumer when something is thoughtlessly tossed out. So, as it
generously lights the city and in return maintains associations of prestige, rank and power,
the night lights of the Empire State Building are an obvious example of such false
gratuity. Warhol’s film engages in the same practice, but only if it is able to obtain and
then retain an audience in the first place. If it were screened at all, the lengthy film, given
its duration, intends to drive the viewer away in search of a desirable “less.” Indeed, in
order to make the transition of night to day more perceptible and the film, conversely,
more interminable, Warhol shot at 24 frames per second and then projected the film at 16,
lengthening its duration by a full two hours. Empire thus perform an intervention within
the ritualized circuitry of gaining power through wasting energy, mocking the
effectiveness of its spectacle by depriving itself of the requisite audience. But because
Bataille allows for registers of excess and expenditure, the unattended film – like the
unattended light bulb – is still an accomplished act of wastage. Because it is exhibited
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without experiencing the gain that ritualized display intends to obtain, the loss is useless
rather than useful and thus the process, like Empire, serves only to defeat itself. So, just
as the camera functioned without the direct participation of the filmmaker, so the film
might reasonably screen to an empty theatre. Indeed, this suggests is a surfeit of
cinematic materials, what Paolo Cherchi Usai calls the “unseen” – all those images that
accumulate to the point that it is impossible for the average viewer to consume even a
fraction of what is actually available. In other words, the excess the film’s production
represents is finally consolidated by its ideally unattended screenings.
The construction of monuments, Bataille argues, is one way in which excess
energy can be exuded. Of the “useless” pyramid, he writes, “from the standpoint of profit
[it] is a monumental mistake; one might just as well dig an enormous hole, then refill it
and pack the ground.” Like idleness or alcohol, the pyramid does nothing but “consume
without profit the resources [it] use[s].” And like alcohol which does nothing to nourish
the body but instead saps its stamina, the empty vessel that is the grand architectural feat
does nothing apart from tax energy reserves (laborers) on behalf of satisfying the
observer (119). Similarly, the “construction of a church is not a profitable use of the
available labor, but rather its consumption, the destruction of its utility” (132). But, then,
the presence of a church functions to promote religion, whose various rituals and
activities “absorb the excess energy of a society” (210). Moving from the mammoth tomb
markers of Ancient Egypt to the cult of church building that characterized the Middle
Ages, Bataille continues his architectural history of excess with the industrial era’s
equivalent, the factory, into which the dominant middle class concentrated the spillage of
its manufactured excess, thus symbolizing the wealth and power being generated within
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(132). Of course there is a precedent of analogizing the movie theatre and the church, the
former supplanting the latter, and of conceptualizing the Hollywood studio system as an
analog of the Fordist manufacturing plant. And then there is Warhol’s legendary Factory,
in many ways premised on the combination of worship and manufacture, and the
manufacturing of worship, and thus nicely complements Bataille’s observations about
both types of monuments. But in specific terms, more than church or factory, Empire
behaves as a cinematic pyramid. The film locates the phenomenon of the skyscraper as
American society’s particular interpretation of the pyramid – the (ideally) permanent
display of the ability to be wasteful. And because the film is so intentionally analogous to
its subject, Warhol manages to situate cinema as the so-called immaterial version of the
Ancient Egyptian pyramid. Empire is thus understood as ritualized performance of
gratuitous self-indulgence, a self-conscious demonstration of the capabilities of the
camera, as well as a manifestation of the autonomous vision machine that produces
images without need for the mental of physical energy of a filmmaker. It likewise makes
a display of available resources, and not only cinematic materials and artificially
produced light, but the time required to make the film and also, if indulged, to watch it.
And it is the tentative nature of this film, which might in fact have gone unwatched –
shelved amidst Warhol’s hundreds of hours of original footage – that really secures the
film its position as the cinematic pyramid – a hyperbolization of cinema’s material,
temporal and visual excess and an homage to the very culture and society that has
produced it as such.
So, like its subject, Empire is a narrative of a culture’s wealth, resource
availability, and technological progress. But rather than fully exult in its iconicity,
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Warhol does something to diminish the stature of his subject. Just as the film performs as
a history of its own medium, so it also looks into its future. Empire behaves as
architecture ideally intends, intuiting and thus also forging the future of its culture’s
social, economic and aesthetic needs and behaviors. Not only does the long take
anticipate the capabilities of digital filmmaking to record for hours without technical
interruption, the amateur conceit that Warhol employs also does well to foresee digital’s
democratization of filmmaking. Because of the film’s self-conscious indulgence in
amateur and entropic production values, the idea it conveys is that anyone can erect a
monument because anyone can make a film. As Warhol told an interviewer, his are
“experimental” films not in the sense than they are avant-garde but because “I don’t
know what I’m doing” (Berg 58). Little energy or labor is required, just the right
technology, a borrowed idea and a few assistants. Implicit in all of this is that Warhol
also foresees the (further) democratization of celebrity culture, a development that
directly corresponds to the availability of filmmaking resources and dissemination forums.
YouTube, Reality TV, and the sheer volume of independent documentaries collectively
attest to the profusion of amateur celebrities and filmmakers – the digital scions of
Warhol’s film factory and, by extension, of the cinematic pyramid.
Entropy or Energy: The End of Editing
As Warhol’s assistant Gerald Malanga recalls: “It was John Palmer who came up
with the idea for Empire. John, Jonas Mekas and I changed the reels for Andy. He barely
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touched the camera during the whole time it was being made. He wanted the machine to
make the art for him.” Warhol’s cinema, then, was dedicated to saving energy rather than
expending it, and likewise to test how far the human could go to remove him or herself
from the labor of producing a film. Indeed, the impulse resonates now with associations
of environmental cinema, though not as model, but rather as the anathema to carbon-
neutral or sustainable filmmaking practices. Warhol’s “entropic” image is facilitated by
total dependence on the cinematic apparatus, on its machinery and electricity, and so
functions as an example of the technological umbilical cord that has come to define
filmmaking such as it is.
Warhol’s film is a portrait of a monument of wasted energy but is itself
constructed according to a principle of total “entropy” – energy saved, kept latent, held in
reserve; such was the imperative guiding Warhol’s early silents, as Tony Rayns points
out (164). Empire’s energy is spent not in the process of filmmaking but, conversely, in
its imperative avoidance. As part of the amateur trappings of the film, editing is
abandoned altogether, creating a void matched only by the camera’s lack of movement.
The energy of the cinema is thus negatively defined, wherein the removal of the energy
that editing and cinematography typically require are highlighted by their absence.
Warhol’s film thus challenged the conventional expectation or even cliché that
experimental filmmaking is so often dedicated to recycling footage salvaged from
forgotten films or the cutting room floor. Instead, by eliminating the editing process,
Warhol was committed to producing the useless footage that might have been trimmed
down and discarded, then found and resuscitated with new value and new form. Indeed,
beyond turning the camera on and off and changing reels when necessary, the one
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formatting choice that Warhol did make almost implies a sort of inverted editing –
shooting at a faster speed than that of its intended projection effectively expanded rather
elided the passage of time. Instead of finding, recycling and thus re-inscribing an existing
image with a refreshed use value, Warhol made his own image waste, completing all
stages of throw-away consumer behavior in a single step (and a single take).
“Always leave [the audience] wanting less,” Warhol once commented (193).
Such was the philosophy Warhol used to describe his cinematic experiments, and the
aphorism functions here as a particularly applicable assessment of the paradox of the long
take. But if the director were to capitulate to audience desire, anything “less” than the
eight-hour long take that composes Empire necessarily implies editing and truncation,
therefore, an amputation and disposal of the waste that is the essence of Warhol’s film.
The question, then, is whether or not film becomes waste when it is or is not edited. Does
the long take horde waste and thus over-indulge in exudation or, conversely, is editing,
the process that relentlessly trims excess away, responsible for producing waste? In other
words, is avoidance of editing more or less wasteful than editing itself? The excess of
Empire clearly frames the film as an extended portrait of wasted time, space, and
celluloid, its form, content and subject is that which might have been sacrificed to the
editor’s discriminating scissors. But Warhol engages with an inherent paradox here, as
only he can, and so effectively negates the idea that a film premised on creating itself as
waste cannot fulfill its objective. Association with the stature and celebrity of Warhol
infuses the project with value – conceptually, culturally, economically and also
cinematically. Such was the cycle that Dadaism and other avant-garde movements traded
in: unwanted debris or banal commodity item are transformed into artifact or art form
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when conceptualized within a new context and then canonized as such. And yet the
ambiguity of Empire allows it to retain something of its fundamental trope of self-made
waste. So long as the audience is overstuffed with the film’s interminable entropy, the
recourse is to leave the theatre (as Warhol left the camera), effectively disposing of the
film and replacing it with some other occupation or cinematic selection, this time one
more desirable, a film that leaves you wanting more than it offers, not less. Thus Warhol
finds a way out of the impossible bind of trying to circumvent the inevitable cultural
cycle that sanctifies and thus diminishes the iconoclastic gesture. Just as the camera is
granted full filming responsibility, so the viewer, not the filmmaker, is left in charge and
is tricked into calling the film refuse, thus inadvertently maintaining the integrity of the
Warhol’s waste-making project. Similarly, the entropy implied by the production of
Empire is double-sided, as the film seemingly, misleadingly, expects as little from its
audience as the audience should expect from it. Just as Warhol’s directorial attention is
divided, leaving the camera to run while he himself is absent, the ideal viewer would take
advantage of how the entropic image encourages indulgence in other activities: “You
could do more things watching my movies than with other kinds of movies,” Warhol told
Cahiers du Cinéma in 1967. “You could eat and drink and smoke and cough and look
away and then look back and they’d still be there” (58). In addition to forcing the
audience to regard it as a form of refuse (and saving himself the energy of calling it as
such), the film thus also transfers the responsibility of keeping the audience’s attention
occupied onto the viewers themselves. Viewing, then, is rendered as democratic,
unchallenging and valueless as filmmaking itself; as such, Empire’s entropy abuses the
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cinema, literally cheapens it, rendering it ultimately obsolete: waste, in other words,
ready for disposal.
Empire’s ultra-rudimentary editing consisted of turning the camera on and off;
however, the timing of the decision was not made by Warhol but instead was determined
by the absence and then presence of the sun. Likewise, the energy that is expended is not
derived from the camera operator, but the camera itself, thus telescoping Vertov’s vision
in Man with a Movie Camera, while also suggesting (like Vertov) the camera’s inevitable
autonomy. Not unlike the Vision Machine that functions, as Virilio describes it,
according to “Kinematic” or “observed” energy (75), Warhol’s camera is fuelled by
nothing less than sight itself, the ability of the machine to see rather than merely record.
Though Empire is perhaps the most striking example, the early silent films and the
Screen Tests also exemplify Warhol’s devotion to upholding an aesthetic of editing
chastity (Rayns 169). “I find editing too tiring myself,” Warhol explained. “Lab facilities
are much too tacky and uncertain, the way they are now.” And why would he edit? “It’s
so easy to make movies,” he went on to explain. “You just shoot and every picture comes
out right” (Berg 58).
According to the dimensions of cinematic excess, as a practice and an aesthetic,
Direct Cinema can be situated as both Warhol’s natural heir and also his polar opposite.
While Direct Cinema is politically aligned with the edit-driven filmmakers of the same
decade, Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah for example, these feature-film directors
indulged in artifice and fantasy in order to forge political allegory; Direct Cinema,
meanwhile, was dedication to achieving pure and unadulterated depictions of live events.
Direct Cinema’s imperative was to operate without irony, metaphor or allegory, and thus
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engage a subject first-hand, without the intrusion of narrative or interpretive devices.
Politically motivated though it often was, its aesthetic equivalent is found in the apolitical
excess generated in Warhol’s Factory. That Empire passes itself off an authentic
representation of time’s passage positions it somewhat ironically, as Warhol’s apolitical
entropy managed to accomplish the ideal that Direct Cinema energetic commitment was
determined to procure – reality’s bare truth. But what is not obvious in the ostensibly
uncut aesthetic of Direct Cinema is that editing choices remain integral, except that they
were made in the moment of shooting and so were hidden in the instructive spontaneity
of the camera operator’s way of seeing. The significant difference is that Warhol’s
exploitation of entropy insisted on using a static camera, thus leaving him with the task of
making one and the same cinematographic and editing choice: physically situating the
camera and turning it on. What is more, Monaco points out that for all the apparent
flexibility, randomness and even casual or relaxed style of Direct Cinema, there was a
huge amount of physical energy demanded by the presumably spontaneous project.
Indeed, the rise of the non-fiction film in the 1960s was largely attributable to the
emergence of portable and affordable cameras, synchronized sound recording devices,
faster films stocks and zoom lenses (Enticknap 39-40). On the one hand, such
innovations were far less taxing to the operator’s energy supply, but on the other, as the
body of the camera operator could now replace the tripod, crane, dolly and track,
unhindered filmmaking came at the expense of increased physical exertion. Monaco
writes, for example, that the camera operator, who was also usually the director, was
required to have “the agility to move quickly in many different situations, the stamina to
record long takes, and an incisive eye for selecting and framing the right shot” (209).
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Indeed, the difference between Warhol’s early silent films and Vertov’s Man with a
Movie Camera is seemingly enormous, and yet the intentions of Direct Cinema do
something to bridge the two extremes. Vertov’s film is a remarkable exhibition of the
energy that is poured into and absorbed by all stages of the cinematic process, from the
energy of the subjects to that of the camera operator, the editor, the projectionist, the
audience and the film itself, playing out on screen. Then there is the energy of the camera,
which assumes physical liberty and independence, superceding its former dependence on
humanity. So it is that Vertov’s self-operating camera and its ambiguously stated warning
and/or exultant prediction about the omniscient Kino-Eye foreshadows the technology
that facilitated Warhol’s excessively monotone version of the city symphony. Indeed,
what is paramount to both Vertov and Warhol is the supremacy of camera technology,
which is truly measured in its ability to liberate human energy rather than burden it with
further demands. Both filmmakers lucidly highlight the ambitions that motivated
cinematic innovation since its inception, namely, the study of the energy exerted by what
Jules Etienne Marey called the “animal machine” (Rabinbach 90). But as Warhol’s film
is a study in all the energy he has saved, it is the exact opposite of Marey’s proto-
cinematic studies. While Vertov celebrates this proto-cinematic principle Warhol
radically upends it, and yet both insist that the real purpose of the cinema is to celebrate
the camera as a machine and a supplier of energy. The question now is how the ratio
might be reversed. In other words, the principles of a carbon-neutral and/or sustainable
cinema render the human operator increasingly responsible for saving the energy
expended by the cinematic apparatus and all its attendant parts, rather than the obverse.
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The false premise perpetuated by DV’s capacity for the long take is that an open-
aperture aesthetic obviates the editing process; but the energy of the cut is transferred
elsewhere, typically to the movement of the camera itself and/ or the subjective decisions
of the operator as they occur in real time. Presumably excused from an editing
component, the DV long take assumes a mythology of autonomy, self-sufficiency and
thus energy efficiency. Likewise, the availability of portable filmmaking equipment in
the 1960s seemed to promise that nonfiction filmmaking would be radically altered. But
as Monaco argues this “speculation mistakenly invested inert machinery with
unattainable expectations,” confused artists with the capabilities of their medium and
“fundamentally misread the creative process” (208). So it is that the combination of a
long take with mobile framing not only entails editing in the moment (such as the
decision to zoom in on a subject or even to physically turn a corner, thus cutting from one
space into another) but it also results in the accumulation of large amounts of unusable
footage. Before the excess of digital video, practitioners of Direct Cinema used editing to
impose cohesion and patterning on their amassed spontaneity, all the while radically
cutting away “objective” footage (Monaco 208).
A cinematic Sputnik, Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark was at the time of its
release the longest single take in cinema’s history. Enabled by digital’s vast storage space,
the mobile camera is anchored to the cinematographer using a customized Steadicam and,
thus energized and stabilized, the film sets out on a 96-minute trans-historical tour of the
Hermitage gallery in St. Petersburg. By overlapping the real-time of the long take, the
first person perspective of the protagonist (represented by the camera’s eye and
Sokurov’s own voice-over narration), as well as the gallery’s witnessed history, the film’s
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multiple historical fragments accumulate organically into a narrative whole. But Russian
Ark’s subject matter is not what is primary, eclipsed as it is by the director’s famous
exploitation of digital’s facility to both record for an almost infinite length of time and
also to indulge in relatively unrestrained mobility. Digital capacitates an ambulatory
camera, rendering literal the suggested omniscience of Haneke’s (and Vertov’s and
Warhol’s) aesthetic, wherein the film-eye’s invisible presence saturates all places and at
all times. The film has been called an “anti-October” and indeed the mobility of
Sokurov’s liberated and democratic digital apparatus clearly intends to challenge the
Marxist politics that informed the Soviet avant-guard in general and Vertov’s and
Eisenstein’s systems of montage and conceptions of the camera in particular. As the
DVD’s accompanying documentary points out, the lead-up to the ball scene which
concludes Russian Ark is partly shot on the same staircase that Eisenstein featured in his
October in 1927. Returning to the scene of the crime as it were, the staircase pits the two
filmmakers against each other and with startling accuracy. Digital innovation is what
restores the relationship between Russian cinema and the Hermitage and it also does
something to align Sokurov with Eisenstein, for what Russian Ark ultimately highlights is
the way in which very the technology of the camera and the formal dimensions of editing
(rather than what is being represented) can be directly engaged as a means of political
discourse. While Bazin understands montage as an attempt to “rule out the ambiguity of
expression,” he extols depth of focus for its democratization of vision, wherein the
image’s extended space and time allowed the spectator to construct a distinct and even
personalized meaning (36). Conversely, however, amidst the political fervor and social
turmoil of post-1917 Russia, the imperative of the filmmaker was to inform, educate and
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ultimately agitate a vast and mostly illiterate population. As such, Soviet montage did not
allow for such liberties as ambiguity nor the luxury of an image’s measured
contemplation. But Sokurov can, it seems, luxuriate, for Russian Ark does just that:
maintaining the momentum of the open aperture and likewise avoiding editing effectively
negates the early Soviet cinema’s theoretical intention to produce in the viewer not only a
specific, unswerving ideological direction but, like Vertov, a new spectator, a new human
being and a new society. The purpose behind Vertov’s theory of the kino-eye, for
example, was to “create a man more perfect than Adam” and from that prototype
“thousands” more (17). Vertov’s cinema, like Eisenstein’s, and October’s staircase
sequences in particular, similarly ushers out Russia’s reigning political, social and
cultural structures and uses the camera to replace them with a politics and a people
entirely new. Sokurov, though, returns to the past that the Soviets dismantled, revitalizing
it with the cutting-edge of the digital camera. The Steadicam’s ability to freely roam thus
signals the end of the aesthetic tyranny of montage and the ideological and political
repression that its Marxist ideology came to represent. So it is that for Sokurov the
grandeur of his shooting location is matched by the democratic promises of what has
become our culture’s dominant mode of expression and communication, the result of
which might be called a digital Baroque. But the opulence Sokurov is celebrating is
accompanied by a distinct air of insecurity. While the protagonist’s interlocutor (Astolphe
de Custine, a discriminating French marquis) constantly derides Russia’s attempts at
cultural and intellectual sophistication, the digital showcase that is Russian Ark counters
the insinuation that this country is backward. The film itself, like its protagonist, seems
intent on responding to both Western Europe’s perceived superiority as well as the
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apparent obsolescence of Soviet Montage. Meanwhile, however, the record-setting digital
long take is as political and ideological as montage once was; the democratization,
innovation and attendant access to wealth and resources that digital represents are the
metaphorical and literal approximations of what Sokurov argues were in 2002 the new
terms of post-Soviet Russia.
Importantly, the full dimensions of Sokurov’s indulgence is not always readily
conspicuous, for just as the unscripted films of Warhol or Direct Cinema result in an
overabundance of footage, so the apparent spontaneity of Russian Ark required four years
of energetic planning and choreography, not to mention three partial takes, before the
ideal of a spacious, cinematically-liberated film finally materialized. As a long take,
Russian Ark reverses Warhol’s excessive entropy and sees Empire’s commitment to
radically minimize the filmmaking process matched by the camera operator’s totally
intrusive perspective. While Warhol made a spectacle out of saving his own energy
reserves, Sokurov’s ostentation requires both the energy derived from the camera and the
energy involved in preproduction phases. So it is that the long take feats of Sokurov and
Figgis (Time Code) exemplify how the work of the editor is substituted with in-camera
functioning, as well as by pre-production planning, scripting, rehearsals, trial runs and, in
the case of Sokurov, a significant amount post-production image modification and colour
enhancement. Added to this is the energy that is surrendered by the camera operator, a
dimension that is perceptibly minimized by Russian Ark’s laudable use of the Steadicam.
So it is that the ambulatory camera that structures the film formally, characterizes it
aesthetically, and also sustains its requisite real time premise, speaks to a greater amount
of resource consumption, not less. The strictures that facilitated the film’s seeming
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effortlessness in fact introduced a new set of burdens – batteries running low, the
cameraman taxed to near collapse, unforeseen production costs – which seem to defeat
the intended aesthetic of open-ended liberation; as such, the unrestricted autonomy
promised by the digital camera proves to be anything but. Filmmaking’s human interface
might be better concealed, but it is not minimized. What is more, on a procedural and
material level, technologies are never exploited without leaving behind some vestige of
tangible impact or physical residue. Importantly, then, is how the ecological dimensions
of cinema now substitute “the hand of man” with our own contemporary God term, the
“ecological footprint” and take this minimization for its priority.
Watching and Wasting
Vertov’s portrait of the energy generated by editing, its accumulative momentum,
ends with an image which both literally and metaphorically anticipates the long take.
Because energy is generated by the cinematic apparatus itself, the autonomous camera’s
omni-voyance suggests a perpetually open aperture as well as the ability to make films
without a separate editing process. But the end of the cameraman inaugurates the
beginning of something else. However ambiguously positioned, it is in Vertov’s prescient
image that cultures of surveillance and the responsibility of watching are so suggestively
articulated. Indeed, as the digital democracy liberates the means of vision, rendering the
camera ubiquitous and post-industrial society increasingly surveyed, it also introduces a
proliferation of vision, wherein the amount of images available to us is as significant as
what they depict. But without the aesthetic and political discernment of the editor and
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cinematographer, the unencumbered camera apparatus combines with the forces of
randomness, chance and entrenched ideological needs to dictate the dimensions of the
images it produces. The seeming effortlessness of Vertov and Warhol’s “kinematic”
kino-eyes transfers the energy saved on the part of the human operator onto the machine,
the result of which is an unprecedented amount of unedited, unscrutinized visual and
physical material. The long-take image, then, complicates discourses of surveillance by
introducing the dimension of the image’s material storage space. In other words, the
diminution of the sharp eye and the sharp scissors of film practitioners is actualized in an
archive of tangible excess comprised of unwatched reels of real time footage – the
physical residue of omniscient, unmediated vision.
Part of what comes with Warhol’s anticipation of the digital democracy is the
prevalence of surveillance video and the necessary archiving of the reams and reels of
unwatched, un-surveyed recordings. As Cherchi Usai points out, “relatively few moving
images can be seen in the course of a lifetime;” what we do manage to take in represent
only a “tiny fraction of those actually made” (93). What Cherchi Usai thus describes as
“the unseen” Warhol’s excessive cinema actively perpetuates, if not exploits. But,
importantly, “the unseen” are for Cherchi Usai those films and images made with the
intention of having an audience, and yet there exists a plethora of images premised on
never being presented to a viewer. Notably, one of the most significant reasons why
video technology prevailed in both the television and security industries, and was later
modified for home use, was that cassette tapes could be re-recorded multiple times
(Enticknap 178). Ironically, however, what was once embraced as video’s advantage, the
ability to erase images and reuse tapes, archivists now blame for the loss of what might
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have been “culturally important programming” – professionally referred to as “missing,
believed wiped” (178). Because Warhol’s Empire assumes the trappings of a surveillance
tape, its cold eye tirelessly and without relent safeguarding the integrity of the iconic
building in the distance, it likewise introduces the dimension that this film, like the
security tapes that were in the 1950s and 60s becoming standardized, would eventually be
erased. Premised in part then on the solitude of the security camera and the recordings it
produces and then are only temporarily retained, Warhol’s surveillance aesthetic impairs
the chances that Empire will even be viewed. Indeed, the film functions better as a theory,
an idea, and even a legend, thus precluding the need to have to see it in order to
appreciate it. Here, then, is an example of the post-cinematic, the film-without-film, but
one premised on the fact that its conception alone can upstage its existence. But Warhol
was not completely dispossessed of the need for an audience, for how else to gauge the
true uselessness of his experiments. In his interview with Cahiers du Cinéma Warhol
explains to the interviewer how part of the experimental value of his films is how they are
intended to challenge the endurance of his spectator (Berg 61). The voyeurism of
Warhol’s open aperture has been the object of much critical attention, but because his
early silent films are in large part informed by the commitment to gauge the viewer’s
behavior, the open aperture of Empire casts its gaze as much upon the audience as on its
architectural subject. Indeed, the edifice appears to be a smokescreen, a two-way mirror
that allows the filmmaker to monitor how the movie-goer might react to the self-
indulgent entropy just barely playing out on screen. So it is that the closed-circuit (CCTV)
video is perhaps the closest formal equivalent to Warhol’s Empire project. Scrutinizing
subject and viewer on levels of form and discourse, Empire’s surveillance trope seems
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the logical result of a celebrity-obsessed culture which, in demanding the right to look at
others tacitly sacrifices its own privacy and is also looked at in turn.
Though engaging in some of the formal tropes that were Warhol’s trademark,
Michael Haneke, however, is overtly political and so he applies the long take – often in
combination with the long-shot. It is without ambiguity that Haneke’s formal strategy
ultimately links and then unequivocally ruptures the forces that render ours a culture of
material excess and, resultantly, a society of surveillance, wherein what holds value,
wealth, privacy, security, is visually safeguarded. Exploration and exploitation of the
CCTV aesthetic is consistent throughout Haneke’s career, culminating in his most recent
film, Caché. Not only does Haneke make extensive use of the long take, importantly
matching it with the long shot and a static camera, but like Warhol’s Empire, the diegetic
film in Haneke’s Caché does not seem to possess an operator – indeed, this is the point
that drives the film’s narrative. Haneke indulges the visual excess of omni-voyant
surveying by means of his own formal means, but then implicates the resultant CCTV
aesthetic within the film’s narrative via the device of the videos used to terrorize his
protagonists. The videos take for their subject the exterior of a suburban Paris house
(located on rue Iris, no less), but are almost force-fed to the house’s scrutinized occupants
and, as such, their excess secure an attentive audience and are therefore not wasted.
Indeed, what the “closed circuit” of security television refers to is how its signal, unlike
broadcast television which is openly transmitted, is received only by a specific set of
monitors. The implication, then, is that the closed circuit is a self-consuming display,
deprived of an audience apart from its own operator (the camera itself and/or the absent
human). As they ironically render the protagonists’ home insecure, eroding the
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architecture of their lives with its assumed provisions of privacy and safety, Haneke’s
diegetic videos use the long-take to upend the expectations of surveillance cameras and
any innocuous associations that might be assumed by the detached long-running image.
What is more, the material wealth of the protagonists is matched by the long-take that
surveys it, and thus Haneke instigates a social critique via the excess of the open aperture.
What Haneke’s characters watch, essentially, is a nightmare version of Empire, but theirs
is as personalized as it is politicized. So, the insistent energy of the camera is anything
but neutral, infused as it is with an alarming degree of power and control. Haneke uses
excess against itself; critiquing the surveillance culture implicit in the diegetic videos, he
manages to undermine his bourgeois subjects who are therefore twice caught within the
materialistic, indulgent waste of the long-take exposure – Haneke’s and that of the
diegetic camera operator. This double-lensed evocation of surveillance sees the formal
dimensions of the long take denaturalized, its apparent neutrality subverted by the
camera’s ability to destroy the subject via the stunning excess of over exposure. What
Haneke and Warhol both imply is that it is the inconspicuous or unseen display of excess
that is the most effective, pervasive and, perhaps, dangerous. By forcing the viewer to
squint to determine the subject of a long shot or else to check the runtime to gauge how
long a particularly interminable take has lasted, Haneke forces the transparency of excess
to dissolve. Such is the intention that informs the maddening and tortuous long takes and
the cool, seemingly disengaged distance of the long shots which facilitate Haneke’s
exposition of a culture whose material excess corresponds with its moral and ethical
depletion.
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As a further dimension of excess, “cache” has significant semantic value,
especially when translated into English, for it suggests not only what is hidden but also
what is stored and held in reserve. A “cache” is a surplus, typically accumulated in
anticipation of a foreseen scarcity. Additionally, a cache is an archive. This term’s
semantic value combines with Haneke’s long-take formalism and suggests the material
glut accumulated by systems of video surveillance. Warhol’s voyeuristic enterprises
likewise amassed a huge archive of original footage. The Screen Tests, for example, grew
to 500 between 1963 and 1966, while during the years 1963-1972, Warhol’s personal
stock consisted of 1300 reels, or 200 hours of original footage (Berg 65). Again, the long
take, static or mobile, digital or analog, suggests both the consumption of materials and
also their generation, hyperbolized and also naturalized by the working of the automated
closed-circuit video camera. It is important to note, however, that the closed circuit is,
like the industrial ecology’s ideal closed loop model (and Bataille’s theory of extension
or useful wastage) premised on good economics and sustainability. As film storage is
costly, reusable tapes proved ideal. As such, major film productions units have only
recently begun preserving their reels, but they do so for commercial reasons, creating and
then exploiting the need for repeat viewings. Before the 1950s, for example, many
studios destroyed prints in order to recycle and/or sell the valuable silver contained in
black and white film emulsion (Enticknap 188). Indeed, reusing videotapes, even at the
expense of losing material, exemplifies the ephemeral nature of images. So it is that the
CCTV system foregrounds what Cherchi Usai describes as the “unique” or limited event
that was the screening of a moving image (103). The question that emerges is this: does
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erasing an image mean wasting it, or, conversely, does saving it imply a waste – of space,
materials and also of energy?
The suggestion made by the long take in general and the digital variant in
particular is that because cinematic resources are so easily accessed and manipulated,
waste can be exploited, to the point that indulgence itself results in its own specific
aesthetic. With digital, however, the conception that it is purely immaterial encourages a
surfeit of images, such as those accumulated when making a film that requires multiple
takes before achieving one that is ideal. The principle sees an equivalent in flawed
recycling programs, wherein the knowledge that something can be discarded responsibly
contributes to the creation of more waste, not less. Guilt assuaged by the blue box,
consumers are granted permission to consume more, and so they do. The same
psychology contributes to a glut of digital images, their so-called immateriality
permitting increased production and consumption, precisely because they are apparently
immaterial and the superficially inconspicuous. The fallaciousness of digital’s
immateriality resides in the fact that the technology that enables its support surface
proves more materially dependent than that of the cinema it is eclipsing – if for no other
reason than the troublingly rapid pace with which the DV camera and all its attendant
parts are rendered disposable by planned technological obsolescence – the mandate of the
electronics, and now digital cinema, industries.
The amateur aesthetic of so many digital long-take experiments combines with its
mobile capabilities to naturalize – but never neutralize – the pervasive presence of the
ostensibly “casual” image in what is effectively now the digital landscape. Warhol’s
insistence that his films were “experimental” rather than “Experimental” confirm many
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of the consequences that digital’s democratization is introducing to the converging realms
of the cinema and the environment. Again, digital media’s ubiquity and its capacity for
unrestrained recording and watching imply not only an aesthetics of excess but also a
politics of storage and/or disposal that is problematized by the tension between the
material and/or immaterial quality of cinema’s artifacts, residues and detritus.
Though the profusion of the digital DIY might testify otherwise, it is not always
easy to manufacture the feeling of the authentically amateur. Staging spontaneity,
likewise, requires an equal amount of effort, more so, perhaps, than the rigidly structured
and the over-planned. Mike Figgis’ 2000 Time Code combines the aesthetic of the
amateur with both artificial spontaneity and the tropes of surveillance video and in doing
so exploits to its maximum the digital camera’s capacity for mobility and duration. The
film consists of four separate single takes shot simultaneously within the offices of a Los
Angeles film production studio. Long take indulgence is multiplied by the fact that the
four films are not kept separate but instead are displayed simultaneously on a screen that
is divided into quadrants. The entirely of Figgis’ enterprise is wholly dependent on digital
video technology, and it is unrestrained in its self-conscious display of the
improvisational capabilities of this medium’s numerous tricks and talents.
In order to obtain 96 minutes of apparent spontaneity and casual improvisation,
Figgis, like Sokurov, over-indulged on the preproduction end, choreographing and
coordinating cameras and actors alike in order to achieve a balance between the four
separate screens. And, like Russian Ark’s long take, Figgis also had to endure multiple
trial runs before obtaining what proved satisfactory. The four separate cameras and their
screens function as a multiplication of the technological display of excess, outdoing what
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Russian Ark later managed to accomplish and suggesting something of the competition
won by the Empire State Building and a further manifestation of the cinematic pyramid.
But though Sokurov’s film attempts to argue that the mobile long take can dispense with
the cut, Figgis’ experiment transfers the process of editing onto the viewer, requiring that
focus is shifted between the various screens on display. Either that, or if a viewer feels so
compelled, he or she might choose to indulge each narrative and watch each take
separately, thus extending its running time to something that would rival Empire – a film
that also tricks the viewer into watching more real time than actually occurred. And then
there is the director’s commentary on the Time Code DVD, providing the viewer at home
with the option of watching all four films again, but this time with Figgis’ narration
added on as a further layer of sensory stimulation with which to negotiate. New Yorker
critic Adam Gopnik has contemplated what might be considered the art of the DVD extra,
arguing that the director’s commentary has become more than addendum but an “organic
genre” all its own. As such, Gopnik posits that these monologues are able to redeem even
a mediocre feature, wherein the viewer can glimpse the director’s emotional trials, as
well as the film’s obstacles, politics and technical circumstances that are often the real
determination of final aesthetic form (90). What is more, Gopnik points out that the so-
called director’s cut which justify the re-issuing of extant discs is in fact a contradiction
in terms; what these cuts amount to is expansion rather than ellipses, as the term implies.
Indeed, in his search for value in digital technology’s rehabilitation of cinema’s discards,
what Gopnik finds is not the revelation of new material so much as expansion of the old
(70). Similarly, as Time Code’s multiple screens grow tiresome, the narratives playing
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out on their respective screens ultimately showcase that which a less excessive director
would have readily cut.
Just as the machine compensates for the absent filmmaker, it is the subjects of the
unscripted film who are required to impose some kind of guidance or structure via their
improvised performances, thus filling in the void left by the open aperture. Likewise,
Figgis’ quadrants and the voyeuristic split screen of Warhol’s later films, Chelsea Girls
in particular, sees the audience retooled as editor. So, leaving the “editing” in the hands
(eyes) of the viewer, each filmmaker manages to multiply his excesses even further, for
each viewing, like each viewer, would be characterized by differently patterned choices.
Indeed, this was part of Warhol’s intention with Chelsea Girls, for as the film required
two separate projectors, which available technology can never keep exactly in sync, each
screening would vary, if only imperceptibly. The split screen suggests the multiplication
of cinematic excess as well as its dispersal, the diffusion of its capabilities, its reach and
the resources necessary to sustain its growth. This is achieved in part by how the multi-
screen shifts energy and labour onto the machine and then onto the viewer, a transference
of cinematic labor that is expedited by digital democratization. So it is that Warhol’s long
take “point and shoot” philosophy has been realized in digital’s capabilities to liberate the
filmmaker, but always at the expense of someone else – the camera, the projector, the
subject or the audience. Likewise, Virilio’s nightmare of the “Vision Machine” and
Vertov’s ambiguous suggestion of an autonomous camera eye are not only fulfilled by
Figgis’ long take experiment, but they are multiplied, creating four times the amount of
surveillance footage to delete, dispose of, or archive.
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Monaco notes that the use of the split screen – exemplified by The Thomas
Crowne Affair (1968) and culminating in Woodstock (1970) – is mostly confined to the
1960s and thus comprises little more than a clichéd convention and a footnote in
cinematic history (64). But since the rise of video and then digital technology and Figgis’
notable exploitation of the trope, there has emerged a substantial amount of films which
make consistent use of the multiple screen. Indeed, even the somewhat limited resources
of the Internet Movie Database produce 255 examples of the multi and split screens, the
majority of which occur between the 1980s to the present. Inconclusive though it might
be, the suggestion is that digital video and the proliferation of surveillance aesthetics has
initiated a propensity for constructing, and receiving, cinematic narratives in double,
triple or quadruple. The television series 24 makes consistent use of the split screen, for
example, while Hans Canosa’s Conversations with Other Women (2006) is structured
also around the device. In the latter film, two separate cameras are used to seemingly add
dimension to – or else highlight – the vain encounter between a man and a women over
the course of a night. Conversations is not an example of the long take or split screen in
extremis, and so makes a display of excess by adhering to the ideology of ritualized
wastage and thus is without any of the critical dimensions imposed by Figgis’s
surveillance experiment. Notable too is Bruce McDonald’s latest film, The Tracey
Fragments (2007) – nothing less than an extravaganza of the split screen, trumping all its
predecessors for indulgence in the excess of vision.
It could be argued that the use of the multi-screen suggests a colonization of on-
screen space, not unlike the increased width and depth that characterized much of the
cinematic innovations of the 1950s and 1960s. But the expansion is paradoxical. Unlike
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the conspicuous consumption of these postwar decades, the digital multi-screen renders
the same behavior inconspicuous, if not imperceptible. In other words, “the screen” is
expanding because it is getting smaller, the logical outcome when a single surface is
divided into several parts. So, as the screen multiplies, it seems to disappear, diminishing
its claims to an existence and an ontology distinct from its non-cinematic surroundings.
The multiscreen of Figgis and then McDonald likely will not represent a pervasive trend,
and, indeed, will more than likely be a footnote to digital’s cinematic consolidation. But
as the digital democracy sees the filmmaker disappear into the capabilities of the machine,
the choice to indulge the excessive aesthetic of omni-voyance further confirms the
concerns raised by Virilio’s insidious Vision Machine, Vertov’s autonomous kino-eye,
Haneke’s CCTV and Warhol’s entropic and intrusive gaze. Added to this is how the
machine – via its screens – disappears into the proliferation of its own self-generated
detritus, eroding distinctions between what is and is not image, what is and is not waste.
What remains, then, is that the ultimate display of cinematic excess is no cinema at all.
Not a dead cinema, in other words, but rather a total, and totally inconspicuous, one; and
such totality and maximization signals nothing if not excess, a category whose practical
and ideological dimensions are becoming less sustainable.
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Chapter Five: Waste
The Residual Ecology of the Image
The free market economy of industrial and now post-industrial culture is enabled by the
ability, if not the right, to dispose of our personal and collective undesirables without
consequences. One of the most enduring tenets of Veblen’s economic theories describes
how conspicuous waste is, like its companion conspicuous consumption, a way in which
the so-called leisure class demonstrates its status, power, and attendant sense of
democratic freedom. Material culture, then, is inseparable from the waste it generates –
the excess that is amassed, thrown away and is then transformed into garbage. As
Jennifer Gabrys argues, not only do gathering sites of detritus function as registers for the
“transience of objects,” and the “speed and voracity of [their] consumption,” but also the
“enduring materiality” of that which has been disposed of and, we assume, left to decay
(163). Cinematic garbage does not exist as a mere conceptualization, but is more
immediately located in the solid composition of the film industry’s surplus and detritus,
those unwanted, unused, or unusable bits – from decayed celluloid to trashed DVDs.
These solid wastes of the moving image foreground the cinema’s essential consumable
and material reality and also denaturalizes the perception that cinema, especially in its
digital form, is somehow immaterial and therefore does not manifest a tangible
environmental impact. Gabrys’ critique of post-industrial culture’s mythology of
immateriality is focused on the transference of information, yet digital (and digitized)
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images are easily, if not, necessarily accommodated by what she instructively terms
digital culture’s “residual ecology.” Used to describe the destructive physicality of
ostensibly intangible and therefore innocuous digital realities, the “residual ecology”
proves particularly valuable when cinema is allowed to transform the concept’s
discursive dimensions, recasting it as the “residual ecology of the image.”
Susan Sontag concluded her famous collection of essays on the subject of
photography with the call for what she termed “an ecology of the image.” Published in
1973, On Photography is strewn with an environmental rhetoric that guarantees her lucid
insight’s an increased endurance and also a distinct prescience. Though she challenges
the feasibility her own proposition some thirty years later in Regarding the Pain of
Others, what Sontag perhaps idealistically described as the application of
“conservationist” measures to minimize the over-consumption and therefore abuse of
image “resources,” the concept has particular resonance and relevance for both its
semantic implications and its theoretical potential. Amending and intersecting Sontag’s
image ecology and Gabrys’ residual ecology, this chapter is framed by the concept of the
“residual ecology of the image,” describing as it does the materiality of (specifically
digital) images and their infrastructure, the ideology of imagistic excesses and resultant
environmental impact, as well as the practice and politics of retaining and/or managing
cinematic detritus through archiving, recycling and reproduction.
The problem that “residual image ecology” identifies and challenges is informed
by the contradictory premises at the heart of industrial and post-industrial production.
The first is that “objects” are made according to the enduring principle of planned
obsolescence and, therefore, disposability, while the second is that those same objects are
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composed of materials (plastics, glass, compressed metals) that have been engineered and
refined to the point that they will not simply fade away. Indeed, as Barry Allen observes,
“the most impressive thing about our trash in how well made it is” (198). Objects, goods,
commodities, from packaging to architecture to information, are designed to destruct, but
not decompose. This, the structuring contradiction that is at the heart of the globe’s
waste management crisis, provides an analytic for understanding and describing the
aesthetic and ideological foundations that form and inform the images our waste-making
culture produces. What matters, then, is identifying and then critiquing the durability of
disposable objects and therefore acknowledging our powerlessness to finally throw
anything away. The equation applies equally to digital repositories and image archives
which, like sanitary landfills, are brimming with texts that the citizens of techno cultures
are unwilling or unable to delete with any real permanence. This failure to truly dispose
of something must be accounted for; garbage, such as it is, must be reassessed and
likewise reconceptualized. This challenge demands that throwaways are not relegated to
unreachable repositories, but instead are left visible, accessible, and therefore available
for possible reuse.
Selected films and images by Agnès Varda, Spike Lee, Kristan Horton and Justin
Kan exemplify both cinematic ecology and cinematic garbage. Taken together, these
works foreground our culture’s limited understanding of garbage’s lifespan and also
problematize, if not reverse, such industry-oriented rhetoric as “disposable,”
“expendable”; Zygmunt Bauman’s category of “invisibility” and Paul Virilio’s theory of
“disappearance” also resonate with new implications. Such concepts are nothing if not
privileged, for they belong to those populations which can luxuriate in being unaware of
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where consumer goods originate and, once used up and thrown away, where they are
fated to expire. There is, in other words, no such reality as disposability, just as there is
no true immaterial dimension to digital cinema. The electronic waste that is shipped
overseas to recycling communities has a counterpart in the dumping ground that is the
internet, both spaces testifying to the reluctance and inability to finally obliterate. Indeed,
computer technology is prized as much for its expansive storage capacities as for its
processing speed; and it is memory which hastens a system’s obsolescence when its
ability to retain information is diminished by technological advances. What seem fated to
obsolescence are the very functions “erase” or “delete”; meanwhile the desktop’s recycle
bin – the euphemistic quarantine for informational clutter – is made unnecessary by the
vastness accommodated in the gigabyte. Material and immaterial forms alike are never
really thrown away; rather they are relocated to zones of seeming dissipation. So, part of
correcting the cultural conceptions attached to disposable lives and limited life-spans
involves exposing not only the social and ecological consequences of throw-away
ideology but also challenging the innocuousness of the rhetoric itself. Disposable, single-
use, throw-away, recyclable – such semantics both normalize and perpetuate engrained
systems of cultural behavior. But just as the reality of e-waste exposes the deceptiveness
of post-industrial immateriality, so the very existence of garbage dictates that
disposability cannot possibly exist.
Engaging with their own materiality and durability, the projects of Agnes Varda,
Spike Lee, Kristan Horton and Justin Kan are primarily founded on the concept of
disposability. Specifically, these filmmakers engage with how disposables function
materially, aesthetically, as well as socio-culturally, and ultimately determine how
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subjects and subjectivities are both conceptualized and represented. Because digital is the
medium that informs the core of these perhaps seemingly divergent projects (even if on
an implicit, indirect and/or conceptual level), they actively reveal how the ontology of
this dominant technology finds its complement within the ideology of disposability. What
these films foreground, then, is, first, the democratization of digital and/or cinema;
second, the increasing ascendancy of the documentary as digital’s dominant
manifestation; and third, digital’s capacity for archiving, resurrecting and repetitively
watching (over-exposing) images that have already been seen. The texts of Varda, Lee,
Horton and Kan facilitate an investigation of cinematic detritus, exposing the (digital)
image as a material and a resource which in turn informs its aesthetic and political
dimensions. The guiding question, then, might be articulated thus: how can cultural
practice be both liberated by and responsible for initiating a system of waste management
that at once limits and makes openly accessible, and thus reusable, the unwanted and
expired, thus rendering a “residual ecology of images desirable and feasible?”
Necessary Wrappings: Waste, Cultural Production and Packaging
Employing Michelangelo’s description of sculpture’s basic procedures, Zygmunt
Bauman articulates the integral intersection between cultural production and the creation
of waste. As Bauman explains, according to Michelangelo, it was the sculptor’s job to cut
superfluous bits away from the “blank” surface that is the slab of stone and thus, through
a process of elimination and paring away, reveal the perfect form that is hidden within.
This description easily accommodates the practical reality of most material-based
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creative processes and functions as aesthetic theory that is particularly apposite in
consideration of Lewis Mumford contention that modernity’s modes of cultural
production are predominantly informed by an extraction-based model. As Bauman writes,
“the separation and destruction of waste was to be the trade secret of modern creation:
through cutting out and throwing away the superfluous, the needless and the
useless….the pleasing and gratifying was to be divined” (21). Notably, Bauman’s
instructive analogy is an accurate description of cinematic editing, and thus closely aligns
film technology with the more obviously extractive-based art of sculpting; for, indeed,
both practices are premised on elimination, paring away, cutting down and then
discarding the unnecessary, enveloping waste. Perhaps with the exception of a long take
executed in a single attempt, the very act of cinematic creation, then, inherently implies a
use of resources and subsequent generation of unwanted materials. To be sure,
modernity’s art forms, like the mining/extraction societies with which Mumford
associates them, are wholly dependent on the creation of detritus. “For something to be
created,” Bauman writes, “something else must be consigned to waste” (22). An
“indispensable ingredient of the creative process,” waste is characterized by a particular
ambivalence that, depending on its context, renders it both “divine and satanic,” a
“unique blend of attraction and repulsion” (22). Referencing Mary Douglas’s theories of
purity taboos, Bauman explains that waste becomes such only through processes of
separation. Arbitrary social categorizations have the power to cast one object as repulsive
or useless, while another is prized for its aesthetic quality or use-value (22). And once
waste is separated out, it must be rendered invisible, usually becoming re-enveloped,
contained by some other form. As architecture critic Lisa Rochon points out: “How to
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package garbage, and make it less offensive, has become the latest design challenge” (25).
The wrapper, then, requires a new wrapper. Any aesthetic practice that is based on
recycling detritus and parings can be understood as a secondary wrapper, wherein making
use of waste similarly, necessarily, creates waste, thus perpetuating the circuitry of
production, use and eventual disposal.
Our eco-centric news media increasingly focus on the relationship between
excessive commodity consumption and a crisis of garbage over-production. But what is
consumed, however, is not only the commodity that is housed within the protective foam
shell, glass jar or plastic sheath, but the package itself. For something to be ingested, in
other words, a container must be turned into garbage. As Heather Rogers notes, the
systematic eradication of refillable drinking containers after World War Two inaugurated
the standardization of what is now ubiquitous disposable packaging and radically
transformed the composition of American trash demographics. By the mid-1970s, Rogers
writes, “packaging had already become the single largest category of municipal solid
waste in the United States” (“Message” 114-115). Presently, single-use packages
(especially cans and bottles) compose one third of American landfill space and have
directly contributed to the doubling of the country’s amount of garbage in the past thirty
years (114-15). Packaging has become an invisible form of garbage; it is garbage
“waiting to happen,” as Rogers understands it (Hidden Life 7), for it is transformed from
commodity to waste merely by virtue of whether or not a container is full or empty.
Indeed, contemporary design (creative waste, as it is often described) has shifted
increasingly towards the package. And yet, the package is not meant to be detectable.
Rather, as Rogers argues, “packaging is barely perceptible as a commodity; its limited
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use-life and predetermined fate as waste” have become culturally acceptable (116). But to
conceive of the container as anything other than a commodity object is to deny its origins
and therefore its essence, for the package, like its contents, is also composed of “natural
resources and human labor – and produces profit” (116). From razors and electronics to
the cultural productions retained on CDs and DVDs, for example, the division between
the single-use package and the disposable product is slight. And just as Rogers points out
that conceptions of what constitutes a package and/or consumable commodity is in need
of radical alteration, likewise does the package need to go further and grapple with
cultural production as both a resource-driven “good” and a promotional container.
So it is that the nebulous and anonymous entity known as Hollywood thrives by
the philosophy of the package, reserving a more than significant portion of a film’s
budget for its marketing interfaces. In 2003, for example, the cost of producing a movie
averaged at $63.8 million, while the standard release cost was $39 million (Fischer 61).
Notable too is that the release budget had risen 28% since the previous year, while
production costs had increased by only 8.6% (61). By funneling this amount of economic
and creative energy into promotional phases (perfecting the wrapper for, perhaps, a less
than perfect film), the film industry, then, rather cynically reverses the logic of
Michelangelo’s sculpting metaphor. As critics such as Cherchi Usai point out, it is the
wrapping that is the ideal form, the contents they conceal paling when compared to their
anticipatory advertisements. Both the extension of and a challenge to mainstream first-
run cinema, the package contributes considerably more value to the re-release market and
its distributors who trade in the economy of lost films, whether archival, restored,
repaired or culturally rehabilitated. Barbara Klinger cites films released on DVD by
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Criterion as one example of how attention to packaging (from the actual container to the
extras and special features) privileges certain films as “standing outside the normal
avalanche of videocassettes and DVDs” and secures them “an elite position in the flow of
movie goods” (60). Criterion’s creation and domination of a refined home-movie market
has seemingly exceeded the influence of academic and art-house taste-makers and
generated a cinematic canon that is sprawling, trans-historical, trans-cultural, market-
based and consumer-oriented. As Cherchi Usai likewise points out, digital cinema’s basic
economy is devoted to the packaging of the reissue: superficially touching up,
repackaging and re-promoting a director’s cut or digital re-master, the lost or forgotten
classic (117). But what distinguishes “movie goods,” as Klinger calls them, from the
more conventionally understood consumer goods is that, though newly packaged and
restored, the archival film and/or re-release has already been subjected to the circuitry of
dissemination and consumption and so is by definition secondhand, post-consumer, and a
recycled commodity.
The combination of home theatres, digitization, and the marketing of released
“classics” has reconstructed the cinephile as archivist, consumer, and technophile
(Klinger 63). The preoccupation with collecting cinema has become “inextricably linked
to the newest and best technology” and is manifested in a direct correlation between the
purchase of playing/ recording equipment and the beginnings of private film libraries (63).
Thus, the collector not only purchases personal copies of favorite or otherwise essential
films, but is likewise devoted to updating ever-improving entertainment systems. Though
her focus is specifically on a social politics of repetitive viewing in the home, much of
the importance of Klinger’s project resides in her commitment to examining how new
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media’s technological and economic infrastructures are altering the conception of cinema,
as both a medium and an area of study. Klinger’s investigation of the relationship
between cinematic replay technology and repeated encounters with re-issued and thus
recycled movies within the domestic sphere can be taken a step further; the result is to
broaden the scope of a recycled, “secondhand” cinema to include the environmental
politics that are inextricably linked to new media’s specific home-viewing practices. In
other words, what Klinger points out as the unprecedented democratized access to and
ownership of cinema that digital technology has facilitated must not only evaluate the
relationship between the viewer and his or her repetitive viewing habits, but must also
take into account the hard reality of the actual viewing technologies, including the
philosophy of growth through obsolescence and its attendant production of waste. Thus,
digital democratization and the empire of home-cinema are supported by a residual image
ecology and a practice of “secondary wrapping,” wherein the re-issued, re-released, re-
mastered, re-cut film is concealed in a fresh container and transformed from what
amounts to a used-good to a primary commodity. So, the combined implications of the
movie good’s packaging or wrapper, the guaranteed obsolescence of the machinery that
plays and replays it, as well as the limited shelf-life of a non-collectable, expendable film,
situate waste as the foundation and also the consequence of democratized, domesticated
cinema.
The digital democratization of cinema, that is, the access and ease with which
film can be viewed, owned, copied and also produced, shifts cinema from the public
sphere to the private. In the same way that digitization atomizes the image, making it
possible to create numerous reproductions without compromising the quality of the
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original or its imprints, so too does the accompanying technology become commodified
and similarly diffused throughout those populations who can afford to purchase it. Walter
Benjamin’s argument that technology’s ability to reproduce objects of cultural reverence
erodes the uniqueness that is their essential ontological value also situates democratized
ownership as the force that shifted the religious to the secular and, by extension, public
culture to private consumption. Because reproduction’s unavoidable consequence is the
creation of surplus, excess and thus some form of waste, Benjamin’s definitive and also
ever-evolving essay now resonates with a distinct set of environmental implications.
An instructive correlation is found in what Rogers suggests is the contribution of
single-use packaging to the refinement of commodity distribution and, ultimately, the
ability of the industry to extend its reach into the home, shaping the daily habits of the
individual consumer. The introduction of the refillable bottle and then the take home six-
pack, for example, shifted the mode of beer consumption from public to private.
Liberated of need to collect and reuse empties, the manufacturer found the use of
disposable bottles widened product dissemination and subsequently replaced the
conventional (communal) keg and the local tavern with the more convenient option of
imbibing within the home (118). Also, because of the linear flow of the beer bottle that
mass distribution made possible, the final leg of the journey was transferred to the
consumer who absorbed the responsibility of bringing beer to the household. The idea,
then, is that the shift from public to private that is at the heart of democratization and
consumerism depends on multiplicity and reproduction; private ownership produces
accumulation, therefore, and not only of material objects but also their seemingly
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immaterial equivalents, the images and information that digital devices generate, display
and ultimately render consumable objects.
There is, (however) though, a disconnect between the individualization of cinema
and what are recent gestures towards the communalization of other forms of consumer
culture’s infrastructures. On the one hand, communal or public systems that were once
literally trashed and replaced with private or privatized counterparts are being revisited
and their infrastructures rehabilitated. Public transportation, encouraged as a replacement
for single-passenger automobile commuting, is one example, as is participating in
municipal re-bottling programs, sharing energy within carbon-exchange grid-systems, or
cultivating home produce gardens. But on the other hand, the increasingly entrenched and
unprecedented dominance of cinema and visual culture is shifting in the opposite
direction, reverting to a less public, more private realm. And the result of the
individualization of the cinema is the over-production of its necessary technological
infrastructures and the over-consumption of its required energy; every home equipped
with some version of a theatre parallels the multiple cars parked in each homeowner’s
driveway. The individualized consumption of the image, like the insistent dependence on
private transportation, signals the same unsustainable patterns of single-use/single-user
consumer society, a condition targeted for the first time by the UN Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 Assessment Report. While the smaller scale
of individualized image consumption suggests a diminished expenditure of energy on the
part of the consumer and industry alike, what self-sufficiency belies is the massive
amount of replication and reproduction. The home-theatre and the home production
studio, like the single-passenger automobile, inextricably link the over-production of
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images and their technologies with the fuels necessary for their manufacture, distribution
and consumption. This private/public duplicity thus captures the dialectical tension, and
even contradiction, at the heart of post-industrial society and its digital culture: at once so
relentlessly private and so unequivocally public, digitality and its cinema are therefore
moving in two directions at once, wherein it is undoubtedly becoming more open and
available, but only for the private consumer. Indeed, the “re” prefix that characterizes
digital’s mythology of progressive, immaterial, carbon-neutral sustainability, suggested
by its capacity for recycling, the sharing of images and information across a publicity of
users, is also charged with the meaning of “withdraw” and “backwards motion” –
reversion, retreat, retraction. The plurality and duplicity inherent in the “re” prefix, then,
signals a movement ahead – the rebirth associated with recycling – and a movement back
– the regression of a privatized and exponentially multiplying home-(re)viewing cinema.
Digitality is thus firsthand and secondhand; it is both new and old; it is waste, garbage,
trash, and it is freshness; it is the capacity to instantly erase and to infinitely archive. A
tool for the production and preservation of cultural texts and objects, the waste that
digital devices and images create is mostly invisible, concealed within the secondary
wrapper of electronically derived geographies, or quarantined to the post-consumer
elsewhere and hidden in the euphemisms of garbage and recycling.
Secondhand Cinema
Intersecting the aesthetics, politics and economics of cinematic production, Bauman’s
important evocation of “wrappings” describes both packaging, in the literal sense, as well
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as the practical mode of cinema’s generation of material and immaterial waste.
Additionally, the concept contributes a dimension to the theorization of a cinema that is
rendered from waste itself. The parings that fall away from the sculptor’s chisel or the
editor’s scissors are only waste so long as they are kept separate from the “pure” realm of
the finished, artistic project. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s 1986 documentary Routine Pleasures
hinges on an agreement wherein the filmmaker acquires his shooting privileges in
exchange for relinquishing whatever residual footage his project might yield and
otherwise leave behind. So it is that without this negotiation Routine Pleasures would not
have been possible. Gorin’s focus is a club of model train enthusiasts whose centralizing
subject and chief orator (Corky) is also an amateur filmmaker. So, as a practitioner of
cinema, the value in Gorin’s leftovers is readily apparent to Corky and, as Gorin explains,
from it the club intends to cut its own self-portrait. What is inherently embedded in
Routine Pleasures, then, what informs the very foundation of the enterprise’s right to
exist, is the understanding that cinema has the essential ability to reorder and reformulate
images and thus grant waste an afterlife. Indeed, the image (cinematic, photographic) is
inherently transformative. As Sontag’s famous essays on photography emphasize, once
selected and aestheticized by the privileging attention of the camera’s transformative eye,
squalor, deformity or bits of trash are given value and recast as objects of art or cultural
artifacts. Subjects within images (cinematic and photographic) are themselves converted,
but so too is the material, physical reality of the image’s support surface; it all depends on
whether or not the celluloid is original or secondhand, that is, found elsewhere, rescued
through reuse and thus rehabilitated. But as Bauman’s sculpting metaphor makes
relentlessly clear, extraction-based cultural production is always about the materiality of
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its resource – whether marble or celluloid – and through that resource’s refinement, the
generation of waste. All cinema, all photo-mechanical image-making is therefore
inextricably connected to the process of making waste, the difference is that not all
cinema, however, makes active use of detritus. Such is the subtle implication of Gorin’s
film, suggesting that, indeed, there is the potential that the excess of the monumental long
take, the buoyant open aperture of Direct Cinema or the opulent reams of typically
unwatched footage accumulated by CCTV surveillance cameras will be absorbed by
another project and granted a cinematic afterlife.
Gorin’s film complements the subject matter as well as the documentary conceits
that inform Agnès Varda’s digital video documentary The Gleaners and I (2000). In her
essayistic investigation into the politics of consumerism, resource availability, poverty
and scarcity, Varda, like Gorin, conflates the investigation of the film’s subject with the
life of the filmmaker, producing a decidedly subjective discourse that merges the
specificity of digital video with her sense of self. What distinguishes the two films on the
most obvious and important level is the shift from Gorin’s analog medium to Varda’s
digital one. Though Gorin’s model train enthusiasts would function quite convincingly in
Varda’s film, gleaning from their portraitist’s discards as they do, it is Varda’s digital
medium, defined in part by practical and conceptual dimensions of recycling, that renders
hers a specifically “secondhand” enterprise.
Structured around the practice of la glanage or “gleaning,” Varda’s film outlines
the term’s trajectory from pre-industrial rural economies to contemporary post-industrial
urban ones. Originating simply as the way farm workers trawled the fields and gathered
for themselves what was left after harvest (and thus managing agricultural surplus),
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gleaning’s current manifestation assumes the castigated form of scavenging or, in
specifically urban environs, garbage picking. Foraging meals out of the trash, harvesting
fallen fruit and vegetables from farmers’ fields, or making art out of garbage-picked
objects, Varda’s subjects – whom the filmmaker effectively separates out and thus
scavenges from the wider population – are committed recyclers, marginalized by the
social expectations of consumer culture. Transformed by Varda’s camera and the insight
of her narration, the gleaners of the film function as analogs for Varda herself; indeed, the
process of employing images “gleaned” or harvested from the universe at large,
scavenged and infused with new meaning once taken home, cleaned up and edited
together confirms this equation. As the term is unpacked etymologically and socially,
gleaning is likewise extended as a metaphor for the mechanics and dynamics of
filmmaking and a way to understand how contemporary, consumer-culture identity is
organized around the accumulation of randomly acquired tokens, souvenirs and
possessions.
Outfitted with what is for her brand new DV technology, Varda reinstates
gleaning as a necessary social, economic and cultural intervention. Theorizing the
relationship between cinema and recycling, for Varda “gleaning” describes a specifically
digital cinematic aesthetic. Indeed, Varda fits into the sub-genre (or trans-genre) of
independent, subjective, autobiographical and decidedly first-person DV documentary, of
which there is an ever-increasing abundance. The specificity of such practice, Varda
argues, positions the self-sufficient cinematic document as a composite of ideas and
images gathered from the practitioner’s immediate universe (real-world, cyberspace, new
media landscapes) which are then reorganized, restructured and reformulated into
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discrete, subjective visions such as Agnès Varda’s. The digital first-person mode is a
limited cinema, in other words, extracted from what is within reach, accessible,
necessarily close at hand.
Varda’s film implicitly theorizes the essentially “impure” or secondhand nature of
image-based art. Bakhtin’s theory of “heteroglossia” and “the dialogic” is a useful
approximation of Varda’s aesthetic articulation of post-industrial cultural production. In
“The Problems of Speech Genres,” Bakhtin articulated how language – spoken, written,
imagined in our minds – is “already-used,” “second hand,” and essentially “hybrid” (75).
What is, in specifically Bakhtinian terms, “double-voicedness” results from speech
diversity, a principle of socio-linguistics in which other words and speech patterns are
“gleaned” from the voices and genres circulating in the world at large and appropriated
by the speaker. The voice, according to Bakhtin’s conception of “heteroglossia,” carries
with it other voices, rendering language “dialogic,” alive with a multiplicity of speakers.
Language is never original; by extension, expressive communication, linguistic (or visual)
is always layered with residues and resonances, the leftovers of all its previous users and
uses. “Our speech,” Bakhtin writes, “is filled with others’ words…which carry with them
their own expressions, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and re-
accentuate” (89). Bakhtin argues that dialogism undermines the authority of an
individual’s speech, subordinating it to the din of other voices, the fabric from which it is
composed, making it impossible to speak purely, “monologically,” in one’s own voice.
The metaphorical value which infuses Varda’s discourse on gleaning achieves a similarly
subversive vision of how the individual and the filmic product are manufactured in direct
relation to the culture from which they spring. Varda, then, effectively upends the
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privileged naiveté of consumerism, exposing the junk heaps, garbage dumps and
disenfranchised citizens that maintain the conditions necessary for a society and economy
to be structured around the ability to throw away and continually renew itself without
apparent or visible consequences. Just as it is impossible to imagine a pure articulation,
so, Varda argues, the post-consumer is seeping into our sensibilities, aesthetics and selves.
The garbage bin is not the end of the discarded item; the dump, rather, is an accumulation
of resources and potential for reuse. What, after all, is cyberspace if not a dumping
ground? Just as Bakhtin was invested in analogizing the impossibility of speaking with a
single voice and the contradictions of totalitarian monotheism, so Varda uses gleaning-as-
metaphor to approximate a similar discourse on the fallacy of the pure image, the pure
subjectivity, and on the impossibility to conceptualize the object without also accounting
for the provenance of its origins and the trajectory of its demise. In other words, Varda’s
is a cinema of leftovers and remains; the concept of disposability thus banished, what is
placed in its stead is a residual ecology of the image.
As Varda explains to her camera/ viewer, the guiding formal principle of her
determinedly digital project is “to use one hand to film the other.” Thus describing what
is here conceptualized as a “secondhand cinema,” the term compresses multiple
possibilities by which to understand and critically assess digital cinema’s technological
and ideological core. To begin, separate from but also attached to “gleaning,” Varda’s
intended meaning of “filming one hand with the other” articulates one of the structuring
conceits that informs much of her essayistic exploration of what is, for her, a new
technology. A woman in her seventies, Varda finds herself liberated physically by the
digital camera. The lightweight apparatus combines with an extensive depth of field to
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eliminate the need for tripods, lenses and crew, and thus grants Varda increased mobility
and independence. Her free hand often standing in for her total physicality, she frequently
trains the camera on herself by means of capturing this “second” hand as it picks or
gleans its way through her surroundings. But when she sees her hand (and so her own self)
cast on her camera’s playback screen, what she encounters is unfamiliar – she is aging,
her skin wrinkling, musculature weakening; she feels caged by the inevitabilities of time.
Secondhand cinema thus not only describes a cinema that makes use of existing materials,
but it is also understood as a practical, medium-specific version of “first-person” cinema.
The term, in other words, articulates how digital autobiographical filmmaking leaves one
hand free, and so is premised upon the self-sufficiency, mobility and multiple
occupations that its lightweight equipment allows. What adds further dimension to the
secondhand conceits that guide Varda’s film is found in the subtle equation she makes
between her own self and the discards that are gleaned by the subjects of her film. Aging,
expiring, she is becoming alienated from the vessel or container of her identity; thus she
is not only a gleaner, but she also equated with that which is gleaned. The discourse on
her aging body is articulated by approximating her ostensible limitations with the expired
or surplus objects that litter the terrain of her documentary. Varda subtly situates herself
and the category of elderly alongside the inanimate objects that are portrayed in the film.
She is, in other words, expired, a cast-off, over-looked, marginalized or otherwise left
behind.
There is, of course, a critical difference between a cinema that represents waste
and one that is explicitly rendered from the husks that have been pared away in order to
reveal the tailored, structured form that is a finished film. The term second-hand cinema,
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however, can also be used to describe a theory of film that exceeds both representing
waste as well as making use of extant cinematic images. Indeed, it would be limiting to
suggest that the secondhand is best applied to that filmmaking practice which trawls for
“found” images, gathering discards, the lost and forgotten celluloid found in stock rooms
or archives, and then altering it into a new form. For Varda, making a film, a
documentary specifically, is an approximation of gleaning because it literally uses only
what is available, that which she finds in her immediate world and, through editing,
transforms into an essay, an investigation, a narrative of self and others and the society
that binds them. And what is available is what the filmmaker and her camera and their
rather restricted means of financing, transport and cinematic resources can access. Thus,
as Varda’s free hand, the punning “second” hand which does not hold the camera,
literally (manually) encounters disposed-of objects, it becomes emblematic of her film’s
digital brand of autobiography and her aging, expendable self. Additionally, however,
this free hand also takes on the dimension of limited accessibility, making use of that
which is within reach of the filmmaker’s hand. The secondhand, Varda’s film suggests, is
a cinema of limited resources, and so is typically characterized by independent, self-
sufficient cinematic practitioners who are often devoted to the enabling, malleable and
rather inclusive documentary form. As such, the secondhand might then be an
anticipation of and model for the emergent carbon-neutral cinema. Using available,
natural light, the camera operator’s own energy and ambulatory mobility, a sustainable
film practice takes for its pro-filmic environment that which is within the vicinity of the
free or liberated hand. The secondhand, then, is about proximity, focusing not only on the
self as a subject but on the practitioner’s immediate, available realm. This is, by
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extension, a local cinema and thus potentially low-energy, conforming to ideologies of
sustainability and suggesting an intersection between digital’s “pure” ontological
dimensions and our contemporary eco-centric fixation with eliminating anthropogenic
pollutants and consequent environmental erosion. Again, Varda’s documentary is
particularly prescient, for it anticipates on numerous levels how cultural (specifically
cinematic) production must acquire an aesthetic, ideology and sensibility that
acknowledge resource limitation as a way to both represent, render as a practice, and also
critique the increasing domination of eco-centric consciousness.
Specifically informed by strictures of limitation, Kristan Horton’s photographic
approximations of film stills taken from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove can also be
understood within the category of a secondhand (and carbon-neutral) cinema. Horton’s
project takes a still from each of the scenes that compose Kubrick’s film, remodels it
using detritus the artist scrounged within the confines of his own studio, and then
reproduces the original with his own analog photographic camera. Horton’s secondhand
practice operates, like Varda’s, by reaching out and grasping for those objects within his
immediate realm, reconfiguring his personal surroundings into the model landscapes that
so uncannily suggest the stills selected from Kubrick’s film. Horton’s, then, is a
secondhand cinema; in material terms, the objects it uses are composed of detritus,
garbage, broken throw-aways and random bits gleaned from the artist’s own environment.
It is also secondhand in terms of its practice, for it relies on a principle of “arm’s reach”
by which to construct each photograph’s environment. The stills themselves are also
rendered secondhand in that by photographing each one Horton reproduces the original
text, transforming Dr. Strangelove into a recycled, post-consumer, secondhand version,
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and vision, of cinema. The project’s implications, specifically regarding cinematic
practice – digital and photo-mechanical – abound. Evoking a narrative of an enforced
creative economy that is based on scarcity rather than excess, Horton constructs an
enduring discourse on the image’s materiality, as well as the possibilities inherent in
conditions of limitation and rationing. Though composed of photographs, “Dr.
Strangelove, Dr. Strangelove” is nothing if not cinematic. Because it is static, this cinema
is, of course, carbon-neutral. And it is primitive, reducing as it does the camera’s mobility
to the point that it becomes physically fixed, positing that the film itself is unable rather
than unwilling to move. The minimalism that is the formal and aesthetic pith of Horton’s
work evokes something of Andy Warhol’s ideal of an entropic cinema whose limited
expenditure of energy also eradicated movement. The Russian avant-garde’s film-
without-film experiments are likewise implicitly referenced. The extremity to which
Horton restricts his project’s resources renders each photograph an uncanny vision of a
proto-cinematic sensibility. However, as “Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Strangelove” references
such a well-known if not canonical film, the project positions itself as an epilogue, if not
a sequel, to the original text. Dialoguing with Kubrick’s Cold War satire, Horton
responds to the source film’s cynical vision of nuclear catastrophe by suggesting that the
images themselves are artifacts from a post-apocalyptic and post-Kubrick future.
Horton’s project, in other words, operates as a message from that same mine shaft where
the film’s eponymous mad scientist proposes select members of humanity might survive
nuclear fallout. Thus, conceivably, scarcity of resources and equipment has limited the
means of cinema but not the cinematic imagination. “Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Strangelove” is
thus a science-fictional dystopia that casts Kubrick’s film as the residue of a cultural
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practice that is no longer materially possible. Here is a carbon-free cinema rather than
just carbon-neutral one; here is the post-cinema, beyond digitality, forced back to its
earliest, most rudimentary photo-mechanical practice. Horton’s mocked-up
approximations are equally haunted and frustrated by the memories and mythologies of
the cinematic imagination, preserved in the original film stills that are situated alongside
his own photographs. The essential implication of reading Horton’s work as both a
secondhand cinema and a glimpse of a lost civilization sheltered in Strangelove’s mine-
shaft – the infrastructure of an extraction-based culture – is the multi-dimensional
foregrounding of the relationship between cinema and resources. Radically deprived of
material means, motion itself is the most glaring omission from Kubrick’s source text, the
“cine” that made Dr. Strangelove a narrative told in the real-time of energy rather than
the entropy of the static shot. But when experienced in a gallery space, the viewer follows
the Dr. Strangelove narrative along by foot, still by still, circling the room, and thus he or
she reinserts the motion that Horton has taken away. As such “Dr. Strangelove, Dr.
Strangelove” produces cinema itself, conceptually and practically, though in a recycled
form.
Though gleaned from an environment of commodities, an unlikely comparison
aligns the rudimentary practices of “Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Strangelove” with Stan
Brakhage’s “organic” films, Mothlight (1963) and The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981).
Constructed without a camera, Brakhage’s primitive gesture saw the filmmaker collage
bits of plant and insect life (blades of grass, moth wings) directly onto tape, from which
projectable prints were then made. Though a more cursory look might situate Horton
alongside Bruce Connor’s experimental found-footage celluloid mash-ups, Horton’s
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practical and structural conceits are in fact more aesthetically and politically aligned with
Brakhage’s organic output not only in terms of their common primitivism but also
because “Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Strangelove” challenges the possibility of organic as a
category. The suggestion made by both Horton’s artificially derived universe and
Brakhage’s “natural” one is that no thing (even “organically” derived) is pure, untouched
by hands of industrial process. Imminence, purity, authenticity are the unobtainable ideals
suggested by the increasingly dominant ideology of the organic. What is within Horton’s
reach are industrial wastes that are essentially composted by his camera and thus
reformulated into, first, post-Kubrick models and, second, photographic images. So,
while Horton’s bits and pieces of industrial culture are recycled and thus reconfigured as
“living” cinematic objects (needle-nose pliers are a naval officer, a handful of popcorn is
a mushroom cloud) Brakhage’s leaves and insects are transformed in the reverse direction,
but are ultimately rendered industrial objects by virtue of being contained within the
technological medium that is cinema. Both filmmakers, then, (and the dimensions of
Horton’s project situate him as such, though on a conceptual level) are composters.
Because the material make-up of their respective resources is dialectically at odds, the
suggestion is that both industry and culture have transformed how they manufacture
waste – materially and conceptually. From the natural to the industrial to the
contemporary hybrid that is the organic, taken together, Brakhage and Horton represent
something of the trajectory of our culture’s waste generation. Similarly, Varda’s film also
documents such a transformation – from pre-industrial to post-industrial gleaning. Before
industrialization, her film suggests, gleaning was, like the dominant mode of production
and economy, agrarian; as such, the surpluses that field workers foraged from a harvest’s
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leftovers were natural (organic) and thus unquestionably fit for consumption. Indeed, as
Susan Strasser points out, the shift from agrarian to industrial economies, and from rural
to urban geographies, also transformed the surplus objects that were available to be
gleaned. Instead of agrarian society’s residual fruit and vegetables, industrializing urban
centers exuded their detritus in the form of scraps of mechanically manufactured
materials. Varda’s rural gleaners, thus, were redefined as rag pickers. But at this early
stage of urbanization, there was still no such thing as garbage or compost. These
categories, Strasser argues, were produced by the transition to full scale mass production
and the conversion to a one way, open flow, linear ecology. The shift to consumer culture,
Strasser argues, was accompanied by the erosion of recycling behaviors and thus
introduced a radical change in the perception of the material object. “For the first time in
human history,” Strasser writes, the disposal of detritus “became separated from
production, consumption and reuse” (109). Mass production thus superceded systems of
“transference,” wherein an object was transformed by the stages of its use and value as it
traveled from manufacturer to primary consumer to picker, then sold back to industry
where its materials were recycled and thus reabsorbed into the system. As philosophies of
obsolescence and disposability were introduced and then naturalized, the salvaged shard
and broken bit lost their economic worth and so the rag picker was recast as the harvester
of garbage, essentially disenfranchised from the industrial economy whose surpluses
were not worth recovering and so declared worthless.
Attaching value to a discard – arbitrarily or randomly so – transforms it from
waste into a found object; the dumpster-diver assumes the role of the recycler or the
gleaner. Situating Horton’s work next to Brakhage’s organic films and Varda’s Gleaners
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articulates a similar shift. Taken together these films map the secret life of detritus and
suggest not only the essential instability of the category of garbage, but also how cultural
production bears responsibility for manufacturing and then naturalizing what are the
arbitrary distinctions between useful and useless. The secondhand cinema is therefore
both a way to articulate the waste-specific transformative dimension of the image, as well
as, potentially, a waste management system wherein the material and immaterial
environments of cinema acknowledge, critique and contribute to the sustainable
possibilities implicit in a residual image ecology. What is more, these works by Brakhage,
Horton and Varda could be almost arbitrarily selected from the already extant tradition of
sustainable filmmaking. Taken together, then, they comprise a body of proto carbon-
neutral cinema from which such formal initiatives as the Planet in Focus Film Festival
might draw from to exemplify the possibility of making film (and a festival) from that
which already exists. A secondhand cinema and a secondhand festival, then, would
glimpse how film production and its reception might modify, willingly or otherwise, to
meet the demands of carbon-neutral cinema in particular but, more importantly, to
introduce new conditions of ecological sustainability on a broad, socially expansive level.
Overexposure and Expendability
A cinema of limitation is a cinema of randomness; the principle of chance is part
of what defines Varda’s project as well as Horton’s. While Varda happens upon gleaners
and images of gleaning in what she maintains are fortuitous moments, Horton’s senses
are likewise finely attuned to finding Dr. Strangelove in his environment and by
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extension, his environment in Dr. Strangelove. In terms of the source film, Horton
describes how it was randomly acquired. “I don’t have a television. When a friend
dropped off a VHS version of the film to the studio, it became the only thing to watch on
the monitor” (Pasulka). Thus located within the circumscribed boundaries of the artist’s
immediate field, it became an object of fixation, if not obsession. “In two and a half
years,” he explains, “I watched the film over 700 times. My perception was saturated by
the film, and this caused me to respond to it” (Pasulka). Indeed, Horton came to the point
where he could no longer distinguish the film from his universe and as his two worlds
collided, the artist was left “seeing both the pie plate and the UFO” (Horton 282). Again,
Horton’s behavior bespeaks a primitivism and an imposed aesthetic of limitation and
rationing not unlike the conditions imposed upon the Russian avant-garde. Viewing D. W.
Griffiths’ Intolerance with repeated zeal, for example, led to the film being re-cut and its
parts reordered, thus forcing Eisenstein and others to find potential in deprivation. As
such, their education and formal training did not entail abundant exposure to a range of
films, but rationed overexposure to a lone example. Horton’s project documents how
repeated viewing does indeed erode or diminish the effectiveness of the over-played film;
the exaggeration and hyperbole that define Kubrick’s famous satire is rendered absolutely
minimal, if not banal. Exposing himself to a single film with relentless dedication and
self-enforced deprivation, Horton’s steady diet of Dr. Strangelove complicates the
relations between viewer and viewed, questioning which one is truly overexposed: the
film to the viewer or the viewer to the film? Which, in other words, is left more damaged
or altered by habitual, excessive replay? The obsessive viewer whose perspective
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dissolves into Dr. Strangelove, or the film that is viewed until its support surface
disintegrates?
As Horton’s title cleverly suggests, an integral dimension of cinema is its capacity
for repetition. Not only do the privatization and democratization of cinema imply the
exponential mass replication and ownership of cinematic equipment, but so do cinematic
texts themselves. Commercially purchased, independently-owned, these films will likely
be, as Barbara Klinger argues, subjected to repeat viewings by the collector-consumer
and their content effectively recycled each time a title is played. The combination of the
re-release and the economy of repeated viewing that is at the heart of the domesticated,
home-owned cinema functions as a further layer within the concept of the secondhand,
recycled cinema, thus further extending it beyond associations of found-footage film
practice or the environmental consciousness. Any film can or will potentially be included
within the scope of the secondhand precisely because digital technology has made it
possible. Now that digital has, as Klinger argues, allowed media companies to reach into
the home, rendering collecting and repeated viewing as mainstream habits, the cultural,
commercial and technological dimensions of cinema combine to transform cinema itself
into what might be understood, in the cinematic spirit of Gorin, as a “routine pleasure.”
Celluloid film was not intended to last. Rather, photo-mechanic support surfaces
typically came with a shelf-life and the film industry treated its product accordingly –
expendable, transient and ultimately disposable. As Cherchi Usai describes, film strips
were ephemeral objects that were “repeatedly shown in different locations and at
different times until they were completely destroyed at last – that is, when the physical
condition of the carrier was in a state so disastrous as to make its further exhibition
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virtually impossible” (67). Celluloid is thus not only altered by exposure to
environmental elements (oxygen for developed stock, light for raw celluloid) but also
from repeated exhibition. Such overexposure is manifest in the material disintegration of
celluloid, the physical material that time and air transform from image carrier to a
mottled, useless vestige of expended life. Additionally, however, overexposure also
transforms the content of a film. Not only does flooding viewing platforms with a
particular image or sequence of images potentially inure audiences to what might
otherwise be horrific or shocking depictions, but it also renders replayed subject matter
banal, expendable – the politics of its content thus disintegrates, falls apart, and is finally
replaced with something new and unfamiliar. Again, what gluts the post-industrial
landscape is the irreconcilable character of the material and immaterial objects produced
according to the contradictory imbalances of durability, on the one hand, and
disposability, on the other. The residual ecology of the image instructively includes, sorts
out and also critiques these overlapping contradictions; additionally, the concept asserts
Sontag’s notion that it is necessary to limit such overexposure in order to uphold the
integrity of the image’s content and its ability to affect the sensibility of the viewer, if not
culture and society at large.
Kristan Horton’s uninterrupted dedication to Dr. Strangelove parodies not only
the parodic film itself, but reception studies, cultural studies and other disciplines
invested in critiquing the media’s over-saturation of contemporary sensory landscapes.
Horton’s strict Dr. Strangelove regimen clearly articulates how the artist’s overexposure
absorbed the film’s hyperbolic spirit, articulated here in its own ironic twist of an ironic
text as an aesthetic of hyperactive minimalism. It is thus through his cinematic
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primitivism that Horton manages a critique of media reception (as a discipline), of the
behavior of repetitive viewing, as well as of contemporary culture’s digital domination.
That is, instead of using contemporary, available, conventional means and downloading,
burning or otherwise reproducing a copy of Kubrick’s film, Horton’s method of
reproduction is entirely, literally manual. Casting himself as a cinematic scrivener in a
pre-Gutenberg galaxy, the artist foregrounds how enthusiasm for a particular film is
typically articulated not only by multiple viewings but also through digital reproduction
and therefore possession.
But digital is not primitive and its capacity for repetition is defined by both its
instantaneity and its seemingly infinite reserves of storage and energy. The expression of
one’s interest or passion for a text does not typically require the time or energy of
Horton’s fastidious, hyper-manual and super-material exercise in minimalism. As
Cherchi Usai unapologetically argues, digitization directly contributes to a glutted image
environment that is characterized by over-production, over-abundance and the
accumulation of cultural waste. Without making explicit his qualitative assessments of
contemporary mainstream cinema, the archivist maintains that its over-production floods
the marketplace and makes it impossible to separate the waste from the worthwhile. Both
Cherchi Usai and Horton use their texts to isolate and interrogate a conflict inherent to
digital technology – that of the scarcity of certain cinematic resources (disintegrating
classical films, for example) but also a hyper-abundance of restored re-releases which
compete with new, contemporary releases. There are, Cherchi Usai argues, a finite
number of films that can be “identified, catalogued and viewed in a given time span;
beyond that number there is nothing but pointless accumulation, a waste of energy
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directed towards the intellectual control of a corpus far too large to be grasped; the
syndrome of Universal Filmography” (77). And this is only the “photographic moving
image;” when digital films are taken into account, their infinite capacity for
fragmentation and reproduction creates a cinema-scape “so vast that the attempt to assess
what is worth seeing and what may be allowed to disappear becomes itself a hopeless
task” (77). The over-production of the image is the precondition for devaluation and is
therefore at the foundation of its expendability. Again, as Cherchi Usai points out, the
destruction of image “carriers” (the celluloid support surface) was “not only inevitable
but desirable insofar as new carriers and new images had to be created for commercial
reasons” (67). The difference that digital technology inserts is that images are now both
disposable – by means of their cost-effectiveness and overabundance – as well as durable
– infinitely reproducible and thus in little danger of wearing out. The tension between
these two attributes is what defines the general terms of a global garbage crisis and
environmental decay. The political danger here resides in the fact that the ability to
collect, archive and store images makes their content less accessible, and less visible
therefore; relegated to the limitless geographies of storage space, images are reduced by
the ratio of how much can be remembered versus how much is actually retained.
The Disposable Documentary
The overexposure of images is the aesthetic and/or visual counterpart to their
over-production. Foregrounding the material dimensions of durability and bio-
degradability, the over-played picture, like commodity goods, is constructed according to
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a principle of expendability rather than longevity. As we have seen, and as theorists of
electronic waste point out, the mythology of digital immateriality belies the physical
reality manifested in particularly insidious forms of garbage generation and the lingering
toxicity of its leaching pollutants. “Digital technology,” Gabrys writes, “is hardly light or
dematerialized” (159). Semiconductors, for example, “require tremendous amounts of
material inputs,” though almost 99 percent of what is used is eventually discarded. So it
is that before generating what Gabyrs calls the “impossibly pure” processing component
such as the microchip any amount of treated resources and chemical compounds are
released into the environment (159). Digital infrastructure thus produces not only
physical waste in the form of hardware, but its images are by association equally solid
and corporeal, ontologically, economically and environmentally. So it is that the
important intervention critics such as Gabrys are making ought to be extended and
necessarily modified so as to include the realm of the cultural. Theorizing the intrinsic
relationship that binds the image to the means that produced it makes it possible to
envision how the electronics industry’s material waste has a counterpart in the images
and information the digital device is designed to generate. Gabrys moves in this direction
when she describes how the NASDAQ trading system is spuriously conceived of as a
nebulous immaterial non-space. However, not only does the “virtual ticker tape of
financial data display information that is obsolete the moment it is generated,” the
information itself trades in technologies that are equally determined by the conditions of
obsolescence. The NASDAQ, then, is an “instant refuse generator, both in terms of its
own erratic valuations, and in terms of the material fallout from obsolete technologies”
(160). Disposability is thus a condition inseparable from all the components of digital
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image and information generation. From the machine itself to its ostensibly immaterial
output, the digital image is an indelible part of the infrastructure of the personal computer
and other electronic machinery designed in accordance with the dominant industrial
principle of planned obsolescence. Likewise, in order to remain recoverable, the image
must abide by the same enforcing principle of technological obsolescence and growth,
shedding support surfaces as they become antiquated and replacing them in accordance
with system upgrades.
The image, then, requires the same eco-critical attention as the expendable
machines that populate e-waste depositories ,while, by extension, what bio-politics
conceptualizes as the “wasted lives” of expendable populations should also be situated
within this interconnected confluence of throw-away ideologies. That the machine, the
image, and the human film practitioner and his or her human subjects can operate within
a single, specific environmental rhetoric is not mere convenience, and the analogies thus
generated do not exist for their own sake. It is the extraction-based society’s economy
and ideology of over-consumption that irreversibly embeds the aesthetic of the disposable
image within both the production of its expendable machinery and the excessively
consumptive cinematic behavior of its operator; to interrogate one, therefore, is to
interrogate the other. The discursive and practical interconnections between
environmental ideology and digital ontology begin with the essential fact that
representations of the multifarious dimensions of what is becoming an ecological crisis
make digital the media of choice. Cinematic exposures of resource scarcity and conflict,
environmental refugees, global warming, rampant suburbanization, the industrialization
of developing nations composes a list that is impressively long and primarily digital. But
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engaging the politics of environmental crisis ought also to be done on the level of form
itself. The very technology harnessed by what is becoming a distinct eco-cinema likewise
contributes to the crisis on a material, resource-based level as well as ideologically, in
terms of cinematic assumptions and behavior. The co-dependent ascendancy of digital
culture and the dominance of eco-politics forces cultural criticism to rethink the image as
a material support surface, a “carrier” of the image and, by necessary and unavoidable
extension, a bearer of the industrial and post-industrial ideologies of resource extraction,
consumption, waste generation and environmental mismanagement.
The democratization of digital technology has ushered in not only greater access
to and private ownership of cinema, but also its independent production. More than any
other pre-established genre, it is the documentary that has come to define, and be defined
by in turn, the terms and conditions of digital culture. As Varda’s film exemplifies, part
of the appeal of the digital camera is its weight. Liberated from tripod and multiple lenses,
the operator is self-sufficient, while the infrastructure necessary to store, manipulate and
disseminate the resultant cinematic images is contained within the space of a personal
computer that is often as mobile as the camera itself. What is more, the processes of
crafting narrative cohesion from the accumulation of gleaned images is relatively
manageable; that digital is particularly forgiving of ineptitudes and errors contributes to
the diminishing difference between amateur and professional filmmaker. Regarding the
photograph, Sontag points out how the introduction of the camera into the mass market
was accompanied by the ideal of photographic perfection that even the most unassuming
user was now capable of achieving. Kodak’s campaign of photography “without
mistakes” created a mythology of “veracity” that “banish[ed] error” and compensate[ed]
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for inexperience” (53). Kodak’s famous slogan – “You press the button, we do the rest” –
finds its contemporary equivalent in the digital camera. Indeed, the capacity to erase and
thus repair an image defines the digital as a truly accommodating medium, only now the
“we” that does “the rest” is nothing less than camera technology itself. As a result of all
this easy sophistication, the advent of the amateur documentary has seen the population
of film practitioners burgeon, a fact that places Warhol’s non-professional actors behind
the camera as readily as in front of it, expanding a cinema of excess to include a glut of
images to match the over-production of image-makers.
But though her mini DV is a brand new tool, Varda is a professional; her
reputation has been forged in narrative and documentary cinema, the latter her most
prolific mode of expression. And so it is that the digital video camera she uses lends itself
to drawing attention to and thus redeeming the bodies and/or populations that Bauman’s
bio-political discourse would otherwise situate as “disposable” and/or “invisible.” The
digital documentary, of which Varda’s is one, is not only centered on the first-hand
exploration of self, but is also characterized as a tool of protest which targets political
conspiracy, scandal, inequality, and otherwise picks up the slack of conventional,
mainstream news-media and makes visible its various oversights. Such is the condition of
what Megan Boler calls “digital dissent” and it says something about the availability of
digital video technology as well as its invisibility and/or ubiquity. The digital camera
renders the operator ever more un-tethered, buoyant and ambulatory than what analog
filmmaking has managed. As Sontag has argued, once the photographic camera was
liberated from the tripod and mass-produced into affordability, it was increasingly trained
on the abject and the impoverished. “Fascinated by…lower depths,” Sontag writes,
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photographs have always “hover[ed] about the oppressed” (55). Like digital’s freeing of
the second hand, the camera became “an extension of the eye of the middleclass flâneur”
who was thus transformed into a “voyeuristic stroller” engaged in discovering “the city as
a landscape of voluptuous extremes” (55). The digital documentarian is the contemporary
equivalent of Sontag’s early modernist photographic voyeur and social agent. The shift
from industrial to post-industrial culture, and likewise from photo-mechanic, still-life
images to digital moving pictures, extends the documentary maker’s trawling grounds
from the local to the global, from the concrete reality of the material world to the
electronic geographies of cyberspace. The relative proximity of the privileged classes to
squalor and suffering were the result of, among other conditions, industrial society’s
urbanization, which resulted in a juxtaposition that “inspired the comfortably-off with the
urge to take pictures” and reify in tangible document a reality that was otherwise
concealed (Sontag 55). The key, then, is access: the assumed openness of urban, global
and cyber environs combines with the commodification and democratization of digital
imaging technology, the operator’s mobility and the camera’s versatility, to lend the
digital practitioner what is assumed to be an unobstructed view of hidden miseries.
As an extension of this mythology of accessibility, the democratization of digital
technology becomes the common denominator that both perpetuates and is perpetuated
by what are the inextricably connected principles of disposability and overexposure. The
over-abundance of images and films available to viewers in all and sundry manifestations
and via any number of viewing platforms in fact limits rather increases the amount of
what will actually be viewed. What Cherchi Usai calls “the unseen” describes how all the
possibility promised by digital technology has injected contemporary cinema with a
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condition of impossibility (93). The excessive increase in the amount of footage available
to the consumer corresponds with a decrease in the percentage of footage that will
actually, feasibly, be viewed: the absurdity of this logic reveals that what is concealed by
digital’s dominant sense of limitlessness is in fact an inherent limitation. Choice and
accessibility are thus impoverishing rather than enriching. The availability of digital
productions (and reproduction) results in a profusion of image-maker and images, over-
exposing and effectively spoiling the image, its content and subject, transforming the
“unseen” into invisible and expendable abstractions.
Of course the ontological differences between the still, analog photograph and the
digital moving picture are as essential as they are vast. In terms of material life-spans, the
photograph was intended to endure and perhaps outlive its subject. The digital image,
however, is characterized by its various layers of expendability – instantly erased and
replaced, shifted into the crypt of a memory card where it might forever remain without
being seen. But the expendability of the digital image is only a potential condition, not an
inevitable fate. What is essential to the dimensions of disposability and image-making is
how this same ontology is particularly, almost ironically, well-suited for capturing and
perhaps redeeming what bio-political discourse articulates as the expendable human
subject and the “wasted lives” that compose invisible populations and their hidden
realities. As Bauman argues, the generation of “human waste,” or “wasted humans,” the
“excessive and redundant” populations that overcrowd the planet, is a manifestation of
modernization and the unavoidable consequence of economic growth (6). Consumerist
culture, or throw-away society founded as it is on principles of obsolescence, describes
more than the way it uses the material objects it produces, consumes and tosses away. As
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Bauman’s (and also Henry Giroux’s) bio-political discourse emphasizes, these terms
must be extended to include those invisible social strata (often those engaged in the realm
of manufacture or off-shore electronics recycling) that are the counterparts of the material
goods that are so conveniently shipped off to landfills. An extension of that vitally
important link between the disposable object and the invisible populations of developing
and developed nations, in particular, is the image: that liminal, ephemeral, and malleable
space where invisibility can be exposed and potentially challenged.
Varda’s digital film situates the expendable image as the aesthetic complement to
the cast-off commodities and the marginalized citizens that are her subjects – the gleaners
who are as socially expendable as their salvaged objects are materially so. Added to this
nexus of expendability is the filmmaking process itself, with Varda’s narration clearly
analogizing between gleaning and filmmaking, rag-picking and the random accumulation
of impressionistic images gathered from modernity’s chaotic and unpredictable social and
cultural landscapes. Taking into account the essential ontology of disposability and
digitality, Varda’s medium casts her as an expendable subject on two levels. First, her
own aging body is made accessible by the principle of secondhand: that is, her camera’s
capacity to “use one hand to film the other” makes it clear that her body has become
unrecognizable, as withered and misshapen as the objects her subjects pick from the trash.
Second, the ontology of the digital camera (embedded in layers of disposability) likewise
and necessarily situates her within the realm of the expendable. In other words, even if
the subject is not explicitly dispensable in Bauman’s sense, the image as commodity
object as well as the specificity of digital media inscribes it with the unshakeable
potential to become as such.
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Indeed, the digital documentary, such a buoyant, abounding genre, is founded on
the same aesthetic and practical principles that Sontag locates within the proclivities of
the modernist photographer’s documentary impulse and tendency for social tourism. The
flâneur is not attracted to “official realities” but rather to “dark, seamy corners” and its
“neglected populations” (56). But even as the “camera makes everyone a tourist in other
peoples’ reality,” Sontag points out, we also become “tourists in our own” (57). What
Sontag notes in passing – the capacity to harness the photo-mechanical camera as a
vehicle with which to explore one’s own social and perhaps psychological space –
Varda’s digital self-portraiture extends and then brings to full fruition. Bridging the social
documentary with the introspective one, Varda’s subjective film exemplifies how digital
democratization facilitates an image-making that is characterized by the extremes of
introversion and extroversion; polarized narratives of reflexivity and autobiography, for
example, juxtapose those committed to external, unfamiliar realities. And again, this is
where Varda’s equation between herself and her subjects makes an important
intervention, incorporating herself, the citizens she documents, and the objects they
collect within the disposable scope of her medium. In this way, then, digital is the great
equalizer, as is renders disposable all those who are picked out by the DV camera’s frame.
And because the camera is as likely to be trained on the privileged, introspective operator
as on the hidden or invisible lives of those who occupy those numerous “dark corners,”
the digital democracy does not exclude many from the ranks of the disposable, but rather
extends to all potentiality of being, like the image, objectified, commodified and
eventually discarded.
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Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke finds its impact and
resonance in the digital footage sourced from those DV-equipped New Orleanians who
were caught within the terrific throes of Hurricane Katrina. The film compresses and then
explodes the ontologies of digital and analog media, environmental ideology, and the
cultural practice of throw-away consumerism; the result is a conflation between the
image-politics of over-exposure and the bio-politics of expendability. Lee’s project,
therefore, picks up and then extends many of the same principles that Varda investigates
in her The Gleaners and I. Though Lee’s documentary is neither introspective nor
dedicatedly digital, the filmmaker’s rather traditional form and photo-mechanic, analog
medium owes its essential effectiveness to the digital resources gleaned from those who
experienced the storm and its aftermath first hand. Like Varda, Lee uses the documentary
to expose or render visible a marginalized population: in this case, the people of New
Orleans whose impoverished conditions earned the focus of the world’s intense but
ultimately fleeting gaze. Lee’s enterprise consists of re-exposing the brutal and ongoing
injustices which the news media’s excessive production of certain, well-chosen images
effectively over-exposed and thus diminished. Too much imagistic space, attention and
broadcast time, too much light, too many cameras, and the expenditure of too much
energetic activity created a crisis and then naturalized it, rendering the situation familiar
and therefore forgettable. That Lee chose a formal if not conventional mode of
documentary discourse, based as the film is on “survivor” interviews conducted in a
uniform studio setting, self-consciously legitimates the project and also counters the
chaos that define the amateur and stock news footage of the punctuating digital clips.
Levees’s routine, almost predictable mode, then, conveys a sense of stability and
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endurance that highlights and likewise undermines the storm’s destruction and the
disposable, digital images that just barely captured it. So while Lee counters the
(disposable) digital footage he uses, he paradoxically also rescues the digital images and
their content, for he exposes footage that might otherwise have been suppressed, and thus
relegated to invisibility. Indeed, what Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others points out
as the “repressive standards” of “good taste” (63) would have dictated the media’s active
concealment of particularly spectacular images such as those of bloated corpses and other
horrors that Lee’s film rescues from the nether regions of the digital unseen. Though Lee
does not himself make primary use of the digital camera, thus consistently distinguishing
the temporal and discursive registers between sourced footage and his own, the film
actively engages with the intersection of the expendable (digital) image and the
expendable citizens of New Orleans. Lee’s project refocuses attention on the crisis that
was transformed into a normalized condition. But the director’s effort must be combined
with his use of sourced secondhand digital images, for this is what opens up a number of
implications inherent in the propensity for digital video to expose disposable populations
as well as to overexpose them, once again rendering them expendable and invisible.
What the representation of Hurricane Katrina as an ongoing circumstance
ultimately reveals is the interconnection between the ephemeral value of contemporary
culture’s images and the fragility of our physical infrastructures. From consumer goods to
architectures and images, the guiding principle of planned obsolescence places
deconstruction ahead of decomposition; what is manufactured is intended to break, not
unlike the precarious and ill-conceived levees that failed to hold New Orleans together:
as Lee’s film argues, rebuilding New Orleans is necessary precisely because of the fact
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that the inadequate engineering procedures and shoddy materials that separated the city
from the ocean did indeed live up to their (transient, temporary) expectations and were
finally breached. That Lee constructs his documentary out of image shards and narrative
residues is itself a gesture of reconstruction and rehabilitation. The disposability of New
Orleans and its populations was enhanced by the unbalanced and over-extended media
attention it generated. Lee’s film, then, is an attempt not only to rescue and reclaim the
Katrina narrative, but to grant it longevity and durability, its exposure deliberately
measured in an attempt to ensure it remains legible, visible, relevant beyond its own
immediate context rather than an isolated single-use event. Constructing the monumental
rather than the momentary, rendering a document that shall not be disposable, such is
Lee’s structuring challenge.
Self-Exposure and the Expendable Self
Theorization of the overexposed image must consider how the camera itself is as
pervasive and ubiquitous as the images it so relentlessly generates. As we have seen, the
mobile, lightweight camera grants Varda access to the lives of her gleaners, not unlike
how the tripod-free apparatus enabled modernist photography to develop its documentary
traditions. This conflation of technology, the image itself and the practitioner’s form
(what Virilio understands as the aesthetic of disappearance), speaks of how increasingly
refined recording devices continue to provide access to what might otherwise be
restricted realities. The invisibility of DV is partly enabled by its ubiquity and receding
physical presence. This factor contributes to an over-abundance (a “hyper-saturation,” as
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Sontag argues) that often renders audiences unresponsive to the tragedy, disaster, or
political travesty its images are invested in uncovering. Overexposure is thus a way to
articulate how an aesthetic of surfeit is potentially self-destructive in that too much
visibility obscures rather than illuminates.
Varda’s investigation of the disposable subject finds an antagonist and also a
surprising complement in Justin Kan’s internet life-cast, Justin.tv. Using a small digital
camera mounted onto his baseball cap (or on a tripod, while he is indisposed) 24 hours a
day and 7 days a weeks, Kan makes available to the world at large the images of his daily
routine by streaming them directly onto his website. (When last checked, the clock that
times his ceaseless commitment to the momentary reported Kan had been live for 81 days,
11 hours, 13 minutes.) But what belies the more obvious – and rather mediocre –
parameters of the project is the fact that it exemplifies how making a spectacle out of the
over-exposition of self is effectively self-defeating (and diminishing) rather than
affirming. The conditions of his life’s constant revelation transform Kan from individual
to atmosphere; and so it is the narcissism at the heart of Kan’s enterprise that in fact,
rather ironically, diminishes rather than highlights him as a subject. Like Varda’s
subjective documentary, Kan’s project illustrates the digital video camera’s propensity
for introspection, self-examination and autobiography. What is more, Kan’s project is a
spectacle of its limitations, for what is used is only within arm’s reach, close at hand,
immediately available. Justin Kan combines this dimension with digital’s
autobiographical capacities and/or proclivities and exploits both to the point of
exhaustion. This indulgence in first-person self-portraiture transforms his daily
expenditures into a live, perpetual web-broadcast, hyperbolizing the minimalism that
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characterizes other self-conscious or reflexive digital self-examinations. The minimalism
of Kan’s enterprise, therefore, is nothing if not paradoxically opulent. Amateur, self-
indulgent and totally lacking in restraint, it fulfills the requirements of Dziga Vertov’s
ambiguous futurism, Andy Warhol’s energetic sloth, as well as Dogme95’s
fundamentalist prescription for pure cinema, while at the same time scaling new heights
of open-aperture gluttony. “Justin.tv” might seem to fulfill Warhol’s ideal vision of a
cinema without an operator and the film free of cuts, a perfect vision, without interruption,
mistakes or an over-exertion of energy on the part of either operator or audience. “The
perfect vision,” Cherchi Usai writes, “has no duration and it is not durable” (29). And the
perfect film, likewise, is defined by a cynical commitment to nothing but formlessness,
however unfeasible this might be. Indeed, Kan’s subjective vision necessarily, but
minimally, edits his lifecast in real time. Lifecasting thus proves an instance of film-
without-film, lessening as it does, not just editing or energy expenditure, but the
difference between the camera and the basic physiology of seeing and moving through
the world at large, and likewise communicating with it.
Given its excessive opulence, it is ironic that Kan’s life-cast abides by the
idealized prescripts of a carbon-neutral cinema. But that it does so to such an exaggerated
extent Justin.tv in fact challenges if not undercuts current conceptions of a sustainable
(digital) cinema. If, for example, the carbon emissions saved by self-sufficiency and self-
mobility are spent on a display of conspicuous (self) consumption, is not the
conservationist ideology of carbon-neutrality compromised? The ideology implied in the
content, quite simply, neutralizes the ideological intentions that dictate the form. The
conflicts inherent in “Justin.tv” expose the tensions that pit digitality against
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environmental conservatism, challenging or at least problematizing the supposition that
digital video and immaterial modes of communication are more sustainable than material
(celluloid or paper-based) counterparts. By willingly submitting to Open-Circuit
Television surveillance, Kan shows that the intention of his long take project calls
attention to some of the concealed economic implications of cinematic environmentalism
Planet in Focus, for example, subscribes to the Greencode Project’s set of “modest,
voluntary, environmentally friendly eco-actions, guidelines, standards and principles that
encourage ecologically friendly sustainability” within documentary, film, television and
new media industries. As part of its commitment to sustainable, if not carbon-neutral
projects, Planet in Focus recognizes and promotes less energy intensive production
strategies and/or the purchase of credits to offset carbon emissions. This later option,
however, is easily criticized as little more than a short term gesture of absolution that
creates commercial opportunities by appealing to guilt or obligation and thus does
nothing to amend poor environmental habits. The carbon offsets economy, then,
promotes consumption and consumerism, privileging those who can afford the luxury of
maintaining outmoded, unsustainable behaviour. Though Kan has no overt environmental
politics, his project meets much of the practical criteria upheld by Planet in Focus and
Greencode, particularly their easy allegiance with the compromised dimensions of carbon
economics. That is, because its intentions are as commercially motivated as they are
willfully benign, “Justin.tv” represents a paradoxical aesthetic of opulent minimalism
which reduces in order to consume more, not less, and so entrenches a form of
commodified sustainability.
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While the inherent economizing that defines the projects of Varda, Horton and
Gorin strikes a blow at the heart of excessive, waste-making cinema exemplified by
Warhol’s Empire and the hyper-abundance inherent in the ideology of the long take,
Kan’s lifecasting duplicitously operates as both the apotheosis of long-take abundance
and the complement of a wasteless, potentially sustainable cinema. Here is an example of
the long-take in all its glory: Kan’s only regulation is to keep his hat-cam switched on
and thus ensure the constant flow of ceaseless subjectivity is streamed onto his website. It
is the digital specificity of “Justin.tv” that problematizes any castigation of the project as
mere waste or excess. A ceaseless, perhaps eternal long-take, everything the camera
accumulates is instantly streamed onto Kan’s website; thus there are no outtakes to delete,
no missteps to edit – no “waste,” therefore, is generated. Here, then, is the cinema of
perfection, free of mistakes, liberated of scraps and debris for there is no cutting away or
paring down. It could be said that this is all, by virtue of its unrefined dimensions,
nothing but formlessness, the raw stuff that once edited would be swept away as
unwanted detritus. And yet Kan’s life-cast, unlike Michelangelo’s uncut marble, is not
all “wrapping,” discards waiting to happen. Indeed, though the project intend to eschew
the intervention of editing, Kan’s every shift or movement, every decision to turn his
head, mediates the flow of seemingly shapeless images and ultimately asserts the
inability of cinema to escape itself: to see neutrally, without subjectivity, is an
impossibility. So, “Justin.tv”, for all its apparent mediocrity, is discursively useful,
foregrounding as it does the future of digital video, surveillance technology, and,
therefore, digital subjectivities, not to mention the over-extension and over-consumption
of carbon neutrality and eco-consciousness themselves. The question that manages to
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impose some structure on all the conflictive variables centralized in the cultural
dominants of ecology and digitality is this: would “Justin.tv” be accepted by the Planet in
Focus submission call? Is it environmentally sustainable, despite its ideology of over-
consumption and its thinly disguised commercial motivations?
So it is that the tension at the heart of “Justin.tv” exemplifies the contradictory
character of digital filmmaking in that it is as informed by an ideology of excess as it is
by the urge for thrift. Like Varda, Kan is harnessing the ambulatory and near-invisible
nature of the DV camera, making use of what is available, gleaning from the world at
large without investing in additional infrastructure or external energies beyond that of the
operator/ subject. Begging to be compared to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, what
lends Justin.tv its complexity is how it manages, like Vertov, to render Kan expendable,
disposable and essentially obsolete. Not only is his subjectivity diminished by over-
exposure, but “Justin.tv” is not about Kan at all, but about the versatility of the camera,
its capacity and appetite for recording. The human is less an operator than a vehicle. As a
corporeal filmmaking practice, the motion and movement and other manifestations of the
filmmaker’s visceral live-ness – the wearer and bearer of the recording device – are
translated into the form and flow of the images that are streamed onto the computer
screen. And so this narcissistic life-cast is about the life of the camera, not its (human)
vehicle, its expendable, over-exposed practitioner or even its unspectacular spectacles.
Indeed, wearing the mini DV camera as he does, the life-caster renders tripod, crane,
track and crew obsolete, and ostensibly grants ascendancy to the bearer of the camera.
But the independence and self-sufficiency of the camera operator have nothing to do with
the operator and everything to do with the apparatus; the life-cast, like the surveillance
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video, resides in the independence, self-sufficiency, and even tyranny, of the camera.
This, after all, is the lesson and the irony of Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov’s
documentary is not about the cameraman so much as it is about how mechanized vision
absorbs the operator and via the process of technological evolution, renders the human
filmmaker useless and thus, ultimately, expendable. Man with a Movie Camera, like life-
casting, can be regarded as a representation of the digital image’s future as well as a
prescient vision of the disposable cinema.
Saving and Decaying: Waste Management and the Archived Image
Waste is a necessary component of cultural production and informs what might be
called the dialectic of (digital) disposability. Film preservationist Cherchi Usai argues
back and forth between the benefits and detriments of film conservation, arriving at the
ambiguous conclusion that his particular field of theory and practice is a “necessary
mistake” (67). Cherchi Usai suggests that it is because certain cinemas have now attained
cultural and/or artistic legitimacy, celluloid films – especially those in a state of
deterioration – are actively being preserved; but, he adds, to save a film is to undermine
the ephemeral nature and disposable quality of the cinematic image. The expendable
materiality and limited life-span of celluloid is an essential part of what has characterized
filmmaking, film viewing and film history and thus structures the ontology of how film
lives, dies and is studied. Usai argues for what he calls the “moral image,” a process of
selection that would determine which films are saved and which are lost. It is, in fact, not
unlike what Sontag described as an ecological approach to image conservation, wherein
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measurement and rationing would protect the integrity of the photograph by preventing
its dissolution into the vistas of hyper-saturated image glut. Cherchi Usai’s “moral
image” strictures propose a similar (and similarly idealistic) management system that
would limit the number of films worth the effort of restoration and viewing. As Cherchi
Usai understands it, part of the enforcement of a moral image ecology would involve a
“relentless effort to minimise any intervention whose aim is to conceal the fact that that
the moving image has a genetically preordained history and a limited lifespan” (107).
Any restoration, then, that attempts to eliminate natural signs of decay, artificially
resuscitate or otherwise “erase history from the body of the image itself” should be
abandoned (107).
Until relatively recently, films were always intended to be shown until they were
physically destroyed, thus freeing up the market and making room for new viewing
experiences (Cherchi Usai 67). The inherent disposability of cinema’s support surfaces
has been reversed by technology’s improved preservation possibilities, the interest of film
and cultural studies criticism in “ephemeral” cinemas, as well as commercial enterprises
which transform the transient film text into a re-marketable commodity. Additionally,
Cherchi Usai’s arguments imply that digital transference and the marketplace’s ability to
grant significance to restored “masterpieces” gluts the system with films that were
intended to appeal to the moment and then be forgotten (77). Arguments throughout
Death of Cinema are informed by a critical understanding of the relatively recent cultural
urge not only to preserve images within digital’s ostensibly infinite storage spaces, but
once saved, to be able to view all of these accumulated resources. Indeed, digital
technology has made the physical attainment of this utopian desire conceivable, but the
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prospect of fulfilling it, viewing the totality of our personal or cultural image archives, is
consequently rendered less tenable. Thus, digital’s intervention into the natural process of
analog cinema’s inevitable decay is also, ironically, its death knell, undermining the
integrity of the image’s limited life-span while also diminishing its value via an over-
saturated and unmanageable viewing economy. While the amount of viewing hours
available on film, for example, has risen from 40 minutes in 1895 (most of these
preserved) to what Cherchi Usai estimated would be 3 billion hours in 2006 (and by 2025
one hundred billion hours), the human’s temporal or physical capacity for viewing can
only become increasingly limited by comparison (111). Articulating and also challenging
this utopian dimension inherent in the “routine pleasure” of relentless, repeated exposure
to particular films, Cherchi Usai, like Kristan Horton, derives a notable amount of
metaphorical value from a Stanley Kubrick film. A Clockwork Orange, Cherchi Usai
posits, is a parable for image culture’s propensity for cinematic over-exposure and the
unreasonable urge to ingest all extant cinema (25). Thus amending the omni-voyant
camera envisioned in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Cherchi Usai argues for the
omni-voyant consumer, whose capacity to ingest cinematic images expands to duly
accommodate what the all-seeing camera, its metaphorical counterpart, relentlessly
records. It is this urge to consume, Cherchi Usai implies, that preconditions the image’s
digitization, commercialization and proliferation. Archiving and preservation are left
determined by the interests of commerce, but are also, almost contradictorily informed by
the dominant forces of obsolescence and attendant disposability. The problem, then, is
not only attributable to the disposability of the image, wherein the film industry (from
practitioner to distributor to consumer) is encouraged and enabled to save, throwaway
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and/or forget films or images. For, in addition to this, digital has rendered cinema an
ephemera that is contradicted by its own durability and an ontological and material
reluctance to decompose. Gleaning from specifically digital archives does indeed
theoretically and somewhat practically interrupt entrenched systems of waste and a
dominant ideology of expendability. However, because picked or found footage is
necessarily reproduced as it is reused, multiplying the image and sharing it between
spaces, the practicality of gleaning as a way to manage waste, clearing the landscape of
detritus, is obviously challenged. The physicality of recycling is thus eliminated and is
replaced by replication.
The film industry’s commitment to what it designates as classics is not a
beneficent attempt to maintain a unique and important body of cultural productions. What
is more, such initiative has begun only recently. Indeed, once the film industry was firmly
established, distributors halted the process of relentlessly circulating copies of films until
their playing potential was exhausted. So, as production increased, the cultural life span
of films was shortened; instead of being replayed, a film was sooner replaced with fresh
fare. Thus, not only was the materiality of a film strip eventually fated to disintegrate, but
the cultural value of the film was also made expendable: single-use and single-run,
shelved instead of circulated. As Klinger points out, it was the television rebroadcast that
inaugurated the recycling of cinema and the manufacturing of the classic film, and thus
placed new value on the lost features decaying in the industry’s storage spaces (91). In
order to market a programming schedule based on older films, cable television specialty
channels proved especially adept at fostering a nostalgia for Hollywood cinema’s
historical and cultural importance; the resultant success was manifested by an increased
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interest – on the part of the public and industry – in what is now considered the classic
(Klinger 92).
Before undermining the ostensibly charitable and culturally responsible
motivation behind film “preservation,” Klinger describes how the film industry has
undertaken a huge financial initiative in order to create the environmentally controlled
circumstances necessary to prolong the life of celluloid. As Klinger writes, “while the
cause of film preservation has an important ecological dimension, it is also deeply
influenced by economic imperatives” (117). What is more, “like many preservation
movements, it is motivated by the double concerns of conservation and commerce – that
is, by both the commitment to safeguard a resource and the desire to find a profitable use
for it” (117). Klinger’s evocation of film preservation’s ecological dimension is charged
with both practical and political currency. On the one hand, the term has a literal
application, for it accurately describes the closed, tightly controlled environment
necessary to protect celluloid from the eroding effects of time and oxygen. On the other
hand, though, Klinger’s ecological resonance foregrounds celluloid film (fragile,
decaying, or otherwise imperfect) as a resource that media industries have singled out as
worth protecting, but only with regeneration purposes in mind. Again, Klinger’s
discourse evokes the environmental politics that are the necessary and obvious extension
of her reception study. Integral to the social and cultural conditions necessary for the
continued consumption of classic or vintage cinema is the maintenance of a market value
that resides in a perceived sense of scarcity and limited availability and thus produces and
perpetuates a sense of cultural and historical worth.
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The Prelinger Library, located in San Francisco and accompanied by a popular
internet archive, is a privately owned open-access collection of what Gideon Lewis-Kraus
calls mostly “hand-sorted” ephemera (50), much of it cinematic and/or image-based. As
Rick and Megan Prelinger have made it their task to “help you find what you’re not
looking for” (Lewis-Kraus 50), maintenance of their collection’s integrity as an organic,
almost self-generating entity depends on fostering conditions of randomness, disorder
and juxtaposition. As such, their basic premise works in opposition to the specificity and
efficiency of conventional library classification systems and digital search engines.
Acquiring, storing and organizing cinematic and other textual resources, the Prelingers
espouse environmental models in order to manage and share their expansive material and
immaterial reserves. Linking text to landscape, image to geography, the Prelinger
Archive makes explicit the multiple and inextricable implications of archiving’s
environmental dimensions. As dedicated environmental activists and preservationists, the
Prelingers choose landscape as the concept that centralizes the philosophy of their
commitments. Thus, the library and landscape are thought of almost interchangeably.
They write for example, that “landscape is our memory” and also a “map of hidden
histories” (50). Landscape, then, does not mean the untouched or the immaculate and
neither does it mean naturally occurring terrain or “land,” but is instead composed of
debris, the residues and traces of how it has been used, abused, and then left behind, its
history told in the imperfections inscribed on its surfaces. So, as “landscape” is not pure
and pristine, and neither is the archive. Rather, the Prelingers are dedicated to salvaging
detritus, that which otherwise would have been left to expire and then be thrown away.
As such, the Prelingers operate according to a broad moral and aesthetic guideline which
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recalls something of Cherchi Usai’s conviction that what is worth preserving is the
actively decaying film rather than the rehabilitated, artificially mended one. In other
words, just as Cherchi Usai envisions the seeming impossibility of preserving death and
decay within the transient, ephemeral quality of a medium that was not supposed to have
a history, so too is the Prelingers’ library and film collection an arresting document of a
throw-away, disposable society and a culture premised on the false ideal of having no
visible residues, waste, or, therefore, archives. Imperfection, then, is the concept common
to both Cherchi Usai and the Prelingers – a perfection in itself, and one that is perhaps
only attainable as a process rather than a final goal. As such, the ecology of the image
and/or carbon-neutral cinema would likewise introduce a set of imperfect conditions,
amending viewer expectations by means of a modified aesthetic whose manifestations are
now, it seems, becoming manifest.
Films have been the cornerstone of the Prelingers’ archiving project. Pursuing an
interest in expendable, disposable cinema such as “industrial movies, safety videos, [and]
social-hygiene shorts,” Rick Prelinger drove around the United States “reliev[ing]
libraries, schools, and garages of their cans of 16mm films.” Prelinger’s eventual
accumulation of the “world’s most significant collection of such work…single-handedly
sav[ed] this entire genre from extinction” (50). The Prelinger Archive is thus notable not
only for the environmental thrust of its classification methods, but also for the fact that it
is composed mostly of gleaned ephemera – “maps and charts and brochures and errant
scraps of apposite paper” which comprise thirty of the fifty thousand items they have
amassed from “used-book stores, shrinking institutional and public libraries, periodical
brokers, private donors, and eBay” (50). The project is financed by the sale of their
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collection of more than forty-eight thousand ephemeral films to the Library of Congress
(for a nominal fifth of its estimated value) as well as through the fees they are paid when
their films are used for commercial, revenue-generating, reproduction purposes
(otherwise they are free and fully accessible on their website).
By making their resources available for public access and open consumption (in
the San Francisco library and on the internet), the Prelingers have avoided perpetuating
the false sense of scarcity (and its attendant nostalgia) that re-release and “classics”
industries cultivate through the mystique of the limited edition. Proponents and skeptics
of digitization, the Prelingers are aware that digital technology has the power to transform
a rediscovered restored Hollywood film into an instant classic, a rare artifact suddenly
worthy of purchase. But digital’s capacity for mass reproduction and dissemination can
also flood the market place with such rarities, inadvertently undermining the conditions
of scarcity that makes a cultural production (a text, a film, a piece of music) collectable
and thus commodifiable. What Klinger, Cherchi Usai and the Prelingers suggest is that
media industries have co-opted film history itself, ultimately equating the preservation of
a film with its purchase. The responsibility for archiving and also for maintaining a
national and/or cultural history is shifted onto the individual consumer, whose sense of
nostalgia encourages and justifies participation in the privatized economy that is home
cinema and, by extension, the home archive. Heather Rogers similarly argues that the
responsibility for environmental conservation is too often transferred onto the consumer
and the taxpayer; it is through purchasing power that an individual is encouraged to
remedy the environment, never questioning whether or not it is consumerism and
consumption that are at the heart of the problem itself. Because its resources are fully
314
downloadable and also free of charge, the Prelinger archive both participates in and
challenges the patterned domestication, privatization and individualization of cinema
which digitization has enabled. But what is notable and remarkable about the Prelingers’
accomplishment is that it is facilitated by the same technology that has allowed media
entertainment industries to privatize and commercialize scarce cinematic resources in the
first place. What maintains the “worth” of the Prelinger archive is, quite brilliantly, its
worthlessness – its sheer openness, public availability, willing submission to private
reproduction and manipulation, thus rendering the conditions of an imposed or
manufactured scarcity something of an impossibility.
And so it is in the interest of resource-based industry (therefore, conceivably, all
industry) to perpetuate rather than to conceal what is becoming a pervasive sense of
environmental calamity. Resources are saved in order to be sold: scarcity and crisis are
necessary categories, for they perpetuate a resource-based economy that is founded on
the value of the limited or the non-renewable rather than the reverse. Industrial ecology,
therefore, is not an altruistic discipline, theorizing as it does how the environment might
continue to sustain the commercial interests of industry: maintaining the laboring body’s
health in order to extract from it further amounts of energy. Shifting industrial processes
from a linear flow or “open loop” – in which resources and capital investments move
through the system and end up as useless waste – to the closed loop system – where
waste feeds new growth – implies a reversion to an earlier mode of industrialization. In
order to foster such a transition, theorists argue, industry must manufacture goods from
materials that can be reabsorbed into the system or at least break down without much
temporal delay or toxic residue. As such, the principles of industrial ecology fit with
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more than a little accuracy the flows of cultural production and the commercialization of
film preservation.
So, just as decay is a necessary historical category, waste is an essential part of
cultural development. But digital’s potential for limitless storage denies the possibility to
generate the surplus and debris that would otherwise be tossed away. This specific crisis
of waste is thus one of over-production and under-availability. Kristan Horton’s project
articulates just such a seeming contradiction, wherein the detritus he employs is all
private, self-generated, implying a scarcity of waste; trash as a resource available only to
the active, enfranchised consumer. Waste, in other words, ought to be democratized,
making it visible, available and valuable, so that it can be harnessed and reactivated. The
problem is not in creating waste so much as it is concealing it, hiding it away where it
cannot be accessed and once again made useful. Indeed, the very practice of gleaning,
Varda’s film demonstrates, has lost its status as a socially acceptable behaviour. As
Strasser argues, it was only after the economic shift to mass-production that such things
as trash, compost or leftovers were effectively “invented” (109). Prior to this, a closed
loop economy saw waste fuelling production and thus guaranteeing its own generation;
given its use value, before the imposition of disposability, instant obsolescence, and the
single-use commodity, waste was neither impure nor useless. Though it is now associated
with garbage-picking, scavenging and poaching, gleaning was merely a social practice,
naturalized beyond considerations of tolerance or acceptability. There is nothing tragic in
gleaning, only in the fact that it is restricted and, as Varda’s film points out, criminalized
and/or socially stigmatized, obviating it as a viable economic option and for both the
individual and industry alike.
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Gleaning material, tangible objects manages the physical environment, for it
contains its detritus and maintains the conditions necessary to promote new growth.
While digital technology and electronic environments see file-sharing and downloading
from such forums as the Prelinger Archive as immaterial approximations of gleaning, the
premise of limitation or containment is no longer applicable. Once a file, document or
image has been sourced, it does not disappear or expire but instead remains available for
another gleaner to appropriate and reproduce, thus setting the conditions for accumulation
and eventual glut. If the Internet and other electronic archiving infrastructures are left
unmanaged, the durability of the digital and its capacity for storage become its detriment.
The same situation is turning contemporary waste management problems into an
environmental disaster. That which is intended to satisfy or service for a limited period is
made of materials engineered to outlive their own relevance; the terms of expendability
and durability are equally and distinctly valued by our culture. Taken together, however,
as they almost always are, they become inherently unsustainable. Thus, cleaning up trash
rendered from non-renewable resources or anthropogenic materials, including mounting
piles of obsolete electronic equipment, increasingly takes the form of concealment –
buried deep in the earth, trucked across the border or shipped overseas.
As Jennifer Gabrys argues, the failure of digital archiving resides in the inability
to reconcile preservation (essentially stopping time) with systems that are premised on a
relentless commitment to the future, transition and “continual reinvention”(162). “Digital
technology,” she writes, “cannot slow down to fit the archivist’s slow time. The dilemma
of preservation,” then, “collides with the dilemma of electronic waste” (162). In a notable
example of these same contradictions, Microsoft engineer Gordon Bell, who led the
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initiative to connect the world’s super computers and thus create what is now the Internet,
has committed his life to a digital archive. In a recent interview on CBC Radio, Bell
explains how “Mylifebits” contains every last scrap, note, text or image he has collected
or will encounter throughout his life; this includes over 100,000 photographs, 150,000
web pages, 120,000 emails, as well as videos, home-movies, grade school report cards,
and other materials which have been scanned and uploaded onto his system. What is
more, the “Sense Cam,” now perpetually suspended from around Bell’s neck, is
programmed to take a photograph every 30 seconds, thus accumulating 2,000 random
images over a waking day, all of which are, predictably, transferred onto his archive.
Shifting his life to hard-drive and cyberspace, Bell contends, is valuable not only for the
purpose of augmenting human memory capacity, but also for its environmental and
economic logic. Bell’s system so far occupies 2 gigabytes of storage space, and each one,
he triumphantly claims, costs a mere 50 cents. But as Gabrys and other critics insist, the
environmental, social and cultural costs that belie the inexpensive and seemingly
innocuous piece of plastic that is that microchip are beyond estimation. The basic logic of
this equation cheapens “Mylifebits” irredeemably, particularly as Bell insists that it is
founded in part on an environmentally inspired goal – the elimination of what might be
called our culture’s paper dependency. But the real fallacy of the project lies in the
temporal incompatibility of preservation and digitization. Bell, it seems, is faced with the
large technological wrinkle that continually renders systems obsolete and their
information reserves irretrievable. His project, then, is threatened by its own terms,
namely, his industry’s commitment to development and reinvention which in turn hastens
the obsolescence of all existing infrastructure. Bell’s system must be continually updated
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if his life’s memories are to be accessed in the future; otherwise his archive, his life, will
be rendered obsolete. Not unlike the reversing effects of Justin Kan’s commitment to
documenting his life through cinematic overexposure, what Bell might well be engaged
in is an enterprise of self-annihilation – the reduction of the self rather then its affirmation.
The self as microchip, rendered disposable, thrown away, absorbed into sprawl of
accumulated residues and where it might, perhaps, be gleaned by someone else. And if
the 50 cent bit is indeed fit to be recycled, its life might be transformed, and its worth
restored, reinvented by the circuitry of the secondhand.
But the secondhand – as an aesthetic and an economic practice – should be
approached cautiously, for reconfiguration does not mean reinvention, but often the
concealing of an older mode in a deceptively new form. Indeed, the Prelinger Archive’s
amassed detritus as well as Kristen Horton’s excessive recycling are nothing if not
demonstrative of image-culture’s gluttonous tendencies. As these projects lucidly
demonstrate, recycling would not be possible were it not for a surplus of goods. Rather
than rely on the immediate fixes that recycling proposes, the production of excess is what
ought to be addressed. But secondhand commerce encourages excess: it keeps an
underclass within the loop of consumerism and also frees up room for fresh goods, and
thus more glut. Gleaners, then, are necessary, for they absorb some of our residue and so
minimize the depth of our footprints. But when the gleaners are overfed, the pirates and
pickers overwhelmed with excess, what recourse will be left? What will neutralize
recycling’s footprints?
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Conclusion: The Ecology of Coppola’s Laptop
In September 2007, thieves broke into the Argentinean residence of Francis Ford
Coppola, and stole the director’s laptop computer, which contained the script and pre-
production work for his forthcoming film, Tetro. In addition to the computer, Reuters
reported that the five armed robbers who raided Coppola’s house, which also functions as
a production studio, made off with camera equipment, other computer hardware and the
backup disk which held, Coppola stated, “all of the photographs of my life and all of my
writing.” While much of the work was apparently saved elsewhere, it seems the director
had lost enough to justify offering a sizeable monetary award for the backup’s return,
pleading that it would save him “years of work” spent on his film script. Fittingly, Tetro
is a somewhat autobiographical narrative, tracing the history of an Italian immigrant
family not unlike the director’s own. But that a human life – as the director’s lost script
and photographic archive surely represent – can vanish with the removal of a machine
points to the transience and volatility of both cinema itself as well as the culture that
produced it. By cultivating a grand dependency on technology and its hardware, it seems
that humankind has in fact weakened its potential for longevity, and in doing so has
rendered not only personal and cultural eco-systems vulnerable but the physical
environment as well.
The intention of “The Disposable Camera” has been for inclusiveness, making it
possible and necessary for multiple disciplines, strategies of inquiry, and various modes
320
of cultural production to engage the universality of the problem itself – environmental
detriment and also how this moment of crisis and imminent threat suddenly renders
visible and essential all those dimensions which heretofore seemed negligible if not
inconsequential. The ultimate ambition this project claims is that it should represent the
beginning of a dialogue, not the summation of one. Likewise, the earnest desire here is
that the camera will not prove disposable, but rather that images and their technology will
be afforded greater care and appreciation; indeed, Coppola’s personal and professional
misfortune reminds us of the inherent value of being able to retain and/or represent,
however ephemerally, some measure of our perceived reality. So it is that what
Coppola’s missing laptop highlights is the question that has come to frame this entire
project: how would (or will) the erosion and/or disappearance of cinematic resources
upend our cultural and personal ecosystems?
Because this question also refers back to the very moment when the idea for this
project was conceived, it does something to confirm the integrity that has all along
informed what is now “The Disposable Camera.” All of this began with a fortuitous, and
unintentional, juxtaposition between image and text that appeared in the Toronto Star. An
article by Tim Harpur on the dispute over oil drilling in Alaska’s National Wildlife
Refuge included as part of the full-page spread a headshot of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens,
caught in the throes of what looked to be an impassioned argument. Stevens, who was
leading the push for the controversial drilling project to go ahead, had the day before
disparagingly referred to the refuge as a “barren, frozen wasteland” in possession of “no
beauty at all”; but the bolded headline that appeared above his picture read quite
differently – “our culture is threatened.” Though at a glance these words plainly appeared
321
to belong to the senator, in fact they had come from Chief Joe Linklater of the Gwitchin
First Nation in Old Crow, Yukon, and, indeed, the statement was properly qualified and
contextualized within the body of the article. The chief, as the Star reported, was ardently
opposed to the pipeline, arguing that such invasive drilling would destroy the habitat of
the caribou herds upon which many First Nations cultures depend for both physical
sustenance and cultural identity. As Linklater explained to the media and politicians alike,
“when the caribou herd is threatened, our culture is threatened.” It is, he said, “the only
culture our people know.” But what the Star’s conflation of Stevens’ image and
Linklater’s words so accurately pointed out was that the need for fossil fuel represents the
survival of Stevens’ culture as well, that is, American and industrialized society as a
whole. Stevens confirmed as much when he argued that “the American people know that
development in (the Arctic Refuge) will help lower energy prices, reduce our dependence
on unstable and unfriendly regimes, and grow our economy.” Not dissimilarly, the
Gwitchin recognize that their cultural autonomy is intimately connected to the endurance
of a natural resource, for they have long depended on the caribou to feed and clothe
themselves, as well as to provide them with a sense of spirituality. What is more, the
disappearance of the caribou would destabilize the region’s entire ecosystem; bears
would prey on moose and then, when the moose were gone, the bears would disappear,
resulting in the loss of “fur-bearing animals all the way down the ecosystem.” But the
reduction of oil would radically subvert another ecology – that of hydrocarbon culture;
and, indeed, the ruptures that are already being manifested by petroleum’s depletion are
proving economically devastating and culturally incalculable. So it is that Stevens was
implicitly arguing that American citizens also require access to a natural resource, not
322
only to sustain what has become a traditional way of life (represented in petroleum-
dependent transportation, food production, material goods and, now, digital
communication and imaging systems) but also to uphold the “spiritual” values that
hydrocarbon and/or commodity culture has come to provide. Against its better intentions,
then, what the Star article foregrounded was not so much the fragility of Alaska’s
ecosystem or the Gwitchin people, but that of industrialized society as a whole.
But the purpose here is not to once again point out the relationship between
culture, the natural environment and resources or to further suggest the ways in which
energy and ecology have always been embedded in cinematic production. Instead,
revisiting the moment of propulsion for what has become “The Disposable Camera”
confirms that what was once an oblique set of questions has become a definitive problem,
to which this project hopes to have contributed a feasible means of approach and
engagement. The real lesson learned from the Coppola story, the nuances contained in the
Toronto Star spread and the eco-system disruption (on levels cultural, personal and
physical) which connects them is that, once the conditions are foregrounded, ecology is
found in all things. Because our planet’s hastening environmental peril is so pervasive
and inclusive, relations that might have before been deemed disparate or debatable are
now urgent and essential, and they exist across and between any and all narratives, modes
of representation and fields of research. The tone has been set, then, and the problem laid
out; the burden that this introduces is confronting the fact that no facet or dimension is
excluded from the nexus of ecology and imagery, the laptop and the pipeline, and the
practice and politics that unite them, and us, and inextricably so.
323
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FILMOGRAPHY Alpert, Jon and Matthew O’Neill. Baghdad ER (2006). Baichwal, Jennifer. Edward Burtynsky: Manufactured Landscapes (2006). Bochco, Steven and Chris Gerolmo. Over There (2005). Demme, Jonathan. The Manchurian Candidate (2004). Erice, Victor. Dream of Light (1994). Figgis, Mike. Time Code (2000). Geyrhalter, Nikolaus. Our Daily Bread (2006). Godard, Jean-Luc. Tout va bien (1972).
---. Week-end (1967).
Haneke, Michael, Caché (2006). ---. Time of the Wolf (2003).
Herzog, Werner. Lessons of Darkness (1992). Lee, Spike. When the Levees Broke (2006). Marker, Chris. Sans Soleil (1982). ---. La Jetée (1962). Maybury, John. The Jacket (2005). Mendes, Sam. Jarhead (2005).
Russell, David O. Three Kings (1999). Scranton, Deborah. War Tapes (2006). Sokurov, Alexander. Russian Ark (2002).
Varda, Agnès. The Gleaners and I (2000). Vertov, Dziga. Kino Eye (1924).