The Kinematic Turn , livre ebook

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copyright © 2012, 2020 André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion translation copyright © Timothy Barnard ISBN 978-1-927852-33-0
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Contents
The Kinematic Turn André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion
For an Archaeology of the Digital: An Interview with the Authors Charlotte Dronier
Notes
The Kinematic Turn Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems 1
Cinema, they say, is in crisis. A day doesn’t pass without someone remarking the fact or getting worked up by the topic. This is not the first time in film history that such a thing has been proclaimed. Often diagnosed as being on its death bed, cinema nevertheless ­always regains its colour. A fine example of this return to health was the release, ­announced with great fanfare in the summer of 2008 , of the new Hollywood film Journey to the Center of the Earth , a 3D adaptation of the Jules Verne story. The film was marketed as a novelty that enabled viewers to rediscover the essence of the shared film ex perience: an intense audiovisual and emotional immersion in a truer than life fiction that was celebrated as cinema’s great return to its former vocation as spectacle, now playing in a specially re- equipped cinema near you.
How would it be possible here not to recall the novelty aspect associated with the kinematograph’s primordial ATTRACTION ? This attraction, given cinema’s intrinsic connection to spectacle, plays a decisive role in what we might call the kernel or fundaments of cin ema’s identity as a medium. This identity is always evolving (as is that of any other medium), but for a good part of the twentieth cen tury the movie theatre, that special site where films were consumed, was at the centre of the immersive journey promised to us by the art form of that century. Was the movie theatre the classical site of INSTITUTIONAL CINEMA ? 2 How could we not recall, in this respect, Roland Barthes’ remark that ‘whenever I hear the word “cinema”, I can’t help thinking “movie theatre” rather than film’? 3 Movie the atres: the jewel case of filmic attractions, but whose future appears to be threatened by the digital revolution that is turning our traditions upside down and putting our habits topsy-turvy. Just a short time ago this revolution precipitated an identity crisis out of which cine­ ma is far from emerging.

A TTRACTION
Strictly speaking, an attraction exists only to display its visi bility. It is there, before the viewer, in order to be seen. As a rule, attractions are momentary, if not instantaneous. The attractions of KINE-ATTRACTOGRAPHY are thus the peak ­moments of the show, the aggressive moments punctuating animated pictures. In the punctiliar view (an animated picture made up of a single ‘shot’, a single tableau) How It Feels to Be Run Over (Hepworth, 1900), for example, an automobile advances towards the camera and knocks it over, causing a sudden and unexpected interruption in the filming.
Attraction, however, is not only the dominant principle of short, punctiliar pictures from the early years of kinemato­graphy. It is also present in the pluripunctiliar pictures (made up of more than one shot) that began to grow in number around the turn of the century. Attraction is also in contra­diction with the dominant principle of INSTITUTIONAL CINEMA : narration. Nevertheless, attraction and narration can work well together; often, the attractions found in kine-attractography even form part of a narrative infrastructure. Conversely, narrative cinema can be riddled with attractions, often on a massive scale, even in the most recent popular films; this is especially true of adventure films, musical com edies, suspense films, science fiction films, etc.
The attraction of early kinematography derived directly from popular stage entertainment dating from the turn of the twentieth century. The attractional quality of kine-­ attractography is not merely an intellectual category devised by contemporary scholars in need of interpretive models. Attraction was a fact of life which the various protagonists of kine-attractography had to face in their daily activities, and they were fully aware of the fact.
A.G.
Seen in this light, many other media today appear also to be go ing through an identity crisis, one that can be detected by various symptoms. Thus we have seen that boundaries between contempor ary media have become increasingly blurred and shift with greater speed. Isn’t the present-day media landscape characterised by flux, contamination, interconnection and a propensity to the reticular? Don’t media today tend to interpenetrate and combine in the form of hyper- or multi-media (something reflected in the multi-dimensional world of the Internet)?
A medium or new technology barely appears before it begins to hybridise with and latch onto other media in a kind of universal intermedial convergence. The oldest media, those whose sphere of influence was once quite well defined, have not been spared. What remains today, for example, of the telephone of olden times? This is a quite legitimate question when we consider that the telephones we call ‘smart’ are constantly and unexpectedly being used to convey or relay other media: television, radio, the Internet, MP4 , GPS , etc. Is it not significant in this respect, moreover, that in many parts of the world the customary term used to describe this ‘medium’ does not include the word telephone ? (In France it’s a portable , in Quebec a cellulaire , in Belgium a GSM and in England a mobile .) It’s as if this omission of the word ‘telephone’ was a subliminal way of concealing the original purpose of the device, which existed initially to enable telephonic communication.

INSTITUTIONAL CINEMA
Cinema as we generally understand it today was not a late-nineteenth-century invention. The emergence of cinema, in the sense we understand the term today, dates instead from the 1910s. We may appropriately invoke the term and cate­ gory ‘cinema’, as well as the epistemic paradigm ‘institutional cinema’, when moving images began to be perceived as their own separate CULTURAL SERIES —a process that took place around 1910.
For fields such as cinema, in which there exists a form of communication among various agents, the institution tells the agents responsible for producing utterances how to express themselves in order to ‘address’ the others, while telling the agents receiving these utterances how to read them. Clearly normalisation and codification, in the case of the cinema, did not appear the day the Cinématographe or the Kinetograph appeared on the scene. Time was required for production codes and norms—and thus interpretive codes and norms—to appear. Or, if you prefer, to be instituted. It is also quite clear that from this perspective the institution ‘cinema’ appeared only after rules, which are the corollary of production codes and norms, took on the force of law.
One of institutional cinema’s principles is to dissolve the ATTRACTIONS scattered throughout a film’s discourse into a narrative structure—to integrate them in the most organic manner possible. Some of its key elements are the norms of classical narrative cinema: the need for a narrator and the star system. The principles and products of institutional cine­ma have little in common with those of KINE-ATTRACTO­GRA PHY , apart from the fact that each paradigm is based on the use of moving pictures. Institutional cinema and kine-attractography are antagonistic and successively dominant paradigms clearly opposed to one another.
A.G.
Is this not an essential feature of today’s media culture and the way it has come under the influence of the screen? Media exchange amongst themselves, quote each other and reflect one another as if in a gigantic hall of mirrors. Networks of self-referencing and inter dependence are created between media systems whose identity boundaries are constantly being confused, each of them being capable of serving as a medium for another. Media thus systematically put their shoulder to the wheel, so to speak, and each can ‘mediate’ to the benefit of others as much as for itself. It’s all as if the Russian dolls described by Marshall McLuhan as forming part of a diachronic media landscape are now being projected onto a synchronic plane. A ‘medium’ must thus be understood here in the sense of a base, an auxiliary to mediation, a mode of transmission. Among the con sequences of this are an intense porosity, a loss of autonomy and singularity, in favour of a combinatorial multimedia quality and a generalised state of INTERMEDIALITY .
Today’s media crisis is thus rooted, in part, in the materiality of media. Or, more precisely, in media materiality as it was defined, guaranteed, protected and regulated by the institution that was erected around the medium and that constructed it as an object while at the same time providing it with a well-defined identity. Every medium appears less and less capable of being defined in a simple, ‘protectionist’ manner. There is no more ‘private property’ or specific field of action around a medium; put another way, media are no longer ‘nation states’, whereby cinema for example was reduced to a mere material base or technology, limited to a mere combinatory formal logic joining a given