Films Without Frames

“It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem real when you view them on a screen”

A Clockwork Orange

I.               Strata of the Moving Image:  Becoming-Baby; Becoming-Mirrors. Desire and Multiplicities of Unconscious.

The gaze is but secondary in realization to the gazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality.  The mirror is but secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality. [1kP, 171]

I had come to think of Cinema with Lacan and his stage of mirrors.  Lacan says, as small developing children, the point when a baby recognizes its face in the mirror is the germination of empathetic interaction.  A simultaneous split into two and three; the self, the reflected, subjugated-self, and the environment in which the mirror and the subject produce the Real.  The resemblance to the cinema sees a mirror on a screen and a projected self upon it.  The environment of our protagonist exists in dialectic juxtaposition to the environment of the spectator.  The movement-image is the remembrance of that germination, of the time when a spectator once realized she or he existed.  While viewing a movement-image, a spectator produces the real through an empathetic reaction to her or his own environment.  His unconscious makes no distinction between a mirror and a projection screen.  A new life is actualized on the screen.

But Deleuze and Guatarri are insistent that the gaze and the mirror are secondary to the white wall and black hole.  The abstract machine of Faciality.  There are more strata growing on Cinema.  Cinema is an Empire of Shadows and Light.  Spectatorship in the Cinema is more than the realization of our unconscious, it is a deterritorialization of the unconscious.  The White Wall is a face, an infantile remembrance (or forgetting) of the desire for mother’s milk.  We crave for the white wall, as we craved for the blinding white shapelessness of the breast.  The Black Hole is an apparatus within the White Wall, producing faces, producing images.  In the Cinema the White Wall is the projection screen, and the Black Hole that produces images is the projector.  An abstract and complex subjectivity is being produced.  A movement-image is not the emulation of a dream.  It is not the truth of self-actualization.  Spectating the movement-image is producing the real, producing subjectivity, and producing empathy, all while creating Milieus and Rhythms to territorialize with the shadows on the White Wall.

I don’t go on a lot of dates, but going to dinner and a movie certainly seems to be a popular way of doing it.  Funny, I think.  A farce. On a date like this you can eat, but you don’t have to shit; you can watch a movie, but you do not have to discuss the libidinal phantasy devised by it.  Sexual intercourse is a multiplicity.  Bodies are reorganized by the motivation of desire; Becomings-one-another occur in an abstract machine.  A couple creates rhythms and reconstitutes milieus – forms a Plane of Consistency.  They are a multiplicity and they are deterritorializing.  In the cinema, we all fall asleep.  The movement-image inspires unconscious desire and produces lines of flight back onto the White Wall and to the other spectators as well.  The multiplicity of sexual intercourse is reimagined as a group of spectators shares their desires.  Assemblages are made not just between a spectator and the White Wall, but also between spectators.  A spectator’s libidinous, infantile desires are reimagined and shared.  This dinner-and-a-movie-date flirts with exposing oneself as a digestive organism, and as a desirous, sexual organism. 

This process sounds abhorring, not beautiful and certainly not fun.  I have had a lot of fun at the movies, and I am not entirely sure that I have simulated sex with everyone else reaching closer to the bottoms of their buckets of popcorn.  The important factor in this process is desire.  Cinema is nostalgia for a world that does not exist, a false world.  The White Wall and Black Hole, the Abstract Machine we create at the cinema is a factory of desire.  Like we did the teat, in the Cinema we desire the movement-image.  We open ourselves up to recognize the mirror and ourselves in it.  The mirror does not produce the reality of the movement-image; our desire does.  In the Cinema, the spectator produces the Real back at the White Wall.  The movement-image is given meaning because we all do this.  Because you read about it in the paper and on the internet, because you talk about movies at work, and because you can discuss a film on your date the film takes on a new life, deterritorialized, beyond the Cinema.  

II.               Assemblages of Production: Art in the Age of the Mechanosphere of Reproduction.  The Cinema-State and the Objectivity Illusion.  Nomad Theater.

“…the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie

moving from reality to the camera.”

Jean-Luc Godard Los Angeles Free Press, March 22, 1968.

                  All Cinema is reproduction.  From The Passion of Joan of Arc to Citizen Kane, from Breathless to Independence Day, all movement-images are a reproduction.  Even Stan Brakhage, in his attempt to liberate the Cinema from the camera could not escape the Cinema as a disciplinary State Apparatus, the Empire of Shadows and Light.  The movement-image is territorialized and deterritorialized in the theater.  Every movement-image is a document of the light and shadows that the film was exposed in front of.  The theatrics of Orson Welles’ soundstages, Truffaut’s shots of the alleyways of Paris, Brakhage’s deteriorated, disassembled filmstock are all representations of the productions (or in Brakhage’s case, the non-production) that happened in front of it.  The Camera is an Apparatus of capture, casting a net over the production in the name of the Cinema, the Empire of Shadows and Light.

                  Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera is a quasi-documentary film about the objectivity of a camera.  Vertov’s camera focuses on an array of mechanical objects, and then displays the point of view of that mechanical object, traversing the complexities of the industrial sphere.  But the point of view of the machines always remains the point of view of the actual camera apparatus.  The camera is in a state of becoming.  Becoming-train; becoming-steam engine.  Vertov set out to illustrate the relationship between a signifier and the signified, and, in doing so, shows instead the lens of his camera traversing a Line of Flight across a plane of industrialization becoming the objects it is meant to represent.  The autonomy of the image is always granted by Vertov’s camera.  The camera is not objective, and never the subject.  It is a signifier in a constant becoming.  The camera’s objectivity is an illusion, a fraud.  As Godard might say, “the most beautiful fraud in the world.”

                  The Empire uses the film camera as its Apparatus of Capture to appropriate the Nomadic War Machine.  The Nomads are a film’s production.  Its tools of lights and shadows are appropriated by the camera and weaponized.  Actors and Production staff, on a stage or in the streets, are performing in spite of the Apparatus of Capture.  It is the duty of the camera to capture the Nomad production, to appropriate and militarize the war machine.  Great lengths were taken by the Italian Neorealists, the French New Wave, and the American Independent filmmakers of the 1970s to demilitarize the War Machine.  The Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, and Easy Rider all took to the streets to combat the Empire.  The Empire’s Capitol was the soundstage and the studio system.  Travel was structured around the camera.  The Nomad Theater deterritorialized the movement-image from the reterritorialized assemblage of the studio and soundstage strata that contained it.  The Nomads forced the camera into the streets.  They turned the Capitol into a Metropolis.  They redefined the Apparatus of Capture as a subject to their movement, demilitarizing the War Machine.

III.               Rhizome Comedy:  Del Close and Truth in Comedy.  The Refrain, Comedy, and the Plane of Consistency.  Nostalgia of Desire.  Bodies without Organs and Films without Frames.

“where do the really best laughs come from?  Terrific connections made intellectually, or terrific revelations made emotionally.”

Del Close.  Truth in Comedy.

                  Every shot in a flim becomes-Hjelmslev’s Net.  The content of a shot is subject to the way that it expresses itself.  The Black Hole Projector and the film itself exress themselves in shadows; the spectator and shadow also form an assemblage, rhizomatic connections, and an abstract machine of interpretation.  Frames deterritorialize at 24.4 frames per second.  The spectator-frame abstract machine and white wall/black hole light and shadow abstract machine form Rhythms and Milieus; form a new assemblage of subjectification and significance, through lines of flight traversing the white wall.  Interpretation and understanding is an assemblage that must be deterritorialized.

                  In 1994 Del Close and Charna Halpern wrote Truth in Comedy.  The book is a manual for Close’s longform improvisation format, “Harold,” but it is also a musing on the nature of theater and comedy.  “It is easy to become deluded by the audience, because they laugh. Don’t let them make you buy the lie that what you’re doing is for the laughter. Is what we’re doing comedy? Probably not. Is it funny? Probably yes.” (Truth in Comedy 25)  Close observes that comedy comes from intellectual connections that are achieved though intellectual and emotional catharsis.  The improvisers in Close’s structure are consistently territorialzing and forming new milieus in the form of scenes, and then they expand their rhythms while gathering a Plane of Consistency.  The connections that Close refers to are a Plane of Consistency, charged with intensities, becoming a Body without Organs and deterritorializing to new Planes of Immanence on which they can territorialize and form new assemblages on new Earths, new Universes.

Filmmakers make these connections consistently, borrowing from and making references to the films of the past.  In Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino implements a dance sequence that easily calls reference to a similar dance sequence from Frederico Fellini’s Masterpiece 8 ½ .  An assemblage is formed between Tarantino’s mise-en-scene and Fellini’s.  An assemblage of interpretation is formed at the white wall.  Lines of flight between the expressive content of the film and the spectators’ own knowledge of content from Fellini’s film.  The connection between the two form a unique assemblage, a dialectic of expression and content, that forms a new plane of consistency, deterritorialize, and reach a new Plane of Immanence where new discourse about and action in filmmaking can conspire.

Filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Paul Thomas Anderson implement this dialectic territorialization.  Godard’s Breathless is an unashamed homage to early American B-movies, and Paul Thomas Anderson frequently borrows from films like Putney Swope for its seemingly unprovoked firecracker explosions to make a new method of cinematic discourse that is unique. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZRzeUrVy1o 

In a very tense scene in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men when Lewellen and Sigur have a suspenseful shootout in a motel , we can see many elements of the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Rear Window  (see above) .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4RnHsV3wIo

These assemblages and subsequent deterritorializations are the Nomad Theater’s strongest weapon against the Empire of Light and Shadows.  There is a Desire that is immanent in the production of these films, a Desire for Nostalgia.  To constitute new milieus and expand the rhythms out into the realm of films of the past is to create a new cinematic assemblage. The dialectic assemblage is a conversation between the filmmakers and the spectators, a method of communication that does not rely on the Empire of Light and Shadows, on its tradition of quality, or its appropriation of the Nomad Theater for its own diabolical sustenance.  The Empire of Light and Shadows is the industry of filmmaking.  It is a strata grown so thick on the plane of filmmaking that it forms he entire plane to fulfill its own devices.  And it only grows larger.

The Nomad Theater deterritorializes the medium, creates new dialectics of cinematic discourse, and creates new assemblages of cinema.   Like Antonin Artaud disassembled and disorganized to become a Body without Organs, free from the axioms of God’s Judgement, the Nomad Theater disassembles the cinema and creates Films without Frames, free from the Judgement of the Empire of Light and Shadows.  Free from the judgement of God, the films can finally simply enjoy themselves and the artistic and intellectual discourse that they contribute to.