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The Cinema Effect

by Sean Cubit
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
464 pp., illus. 48 b/w. Trade, $39.95
ISBN: 0-262-03312-7.

Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann
Braunschweig School of Art, Germany


spielmann@medien-peb.uni-siegen.de

Another Cubitt. After the publication of two volumes on video that discuss aspects of medium and culture (Timeshift 1991, Videography, 1993), Cubitt's critical preoccupation with the phenomena of flow, change, and instability also drives the discussion of digital media and networked communication with regard to the organization of knowledge, power, and spatial relations on a global scale in the monograph Digital Aesthetics (1998). There, he identifies cartography as the paradigm of realism in contrast to perspective as the paradigm of special effect (perspectivial vision is synthetic) that is essentially spatial because it organizes in space. (Cubitt coins the term 'spatial effect'). More recently, in the comprehensive survey of simulation theories (Simulation and Social Theory, 2001), Cubitt once more stresses in a historical view the building of concepts and the manufacture of thinking processes that in the interplay with social and economic factors merge into clustered terms such as 'simulation' (here again, the synthetic characteristics are foregrounded). And finally, the (up to now) masterpiece is out: a book about The Cinema Effect that takes in previous reflections on the instability and flow in the emergence of media instead of identifying interruption and defining normative patterns.

Departing from still commonly held theoretical positions according to which cinema is roughly divided——that is, realism (starting with the brothers Lumière) and magic (starting with the stop-trick by Georges Méliès)——Cubitt is interested in the magic flow of effects that constitute cinema on the whole: as a visual effect of motion on the temporal raster of the 'pixel', as an effect that through the differentiation of the 'cut' constructs objects in spatial and temporal relations, and as a special effect that grounds in animation and connotes meaning, transformation, and metamorphosis through the 'vector' which marks the transition from "being" of the object (cut) to becoming 'synthetic'. Lucidly, the argument of the book develops from the beginning of the medium where Cubitt describes three positions, namely Lumière, Méliès, and Cohl, that together contribute to the formation of the cinema effect. In the first and basic chapter Cubitt builds an argument for viewing cinema as an 'object' on the scrutiny of the phenomena of motion, spatial object, and transformation that are placed in terms of pixel, cut, and vector.

The first, the 'pixel' describes the moment of movement as the first 'magic' effect of cinema. This constitutes an aesthetics of astonishment and instigates the 'birth' of cinema as special effect. This moment in the history of cinema, as the author stresses, 'documents' not 'life' (la vie) but 'liveliness' (le vif) and is shared by the social activity of the modern 'flaneur' (around 1895) and is also paralleled in the new concept of life that is divided up into work and leisure time. Thus, in understanding cinema as magic, special effect is, first of all, exemplified in the work of the brothers Lumière who serve as main authority to Cubitt's statement that cinema does not represent time but originates it. Finally, cinema does not represent 'reality', and it is not the temporal structure that automatically and necessarily leads into the narrative. On the contrary, as the thorough (and for the non-expert easy to follow) discussion of theories on early cinema convincingly concludes, Lumiérès' cinema is misregarded under the category of 'documentary', because it shows the magical transformation from life to liveliness: therein lies the magic, the speciality of cinema.

The second category that Cubitt introduces in order to liberate cinema from the dogma of realism and narrative is the 'cut' that develops with the interruption of movement through Méliès' invention of stop-trick. In line with the previous argument that the cinematic events relate to the real but (with regard to its material condition) consist of discrete and fragmented elements, Cubitt's secondary discussion of the cinema as the universe of the 'synthetic' unfolds how Méliès' technique of stop-motion distinguishes objects from their movement. Méliès, thereby, constitutes the possibility of cinematic third dimension: cinema as a spatial effect. Logically, what follows in the third, the 'vector' section, is another argument for the synthetic characteristics of cinema that Cubitt identifies in the early animation films of Emile Cohl (around 1908). Clearly, here film is not narrative, not illusion of continuous flow, but fragmentation.

All of this, 'pixel', 'cut', and 'vector' point to the cinematic way to spatialize looking. Here, Cubitt relates to Jacques Aumont's theories of painting, photography, and film where Aumont anchors the invention of cinema in the 'mobilization of gaze'. As Cubitt concludes: "At some point in the near future when historians recognize that the photochemical cinema is a brief interlude in the history of the animated image, representation will become, like narrative, a subcode of interpretation rather than an essence of motion pictures" (p. 97). This view of cinema maintains the importance of a material theory of film "against narrativity". However, the point being, animation film is not a sub-category of cinema, but its essence that determines the grounding principles for the development of any cinematic magic, a magic that involves the construction of movement from discrete entities and the perception of moving images, a magic that encompasses the extension of temporal and spatial features, and through its potential of the spatial map beats off any scholarly notion of cinema representing reality——and, finally, a magic that is open to the production of meaning. Cubitt stresses, in particular, the positive aspect of the 'vector' principle of 'becoming' (which means open-ended and mobile relationships between 'subject, object, and world'), because in a world where everything turns into spectacle and data, where everything is ruled by laws of commodity, the work of art "must be positive". One challenge, clearly lies in the affirmation of the reality of cinema as magic: "The vector does not tell us what to expect: it requires us to think" (p. 85).

In light of this idea, the critical and political stance against narrative and realism implies an avant-garde position towards corporate cinema that has taken over since the implementation of copyright laws. This produces the apparatus of a narrative according to the laws of commodity that are highlighted in normative Hollywood cinema. Consequently, in the following two chapters ("Normative Cinema" and "Post Cinema"), Cubitt discusses the stabilization of cinema that subordinates magic to narrative. Strikingly, Eisenstein's montage of effects marks the transition from total cinema to the aesthetics and norms of totality in so-called classical film that forms the paradigm of 'spectacle' in the 1930's and 1940's. While the cinema of spectacle exposes temporality, it removes from the magic and cinematic effect. The task of media theory here is to understand 'why and wherefore' the 'commodity fetishism' has driven the production of cinema for a hundred years. Because Cubitt argues for a stronger consideration of the mutual, but problematic relations between the 'cinematic object' and its audience that at the same time drives and is driven by this practice of mediation; naturally the following chapter searches for points of resisting the 'total' cinema. These possibilities are identified where cinema turns away from the paradigm of reality (temporal) and reinvestigates the early miracle and magic effect through stress on the 'spatialization of time'. But differently from the early days of the medium, the period of "post cinema", as Cubitt puts it, departs from normative aesthetics and the elitism of the 'sublime'; it bears the potential of 'becoming' democratic where it follows the understanding of 'beauty', which is inside the world and "confronts ugliness: sickness, squalor, brutality: things that can be changed" (p. 10).

Logically, the idea of change is linked to the notion of flow that is initially identified in the principle of the vector because it connotates 'becoming'. But, in "post cinema", the explorative naivity and pioneer spirits of early cinema are gone and cinema has to struggle harder to connect to its magic. Even in mainstream films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix, Cubitt finds roots and traces of the "instability of the vector", effects that "hover between reality and unreality" (p. 350) and that are open to ethnic issues as well, such as effects of orientalism that enter cinema. What counts here is not that Hollywood simply incorporates and swallows the 'other' under its 'old' paradigm of realism but that differently Cubitt finds unstable relations, unstable oscillation between antagonistic principles (realism and simulation) in open-ended spaces of the cinematic universe of the 'synthetic.' This constitutes another era of 'cosmopolitan film'.

As its leading metaphor the new book starts with Christian Metz' s statement that "in some sense all cinema is a special effect." What Cubitt means by the phrase, expresses a counter-argument against a narrow understanding of film's relations to (physical) reality. "To the extent that all cinema is a special effect," as Cubitt previously explained in Digital Aesthetics: "The effects film is the cinema of cinema, the cinema of a disavowal become affirmation in an astounded moment." From the conclusion that film as a commodity inherits from perspective and painting the transformation of three- into two-dimensionality and the transformation of the temporal into the (static/spatial) spectacle, we can draw a line to the understanding of cinema as another 'effect'. The concern in The Cinema Effect, then, is to underline the construction of a cinematic reality of its own 'language' that functions as the mediator between the viewing subject and——what Cubitt is interested in——the 'object of cinema'. The medium of film has always played a major role in Cubitt's reflection on electronic and digital media when he focuses on the interplay of technological, economic, social, and political factors (in short, relationships of power, knowledge, and aesthetics) that drives the emergence, constitution, and institutionalization of a new mediums and, thereby, sets the frame for the unfolding of the 'object' (and the specificitiy) of the medium in temporal and spatial terms——an 'object', however, that is subject to change and not a stable (timeless) category.

In the book, The Cinema Effect, Sean Cubitt pursues the effects that cinema produces in relation to reality from the the perspective of the digital media and traces back the roots and conceptual history of terms such as "pixel, cut, and vector" that are commonly used in contemporary media language. The idea is to discuss the 'object' of cinema as a conglomeration and amalgamation of cinematic effects that are responsable for a 'moving image'. And these effects, as they express in pixel, cut, and vector, are further discussed as they establish digital aesthetics, because, for example, the openness of the vector includes the 'subjective role' of the indivudal who engages in an authorship type of interrelations with the computer. Plus, the notion of transformation and metamorphosis——in short, all the ephemeral presentations that cinema inherits (because it is an 'effect' of 'reality' of its own rule and not a simple 'reality effect')——make the connection to the human-machine relations that we deal with in the computer age. Where Cubitt states, "The vector is the art of curiosity" (p. 85), the focus easily extends into the discussion of European "oneiric film" that in the manner of science fiction deals with the results of the atomic and post-nuclear catastrophies that the Hollywood cinema passes forward. Throughout the book, Cubitt 'searches' for traces of cinema that maintain and revitalize its magic against totalitarian and corporate cinema. The reader, then, is not surprised that points of resistance that highlight instability, fragmentation, and spatial effects for the most part are located in the realm of science fiction, where magic is near.

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