Final Thoughts on “A Thousand Plateaus”

Out of all the readings – many of which were quite challenging – A Thousand Plateaus was by far the most difficult for me to read and comprehend. It’s not that I don’t understand the concepts of Rhizome, Bodies WIthout Organs, Striated/Smooth Space, et al, but rather the difficulty I encountered lay in the style of writing. When first reading the book, I was taken back by the almost poetic stream of consciousness that showers from each paragraph, and it was only when I realized that this was indeed the point of much of the writing that I began to engage in a fruitful relationship with the text.

The text made me recall Nietzsche’s style of writing, which in itself confronts the supposedly sedentary status of language while at the same time putting forth new concepts. Indeed it would seem highly reductive to speak of Nietzsche’s concepts without addressing the means by which he explicates and expands on these concepts. In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, making this productive link between form and content made all the difference for me in understanding the works. It would be wrong to say that there aren’t serious concepts being explored in this tome, but in order for me to grasp them it was necessary to adopt a kind of intuition and reflection after the fact – much like Bazin insists on the meaning being produced a posterioriin neorealist cinema.

Though I couldn’t make the event at the Whitney, I was pleased to watch the video of the event. Apart from the fascinating nature of the combined and shared trades, I couldn’t help but feel that the reading of A Thousand Plateaus was entirely appropriate-achieving the poetic stream of consciousness I mentioned above. Though certainly useful to study in an academic context, I believe the value of the text is in its freedom of expression and form. Though sometimes I feel like it gets bogged down in digression and red herrings, there is a totally unique quality to the book because of this. It raises interesting questions concerning the written word and language in relation to philosophy. This of course seems entirely consistant with Deleuze’s project of linking art with philosophy and creating productive conduits between each field.

Forgive the brevity of my final post.
I have some Rhizomes to attend to.

Ian

“Chris Marker’s Second Life”

Thought I’d post this in lieu of the mention of Second Life during the last class-bizarre but as the article states, it’s “not surprising” that Chris Marker would inhabit this realm.

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1143-chris-markers-second-life

I guess someone found his space in Second Life and did a little “tour.”

http://www.chrismarker.org/?s=L%C2%B4Ouvroir

Not really a proper post, but I wanted to share this.

Ian

Zeno’s Frame Rate

I was just recalling an animated argument I had with my dad over Winter break that I thought I might use as catalyst for discussion here.

The discussion started when my dad asked me to explain how frame rates work in film versus video, and I explained to him the qualitative difference between 24fps film and 30fps video. I explained that slow motion is achieved by “over-cranking” at a rate like 60fps and then conforming that to 24 or another similar rate. My dad inquired as to the fastest possible frame rate available, which I wasn’t sure of though I know ultra slow motion cameras can shoot at rates up to 1200fps.

My dad didn’t believe there was a difference in perception when viewing 24fps vs 30fps, which I argued was false as all it takes is attentiveness to the quality of motion to notice the varying rate. My dad posed the question “at what frame rate would human perception confuse the projected image (video or film) for actual motion?” By this of course he didn’t mean a return to people fleeing from the arriving train at the early Lumiere screenings – unable to distinguish artifice from reality. Rather in a more theoretical sense, at precisely what frame rate would film or video motion match the quality of motion we experience in human perception, to the point at which the image would somehow mirror the quality of motion experienced when the viewer for example turns and looks at his cat walking into the room. Assumed here of course is that projection apparatus would be projecting at the same rate as the footage: 1200fps at 1200fps. Also assumed is that we all experience motion perceptually in the same manner.

No doubt this is not an easy question – however my response was that it would never be possible for cinema to match our perception of motion precisely because the process of illusion of motion achieved in cinematic motion is generated in an artificial manner: our experience of time and motion is not quantitative and measurable in perception but seamless and can only be measured a posteriori, like the assumption in Zeno’s arrow paradox. When we watch an HD video shot at a 60fps rate, does the motion look any more “real” to us than 24fps? My argument was that we perceive these different frame rates in terms of their respective qualities of motion. We can’t experience quantity when we watch different frame rates, only the resultant quality of motion produced. Thus if it were ever achieved to shoot and project at 10,000 fps, no matter how “real” the image looked, there would always be some sort of nagging qualitative factor that would linger in the image, giving it an unreality. In short, increasing the number of frames-per-second doesn’t necessarily produce more reality of motion.

This seems to me to tie into our discussion of Bergsonian time and movement. It seems to me that my dad – a scientist/mathematician by trade – is concerned with motion and time in the classical conception: quantitative, measurable, spatial. He is not wrong in his logic to suppose that perhaps our experience of motion consists of an infinite quantity of “frames”, but this seems to me the same logical conundrum in Zeno’s paradox: specializing movement and time quantitatively, making them measurable in a way denied to us in our everyday perception and experience. It’s worth nothing that despite varying frame rates, if an event is captured in 20 seconds by three separate cameras, all shooting at the same rate, the footage from all three cameras projected at those same frame rates would synchronize: the object or event would not be staggered – it would only differ in quality of motion. The event would still end at 20 seconds.

I should point out that by asserting cinema’s essential illusory production that I don’t believe cinematic images to be a false quality of motion or time, just a different expression of motion, produced by an alternative generative force than our perception of non-cinematic images in movement.

Any thoughts? I’m sure there are holes in either side, but I thought this might generate discussion or thought…

– Ian

Field Report: Nathaniel Dorsky at SVA

I recently attended a screening of Nathaniel Dorsky’s recent group of films entitled Quartet. The films Sarabande,Compline and Aubade and Winter,which are screened in various orders according to Dorsky’s preference, are utterly astounding. Not only are the films entirely silent, but Dorsky will only screen the works on their original format: a 16mm projector. Accordingly I am unable to provide many stills from them as they are not available to be watched digitally and Dorsky quite rightly points out that this would qualitatively alter the works from their current identity, which raises important questions of cinematic ontology in the genealogy of film and video. In the Q&A after the screenings, Dorsky jokingly referred to 16mm screenings as increasingly resembling concerts: subject to available equipment and varying circumstances.

After leaving the screening, I was struck by a number of relations to Deleuze’s philosophy and thoughts on cinema. Though I could certainly touch upon the “Time-Image” and Dorsky’s work, I’d like to continue a couple of thoughts from my previous post in regards to continuity editing. Dorsky’s work is an example of cinema as liberated from the tyrannical and territorializing demands of capital which play an important role in the formation of the “movement image” and its sub-categories of “action-image” and “affection-image.” As discussed in my previous post, continuity editing (in its worst application – there are of course exceptions) dulls our attentiveness to the image by attempting to conceal the seams which bond one shot to another, and which act in concert with a classical narrative schema to calibrate cinema for one sole style of filmmaking. Thus, action and images are ordered centripetally to build towards the narrative climax which precedes the film’s production and editing: montage is used here as a mold into which to pour preexistent story into.

What marks Dorsky’s cinema then, is an utter dedication to the immanence of the world, and as such his images are free from a transcendent model of representation and preexistence. Montage functions here as an open productive form, pure “tonal montage” to borrow Einstein’s term. There is no underlying narrative in the films, yet each film has a distinct character and stylistic unity, a duration. Images pass before our eyes that are by turns mysterious and familiar, or the familiar rendered mysterious and vice versa. It’s not easy to recount precisely what the objects Dorsky films are – though it is not an effort to be obscure. Rather, like the Paul Klee quote, Dorsky renders visible the mystery and immanent existence of objects and events as they present themselves to his camera. Flowers, a woman leaving a cafe, shadows through a screen on a door or window, the tones of light splashing on a car hood (recalling Godard’s in Two Or Three Things I Know About Her), trees passing over the sun and clouds – darkened to nocturnal quality by stopping down the camera. Another wonderful part of Dorsky’s work is that his images often seem to defy the customary laws of gravity in film; it is truly difficult to ascertain just what position the camera was filming from, on top of the uncertainty about what was actually being filmed. During the Q&A, Dorsky mused that cinema often follows the gravitational laws of human perception, while it has no real reason not to look at objects from new perspectives. This of course reminded me of Deleuze’s belief in cinema being able to provide a non-human vision of the world.

Perhaps the key quality of Dorsky’s films is their projection at silent-speed, 18 frames per second. Though we have a notion of cinematic motion at 18FPS, these silent era films are usually projected at 24FPS, thus rendering movement faster than normal. However, when 18FPS is projected at 18FPS, a new quality of movement emerges that is totally unique, and reminds us of the qualitative differences in frame rates, which do in fact have a profound effect on the experience of a cinematic work (see for example Christopher Doyle’s use of 4FPS at 4FPS in Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels and Chungking Express.)

What we find in Dorsky’s cinema is a return of sorts to the style of filmmaking envisioned by Dziga Vertov, a cinema reliant on the immanent vision of the kino-eye and the intuition of the kino-editor (I may be wrong, but I don’t think Vertov ever granted us a catchy neologism to accommodate the role of the editor – though it is obvious just how important the notion of editor was to Vertov, as in the lengthy editing sequences in Man With A Movie Camera.) The filmmaker acts as an agent of collection, of accumulation, of spontaneity. I was lucky enough to have Dorsky visit my class last year, and when asked how he shot his films, he reached into his bag and pulled out a beautiful Bolex H-16 camera, which accidentally fired off a few frames as he unpacked it. He explained that his method for working was only to shoot things as they presented themselves, subject to a stringent criterion of wonder. This very much excited me, as precisely how I like to work is by this very process of acquisition and intuition, capturing moments as they present themselves: no memories, no plans, to quote Le Jetée.

Of course I should be careful not to present Dorsky’s work as being better than narrative cinema, but it is undeniably cinematic unto itself-utilizing the camera to present works which remind of us the beauty and wonder of every day life, without recourse to theatrical or literary artifice. Why shouldn’t cinema also function in this fashion? A productive compendium of the sublime and ineffable. Objects indexed in their process of becoming and screened on 16mm film, which itself is in the process of material transformation.

Hume and Classical Continuity Editing: Billiard Balls and Match Cuts

After our consideration of David Hume, I became very curious and sought out a copy of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I was shaken again by the absolutely destabilizing notion that as a fact, we do not perceive causality and all inference/perception of causality is linked to a compendium of memories and past experience. Hume gives an example of two billiards balls and suggests that when Ball A strikes Ball B, precisely what we do not see or experience is the casual link that suggests to us that Ball B will be propelled forward. Likewise, there is nothing in either of Ball A or Ball B that unto themselves contains their relation to each other in this action. Though surely reductive to present this as the only proposition in the work (I’ve only begun to dig into his philosophy), it seems as though it is the core problem from which Hume develops his often very interesting provisional solutions.

Now that we have arrived at the cinema unit, I thought I would note an interesting parallel to Hume’s philosophy. Sam mentioned during his discussion of Hume that it seems as though cinema is kind of the perfect proof of Hume’s argument: when we infer continuity (in the broad sense of the term) we are ourselves active producers of meaning. If the perfectly rational man with no a priori knowledge that Hume imagines were to enter a cinema (assuming of course he knew what a cinema was; I suppose that’s another problem…) he would be confounded by the series of images passing before his eyes. However when a spectator enters the cinema, not only do they have a lifetime’s worth of experiences, but also a lifetime’s worth of cinematic experience, much of it constituted by the style of editing most suited to emulate the inferred continuity of perceptual existence, that style is “continuity editing” or perhaps more apropos in relation to Hume: “invisible editing.”

This style of editing as codified with the arrival of synchronized sound is predicated on maintaining a continuous, “understandable” cinematic space in which all actions and reactions are explicated and made to appear natural, unquestionable. Combined with a narrative arch that places all actions onto a centripetal curve to an inevitable climax, “invisible editing” constitutes much of commercial/narrative cinema to this day. What is interesting is thinking about Hume’s notions of perception and causation in this respect. Take the example of a match-action cut, in which a figure in medium framing sits downs. In Shot A he is seen beginning to sit down. In the middle of the motion, we cut to Shot B in which he completes his motion and sits in the chair, in a tighter framing. Precisely what is being aimed at here is concealing the cut which binds two discreet shots into one seamless action. What is actually occurring here if not a practice of Hume’s claim? There lays a chasm of unknowable depth between the two – a year could have passed between the two shots, any number of events could have transpired, this man may not even be the same person. Like the billiard balls, there is nothing specifically in Shot A that contains within it Shot B and vice versa. I am not referring here specifically of the content of the shot – of course we perceive someone who appears be same person, completing the action we just saw begun. Precisely what this cut masks though is the chasm of potentiality that lays between the two cuts: according to the rules of this montage style, the cut should not call attention to itself precisely because what we are supposed to be paying attention to is Jimmy Stewart or Humphrey Bogart as they continue their conversation with whomever joins them in their sensory-motor schema. So in a way, the same continuity we produce ourselves between discreet events which in themselves produce no objective relation, is now mirrored on the screen. Everything proceeds through graphical common sense: the 180 degree rule, the eye-line match, the match-action cut, the shot-reverse shot, etc. This is the world that Hume warns against in his writing, a world in which everything is somehow given and nothing is questioned, examined, experienced, verified. Of course, Hume’s discovery is a double edged sword: we shouldn’t reject everything we perceive to have a cause-effect relationship and live our lives like animals, but rather this essential ambiguity should serve as an ever-present reminder of the danger of the human imagination unchecked. So in continuity editing, what we have is basically a closed territory, which demands that a cut be anything but that: “don’t worry about that, can’t you see that this is explained for you? Carry on with Mr. Bogart!”

It should be noted that all cinema in which there is more than one shot there is always a sort of continuity that is inferred. As an audience, we expect there to be some sort of relation between the images we are viewing. Continuity editing simply assumes these relations be made invisible so that ostensibly the “story” of the film may be easily understood and followed. It’s not hard to see why this style fit into an industrial mode of filmmaking in which labor was divided so that by the time the script arrived, there was a certain mold to pour each story into. This is not to say that directors didn’t find ways to usurp this mold and inflect subtext to a work but this was an exception, not a rule. As Deleuze and Guatarri note: a territory is never completely closed and there always exists the potential for a line of flight. Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk are exemplary here, as what lays beneath the surface level of story/narrative is another layer, waiting to be excavated by those for whom a certain cut or camera movement constitutes a disturbance in the given. Above all, Hume asks that we be vigilant against anything that seems obvious or immediately apparent in our perception. For cinema which is an art and not an empirical science, perhaps we should remain open to the expressive potential of montage and not assume that its only function is to serve as an analogue to other narrative-based art forms.

Process Ontology and Jazz Music

(I know it’s super late in the semester to be posting my first entry, but here goes…)

One of the more difficult concepts (at least for me) introduced in the opening weeks of the course was the notion of subjectivity in a process ontology. Of course I have only begun to delve into Deleuze’s mode of philosophy, so I obviously won’t be able to give a full explication of this idea; however, a pathway to understanding opened for me in the context of music, specifically jazz music – my area of expertise.

To my understanding, Deleuze posits that in a process ontology, subjectivity is born from the ceaseless flow of time itself: we are not beings which experience changes but retain essential qualities which define our stable forms; rather, according to Deleuze we are always invariably in the process of becoming. It is our relations in time (which has not a beginning nor end: we enter in the midst) that individuate our existence, which is not then stable but perpetually in a state of shift, ephemera, metamorphosis, development. In contrast to a substance ontology, there are no apriori essences (Universals, Ideas or Forms) which exist before us and to which we might adhere to as somehow essential components of our being, serving to anchor our existence against the flow of change.

To reiterate a point Sam made during one of the first lectures, a musical composition does not preexist itself: it is in the process/unfolding of a piece that a stable identity emerges and exists. Through the repetition and difference (I am not intentionally referring to Deleuze’s text here, as I haven’t read it but the phrase certainly applies!) of rhythm, melody, harmony and other variables, a musical piece individuates its existence through time. Though we may refer to compositions we know or have heard, this reference does not constitute the existence of a piece of music unto itself – it is only a signifier for an existence which can become such only through it’s performance in time, either live or recorded.

For me this application takes on a very interesting relevance in relation to jazz music. Although all music comes into being in the process of its unfolding, jazz music (and other improvisatory music, of course) is unique in that its character may wildly vary, as opposed to having set coordinates (i.e., a score which must be read). A jazz recording is a record of the process of becoming, of individuation in real time. Even more so, we can differentiate between the becoming-sound of the entire piece, but also more specifically to the emergent identities which constitute themselves in the unfolding of their improvisation through the duration of the piece.

In a previous blog for Sam’s Godard class last semester, I wrote a brief overview of the basics of jazz improvisation in terms of its basic mechanics which hopefully will clarify the core concepts of how a typical jazz composition is played. This method undergoes radical changes in the early 1960s, but to this day it is still the standard operating procedure of most jazz musicians.

[On Godard and Jazz Improvisation]

I would like to give an example of a standard composition in jazz lexicon, “My Funny Valentine.” Below are three recordings made by Miles Davis, with three different ensembles. What is interesting for me is that jazz music when recorded is a document of individuation at a respective time – this is how the world and the experiences of the musicians has come to form their personality at this time, which inevitably is completely different for each performance. Conversely, this is the event which changed those who experienced the recording or live concert. Of course, the variation in the band members changes the music drastically, but it’s important that Davis was a bandleader par exellance, carefully selecting his bandmates in an effort to pursue a specific musical character.

Miles Davis is an interesting example as his work in the later 1960s switches gears and focuses on what could be described as foregrounding to the aesthetics of minimal/electronic music. The compositions more and more frequently focus on repetition and development over long stretches of time, notably being assembled after Davis and his band had recorded numerous takes. Perhaps for one of my next posts, I will investigate Davis’ electric period.

– Ian