Medialogy

What is the shot anymore?

RHETORICAL FRAMES, RHETORICAL SHOTS: Separating Space from Duration

Cinema has really stuck us with some tropes that no longer function. Teaching college students Intro to Film Production, at the beginning of the first quarter I have to define ‘jump cuts’, which means I have to define ‘shot’. I usually come up with something strangely technical and formal for such an intuitive temporal object. Something like: “The Shot, like its namesake of the gun, refers to a single pulling of the trigger… a single continuous series of frames separated only by 24th of a second of real time.” The first part sounds good– for me it evokes those Bond-gun like Super-8 cameras, where you would hold down the spring-loaded trigger, committing film (and therefore real money) second by second to what was in front of the camera. “Shooting it”… it really felt it. Much more gun-like and less surveillance than the video camera which feels more like a hose that you try to spray over everything like fertilizer or insecticide hoping for absolute ‘coverage’.

Even in film, the logical underpinnings of the shot were questionable. Shots popped in to existence either with the mechanical triggering of a set of shutters by horses’ hooves, or with the skilled regular hand-cranking of the early camera man. I think the latter. Muybridge made more of a bear-trap for time, using devices of thread and snapping boxes. It was only after having seen motion reproduced that the cameraman, and therefore The Shot, could exist. That strange process of imagining an absent (not yet found) representation while faced with its real referent… An imagination that television successfully mechanized, so now not just professional cameramen, but everyone has the experience of watching a live video mediation of an object in their video camera or cellphone screens… watching, waiting, and then committing to a recording… a ‘shot’— if you can call it that now. More like a video recording of a live mediation than a gun shot.

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Looking at an HSBC ad campaign while reading D.N. Roddowick on “the figural”

I am at the Midtown New York Public Library.  I am reading the first chapter of D.N. Roddowick’s Reading the Figural.  His concept of a ‘figural’ seems to be one of those post-modern philosophy place-holder terms for everything and nothing… ‘emergence’ ‘becoming’ ‘excess’ ‘the eternal return’… there are a lot of references to a new understanding of “visual culture,” “death drive,” dream theory, and a post-semiology framework (without frame or work, I suppose… Roddowick compares semiology to Newtonian physics failing to conceptualize relativistic thought). …The book is light on examples. I find writers like this clearly intelligent and studious, but I am never entirely certain they aren’t hacks. It is uncomfortable… either they aren’t saying anything, or I am not understanding, both of which are a little insulting. But I really like all the same people… Lyotard, Barthes, even Deleuze sometimes… so I am still reading and looking.

Roddowick quoting Lyotard:

The figural is unrepresentable, beneath or behind representation, because it operates in an other space ‘that does not give itself to be seen or thought; it is indicated in a literal fashion, fugitive at the heart of discourse and perception, as that which troubles them.  It is the proper space of desire, the stakes in the struggle that painters and poets have ceaselessly launched against the return of the Ego and the text. [p8]

It is everything.

What I call the figural is not synonymous with a figure or even the figurative. It is no more proper to the plastic than to the linguistic arts. It is not governed by the opposition of word to image; spatially and temporally, it is not bound to the logic of binary oppositions. Ever permutable—a fractured, fracturing, or fractal space, ruled by time and difference—it knows nothing of the concept of identity. The figural is not an aesthetic concept, nor does it recognize a distinction between the forms of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. It describes the logic of mass culture itself; or rather a culture of the mass.

It is nothing.

But I am interested in the premise as given in the Preface: that in order to understand contemporary imagistic culture, we have to re-think the opposition of image to language… that we are long overdue for re-thinking Lessing’s opposition of the simultaneous arts and the successive. With the rise of ‘digital culture’ we really really need to critically deal with cinema. Roddowick relates an epiphany, when he first witnessed early MTV broadcasting and how fluidly text was spatialized and space was textualized in the productions of early non-linear digital editing and effects [3]. I am fairly certain that a host of previous examples can be found in animation, but I, too, remember the astonishment of the new form that was photographic, electric, and abstract.

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