{"id":875,"date":"2015-12-05T16:43:48","date_gmt":"2015-12-05T16:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/?page_id=875"},"modified":"2015-12-12T16:36:17","modified_gmt":"2015-12-12T16:36:17","slug":"mirror-mirror","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/mirror-mirror\/","title":{"rendered":"Mirror Mirror on the Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mirror Mirror on the Wall<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

GARRETT STEWART<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

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S<\/span>tart anywhere. Dip in at random. Begin with name recognition if the temptation can\u2019t be resisted. From 1925, from Der Tag<\/em>, this, for instance, from B\u00e9la Bal\u00e1zs (no. 23, \u201cReel Consciousness\u201d) on the auto-documentary impulse of the new medium, including the record of a filmmaker\u2019s own death in certain celluloid cases. Bal\u00e1zs\u2019s is a reaction to motion capture extraordinary for its time and proleptic of ours:<\/span><\/p>\r\n

This is a new form of self-reflection. These people reflect themselves by filming themselves. The inner process of accounting for oneself has been externalized. <\/a> This self-perception until the final moment is mechanically fixed. The film of self-control, which consciousness used to run within the brain, is now transposed onto the reel of a camera, and consciousness, which has mirrored itself for itself alone <\/em>in internal division until now, delegates this function to a machine that records the mirror image for others to see as well. <\/em>In this way, subjective consciousness becomes social consciousness.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

More than film theory, a whole ambient field of psychoanalytic criticism is anticipated there. The internal circuit of \u201cconsciousness\u201d per se \u201chas mirrored itself for itself alone <\/em>in internal division until now.\u201d From now on, the split is externalized, say projected\u2014not as \u201cscreen memory\u201d but as indexical trace, not psychoanalytically but psycho-technically. Switch the italic and the metafilmic point on which I will be closing in is comparably refracted: \u201cwhich has mirrored itself<\/em> for itself alone in internal division until now.\u201d But perhaps the most remarkable stress here is the thought that \u201cself-control\u201d was always an \u201cinner film\u201d (of imagistic self-monitoring) to begin with. From Bal\u00e1zs to Bernard Stiegler: a road not often travelled. Many such untrodden and often astonishing paths are sketched and cleared in these pages.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

I will, as suggested, be coming back to the more-than-dead metaphoric trope of \u201cmirrored itself\u201d in a further dimension of its prefigurative force. One certainly doesn\u2019t need to consult Lutz Koepnick\u2019s The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood <\/em>(2002) to see the visual, rather than just figurative, longevity of this term, in and beyond German cinema\u2014nor to find oneself tempted to linger over its on-screen manifestations. Famously, the serial killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang\u2019s M<\/em> \u2013in distantly paired secondary reframings\u2014studies himself in a mirror, in the first case for signs of pathology, in the second for the branding signifier \u201cM\u201d indicating (interchangeably, in their English cognates) Marked \/ Man \/ Murderer.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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The first scene is a prolonged and solitary self-scrutiny; the second a brief moment of ratified paranoia ending in panic and recoil\u2014its mirroring cut short when he discovers himself espied as if by us (via the POV of an underworld spy) over his shoulder.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In such a composite installation of mirror tableaux, the indexical planarity of optical manifestation becomes, in Lang, the condition of projection and its motif at once. This is a note implicitly struck in many of the earliest pieces in The Promise of Cinema<\/em> and manifested in innumerable narrative episodes in the medium\u2019s subsequent history, including one from this very year\u2014and with which the present \u201creflection\u201d gives me the chance to catch up. But Bal\u00e1zs alone would have been enough to induce a productive historico-theoretical loop of rumination in the nature of record and projection. Which is only to say that any single \u201centry\u201d in this densely resonant anthology is capable of entering the reader upon an entire lineage of thinking in image. The parts aren\u2019t greater than the whole; rather, in their multifariousness, their disparities and curious convergences are the whole point.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Promises, promises. Some kept, some voided, some exceeded, some betrayed. Cinema history, like history at large, is likely to fulfill certain sectors of expectation while, as we say, \u201cgoing back on\u201d other promises, other seeming assurances. And cinema historians, going back here to what German commentary saw portended by the new medium\u2014what it foresaw as the future of vision and record both, in everything from new focalizations of human consciousness to enhancements in forensic science\u2014are offered by this archive a genuinely new purchase on vectors of potential, on truncated dead ends, and on many a bent trajectory in between. What The Promise of Cinema<\/em> witnesses to, that is, by sheer force of evidence and on one technical, social, or psychological front after another, is a tacit pledge of evolution either borne out, reneged on, or technologically recalibrated.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

As an author who had recently completed a trilogy on film theory with its third book launched by turning back to Fritz Lang\u2014and, through him, to many of the issues touched on in this collection\u2014my attention was primed, to say the least.\u00a0\u00a0 After a first monograph on the photographic underlay of cinema, or, in other words, on the photogrammic constitution of the filmic strip and its on-screen disclosure, then a follow-up book on screen narrative\u2019s digital transformation since the end of the filmic century (roughly 1895-1995) in relation to Gilles Deleuze\u2019s early 1980s anticipation of a pending electronic redefinition for the \u201ctime-image,\u201d I next aimed attention (building on Between Film and Screen: Modernism\u2019s Photo Synthesis<\/em> and Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema<\/em>) at what I saw, and traced out in Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance<\/em>, as a dovetailing of the material shift in postfilmic cinema both with the time-stamped image reservoir of video surveillance and with its whole prehistory (in the overlap of espionage and montage) in narrative filmmaking. The German press so extensively culled for The Promise<\/em> of Cinema<\/em> was there first in many facets of this consideration, I now find.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Without anticipating the overthrow of the photochemical substrate after computerization, of course, yet giving terms for many of these later salient effects in its own emphasis on celluloid illusionism per se, several relevant perspectives for compassing this transformation were already in play by the first decades of the last century. Given the particular tunnel vision of my own interests in looking back on this material, what stands out most sharply is the prevalent sense of illusionism\u2014of mirage\u2014that is located by so many writers as definitive of the new apparatus. One result is that the legendary Sch\u00fcfftan mirror tricks dear to special effects lore get glossed (now worried, now self-promoted) in separate stretches of The Promise\u2014<\/em>and, more than that, found to signalize the cinematic apparition all told. Beyond the frequent pre-Bazinian dimensions of much German thinking, one thus finds anticipated, as well, a line of French theory running from Jean Epstein (on the \u201cspecial effect\u201d of all screen picturing) to Christian Metz (on the deep equivalence between montage and trucage<\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Certainly, German cinema\u2019s place in the medial logic of surveillance was unmistakable for the third phase of my trilogy, right from the start. But journalism\u2019s early grasp on the question was an eye-opening surprise. To close the circuit, as it were, of my surveillance survey around a specific screen instance whose possible critical reverberation was the sort of thing I began reading for<\/em> in the pages of The Promise<\/em>, let me recall a moment, in Lang again, that I find anticipating the \u201csurveillancinema\u201d (one conflated technique) of recent screen editing in a distinctly emblematic way. What, I was eager to discover, would contemporaneous German writers plausibly have to say, if only by inference, that might help contextualize the prolonged moment in M <\/em>when the graphological analysis of a thumb-print slide, as a function of the whole manhunt plot, is projected to the scale and ratio of a film screening\u2014so that that it becomes a fixed-frame technical microcosm of film watching at large under the compromised conditions of a relentless surveillance plot? Or what would the early press have latently foretold about the way this forensic valence of visual scrutiny evolves, through the innovative use of CCTV in Lang\u2019s last film three decades later (The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse<\/em>, 1960), into the aesthetic of electronic remediation in the recent spate of Hollywood surveillance thrillers in a sci-fi and sometimes 3-D mode? What might early German celebration or critique, either one, have seen coming along this route? Even with unforeseen technological innovation down the road, what initial promissory notes have been cashed out, reinvested, or defaulted on?<\/span><\/p>\r\n

So down to business in these busy, dizzying, and headily suggestive pages. To characterize just some their preoccupations, or more like their open-ended speculations\u2014and to do so in a German variation on that baseline keynote query of Andr\u00e9 Bazin (whose ontology these writers so often anticipate)\u2014the underlying issue: Was ist Kino<\/em>? What is its essential constitution as well as its promise? A structure of illusion in itself (several pieces with that term in their title), as well as the cause of hallucination in others (no. 16, Albert Hellwig, \u201cIllusions and Hallucinations during Cinematographic Projections \u201d), cinema is also understood as a tool of epistemology readied for surveillance (no. 239, Wilhelm Von Ledebur, \u201cCinematography in the Service of the Police\u201d), with related forecasts of broadcast itself, the \u201ctelecinema\u201d that will eventuate not just in \u201chome cinema\u201d but in CCTV (no. 270, Arthur Kron, \u201cWhy We Still Do Not Have Television: Possibilities of Electric Television\u201d; no. 273, Ernst Steffen, \u201cTelecinema in the Home\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\r\n

At the same time, beyond that striking anticipation in Bal\u00e1zs of the prosthetic instrumentation of an auto-reflective archive (with its latter-day apotheosis in the cell-phone selfie), and more frequent than the stress either on forensic record or remote transmit sampled above, is the stress on screen figments in their technologically exponential\u2014and cognitively asymptotic\u2014approximation of the real<\/em>. These are just some of the gathering parameters by which cinematic process is engaged in early commentary as a proto-Bazinian ontology (and thus teleology) seen in one account, from the watershed vantage of sound synchronization, to be leading \u201cmost certainly\u201d to 3-D, or, as phrased by its author, to \u201cstereoscopic cinema\u201d (no. 272, Erich Grave, \u201cThe Third Dimension\u201d)\u2014while also, in its slow-motion special effects, owing a backward debt, in another piece, to the chronophotography of Marey and to earlier motion imaging achieved by mirrors in the praxinoscope (no. 38, Hans Lehmann, \u201cSlow Motion\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Such historicized awareness of protocinematic mirror effects seems to have inflected the frequent reference to mirror trickery in connection with illusionism itself, either by metonymic association with the actual Sch\u00fcfftan strategy of special effects or by synecdoche for the cinema as a whole in its role as outsize magic mirror. At times, the mirror trope is casual and passing, especially if the medium\u2019s supposed passive realism as documentary footage is the point being pressed, as in the notion that on screen \u201ceverything is real, a mirror image of nature\u201d (no. 117, Johannes Gaulke, \u201cArt and Cinema in War\u201d). But the figuration of film as retentive mirror can gain a more skeptical purchase on the screen frame all told. Singling out the simulated image within the broad category of illusory presence on screen, one critic wonders at the suspension of disbelief induced even when the audience knows that a given set is \u201cjust magnifications of toysized models? Or, according to the most recent information, they are often just cleverly photographed mirror images?\u201d (no. 151, K.W., \u201cWhat is Film Illusion\u201d), with an editorial footnote that directs us to the Sch\u00fcfftan device and the inventor\u2019s own celebration of it (no. 269, Eugen Sch\u00fcfftan, \u201cMy Process\u201d)\u2014a note whose lead I was eager to follow.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

It is a complicated \u201cprocess\u201d indeed\u2014hard to sum-up without diagrams, but easy enough to see as emblematic. Derived from a history of optical illusion on stage and in optical toys, the semi-transparent Sch\u00fcfftan mirror captured an architectural model or transparency that was then, with human motion introduced by a trick of perspective, filmed as wholesale reflecting surface by the recording camera. In either case, whether with 3-D models or 2-D flats, the miniature\u2019s simulated spatial surround was partly blocked out to allow for the insert of proportionately \u201cminiaturized\u201d actors visible through the mirrored mock-up when filmed in recess at a calculated distance behind it, with the adjusted lighting further smoothed out so as to achieve the desired look of a continuous image field. By an in-camera effect, that is, the actors could thereby seem, for instance, overborne by some towering (rather than just secretly foregrounded and exaggeratedly scaled) image. Lang again: the giant maw of Moloch devouring its victims in Metropolis<\/em> only by the cinematographer\u2019s having filmed them at a sufficient distance so that, within the surrounding field of a this gargantuan image, they would seem to be the monster\u2019s dwarfed pawns; or, earlier in the same film, the racing athletes in the vast modernist stadium inset in longshot within the mirrored model to evoke their subordination to its stupendously different scale.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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Before matte or blue screen, and long before computerized imaging, here was the masked equivalent (in both senses: actions partially masked out by scenography in spaces wholly dissimulated) of Eisenstein\u2019s volumetric montage, projected instead as the spectacle of monumentality\u2014or monstrosity. Freder\u2019s POV shot of the Moloch epiphany is also the equivalent in personal witnessing, of course, to the telescreen by which his father, the corporate overlord, accesses his only images of the proletarian underworld. Suffice it to say that special effects and machinated surveillance tactics, operating from two sides of a supposed epistemological divide, and separately estimated in their cinematic valence by early German writers, are often found wedded from then on in the history of screen narrative. In regard to verisimilitude, however, the historical reaction at stake in the Sch\u00fcfftan allusions is more specific and vigilant\u2014if also forgiving. In sampling The Promise<\/em>, one is quick to realize why the idea of a world in realist reflection on screen was also caught up in a counter-discourse of illusionism. Mirror mirror: early re\/viewers of the new film sets, seeing anything but \u201cnature\u201d held up to view, were not just seeing the scopic tricks of undetectable mirrors as merely part and parcel of the assembled mise en sc\u00e8ne\u2014let alone simulated or tricked mirrors that become spatial thresholds within certain fantastic turns of narrative\u2014but were often looking directly into a partial mirror plane as the defining optic field of the entire projected spectacle. However readily overcome by suspended disbelief, such fakery came straight to mind as a synecdoche for the virtuality of screen space all told, even when no effects more special than the apparition of projected motion were entailed.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Yet this is only part of the illusionist picture, so to say. Beyond such profilmic mirrors on the set, there are, indeed, those mirror simulations induced in the lab. It is here, too, that the magic mirror becomes, in journalistic response, an implied pars pro toto<\/em> for the framed image plane of the screen. Among recorded enthusiasms for early Expressionist cinema, there is this effusive mention of The Student of Prague<\/em>, for instance, pitting the wondrous against the awful within the new sublimities of machinic vision: \u201cThere are magical views of old Prague; there are images that make our eyes widen in horror: as when the mysterious Dr. Scapinelli releases the reflection of the student Balduin from the mirror . . . \u201c(no. 200, Henrik Galeen, \u201cFantastic Film\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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The artificial space, the tricked visual surface: these are cinema in embryo and in essence\u2014and, yet again, in postfilmic prospect as well, with the legacy of such effects being legion in digital cinema. The CGI (computer-generated image) of VFX (visual special effects) is the very destiny of a once-indexical registration of illusory space.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

With such a mirror prototype as license, I take the liberty of indulging in a single historical leap, one isolated metamedial catapult, of the sort these pages will no doubt invite in other users of the archive. As with the journalistic writers who, faced with a flood of new visual production, singled out their favored moment for illustration, so, from our own current inundation of computer effects, I do mine. Appearing since my book on the escalating VFX dimension of surveillance cinema, the mirror shot I have in mind\u2014can\u2019t shake from mind\u2014comes from a thinly veiled remake of a minor masterpiece of Lang-like neo-noir by John Frankenheimer, Seconds<\/em> (1966), originally shot in riveting deep focus by James Wong Howe.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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