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Time, and Time Again
Unit 2 CRITICAL REFLECTION
Throughout the course of unit 2, I have been dealing with time and the representation of it. I spent time making work, and my leisure time on films and social media. It was the latter that informed my practice of looking at internet images.
Films, as an art form to represent and depict time, are commonly consumed on social media platforms as fragments. The epitome is TikTok which is designed specifically for users to receive constant stimulation with seconds-long videos. I learnt that on 3 October 2023, Paramount, a major Hollywood studio, released the entire film of Mean Girl on the platform, chopped into 23 parts. This marks the beginning of my inquiry into these two forms of representation of time. I would start with films.
Let There be Light (in a Dark Chamber)
There are two major approaches to understand the history of cinema. In The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, Laurent Mannoni takes the classic approach and begins with the Camera Obscura, which is Latin for “dark chamber”. He highlights that in 1589, an Italian scholar described that choreographed people from the outside were projected into the chamber, accompanied by sound, which formed a narrative and fantasy to the image (Mannoni et al., 2000b). I am impressed that this may be all cinema is about: turning daily life into spectacles for an audience. The outside world they saw from the dark chamber, appeared to be real, was actually choreographed. This very nature of cinema would return 400 years later.
As technology advanced, Mannoni describes that new inventions brought increasingly convincing illusion of the image as reality. He highlights the invention of the Magic Lantern in 1659, and its subsequent modifications that helped created Phantasmagoria/Fantasmagorie, an extraordinary slideshow spectacle (Mannoni et al., 2000b). Narrated with finely painted slides, together with movements of the Magic Lantern itself, the show successfully projected an experience similar to the modern haunted house with (moving) images. Mannoni cites the Fantasmagorie as “one of the greatest precursors of the cinematograph show”. And it is basically a ghost story. The desire for spectacles, like ghosts, haunts in the heart of audience members for several centuries. Is this what cinema is invented for?
Phantasmagoria, from Memoires Recreatifs, Scientifiques et Anecdotiques
by Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Paris 1831
With the arrival of photography, both Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey used the latest photographic devices in their times to capture series of still images that described motions. This became the “raw material” of motion pictures we still enjoy today. Two decades later, in 1895, Louis Lumière’s 46-second film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory was screened in Paris, marking the first public filmshow in history. In the essay Life Itself! The “Problem” of Pre-Cinema, Ian White describes that the films “was spectacular not because it presented fantasy, costumes, narrative. Its brilliance was measured the degree of detail it could present of an everyday event. In the hierarchy of reality, its image emulated life: mundanity was thrilling” (White, 2009). The word he used is spot on here, that the film “emulated” life. The sequence was quite clearly staged because none of the workers walked towards the camera.
Test Images
Louis Lumière's Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895)
A “Motion Picture”
Another theory of the birth of cinema is detailed in Philippe-Alain Michaud’s book Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Michaud claimed that Warburg did not pay particular attention to the phenomenon of the moving image, but instead focuses on Renaissance paintings that connected to Antiquity’s representations of gestures (Michaud and Hawkes, 2004). Warburg contrasted Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons. Warburg believed that the focus of the sculpture was the motion and used this proposition to read Birth of Venus, that its representation is of both the moment and the complete sequence of action, and it was "taken to the point where movement yields the formula of its recomposition".
From the history of (pre-)cinema, I see our desire of looking at motions as spectacles, and we are eager to turn our daily life into one. I am also intrigued by how a single image can represent motion, and its relationship with the motion sequence as a whole.
Time in Cinema
For films to be a medium of representing time, how does the audience experience time in them? Enrico Terrone contemplates this question in his essay On Time in Cinema. He first uses Noël Carroll’s framework to define film, in which he highlights one particular feature of the moving image: its possibility to elicits the impression of movement from the spectator. From this, he points out the reason that even static films have this possibility whereas paintings and photographs do not, is because the moving image has a duration (Terrone, 2017). He adds, using Gregory Currie’s terms, that film is not its portrayal of time, but the manner of its portrayal: its portrayal of time by means of time. He puts forward the concept of cinematic duration, namely, the duration Df of the film itself; the duration Ds of the spectator’s experience; the duration De of the events portrayed. He suggests that, at least for a single shot, the duration Df would equal Ds, i.e. the fictional duration of an episode and the amount of viewing time over which it is represented are identical (Terrone, 2017). The above framework is useful for my reflection on various artists’ work as well as on my own.
24 Hour Psycho
If films are to emulate life by representing motion in time, what would it be to be experienced with different speed? British artist Douglas Gordon makes a number of works to explore how films are presented and consumed. In 24 Hour Psycho, one of his most prolific work, he slows down Hitchcock’s horror classic Psycho to a duration of 24 hours. The work poses a challenge to our perception of time and moving images. Using Enrico Terrone’s framework, Gordon’s intervention of the film alienates the duration Ds from Df, to such an effect that the narrative structure disintegrates. However, by projecting the film at a speed of two frames per second, it still effectively elicits the impression of movement from the viewer. Gordon sets a brilliant example of creating new meaning from old films as found images. Psycho, alongside with other classic films, was released originally as consumable entertainment. This film has its aura as well as burden as a horror classic. By slowing it down and taking away the sound, Gordon strips away the horror and alienates the audience's memory of it. While making the familiar unfamiliar, the work establishes new relationship between the static (individual frame) and the moving (film sequence). Holger Broeker points out that in Gordon’s work, “individual movements and gestures are fragmented into individual images that would normally elude not only the gaze of the viewer, but also the control of the actors. In other words, the deceleration magnifies not only the passing of time, but also many of the physical details" (Broeker, 2016). Its images develop a new logic.
Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho
The Social Photographs
Withdrawing from slowness and fast-forwarding to the social media age that we are living in, I realise that there are striking similarities between films and social media (and its platforms) as a medium. In his book Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, Nathan Jurgenson gives an in-depth analysis of photographs in the social media age as a phenomenon, or what he calls the social photography. He starts off by describing the nature of the phenomenon, which is to grant a new productive life to the everyday surroundings that usually seem to have exhausted their photographic potential. He quotes Edgar Gómez Cruz that “photography has gone from being a medium for the collection of important memories to an interface for visual communication”, and to ask whether social photos are “good” is to ask whether one’s self-presentation is “good” (Jurgenson, 2019). It is the (re)presentation of one’s everyday life in motion, a desire connecting to the origin of the moving image.
Jurgenson continues to put forward that social photography evolves to be streams of photos of everyday life, and its most significant technology is “perhaps not small, portable cameras but the social platforms that provide an audience, a social motive in addition to a technological means" (Jurgenson, 2019). The barriers to an image being seen have also been lowered dramatically, bringing photography into the stream between the scenes. To illustrate the scenario he gives an interesting example: “Unless the meal is very special, the photo of food fails at being a scene, the traditional domain of photography. But as part of a stream, the photo of food often succeeds as part of an ongoing communication of who you are, what you are experiencing” (Jurgenson, 2019).
The above setting has a resemblance to the consumption of films, thus gives a formal similarity to the two mediums. With editing, most narrative films are actually streams of time composited with different scenes at different point on the timeline, i.e. the montage. Social photography downplays the thingness of the image, as it is recognised as part of a stream rather than on its own. The photo stream of one’s social media account is also a montage. As Jurgenson accurately describes, “the social photo is often viewed through the grid, stream, or story to be finger-scrolled, swiped, and tapped…for the person doing the swiping, there is a more panoramic view of social life, akin to the montaged scenery from the train window" (Jurgenson, 2019).
With the logic of selection and the use of filters, a social photo presents in a way that is more expressive than the accurate fact of reality, and is often considered a manipulation of reality. Jurgenson writes that "the measure of 'reality' and 'truth' should not be counted solely by how the pixels in the image relate to the photons out in the world. The 'truth' of capturing the essence of yourself and others, the mood, the what it is like quality of experience can depend on expressiveness more than accuracy" (Jurgenson, 2019). Here he seems to approve this manipulation of reality, which is to present the everyday mundane as spectacles. This is also what cinema is exceptionally good at doing.
24 Frames of Truth
After looking at the strikingly similar traits, I try to develop works to depict the parallel between the two forms of representation of time. In response to the consumption of films as fragments, I develop the idea to reduce film sequences into individual frames, then post them one by one on Instagram. I choose Instagram as it is the dominating social media platform dedicated to still images, making it the best platform to explore the nuance between the static and motion. I set up the Instagram account @24frameoftruth, and its handle comes from the film Le petit soldat by Jean-Luc Godard, the legendary French filmmaker. In it, a character says “The cinema is truth 24 times per second.” Making use of Instagram’s interface, by scrolling through of the profile page, the film stills are restored as moving images. The “materiality” of Instagram is used to look into how films, as a century-old art form, are consumed in the most “contemporary” way. A film that works as a stream of time and montage is housed on a prevalent social media platform, which serves the same function to present time as streams and montage. The content on both mediums converge in my work, which are spectacles made from a manipulated reality.
I set up an installation with a phone, a camcorder and a projector. Viewers are invited to scroll through the page themselves, and their fingers would also be projected on the screen. Its scrolling movement is connected to early cinema history, when films were screened by rotating the hand crank of the projector.The installation’s ergonomics captures the same mechanical action that made cinema possible a hundred years ago.
The work also demonstrates how one can challenge perception towards an everyday interface by using it not the way one is told to. It opens ways for viewers to re-imagine their interactions with these interfaces, which go against consumption habit and the core drive of content on these platforms. Furthermore, by looking at individual posts, viewers can actually appreciate each frame out of a film sequence through my work, which is hosted on a platform made for fragmented consumption. Unlike how films are normally consumed in cinema, my work actually allows time for viewers to contemplate the visual elements, as the details are magnified with the way I use this interface.
I have been asked why I choose Psycho as the first film to be presented in this Instagram account. It is a deliberate decision to use the same film as Douglas Gordon did. I wish to establish my work to explore the perception of time through classic films, and argue that the issue gains a renewed understanding in the social media age, an era defined by ultra-fast content consumption and fragmented attention. I also see the genre of horror films to be the epitome of viewers’ desire to look at spectacles, as evident in the prevalence of the Phantasmagoria show. While Gordon completes his work by adjusting the speed of playback, my work is completed by using the “playback speed” of Instagram’s interface, and its ability to show individual frames at the same time. While Gordon plays around with the audience’s memory by presenting the whole film, I do the same by presenting two sequences, with a deliberate omission of the famous shower scene. When the work was shown at the gallery, very few visitors could correctly identify the film. When they were told the answer, some of them said they had seen the film but could not recall the scenes that I chose. To me the scenes I have chosen are scarier than the shower scene, as the latter’s horror effect is stripped off by its omnipresence in popular culture. Ian White considers that Gordon has turned the original film into a quasi-religious object of worship. Using this analysis, my installation work has also turned the film into an object of consideration rather than a narrative entertainment, that engages the audience to contemplate what motions they are looking at on social media platforms.
References:
Broeker, H. (2006). Cinema is Dead! Long Live Film! The Language of Images in the Video Works of Douglas Gordon. In: Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural.
Jurgenson, N. (2019). Social Photo : On Photography and Social Media. Verso Books.
Mannoni, L. et al. (2000b) The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA50755225.
Philippe-Alain Michaud and Hawkes, S. (2007). Aby Warburg and the image in motion. New York: Zone.
Terrone, E. (2017) 'On time in cinema,' in Routledge eBooks, pp. 326–338. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315269641-26.
White, I. (2009). Life Itself! The ‘Problem’ of Pre-Cinema. In: S. Comer, ed., Film and video art. London: Tate.