Theory
8. Cine-Graphism : A New Approach to the Evolution of Film Language
through Technology
Tom Gunning
Hidalgo, Santiago (ed.), Technology and Film Scholarship. Experience, Study, Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018
doi: 10.5117/9789089647542/ch08 Abstract
Thinking through the relation of the invention and practices of early cinema to technology, one sees that the lack of a defined purpose for this new invention actually corresponds to new understandings of technology as an open field. This leads to an attempt to place cinema and technol- ogy in a broader context, in relation to language and human evolution.
While the analogy of cinema and language has been an aspect of previous film theory, it has primarily tried to relate film techniques to linguistic systems and has encountered dead-ends. If one returns to the relation that film bears to writing, through the transcription of events onto film, a relation to a different sense of language appears, founded in André Leroi-Gourhan’s understanding of gesture and writing.
Keywords: Bernard Stiegler, film language, gesture, film theory, early cinema
Technological Drive versus the Technology of Purpose
Cinema appeared first as a particular technology at the end of the nine- teenth century; but precisely what it would be used for was not immediately clear.1 The work, both historical and theoretical, of my friend and colleague André Gaudreault indicates that cinema’s purposes were originally less well defined than were its mechanics.2 As Gaudreault has shown, cinema as a cultural form emerged gradually from a number of differently defined uses and rather separate cultural series. These include: Marey’s need for a
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means of recording scientifically the movement of bodies: human, animal, and inanimate; the Lumière’s company’s desire to extend the market and methods of amateur photography; Edison’s attempt to “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear,” that is, follow one successful recording invention with another. Such examples could be multiplied.
Clearly defined goals play a lesser role in technological development than we tend to think. Paul Spehr’s recent massive work on William Kennedy Laurie Dickson’s process in inventing the Edison kinetograph and other mo- tion picture devices reveals how Edison’s project of inventing commercial motion pictures actually grew out of the conception and construction of the Edison laboratory, which opened in 1888 just before Dickson’s research in cinema devices began:
It was to be the largest most complete research laboratory in the world […]
The focal point of the main building was a two-story library which was to have reference books on every conceivable subject, scientific journals, published patents and other documentation that would support the work of his experimenters. There were to be two machine shops. A general shop with the most up to date equipment and a specialized shop for precision work. A large supply room was to be stocked with every imaginable type of material so that an experimenter could find what he needed on site and not have to wait. The advance publicity claimed that the lab would be capable of making anything from a lady’s watch to a locomotive and the stock room would have everything from screws, nut and bolts to walrus hide, swan’s down and porcupine quills. There would be a carpentry shop, a blacksmith and glass blowers. On the third floor there was a large room for meetings that became a music room and occasional recording studio.
There was a room for photography on the second floor.3
Spehr shows that Dickson’s duties in the photography room were also loosely defined, and moved between documenting the work of various experiments with photographs, supplying photos of Edison at work to newspapers and journals, to the project of inventing the kinetograph, which eventually expanded to constructing the Black Maria studio on the grounds of the laboratory.
Rather than following a specific plan and defined purpose, the Edison research lab explored various possibilities in materials and methods, often unsure of, or radically revising, their goal as experiments progressed. Re- search was often not designed to realize a specific project, but to generate projects generally. By assembling materials, apparatuses, and skills, the
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Edison laboratory functioned as a sort of technological lexicon, a standing reserve of material and processes that exemplified the technological world and its possibilities. The laboratory expressed a technological drive, the product less of a singular instrumental purpose than of a broad curiosity impelled by principles of mechanics and vagaries of application. Edison’s method followed an almost Darwinian process of natural selection and survival of the fittest, rather than simply realizing a pre-conceived intel- ligent design.
Inspired by this fascinating groping that guided both the invention and the early development of the cinema, I want in this essay to offer a radical revision of how we think about cinema in relation to technology. To do this, I want to revive and revise an analogy familiar to our field but always problematic: the relation of cinema to language. In this revised approach technology, language, and cinema, will be understood within a particular approach to human evolution. As Bernard Stiegler has claimed, understand- ing technology as simply devising a means to accomplish an end distorts its nature.4 The technical object itself (and even more an ensemble such as the Edison laboratory) possesses, as Stiegler puts it, a genetic logic of its own, not simply attributable to human intention. We enter here into the under- standing of the technical world introduced by Gilbert Simondon in which we seek, as Muriel Combes puts it, “to know the functioning schemas of technical objects, not as fixed schemas but as schemas necessarily engaged in temporal evolution.”5 In Simondon’s theory of technology we move from the goal oriented use of the tool to the open technological environment of the machine and its ensembles (such as the Edison laboratory, open to new uses and revisions). Thus, cinema with its initial variety of purposes may not be aberrant, but rather exemplary of a Simondon’s view of technical development. “The technical object exists, then, as a specific type achieved at the end of a convergent series.”6
Thus, the technical object must be understood as more than an inert utensil, a means to a predetermined end.7 Following Martin Heidegger, Tekhne should be conceived as process of growth and unfolding.8 This is not to claim that the technological processes that resulted in cinema were in any sense random or irrational, but rather that their ultimate outcomes were not necessarily inscribed or foreseen in their origins. The shapes of development only emerge afterwards, in retrospect. I am arguing, cer- tainly, against a narrow teleology in our understanding of technology, but my claim goes further. In order to place cinema within large patterns of technological development, I claim we need to understand technology as a phase of human evolution. In this, I am following the lead of Bernard Stiegler
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and others inspired by the work of paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan who described the history of technology precisely as an extension of the processes of human evolution. As Simondon also demonstrates, rather than being in opposition, the human and the technological define each other.
Leroi-Gourhan would claim we become human through our technology.9 As historians of cinema, I also believe we need to deal with both technol- ogy and aesthetics. I understand this to mean we deal both with machines, their construction, and development, and with the way human beings use them, the pleasures they take in them, and the purposes they inscribe in them. Although aspects of these two issues can be approached separately, I believe a full understanding of either implies the other. Approaching technology as an extension of human evolution undoes a facile separation of technology into means and ends, material and spirit, tools and meanings, but reveals the close interdependencies of Tekhne and aesthesis. Leroi- Gourhan’s work plots a continuity from physiological evolution to the pro- duction of tools, as human adaptation moves from physical transformation into cultural production. As he states, “The hand, already formed in the monkey, stops changing […] from the moment it begins to hold a tool.”10 The production of tools involves a process of exteriorization, a projection of the human into nature, with all the danger of alienation and delights of discovery that entails. Stiegler describes this transformation of the world through our use of objects as “the pursuit of life by means other than life.”11 Exteriorization, Stiegler says, “must not be understood as a rupture with nature but rather as a new organization of life – life organizing the inorganic and organizing itself therein by that very fact.”12
I find Stiegler’s (and Simondon’s) approach to technology especially relevant for understanding cinema. However, I am not intending in this essay to comment on Stiegler’s recent critique of the role commercial cinema plays in contemporary society, which I find less useful for understanding film history. In contrast, the continuity he asserts between evolution and technology provides me with a new way to think through the history and origins of cinema as well as its contemporary relation to new media, by defining the active role technology plays within these processes, past, pre- sent and future. Technology as a force of development, rather than simply a narrow ‘technical’ issue for investigation, appears especially clearly, I would claim at the point of cinema’s origin. Thus, I return to the early cinema that recent French film theory (including Stiegler) continues to bypass in favor of their love/hate affair with the Classical Hollywood cinema and its suc- cessors. In its technical hardware and its function as an apparatus (which includes human operators/observers, filmmakers, and film spectators,) the