stopping: an aesthetic

 1. Kracauer saw his first film - ›Film als Entdecker der Schönheiten des alltäglichen Lebens‹ - at some period before 1906, according to his biographer. Much, much later, from a point in his war scattered life that he felt the need for some unity, he wrote: “[…] what moved me so deeply was just a normal suburban street, filled with lights and shadows, that the film transfigured. Some trees stood around, and in the foreground was a puddle, in which otherwise invisible house facades and a piece of the sky were mirrored. Than a breeze disturbed these shadows, and the facades as well as the sky began to sway. The trembling overworld in the dirty puddle – this image has never left me.“

The trembling overworld in the dirty puddle is not only a look into the mechanical magic of the moving picture – it is an image ripped from a distinct vein of literature. From Blake, from Nerval, from Novalis – the sense that there was more to dreams than something to be forgotten at waking.

Yet Kracauer’s film, and the films that became sound films and color films, seem increasingly to be one phase in a larger cinematic block, one that was not imagined in the twenties, when cinema’s cleverest critics – Bela Balaczs, Jean Epstein, Eisenstein – were thinking through the combinations, gamblers holding their dice, prepped for another throw.

2. 1980 is not a bellweather year. Hostage crisis, inflation, campaign between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, these are the faint associative chimes that ring out for the American goof. But it was quietly decisive in one way for the arts, for that was the year in which the VCR entered the American consciousness as more than just a hobbyists item mentioned in Popular Photography. True, Betamax had come out in 1975, and there were expensive alternatives on the market, but it was roughly around 1980 that a critical mass had been achieved. Meaning that you didn’t have to explain what a VCR was. In 1981, Jack Valenti, stooge of the movie industry, said: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." It is the ritual of technological dissemination that the corporations it seems to threaten throw their lobbyists at it, and then they figure out how to capture it and use it for themselves. Money money money.

What was decisive, it seems to me, was the ability not so much to record film, but to stop it.

This is reflected in the way film was written about. Before the VCR, film exhibition was generally a public thing that the writer on film had to experience like everybody else – that is, as a continuous, forward moving reel. A reel that you could not stop and rewind, unless you were in a very special environment. In this sense, it fulfilled that cliché about the book whose pages “you can’t stop reading” – except that this magic book would, indeed, have become something unheimlich if you really couldn’t stop reading it, if the pages refused to turn back or to stop.

The VCR put an end to that for the masses. Or, rather, it divided up the cinematic universe. All so subtly.

3. Jean Epstein, writing in the 1920s, had a prevision that film had yet to be understood in its true metaphysical and lexical glory – the words had to be invented for it, and so did the concepts:

“The Bell-Howell is a brain in a standardized, factory made, commercially distributed metal box, which transforms world exterior to it into art. The Bell-Howell is an artist and only behind it are there other artists: the director and the operator. Finally, you can buy a sensibility and you can find it in the marketplace and pay a tax on it as you do for coffee or an Oriental rug. The gramophone is, from this point of view, a failure – or simply remains undiscovered. We must find what it deforms or where it choses. Have we registered on a disc the sound of the street, of motors, of railroad stations? Some day perhaps we will see that the gramophone is made for music like the cinema is made for theater – that is, not at all, and that it has its proper way. For we must use this unhoped for discovery of a subject which is an object, without a conscience, that is without hesitation nor scruples, without venality, no smugness, nor possible error, an entirely honest artist, exclusively art, the artist type.”

Epstein was an imaginative film writer and maker, like many in the 20s. What he gives us is a machine that is an artist in as much as it transforms the world exterior to it. But what he doesn’t give us is the crucial moment when that machine stops. It stops, and the subject and object fall apart again. Or… perhaps not. Certainly they don’t fall apart again in the traditional way, where reason is the differand – not stopping. We don't have a metaphysics, or perhaps I should say the aesthetics, of stopping even now.

I have not had the infinite amount of time necessary to research my thesis, but I do think that we have all too lightly jumped over our ability to stop, to rewind, to fastforward film. A breeze has passed through the Overworld. The way Kracauer and Jean Epstein saw movies and the way I do exist in different aesthetic worlds, go on ‘different paths”, to use Epstein’s phrase. I rarely see a movie on TV – or, I should say, on the computer screen, which is where I download them – without at some point stopping it, for this or that reason, or even rewinding a bit (I didn’t get that, I say), which removes from films the magical, irresistible thrust forward which was the experience of Kracauer, of Epstein, of the movie as something one must sit with, endure, in a theatre, which must be run on a reel, to see. Film has become readable for the mass consumer in another way, and perhaps the way it was read in the past, perhaps the former conditions of its production and viewing, hold us in the most tenuous ways when we go to the theatre to see the movie. Something that I can hold onto in Paris, with its hundreds of movie theaters, a bit more forcefully than I can in, say, Atlanta Georgia, with its maxiplexes. The future does have a way of destroying the past that is most marked in our aesthetic lives, the lives of the senses, the real core of our lives.