Cinemachines by Garrett Stewart

Author:Garrett Stewart [Stewart, Garrett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER000000 Performing Arts / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

These characters, as if we didn’t know it by now, are the epiphenomena of the machine, not its masters. The next effort to recover the norm is the projectionist’s, but he ends up putting the film in upside down, again reminding us—in full-screen inversion—of its photogrammic materiality and verticality alike when operating, right side up or not, at right angles to the arc light’s beam. Even more illogically, when he switches reels again, the film-within-the film becomes a kind of punning double picture where a shoot-’em-up Western has overlain, from behind, not just its image but its whole threatening diegesis upon the main characters, resulting in an actual gunshot from—and in—the rear. This happens when the frame ratio changes from an ominous close-up of the vengeful Indian to a medium shot (pun no doubt intended) that allows the rifle itself the focal length it needs.

The collapse of the cinemachine could scarcely be more complete. Misalignment versus inversion versus superposition: jammed adjacent frames popping us from the plot to its obtruded apparatus; flipped reel turning the whole thing upside down; overlaid frames inducing a crossfire of both plot- and sight lines. This threefold optic farce is in a very particular way definitive. Instead of being jinxed by such disjunctures, of course, screen comedy turns them to optical puns, one image for the plot, one for the razzed if not downright unraveled medium. Irreverence runs deep. Through such kinks in the “thread” (Cavell) of reeled celluloid, filmic (rather than just film) comedy backflips to a wild realization of its own underlay. In Bergson: repetition, inversion, reciprocal interference of series. In Olsen and Johnson: snagged differential iteration, upside-down spools, and the collisional nonsense of interfering projected worlds—with one transposed upon, sneaking up upon, the other from behind. Beyond any narratively assimilable “assertions in technique” (Cavell)—beyond any unique power of the photogram chain, like pause or acceleration, that might affiliate the hijinks of machinic comedy with the ingenuities of the avant-garde (Epstein)—here is the apparatus not appropriated for rhetoric but dismantled as coherent image system.

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