FILM
- AS A -
SUBVERSIVE ART

INTRODUCTION

THE FILM EXPERIENCE

This is a book about the subversion of existing values,
institutions, mores, and taboos -- East and West, Left and
Right -- by the potentially most powerful art of the century.
It is a book that traffics in scepticism towards all received
wisdom (including its own), towards eternal truths, rules
of art, "natural" and man-made laws, indeed whatever
may be considered holy.  It is an attempt to preserve
for a fleeting moment in time -- the life of this book --
the works and achievements of the subversives of film.

Subversion in cinema starts when the theatre darkens
and the screen lights up.  For the cinema is a place of magic
where psychological and environmental factors combine to
create an openness to wonder and suggestion, and unlocking
of the unconcious.  It is a shrine at which modern rituals
rooted in atavistic memories and subconscious desires are
acted out in darkness and seclusion from the outer world.

The power of the image, our fear of it, the thrill that pulls us
toward it, is real.  Short of closing one's eyes -- in cinema, a
difficult and unprecedented act -- there is no defense against it.

When Lumiere's immortal train first pulled into that station
in 1895, moving directly towards the camera, the audience
shrieked. it did so again when Bunuel sliced a woman's
eyeball with a razor, when Clouzot quite literally made the
dead return, when Hitchcock committed sudden murder in
a shower, when Franju killed animals before its eyes.  The
audience fainted during films of operations, vomited during
birth sequences, rose in spontaneous enthusiasm at propaganda
films, wept while the heroine died protractedly from leukemia,
 shouted with delicious anxiety during Cinerama's rollercoaster ride,
and even felt twinges of concern at being exposed to screen cholera.
 In the light of these manifest responses, why assume that the count-
less other fantasies dreamt in silence in the cinemas of the world
during the last seventy years -- fantasies of lust, violence, ambition,
 perversion, crime, and romantic love -- were any less powerful?

"It is at the movies that the only absolutely modern mystery is
celebrated", said Andre Breton.  (1)  It is appropriate that it was
a surrealist who so well expressed the curious combination of
technology and metaphysics that is cinema; for modern science's
realization of a continuum from the rational to the irrational
relates directly to the very nature of the film-viewing process.
This entails a darkened theatre, greater openness to suggestion,
the semi-hypnotic trance of the viewer, the surfacing of deeper
desires and anxieties, and the inhibition of reasoned response
in favor of "gut-level" reaction.  Far from representing a defeat
in man's struggle towards conciousness, the acceptance of this
inevitable duality (the flowing into each other of rationalism
and irrationality) is itself a step toward the future.

The mechanics of the film-viewing process have been discussed
by Mauerhofer, Kracauer, Stephenson-Debrix and others, (2)
 though a comprehensive analysis remains to be undertaken.
The viewer enters the theatre willingly, if not eagerly, ready
for surrender, (and deeply dissatisfied if the film is "bad"
and the illusion does not "work").  The film experience
requires total darkness; the viewer must not be distracted
from the bright rectangle from which huge shapes impinge on
him.  Unlike the low-pressure television experience (during
which the viewer remains aware of room environment and
other people, aided by appropriately named "breaks"),
the film experience is  total, isolating, hallucinatory.
  The viewer "forgets" where or  who he is and is
offended  by stray light, street or audience noises
which destroy the anticipated, accepted illusion.

As soon as the lights are lowered, the huge rectangle of the screen --
previously noted without interest -- becomes the viewer's total
universe. What transpires here in bursts of light and darkness is
accepted as life; the images reach out to him; he enters them.

The many mysteries of film begin at this moment; the acceptance
of a flat surface as three-dimensional, of sudden action-, scale-
or set-changes as ordinary, of a border delimiting this fraudulent
universe as normal, of black- and-white as reality.  The spectator,
Rudolf Arnheim points out, (3) experiences no shock at finding
a world in which depth perception has been altered,  sizes and
distances flattened  and the sky is the same color as the human face.

But the mysteries are only beginning.  The very darkness enveloping
the viewer is more complete than he realizes; for the essence of
cinema is not light, but a secret compact between light and darkness.
 Half of all the time at the movies is spent by the transfixed victims
of this technological art in complete darkness.  There is no image
on the screen at all.  In the course of a single second, forty-eight
periods of darkness follow forty-eight periods of light.

During this same infinitesimal period, every image is shown to
the audience twice; and as a still photograph; for the film comes
to a dead stop in the projector forty-eight times in the course
of a single second.  Given the retina's inability to adjust quickly
to differences in brightness, an illusion of movement is created
by this rapid, stop-start series projection of still photographs,
each slightly different from the one before.

Thus, during half the time spent at the movies,
the viewer sees no picture at all; and at no
time is there any movement.  Without the
viewer's physiological and psychological
complicity, the cinema could not exist.

The "illusion" of film -- so platitudinously invoked by journalists --
is thus revealed as a far more intricate web of deception, involving
the very technology of the film process and the nature of its
victim's perceptions.  Could it be precisely during the periods
of total darkness -- 45 out of every 90 minutes of film we see --
that our voracious subconcious, newly nourished by yet
another provocative image, "absorbs" the work's deeper
meaning and sets off chains of associations?

It is in this alien environment that the viewer willingly permits
himself to be invaded by strong images, created and manipulated
by a director-magician who entirely controls his vision.  True,
all vision, even undirected, is dynamic, and reflects, as Arnheim
emphasizes, an invasion of the organism by external forces
which upset the balance of the nervous system.  (4)   But while
in daily life the viewer can shift his focus of attention as he wishes
(without losing a sense of continuity regarding his surroundings),
in cinema his attention is "riveted" on a pre-ordained succession
of images, whose nature, tempo, sequence, and duration have
been carefully constructed for maximum impact by a third party.

Removed from the real world, isolated even from fellow-viewers,
the spectator falls to dream and reverie in the womb-like
darkness of the theatre.  Flooded by images, his unconcious
is freed from customary constraints and his rational faculties
are inhibited.  Stephenson and Debrix point out that except
for seeing and hearing, body and other senses are at rest
in the cinema, thus allowing imagination, stimulated by the
filmmaker's emotionally charged, expressly-selected material,
to exert deeper and more lasting influence.  Mauerhofer refers
to the viewer's voluntary passivity and uncritical receptivity;
and Kracauer emphasizes the dialectical wavering between
self-absorption (leading the viewer away from the image, into
personal associations triggered by it) and self-abandonment
(the movement toward the image).  Perhaps the state of the
viewer (as Mauerhofer, the psychologist, and Breton, the
surrealist, both agree) is closest to that between waking and
sleeping, in which he abandons the rationality of daily life
while not yet completely surrendering to his unconcious.

And the image is powerful; he cannot turn from it.  For man,
perhaps in response to an atavistic memory of fear or child-like
joy, cannot resist the attraction of movement (when he enters
a room or cinema, his eyes are inevitably drawn to the moving
shapes). He cannot "resist" the shocking changes caused by editing,
the sudden intrusion of shapes into the frame, the cascading bursts
of images flashing by at a rate faster than life,the sensuous power
of the close-up looming over him.  It is so much easier to turn from
the action into a live play.   Here the spectator has accepted its
unreality (just as he accepted the film's "reality") and since he
knows it cannot "reach out" and attack him, he never flinches
from stage as he does from screen violence.  In both cases,
the murdered man rises to be killed another time; but cinema
is "closer" to the viewer -- strange tribute to the faculties of a
brain more affected by two-dimensional reflections on flat canvas
than by live actors performing in three-dimensional space.

And it is a tribute to the power of visuals as such. For in man's
evolution, images antedate words and thought, thus reaching deeper,
older, more basic layers of the self. Man begins with what he sees,
progressing to visual representations of reality.  Their transmutation
into art does not seem to diminish the images' impact.  As holy today as
in man's pre-history, the image is accepted as if it were life, reality, truth.
 it is accepted on a feeling - rather than mind- level.  Significantly, it is
only if the "suspension of disbelief" is broken by disssatisfaction with
a given film that the viewer emerges from his hypnotized state.

And yet, however "authentic" the image, it remains a distortion of life.
Not only does it lack depth or density, the space-time continuum,
or the non-selectivity of reality, but it emphasizes certain aspects
to the exclusion of others by isolation them within a fixed frame
in a constantly evolving concatenation of blacks and whites,
objects and grounds.  This magical invocation of concrete
images that seemingly reflects reality while actually distorting
it, sets up additional tension between film and spectator;
it increases his sense of dislocation and disquiet and permits
further inroads into his ever more vulnerable subconcious.

It is the powerful impact of these brightly-lit images moving in black
space and artificial time, their affinity to trance and the subconcious,
and their ability to influence masses and jump boundaries, that has
forever made the cinema an appropriate target of the repressive
forces in society -- censors, traditionalists, the state.  While the result
has often been its inability openly to project fundamental human
experiences or insights, neither repression nor fear seem able to stem
an accelerating, world-wide trend towards a more liberated cinema,
one in which all previously forbidden subjects are boldly explored.
 This evolution from taboo into freedom is the subject of this book.

REFERENCES

(1) Andre Breton, quoted in J.H. Matthews, Surrealism and Film, 1971
(2)  Hugh Mauerhofer, "Psychology of Film Experience", The Penguin Film Review, 1949
+ Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, 1960,
+ Ralph Stephenson and J.R. Debrix, The Cinema as Art, 1965.
(3)  Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, 1933 / 1957
(4)  Idem, Art and Visual Perception, 1965