Exposing The Line In Film
“In that, to be able to read a line ‘as a line’, we first have to posit the areas where there are no lines; within and upon the picture plane, as non-object field. A field which, for line to speak, is required to be read as mute and empty of characteristics, over and above that required to allow line centre stage as the apparent site of all meaning.” Gordon Shrigley, Spatula
At centre of the moving image lies a technological desire for transparency, a need to obliterate a consciousness of the ‘line’. One can see that modern art rooted much of its practice in revealing the line, the edge, of exposing its duplicity in the production of absence and presence. Montage, theorized by Sergei Eisenstein in terms of the cinema, pervaded the modernist movement in the form of Cubism, the use of collage, and so on. The force of modernist art made lines and edges apparent, boundaries were put under constant stress, where the line, a divide between part-images, between fragments of images, split and gathered together images and words, engaging with the production of meaning based a dialectics of conflict.
So how does the moving image deal with the line? The title sequence and first shot of Lost Highway (1996): car headlights illuminate a yellow dashed line along the middle of a motorway. With forward movement of a car, the low angled shot picks up the dashed line in the middle of the motorway. This dashed line re-appears at crucial points in the story, although at one point it begins as two continuous double lines. David Lynch’s film, the story of a man accused of murdering his wife, who is then jailed, only to morph into someone else, follows this trail of fragmented linearity, one which tempts meaning, and therefore linearity as a form of making, and simultaneously denying, sense. Although Lynch uses the familiar elements of popular cinema, guns/detectives/murder/cars/sex/pornography/jazz/popular music so on, plus a honeyed dose of Oedipality, one could summarise Lynch’s oeuvre as an attempt to overcome the obvious linearity of mainstream cinema.
Of architectural drawing, Sarah Treadwell writes; ‘Dotted lines, tracing unseen geometries have been allowed into the discipline to deal with the invisible, the implied and the mobile.’ Treadwell continues; the on/off pulse of the dotted line suggests the structuring of the digital, ‘the on/off digital patterning of dots and dashes suggests that these lines… are coded with bodily rhythms.’ Or in the case of Lost Highway, the engagement of the body with the machine, and the forward movement of the moving image - a rhythm of seeing and thinking.
The issue of writing about film as a language that had a specific relationship to written language, has been obliterated in recent years by the reaction to post-structural thinking. Christian Metz, one of the prime movers behind post-structural film theory, investigated the nature of film as a symbolic medium and a language. For Metz a number of problems arose; the notion of film having a signifier/signified relationship, as does written language, soon became a more generic issue of content/style, the narrative provided the main handle in terms of linguistic analysis, and it proved difficult to reduce the shot to the minimal unit of cinema.
Perhaps another way of approaching the question of cinema as language would be to speculate about the role of the line in the cinema, sometimes a given, sometimes possibly even actively drawn. The line, drawn or given, occupies a space between the imaginary and the symbolic, is that boundary that divides them and, at the same time, makes them possible; image making/writing at its beginning. The line brings the image into play, is the image itself, and also connects images together.
The line in cinema exists on two levels; the mimetic level, that is what is seen on the screen, the lines of represented reality, the lines inferred by camera movement, that lines designed to guide our vision of the unfolding drama or vision. And then there are the lines inherent to the technology; I’m thinking of the line that surrounds the celluloid frame, the lines, the black bars, that divide one still frame from another, to many the life of film itself. There is a body of cinematic thinking that has focused in on what Dziga Vertov termed the ‘interval’. It’s a term that revolves around the gaps between the shots, an inherent measure of the cut, which allows one to edit in the manner of musical phrasing. The interval also occurs, if one follows Vertov’s thinking over a period of time, within the shot, in terms of a change in emphasis in the camera movement, for example. The idea of the interval was important amongst structural film-makers (and Deleuzian’s, but they take a different, and more transcendental line on the interval), for example Kurt Kren and Tony Conrad, whereby cinema sought to oppose its naturalised mimetic purpose, and instead stressed its materiality and its rhythms through a focus on celluloid as a broken, rather than a continuous form.
The horizontal lines in video usually reveal themselves when the image is re-filmed or re-photographed. I’m not qualified to pass comment on High Definition video, albeit to say that it’s higher in its definition because it uses many more lines per image. The most obvious point of contact with the technological line when watching a film are the edges of the frame, this line that edges round, demarcating the inside of the image and its outside is supposed to remain invisible, sustaining the order of the illusionary, it demarcates space, the space of the screen, it allows the flat plane of the image to be transcribed into a three-dimensional space, it allows the outside, that which announces the image as absence, to remain hidden.
How much is the line in the moving image drawn, how much is it given? The shot-counter shot, the eyes of one character meeting another within the film, entrapping the spectator in their identificatory looking, is premised on an orientable ‘straight-line’ vision. Within Althusserian ideological terms, apparatus theory sought to condemn Hollywood, because it supposedly used the Renaissance perspective system of centralizing the spectator, sutured them into position, causing them to imagine they were constructing the film in an enraptured state of forgotten consciousness and unshackled Lacanian desire.
At the beginning of Lost Highway, the main character, Fred, hears the front-door ring. We see him look at the intercom. After a few more shots we cut to the intercom in big close-up. Fred presses the ‘listen’ button, he is mysteriously informed that someone called “Dick Laurent is dead”. He goes to look out the windows of his house to try and see the culprit of this strange message. The windows obscure his view directly downwards, he can only look up and down at the street (shots which bring to mind the opening of Maya Deren’s film, as does the architectural design of Fred’s home). From the outside we see him staring out the windows, trapped behind the glass of his modernist house. The point here is, that via composition, framing and the sequencing of the shots, a straight line is drawn between Fred and the intercom, but that line is then interrupted by the obtuseness of the narrative and the shots of him trying to see onto the street below.
A line is also drawn between the beginning and the ending of the film. Once Peter Dayton has morphed back into Fred, and the Mystery Man and Fred have disposed of Dick Laurent, Fred returns to his house and announces in the intercom at the front door that “Dick Laurent is dead”. The narrative line, according to some, follows the inside-out line of the mobius strip. In point of fact, at the risk of seeming pedantic, the mobius strip is non-orientable, where left and right are interchangeable. While in Lynch’s cinema, in contrast to say Yasijuro Ozu’s films, for example, the 180 degree line is never crossed; shot and counter-shot sustain a normative consistency that serves to sustain the audiences spatial orientation. Through careful continuity, sustaining the body’s orientable asymmetry, characters will always remain on the same side of the screen. On the other hand, the narrative line in Lost Highway is assured where male hysteria, based on the desire and complete control of ‘woman’, causes the psyche to circle round and round itself, and the line, broken as it is, is both drawn, by the narrative, and given, by the deranged subject.
Which brings me to the most ignored event in the history of cinema, the scratch on the film. The scratch, usually vertical, but sometimes horizontal, depending on how the damage is done, is largely invisible, apart from the odd experimental film that has drawn attention to this ‘material inscription’. Unfortunately, digitising and transferring to DVD mark the natural end to this celluloid enemy that has, in its time, served to ‘authenticate’ many a documentary film or archive footage. This is the line, sometimes even drawn before our eyes by a poorly maintained projector, that marks the limits of the image, the materiality of the film, that leaves scars and mementos of the passage of time on an object that is primarily mimetic and archival. Sadly, as cinema dies, so does the scratch (and other miscellaneous marks).
Recent thinking has misspent a lot of energy on refuting the straight line and linearity; the straight line represents a form of incarceration. Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books 1 and 2 celebrates the time-image of post-war realism and European art house cinema, arguing that it is the Bergsonian durational. There are many issues that one could take up with the Deleuzian theory of the cinema; namely its confusion between a highly historically specific cinema, its attempts to propose a universalised theory, and its transcendent stress on the organic, whereby the inorganic, the technical only has a minor role, at best. Which is why the line, supposedly a spatialising term, undeservedly suffers.
This technics of the moving line in the moving image requires further analysis; perhaps mostly in terms of the tracking and panning shot, as exemplified by Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni, not forgetting a range experimental film-makers from Michael Snow to Peter Gidal. One issue that concerns me is how one can characterise the forward moving tracking shot and the zoom, for example Snow’s singular Wavelength (1967); is the spectator part of, and inside, the line itself?
There’s a nice moment in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire (1987) when Peter Falk, previously an angel himself, now an ordinary mortal and an actor who spends his spare moments drawing in his sketchbook. Falk stands at a mobile food stall drawing in the Berlin cold; the angel (Bruno Ganz), later to turn mortal himself due to his love for a trapeze artist, stands watching Falk. Falk feels the angel’s presence, and tells him how good it is to be mortal, “… just to touch something, feel the cold, to smoke, have coffee, and if you do it together it’s just fantastic. Or draw – you know you take the pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line, together it’s a good line. Or when your hands are cold you rub them together, that feels good. There’s so many good things…” That, is the line provides the satisfaction of bringing together the imaginary and the symbolic, a recognised absence in the present; the melancholic pleasure that the line is in a position to acknowledge, but one in the cinema, that is all too frequently hidden in the realm of the spectacular and artistic intentionality.
Adam Kossoff
As interesting as discussions such as these are, or may be, I’m inclined to wonder where all this talk of lines leaves us? It has become fashionable these days to talk of “meanings”; whereby the reader is free to make sense of the text for oneself (’the plaurality of entrances’ (Barthes, 1975) and so on).Yet poststructuralism has merely given rise to a kind of hermeutic hyperrealism whereby the text, particularly of the kind Lynch’s name is associated with,is rendered fetishistic. The pleasure of the text indeed. But as Paul de Man noted, ‘the aesthetic is a seductive notion […] a eudemonic judgment that can displace and conceal values of truth and falsehood’ (1982)
The tendency in cultural studies has been to seperate the text and history. Textual analysis is too subjective for any historical objectivity but to chase away the text seems over reductive too. This being so, then we might be better served to call for a kind of textual historicity. The idea that we are free to interpret the text at will is a rather romantic notion anyway. Of course we may “happen upon” texts but usually we do not. Furthermore, we are conditioned to read in very prescribed ways (which is not the same as saying eveyone reads the same way). Hans Robert Jauss suggested that we appoach texts through certain ‘Horizons of expectations’ thatallow us to anticipate what a given text will yield. But, he argued, the ‘aesthetic experience’ can ammount to more than a ’sociology on taste’ if it described ‘the reception and influence of a work within the objectifiable system of expectations that arise from each work in the historical moment of its appearance, from a pre-understanding of the genre, from the form and themes of already familiar works, and from the opposition between poetic and practical language’ (Jauss, 1982, p.23).
This brings us back, then, to Lost Highway. Bazin famously spoke of ‘the genius of the system’. Rather than admire the talent of this or that filmmaker, it is, according to Bazin, the Hollywood system that has adapted to accomodate new forms of expression and the modern auteur is an agent of that system. (Indeed, Bazin would have it that visible lines in Hollywood have been a feature of Hollywood since the early 1940s.) Without distribution and exhibition networks there would be no audience and no David Lynch. With Lost Highway lines are, of course, made visible. Variey complained, indeed, that the film was just ‘too deliberately obscure’ for most cinema goers (McCarthy, 1997, p. 44). What is of social significance is where a film such a Lost Highway sits as entertainment. What does it tell us about the nature of cinema as a social institution in the mid 1990s; the blurring, perhaps, of lines between the theatre and the gallery? Certainly it was this puzzle that perplexed the critical industries at the time of its release.
Tony Todd
/Anonymous 07/11/2007