SHARD CINEMA

EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

SHARD CINEMA

EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

This book is for Vic, who makes weathering
all these storms worth it,
who knows that images matter

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like most books, this one owes a lot to a number of people whom I’ve talked to and watched with, bounced ideas off and learned from. A few publications and institutions, too: The New Inquiry, Third Rail, La Furia Umana, Tabakalera, Maumaus, the Serpentine Gallery, the Architecture Department at ETH Zürich, and the University of Sussex have all supported this project in various ways, publishing early versions of some of these texts or bringing me to talk about shattering surfaces. My thanks to the people behind fxguide, whose site and interviews were an invaluable resource for this, as the frequent citations will make evident. Thanks to my editor, Emma Jacobs, for her astute edits and patience, to Tariq Goddard for taking on and seeing through the book, and to Johnny Bull for a brilliant cover. Thanks to Roda, who made me leave digital snow for the kind falling heavy outdoors. Thanks to the people with whom I’ve had the lucky chance to talk about some of these ideas, in passing or at length: Erik Bachman, Laure Prouvost, Max Fox, Alberto Toscano, Esther Leslie, Sabu Kohso, Ken Jacobs, and my students at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Three people in particular have left deep impressions on my thinking and are inseparable from the project. Mike Thomsen, whose brilliant thinking about video games and vision was a big influence, as was his generosity, friendship, and loan of a PS3 when I was broke and wanted to see how games had changed without me. Lucy Raven, whose work on the global network of digital compositing was a key touchpoint when I started and who’s been a necessary friend and collaborator since. And Vic Brooks, with whom I’ve watched, talked, learned, obsessed over CSI, whispered bad ideas to during the chase scene, and who has been a constant interlocutor and partner throughout my work on this.

This book is in memory of Harun Farocki, Chantal Akerman, and John Berger, who all taught me to see better.

…to see, it is necessary to lose consciousness of one’s own being, it is necessary in some way to stop seeing.

– Plotinus

It was like being pinned to the ground while an angry dishwasher shat in your face for two hours.

– Charlie Brooker on Transformers

At one, very practical level, there seems to me to be not enough fragmentation at the moment.

– Doreen Massey

FRAGMENT 1

he says, very slowly and clearly, each word bullet-spat past the teeth and terse lips, making sure it cannot be misheard, because Karl did not understand him the first time, when he told him in their mother tongue to do so. Karl, long-suffering blond hulk Karl, doomed to fail and flail and smash flower arrangements in proxy for a hero who he cannot kill, just looked at Hans, perplexed and silent. Perhaps, some speculate, it is because the German was incorrect, leading fans to bemoan the missing step of actually checking with a native speaker. Or, others suggest, it was just confusing in the given situation, telling poor Karl to shoot the glass, which colloquially would mean shoot the window. But in this room there are no windows. Only walls of glass, screens of glass. Besides, the office has already been well shot up, as has everything inside it, all the computers and the walls, the limbs and monitors and files, everything except the one intended target. What remains to ruin? Shards and splinters and sparkling dust pile the floor and get slicked with blood, and this is what spurs Hans’ tactical innovation and confusing command: not to hit the target but to attack the surroundings. To devastate more and more of the glassy room and make their enemy run unprotected across it. To make him leave a trail to be followed, a red ellipsis that draws a line to its author.

We know this, and Karl does not, because we who watch have been directed to see those cut and naked feet. We’ve seen the dawning grasp of Hans that all the world’s a trap provided you know how to miss your enemy and

SHOOT
THE
GLASS

My personal theory: when Hans says “schiess den Fenster,” Karl is stunned. Absolutely horrified. Because Hans, by using the accusative article “den,” has assigned the masculine gender to the window. But everyone who speaks German knows that windows are neuter. (Comment on Quora)

Which window? Which is a window and which is a wall and which is a screen? Karl might ask, if the situation weren’t so urgent. All windows. Because all are windows and walls and screens, the next three decades of moving images will come to respond in increasing unison.

barefoot and softly through the night, to continue the mutation into de Sade hero, endlessly subject to pain, puncture, and mutilation, yet endlessly durable, ready to track fresh blood into the next set piece, the newspapers scattered on the floor, the stain over MONEY INTO TRANSMISSION, the small splatter on The Southern California guide to lower heating bills

make an interior collapse in on itself. But Karl does not, beleaguered Karl who is not a camera but a henchman. So Hans shakes his head in frustration. He says it again, and he says it in English this time, as he is no longer just telling Karl. He is also telling the camera operator and the focus puller where to point the lens, playing on that linguistic doubling there since Étienne-Jules Marey’s repeating camera rifle: shoot the glass, not the character. He says it in English, and in whatever tongue it is dubbed into for global distribution, because he is telling us, we who are watching Die Hard, so that we’ll eventually realize the gravity of these words, even if it takes a couple decades, because shoot the glass inaugurates and names the nascent start of a relation to images that will come to be inseparable from basic parameters of how we see and how we touch.

Later, we won’t need to be told twice, because we’re already doing it, already aiming eyes and phones and virtual rifles, but we’re not there yet, and neither is Karl, though it isn’t his fault. He hasn’t seen this film yet, hasn’t seen the scene that follows (or the ones after that, his death waiting in the concrete wings), and so we’re all told, all given this direction to watch closely, because what happens is a portrait in miniature of what is to come. Like how when Karl leans out to do as told, it is past the hard drive of a computer behind which he has taken shaky shelter, the kind that in another decade will be the source of that glass’s shattering, collaborating with its operator to forge the flawless digital sparks here made by more direct means: just blowing up the computer itself, while Karl – who can’t catch a break – skitters to the side. Like how the film, one that is as pro-cop as it is anti-plan, is

Because we share sight with a camera that’s everywhere and nowhere at once, able to bob amongst a hail of projectiles and never once be struck, its own polished glass always smudgeless and intact amidst the fray.

Shoot the setting – and wait for it to come to pieces. Shoot that. Shoot the shards and the sparks, shoot the papers that flutter around like panicked birds.

and because this film is not Spaceballs, he’s not alone in this, never given the chance to see how he looks on the screen that holds him

Stamped on the servers behind them:

CONTROL DATA

already obsessed by this split between the evidently tactile and the supposedly immaterial, the same false divide that will later come to dominate the visual worlds of our last decade and a half of speculative film. Like how the very room where the shootout takes place is literally gridded for the sole apparent reason of making it look more cyberish and hyper-rational, resulting in a firefight in a space military tacticians could only dream of, there where any body might be mapped by coordinates, and the bullets destined for it are ever and always placeable, as they will be in all the films that inherit this look.

Still, we’re not there yet. Here, inside Fox Plaza, the actual building of the company that will distribute the film, the effects are practical. When the final fall from the roof happens, it’s achieved with a bluescreen matte onto live footage, optically printed rather than digitally composited on a computer that the film is too busy blasting to bits anyway. The set is physically built and laboriously destroyed, its glass shot to shit, as happens sometimes in Los Angeles, like in Assault on Precinct 13, twelve years before, where all windows were ruined and the police station made porous to the revenge of those gathered outside. Or like nine years before Die Hard, some thirteen miles southeast from Fox Plaza as the helicopter flies, how Barbara McCullough filmed Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification in Watts, finding in the city a pocket of what attempted development left strewn behind, including plenty of shattered glass, its “jewel quality” flaring when the sun hit just right. There, everything that had supported and fed and cheered lives lived in shelter now lay scattered inside or outside of houses for which the distinction didn’t matter anymore,

Like how every bit of glass in the room is a screen, whether literal monitors for the banks of computers or simple walls of glass that serve no purpose other than to display, to frame those in the room as if they too had no exit from the realm of images they will make.

In the film renamed “Nakatomi Plaza,” it is a building that looks like a discarded polygonal hunk, a previs approximation of a digital asset slotted in for the final thing.

this looks like someplace in some other third world country. But it was sitting there, you know, and you have the broken glass, wound up looking – when the light was reflected, had this, you know, really jewel quality, you know, about it. And you just had, just pieces of things around that were just really pretty amazing. (Barbara McCullough)

their windows splayed across the blighted soil that had to be purged, there where the city evicted residents to build a highway that never came, this architecture of slow attack.

Later, in Die Hard, glass is purposefully shot again, although unannounced this time, and here too the relation of body and architecture and safety gets it twisted. The cop is standing on the window, like we blinked and gravity went sideways. His bare feet are still bloody, and they’re pressed flat against the glass, bracing him against a threshold that just won’t give, the screen locked until the passcode – easy to guess: more bullets – is entered, and with it too the user.

And much later than that, twenty-three years later, in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, a skyscraper really will go sideways, even without our heads lolling bored to the side in anticipation of sleep when this is all over. A giant robot python worm is busy boring through the building’s glass curtain wall into the open-plan architect’s office inside, and soon it strangles the building, as such things do. The tower starts to angle sideways, its mirrored cladding reflecting back the city into which it crumples, each individual pane displaying a fragment of the surrounding world in anticipation of when it all really shatters and still continues to reflect, the little spinning shards depicting everything except the camera that was never there to start. And so, fleeing from the robot or the imminent fall or both, the assorted muscular and lip-glossed protagonists leap through a window to slide down the windowed exterior, like a waterslide lubed with cubes of glass. They skim down its surface with no way in, heading for disaster, and one of them yells:

and getting bloody prints all over it, because touchscreens only stay clean in advertisements and promises

And it is this image that will become the cover of the game of the film from 2002, Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza, named for the building, the one that in the game you cannot leave. Yet the game itself is built on another architecture, started as a fan conversion of Duke Nukem 3D. In order to get the exact right surface to faithfully cover the digital walls, the development team feigned interest in renting office space and, on the tour, snapped photos of the texture of the walls, to be bitmapped onto the space through which you rampage, there where “objects, furniture, and environments react accurately to gunshots and movements.”

it is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it. (Fredric Jameson)

But there’s no German here. No need to pass through the repetition and explain to us how to watch. Because this has become the expected mode, and so it’s no surprise that yes, Hans, the glass is shot and, yes, they tumble back inside, to slide the other direction down towards another drop out another window. They skitter and scream and desperately grab at frayed wires and cables that once powered and linked the computers of the office, and the characters deemed important enough to the story hold on fast. But others who never were put at the center of the frame to start find nothing to anchor them, because open-plan offices aren’t made for sinking ships, and so over the edge they go. The camera takes the plunge with them. It follows close behind, staring all the way down at the detritus that falls with it: the desks and lamps, monitors and photos, the thousands of sheets of paper that ripple past us but never can be read, that fill the air like it’s autumn in a world where all the forests have been pulped for confetti.

SHOOT
THE
GLASS

One of the glass lites, 8’-6 tall by 10’-0 wide supported only by vertical cables for the ultimate in creating a joint free transparent wall, according to the firm behind the building copied in digital double, 155 North Wacker, whose exterior glass curtain wall system consists of a factory glazed, unitized, aluminum and glass wall, with exterior stainless steel fins that no one will suddenly crash into as they slide towards the void.

NOTES ON COMPOSITION

And thus it is necessary to begin again, and again, in the middle of things.

– Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing¹

This book began simply from watching. Not from an inquiry or planned research project, and not from any one clear and punctual moment of revelation in front of my computer or in a movie theater or while playing a video game. Instead, the image that spurred this book was something I saw over and over again but never with any kind of shock. What eventually made me notice it was the realization of how its familiarity had crept up on me, how I knew I hadn’t been seeing it all my life yet couldn’t remember a first time.

That image was, basically, the shards of this book: the slow-motion shatter, drift, spray, and spread through the air of broken glass, ice, cement, plastic, wood, and metal, of crystalline drops of water and glowing sparks and specks of dust and snow and sand, all given ample screen time to go nowhere in particular. Without any one film, ad, or game triggering the thought, it gradually dawned on me that over the past decade or so I had watched this happen hundreds of times, especially in the most costly films and moving images made the world over. And when I started pursuing this more specifically, tracking the image through its iterations, tracing it back from now, it became clear that it took shape as a style and figure at a certain point, roughly from the last years of the 1990s on.

However, it wasn’t just this particular content or scenario that I’d seen so often. After all, that kind of destruction is to be expected in action, science fiction, horror, and fantasy films, and games that spend much of their time setting up collisions and watching things go to pieces. What had become so familiar to me was also this image’s fundamental feeling. I mean that in two senses of the word. First, a feeling of – specifically, the experience and affect suggested by the peculiar kind of time, movement, surface, and space at play in these shard sequences. For instance, their strange fusion of hyperviolence and prettiness, their fine-grained attention to delicate textural details of what is almost always occasioned by war, invasion, or danger. Or their sense of frozen advance, a dreamy moment held open in near-stillness by a mobile camera that’s at once forensic and aimless, floating and physically decoupled from the scene it so insistently roams and circles. Second, a feeling for – the way in which the mood and mode of these shard moments is attuned to not only the collapsing world they depict in high resolution but also to what else is happening on, beyond, and beside the screen. Because the more I watched, the more I became aware of how these images detect, display, grapple with, or push away the evidence of their own construction, how they fundamentally relate to all the work, time, boredom, knowledge, joy, and capital that passed through and is sunk into every spinning splinter of ravaged condo.

This book is ultimately about those feelings. It’s about how we watch and how what we watch can’t be untangled from what it feels farthest from. In a more restricted way, it’s also about a specific possibility: that rather than being the arbitrary stylistic consequences of a blockbuster’s attempt to wow audiences, the particular contours of these shard moments form the visible signature of an entire mode of making, watching, and interacting with images that has become increasingly prevalent – and so has become increasingly hard to see for just what it is.

That’s a big claim, and there’s a decent chance that even if these passages of lugubrious wreckage only occurred in one or two movies or games, I still would have fixated on them. After all, they echo, however distantly, one of my favorite moments ever filmed: the slow-motion feathers in the air of the pillow-fight scene in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933). I saw that first when I was seventeen, and those feathers have transfixed me since. Partly, it’s for their clarity and anarchic joy, for how they capture the temporality of revolt, suspending seconds around it to rewrite the terms of what matters, even if only for an instance. But it’s also for how the movement of the feathers make cinema’s base principle of mechanized motion into a capacity for its sudden inversion, both literally in how the film’s sound starts to run in reverse (as the boy vaults and flips backwards up onto a chair, as if rewinding), and conceptually in how it finds a small juncture of freedom precisely through this inhuman velocity, rather than in retreat from it. So in some sense, it was probably unavoidable that I’d fixate on the shards, given my obsession with the multiple senses of time at work in that scene. Or, for that matter, given my general predilection for any moments in film deemed ornamental, stupid, or excessive, the kind where you see nothing but technique testing its granular legs, the kind that get lambasted in well-mannered reviews as what is wrong with cinema these days.

Still, there’s something else that lurks in the gap between the specific experience of watching this shard cinema and the slowness of realizing that it is something distinct. An attempt to make sense of the tensions and timescale of that gap is one of the central concerns of this book, particularly the way that we struggle to come to terms with how we are already remade well before the point of noticing, already outpaced by our own gestures. Those gestures make up one of my other central concerns here, and they recur throughout what follows, including in their most literal and physical forms, like the way our hands learn to navigate touchscreens and softly stroke glass, or the way that a camera turns just slightly, lingering a split second on a face at the periphery of a chase scene. These gestures don’t signify anything in and of themselves. Instead, they are movements that gesture out and open onto a world that they help articulate. This is the wider understanding of them at play in the book: they are forms of testing and navigating the uncertain edge of an apparatus or medium, always trying to determine where it is that we end and something else begins – and almost always with the result of realizing that we’re even more hybrid, prosthetic, and conjoined with what we’ve come to hate than we first expected.² Because the process of gesturing is never natural or private. It marks, and is a mark of, the small textures of historical transformation, a torqued sign of how we are subsumed into systems and structures that dwarf us but come to be so familiar in their omnipresence that they vanish into simple utility.

In this way, my own slowness at noticing those shards I’ve been staring at is perhaps a consequence of what Siegfried Zielinski calls the “vanishing point” of a medium.³ The vanishing point isn’t the dramatic emergence or disappearance of a form, like cinema supposedly bursting onto the scene or, conversely, seeming to undergo its much-vaunted death, because Zielinski’s thinking runs counter to that sort of sudden punctual arrival of a medium. Instead, the vanishing point signals a process where the energies and techniques of putatively different media become both ubiquitous and entangled, shaping how we see and take on all the tensions, forces, and flows that come with them. Yet in that ubiquity, they also threaten to pass into invisibility, insofar as they change the very conditions through which we’d judge or experience a medium or technology as a distinct thing that we might choose or reject. In other words, this vanishing point marks the way that something becomes unseen not because it has been replaced or faded in importance, but because it has become naturalized, a structure and a given, as we forget how it was to have been otherwise.

The shard moments that shape this book are hints of such a process, the most explicit, hyperbolic, and almost caricatural traces of the vanishing point of a mode of image-making which I’ll just call the composite image. This is less a distinct medium or aesthetic so much as a relation of images to the pathways, workflows, and contradictions they enact. It is a relation that draws no clean distinction between production and post-production, the filmed and the assembled, the living and the animated, or the finished and the continually-in-process, distinctions that were never valid in the first place but which still cast long shadows over how moving images were thought of and worked with through the last century.

The historical backdrop to the composite image, the forms of looking and touching it expects, and the ambient anxiety surrounding it are inseparable from a story that took shape in the 1990s and has become especially prevalent in recent years. I don’t mean a story internal to film theory or scholarly film history, where it has rightly been challenged and qualified (although still holds more sway than might be expected).⁴ Instead, I mean a more diffuse account that has become commonplace, evident everywhere from film reviews to comment threads, advertising, contemporary art, and the way that technicians, VFX artists, and directors themselves talk about what they’re doing.⁵ The crux of this narrative is that the gradual shift toward the omnipresence of digitally processed images (whether full CGI or combining filmed with animated elements) has severed a fundamental connection that was operative throughout a century of cinema: one that joined the images themselves to the situations they emerge from and the world beyond the screen. It’s a story, at its most basic, about a sense that the more we see images produced digitally in one way or another, the more time we’re spending with images that, casually speaking, don’t show a “real” scene.

More precisely, the concern is that they are no longer indexical – i.e. maintaining a physical tie to their referents, in the way that an analog photograph that imprints light onto film through a chemical transformation does. The most obvious instance of this “loss” is digital animation with no direct photographic trace (other, perhaps, than in forms of motion capture that provide frames/templates for character modeling).⁶ But there’s a different variety of this closer to the heart of my inquiry. It’s what J. Hoberman, for instance, calls “cyborg cinema,”⁷ involving images that don’t clearly declare themselves to be photographic or computer-generated, because they are both at once. In short, because they are composited, which means an assemblage that constructs a set of discrete elements from different moments and sites of recording, modeling, or animation into a unified visual field. And in that unification, it adopts the style of a single sequence in continuous space and passage of time – in other words, as if it was filmed. What does this mean practically? In many of the examples that populate this book, it means stitching together into a single shot one green screened actor, four digitally animated robots, a winter’s worth of procedurally generated snowflakes, and a backdrop composed of thousands of still photos melded into a continuous surface. Crucially, though, the digital work in these composite images doesn’t necessarily take a form that reveals and celebrates how it has been created by software, like a Pixar dog. Compositing is present above all in the production of what cannot be seen, except for when something goes briefly wrong. It shows itself in the smoothness and unity of the final image, in the way it can look like it was never assembled to start.

The work of compositing itself is hardly new, as a century of glass matte painting, chroma-keying, and optical printing suggests, nor is its use to carry out operations that don’t show themselves off as technique and marvel. Consider, for instance, the use of an in-camera matte in The Great Train Robbery (1903), a film that if remade a century later would surely consist of bullet-time roundhouse kicks in the pouring rain while sparks sputter off the wreckage of a Ducati that jumped onto the train to halt the titular robbery. The matte, however, wasn’t used to achieve something that screams out to be seen. Instead, it was used to extend the illusion of the “realistic” inhabited space of a telegraph office, allowing the motion of the train to be glimpsed out a window at the rear of the shot. The same holds for contemporary uses of compositing, which are hardly limited to what can only be achieved with its help. The digital construction of single shots from manifold sources gets used to save money and time, including for resolutely secular shows like Ugly Betty, where the cost/hassle of on-location shooting is solved by simply slotting in a city background behind winsome moments shot on green screen. Or, like in Exodus, in order to only have to wrangle a few tangible frogs onto set, relying on digital doubles to flesh out the rest of the plague. Or to avoid complications that certain films deeply deserve to suffer, like how the makers of Chappie composited their images of social turbulence, because, in the words of the film’s visual-effects supervisor Chris Harvey, they were worried they would “actually create a riot by staging one,” as “[s]ome of the locations were, security-wise, not necessarily the safest places.”⁸

In this book, the composite image comes to designate a much wider field and set of operations than only the recent technologies of digital compositing. More generally, it marks the way that single images or sequences gather together, however accidentally, a range of echoes, locations, and moments, compressing the incompatible and never quite hiding the seams. Historically, it also comes to designate how this capacity gets amplified by a global proliferation of screens and recording devices, handled within lived spaces that are equally sites of transmission, surveillance, and interference. And finally, the composite is the model for the book’s own method, its attempt to join the discontinuous and far-flung without flattening their peculiarities, preferring a winding and inconstant thread that links, however tenuously, razor commercials and riot footage, iPhone games and disaster photos, architectural fly-throughs and textile mills, early special effects and the history of colonial punishment.

However, in terms of the more specific claim about composite images in huge-budget films, games, music videos, and ads, the majority of instances I’m considering are ones where the compositing (and visual techniques in general) is more literal and showy, where viewers know for damn sure that it wasn’t shot on location, if only for the fact that the location is a skyscraper in the midst of collapsing while being shot up by plasma rifles. In other words, I’m starting with the most extravagant examples of compositing techniques – the shards – that appear in the costliest cinematic images in the world, those produced by Hollywood and its global partners. The reason for that is because I want to show how even in those images that seem most absurdly overblown, moronically expensive, improbable, dazzling, and “fake,” that even and especially in these we can glimpse the process and frictions of their making, a form of counter-viewing that doubles back on them as occasions to watch against the grain.

Returning to the notion of the indexical, it’s worth noting that I don’t think the sense of a “lost indexicality” in recent moving images is all wrong.⁹ Still, I want to argue against this limiting version of the concept because I think that it misses out on what is at stake in these shifts and vanishing points. As a start, we should move away from the fixation on an obviously material trace, and towards a sense of the process of forging connections between images and a world beyond, and at work in, them.¹⁰ The original sense of index was bound to a Latin word for the index finger: that is, the part that points, suggesting a looking that’s not casual but directed, guiding the eye of a viewer and indicating the sites of joining and exchange where something remains visible if only you know where to look. In this regard, I’ll argue that it makes sense to think of these seemingly weightless, polished, and cash-suffused images, the ones that initially seem like tautologies of themselves, as truly indexical, just not in the sense that has been so relied upon by cinema.¹¹

Because if we compare them with other modes of cinematic image, composite images indeed don’t point in any strict way back to a single scene or a sensible occurrence in space that seems to translate with minimal friction to the finished sequence. Yet in those earlier forms of the more supposedly indexical, like the directly physical/chemical/ mechanical capture and production of images, the point of material contact – that indexical stain or registration – also depended on so much else that had to go unregistered and unrecorded: the whole apparatus of the production, the distinct qualities of the lens, the hand of the assistant who threw fistfuls of feathers from just out of frame to approximate snow. And in the recent composite images that seem least graspable and furthest from connection with the lived world, it is exactly this other missing material that comes into view, however unevenly: the traces of the process of their making, all the things that get coded as artificial and as the sign of a reality betrayed.

There is much in the book that has little to do with this, and the intent of this preface isn’t to provide all of its arguments in miniature. Instead, I’ll offer a couple of final points about how this book itself is composed. As the above perhaps indicates, this is, in some regards, a work of film or media theory. But it isn’t about film or media theory, and it isn’t written solely for those with a lot of background in it or who’ve had the opportunity to make that line of inquiry a central part of their lives. I’ve tried to write it in a way that doesn’t have any prerequisites, that gives its own grounding, however personal, speculative, or affective, and that delineates what it means without relying on a shorthand familiar only to a few. My hope is that it remains open to all those who watch, especially as perhaps its central claim is that our watching is always denser, sharper, and stranger than we give it credit for, picking up on historical echoes and rough edges that we too rarely take the time to question. In this way, it is a book from, about, and for watching, in the extended sense of all its accompanying gestures: in playing, in grasping, in hoping, in turning the eyes away, in seeing what isn’t supposed to be seen, in fighting.

This book is best read as a series of essays that follow and develop connected lines of thought, but that ultimately form a mosaic; they can be read in whatever order, although each larger section (“Part One,” “Part Two,” etc.) makes more sense if its essays are read in sequence. As will become immediately clear, the book is about more than shards and action films. It begins with the literal sensation of holding a cellphone, passes back into the experience of working in early factories, and moves on from there, weaving back and forth in time, and only reaching the titular shards midway through Part Two before it leaves them again. It is also interspersed throughout by a series of short fragments, each of which centers on a single moment from a different film or game. These are displayed on facing pages, reminiscent of the split-screen format (or multiple monitors) used by those who do the work of compositing.

Lastly, you’ll notice that there are no images printed in the book. Part of this decision came from the practical difficulties of reproducing (and getting rights for) scenes from huge blockbuster movies. Ultimately, though, the decision not to include images comes from a sense that we think about images differently when we can’t immediately refer to them, when they can’t become illustrations or verifications, letting us check or prove a point. I’m compelled by what happens when that is withheld and how, in the work of describing what could be seen, we sometimes stray into what has become invisible through familiarity. Still, given that while working on this I’ve gathered images, stills, sequences, diagrams, and clips, I’ve put them online (at www.shard.space) as an appendix, ongoing archive, and companion to the book. In the same way that the fragments within resemble a split-screen, the book itself might be read in tandem with another one – with a phone or computer, somewhere, anywhere – and in this way open up lines of thinking or fields of inquiry far beyond what I’ve suggested.

After all, my hope is that this book can serve as a point of departure or contention and that it will be – in the words of Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz – one of “proportions rather than statements; an object with which one can argue.”¹²

_____________________________________

1 Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 2.

2 See the chapter “Operator Error” for a longer examination of this, particularly in the reading of the diaries, testimonies, and poems of women who had to learn hectic gestures of machinic collaboration in their work in early textile factories.

3 Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 1999).

4 For an overview of these debates, which I won’t be addressing here, I’d recommend especially: Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2007), pp. 128-52.

5 In this book, I’m more interested in this widespread, often unqualified narrative, for how it has inflected the way we talk about our experiences of viewing, and for how it inflects the way that capital-intensive images try to cater to and profit from this, as in the renewed fetish for “practical effects.”

6 For others, though, the loss of indexicality occurs more fundamentally, with any digital photography and video and its shift from the chemically transformed to the written-in-code. “Once live-action footage is digitized (or directly recorded in a digital format), it loses its privileged indexical relationship to profilmic reality,” according to Lev Manovich. For David Rodowick, “[c]omparing computer-generated images with film reaffirms that photography’s principal powers are those of analogy and indexicality. The photograph is a receptive substance literally etched or sculpted by light forming a mold of the object’s reflected image.” Such an indexical trace “always returns us to a past world, a world of matter and existence.” Lev Manovich, “What is Digital Cinema?” in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 179; D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 9, 121.

7 See Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st-Century Cinema? (London: Verso, 2012).

8 Luckily for them, “the people were all awesome. I don’t remember any problems by any of the local people while we were there.” Unluckily for the history of cinema, we don’t have a film that turned suddenly into a documentary of a riot provoked by those who just want a “gritty look” (like the filming of The Bourne Legacy in Manila) or of the expropriation of cameras to be used for other ends, like a huge-budget remake of the Dead Prez video “Hell Yeah.” (Harvey’s comments come from: https://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-practical-and-digital-tech-behind-chappie/.)

9 At least in terms of the transformation of a baseline viewing experience, where now the sensation of inhuman smoothness and weightless inconsequentiality is hard to avoid, and where accidents seem off-the-table (as the flitting shadow of a bird crossing overhead can be erased in After Effects or added by the thousands, provided that the film is full of bad omens).

10 In this way, I think it is more fruitful to treat both the composite image and fully digital animations as “technical images,” under the framework that Vilém Flusser suggests. For Flusser, a historical loss of the centrality of text (by which he means not only literal written texts but the structure of ordering meaning in sequence, through the development of a syntax) has produced a return to the realm of images, which he argues were a central mode of meaning-making throughout much of the history of the species. What returns, however, doesn’t have the image’s earlier sense of directly “grasping the world.” Instead, it is fundamentally mediated: “What remains [from the loss of meaningful sequences or graspable images] are particles without dimension that can be neither grasped nor represented nor understood. They are inaccessible to hands, eyes, or fingers. But they can be calculated (calculus, “pebbles”) and can, by means of special apparatuses equipped with keys, be computed […] It makes mosaic-like combinations of particles possible, technical images, a computed universe in which particles are assembled into visible images.” Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 10.

11 Here, I’m taking a major cue from Laura U. Marks, who notes that: “Digital media are indeed indexical, if we keep in mind what level of materiality they are indexing. They may index the imperfect flow of electrons that constitute them, or the platforms on which they were built. They may index what they cost to make, or the social networks in which they exist.” Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 190.

12 From their description of how they intended their film In Danger and Distress, The Middleway Spells Certain Death – discussed in “Fragment Four.” Quoted in Miriam Hansen, “Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Kluge and Early Cinema,” in Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, ed. Tara Forrest (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 404.

FRAGMENT 2

An account of the making of In Tune with Tomorrow (1939), Chrysler-Plymouth’s 3D stop-motion film that details the step-by-step process of the assembly of a car, yet where everything floats into place like haunted steel, where no hands are ever seen, where the labor of moving those parts for the film remains hidden in the unfilmed intervals between each and every still frame, where parts

(J.A. Norling, “Three-Dimensional Motion Pictures,” in Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Vol. 33 [1939], p. 629)

that moved along the floor involved little difficulty except for accurate timing and space, but to make a heavy motor or an entire body sail in through the air raised real technical problems. Overhead tracks were built from which to suspend these parts on steel wires attached to a movable trolley. To make these wires invisible they were camouflaged by painting and, in addition, were plucked like banjo strings at the moment of photographing, the rapid vibration serving to prevent their registering on the film.

Part One

Operational Sequences

GLASS HANDS

“Who shall say that man does see or hear? He is such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?”

– Samuel Butler¹

Until about six years ago, I only had a couple of intimate and tactile relationships with glassy surfaces. The first began early, a symptom of growing up where winter is long but inconstant, with temperatures that climb and drop hard. Ice always appeared less a thing than a pause, a literal freeze-frame, because in Maine you don’t get to step outside of the process or go through winter piecemeal. It is always in a full circuit. First, there’s the anticipation of snow, which can be huffed, a smell of dry dust in the throat’s back, like smoke but from burning metal, not wood. Then comes snow, sleet, tapering-off rain, slush, night’s black ice, partial melt, brown lumps of not-snow-but-not-ice, and then do it all over again, all on a long GIFish loop until you wake up and it’s late April, and outside all the permafrost dog shit has come to light and nose.²

But when that pause happens fast enough, or with a slight interval of rain before night, you get the rare marvel of totally clear ice. We’d go skating, down the Royal River or out in the Cumberland marshes, where you could TIE-Fighter swoop between the cattails and ash stands, and I’d catch cracks and skid on cut hands, mouthing the milky pond. Like an improbable crush or money, ice’s surface always splits this way between pleasure and damage, never more dangerous than when you don’t realize you’re already navigating it. When my grandmother’s second husband died, she moved from Florida to live near us. I became newly, sharply aware of how fragile we can be when crossing ice, especially when our bodies have already begun to bend like birds. All the same, I’d carry slick loafers in my backpack to school and put them on for the downhill walk home, to spend it slipping as much as possible, acting out a semi-skilled pratfall teetering on the edge of facial reconstruction. The gestures we develop to negotiate ice barely manage this tension, always swerving between sublime grace and dorky flailing.

Given that I don’t wear glasses, my other memories of focusing on, and caring for, the smooth and unyielding are all from jobs. One was selling wine, where you spend so much of the day touching and holding glass. Stacking boxes of it, proffering $200 bottles of it to the rich like snake-oil. Lifting and arranging it, realizing that when vintners want their wine to appear to justify their prices – to demand what they fetch – they make the bottles heavier, as if value was something to be hefted and luxury sold by the pound.

For slick surfaces, the bottles gathered endless dust, or at least the dust appeared so visible because every speck violated an unspoken premise of wine fetishism. The wine can appear old, but only if it is wildly expensive, starts with Chateau, and conjures cellar visions.³ If not, it must look as if it’s just on a layover, a minor lag before rushing off the shelves. This image of the agreed-upon guarantees a consensus of taste, which is what yuppies need as a backdrop to take flight from. So all day I touched glass, but the glass was supposed to be invisible, only a problem – only visible – when too slick and itching to fall. It only worked when it could be ignored.

The other job that gave me this surface experience was washing dishes at restaurants where I’ve cooked and prepped. Washing makes you fixate on trying, as fast as possible, to get a surface back to looking like it was never used in the first place, or just close enough that your boss won’t make you do it over. This requires, and therefore develops, a strange hyper-sensitivity of fingers and palms, even as the heat, water, and bleach wreak havoc on hands, because you have to gauge without really looking: how much is still crusted on, how much texture is there to what is supposed to have none. (Kluge and Negt: “the hand’s task is not only to hold something. It must also function simultaneously as an organ of perception.”)⁴ It is hellishly boring work, barring the radio and talking and sometimes flirting, because going through the motions means learning a set of gestures repeated over and over again but which never get to be fully automatic, the rhythm broken every time burnt salmon skin just won’t let go.

Until around seven years ago, these were the only times I had significant, affectively-thick tactile experiences with glass or the glassy. Then I got my first phone with a touchscreen, and now, like most people I know, I touch, rub, tap, worry, flick, and stroke glass at least once an hour, almost every hour that I am awake, almost every day of the year. My days, and whatever intimacy they include, are inseparable from the feel of something that shivers as if brushed with ice, yet always touches the same way back. Through it, I fell in love from afar, finger-skating sexts to London on a Foxconned slab.

_______

I think it makes little sense to think of this development in terms of good or bad, as a disaster or a miracle for the species, even in terms of the kind of sociability it implies, like the much-vaunted loss of allegedly unmediated public experience. I know that in public spaces, yes, we do look at each other’s faces less often than we used to and that those spaces aren’t often marked by the sound and shapes of newspaper being folded and spread in hands. But public spaces have never meant the same thing – or signified a welcoming – to all who cross them, always suffused with implicit hostilities, privileges, and exclusions, and print newspapers can just as easily propagate vile imperialist pap as their websites.

Still, what seems certain is that this transformation of some of the basic predicates of our experience is without precedent in human history, in terms of just how fast it has rewritten modes of gesture, reading, and seeing for just how many people.

There are, of course, other equally large shifts in humans’ technical-social experience, in no small part because we’ve never existed independently of our prostheses and practical entanglements. The use of buttons, for instance, in the typewriter brought with it a widespread experience oflanguage as mechanical input, one previously available only via the typesetter or the telegraph and hence still requiring an “expert’s” mediation. Or the radio’s simultaneity, at once joining source and site of listening and drawing the lines between those sites, between the car, bar, home, and farm. The mechanization of war. Cinema’s animation of the still and reproduction of motion. The “whipping machine.”⁵ Mass-produced commodity markets. All online everything.

Still, it seems uncontroversial to assert that almost no other machine – not the smartphone itself but the set of gestures, textures, embedded memories and technical knowledge, metals and plastics, supply chains and sensors, work, and social forms that stitch together at the moment where it and I use each other – has so rapidly become inextricable from the everyday.⁶ The other technologies took decades, if not centuries, to drift into use and gain the familiarity of being casually touched and unremarked upon, even if their effects were as dramatic in the long run. Indeed, the only others that happened close to this scale and velocity, across borders and populations, are all bound to war, to the sudden awareness of being part of a new machine – one named trench, carpet bombing, drone, gas attack, napalm, heat signature, or counter-insurgency – that will literally kill you if you don’t rapidly come to terms with how it functions. These technologies remake the landscape and turn all maps 3D, all neighborhoods into theaters of operation. And no matter how atrociously normalized that becomes, it can never approach the sleepy familiarity of a thumb that vaguely flicks a feed.

My interest in this doesn’t lie in trying to define the general anthropological overhaul bound up with the digital, for which the phone has come to serve as one particularly visible index. I wouldn’t know where to begin with that, and we’re far too embedded for any fantasy of critical distance. Instead, I’ve become fixated on the sensation of a screen, on how it shifts from a sensational element in space – one that delimits the distance covered by projection or around which we gather – to a sensual object in itself. In other words, I’m struck again and again by how only a few years ago, I did not carry around a warm slab of receptive ice in my pocket, but now I don’t need to look down to trace patterns into and via it. Even more simply, I want to understand what’s at stake in the way that so many of us spend so much time petting slick and smeary surfaces, carrying windows in our ass pockets.

It’s a marker of how serious this recalibration of hand, eye, mind, and attention is that my examples are far-flung, that in order to find precedents for how it feels to not only touch but also hold and carry screens, to care for them to the point that I don’t think about such care, I have to go back to what seems far from screens and their images – back to dishes, wine, and ice. Growing up with computers made a visual-practical relation to screens second nature, sure, but I learned to manually navigate Androids through winter and wages. And from other scattered sources. Through reading about Spinoza polishing lenses and realizing that even if there’s only one substance, there’s no reason to think that all of a body moves at the same speed. Through watching how my friend polishes her glasses with a grey cloth when she’s thinking or tired or both. Or the way that Tonya Harding fell and then wept, in spite of those gold blades. How Anna Kavan writes winter in Ice, running up against the limits of description and so just writing white and ice and frozen over and over again. How the security glass of bank windows requires blows of different speeds and types. Malaparte’s horses trapped in a lake’s prison of ice. Hundertwasser’s loopy, and totally correct, fantasy of cultivating mold on high-modernist glass houses, “when moss grows in a corner of a room, rounding its geometric angles.”⁷ Dying in the ice worlds of Mario. Drawing dogs in condensation. Wiping dry erase boards with bare hands.

And, to some degree, through watching and reading science fiction. Although as we’ll see, this is not as much as to be expected, because the touchscreen has an odd history in the decades before it became ubiquitous. Nevertheless, especially in speculative fiction fixated on the digital, ice and glass made famous recurring appearances.

In William Gibson’s first novels, for instance, ice (or “ICE,” i.e. Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) named the defense systems within cyberspace that had to be broken and evaded like frozen architecture, with the “worrying impression of solid fluidity” yet subject to becoming “the shards of a broken mirror.”⁸ And actually mirrored glass appears elsewhere in the novels, as contact lenses which one must be pointedly reminded not to smudge with fingerprints while fucking.

A decade after Gibson’s novels, the film Hackers (1995) took this “endless neon city-scape”⁹ and gave it a Tron-ish literalism, depicting information as physical construction and vice versa, mainframes as glass towers between which hackers can zip and maneuver as protocols. But in Hackers, as in the Gibson novels (and other strains of cyberpunk made mass by the mid-’90s), the ice and glass remained either virtual or a metaphor made into architecture to be built for film first physically, then digitally. When it comes to the apparatus for navigating info cities or server farms, it shares none of that glossy glass. Instead, it’s a console, something unwieldy and manual that the “jockey” must plug into in order to pilot cyberspace like a glider (Gibson). Or it’s just a laptop you spray-painted with camo because you’re so adept you don’t need to see what the keys say (Hackers and, thanks to the film, almost me, before I realized it was a terrible idea).

In the other films I was watching in the ’90s and ’00s, ones actively concerned with feeling prescient (even if, unlike Hackers, they involved less Rollerblading and weren’t a fundamental erotic touchstone for me), that split between practical, physical input and unbound virtual space remained operative. In Lawnmower Man (1992), the space is navigated from within the mind’s eye, as the climax of experimental drug treatment and with slighter grander dreams – becoming pure energy in a mainframe, controlling the world, et cetera – than expanded emojis. If anything, the film is especially intrigued by the way in which these experiences are never purely digital. The god-to-be is not defeated by Krav Maga with trenchcoats or some proto-Matrix peeking behind the veil – that is, not by struggles inside VR. Instead, they just blow up the building where the mainframe is housed. In other films, when excitement and budgets didn’t get blown on CGI to depict what the Internet looks like in cross-section, a consistent option was to go instead for the virtuosity of managing multiple screens at once, via a generic hacker’s keyboard flutter and punctuated with some ubiquitous variant of “OK, we’re in” (as in Swordfish, for example).

As for starships and interfaces designated as in the future and not of this world, their consensus was to hold to a vaguely pilot vibe. For all the advanced tech in Independence Day, the alien craft is piloted by something held – a tremendous metal joystick – and analog enough to be patched into by Goldblum’s Dell. On TV shows, like Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG-1, the screen-heavy spaces of the “bridge”/ combat control room etc. continued to contain what one would expect: keyboards and monitors as distinct things. One of the prime reasons seems to be that like the Kinetoscope, the touchscreen is an interface built for one, never particularly efficient in situations where you want to show someone else what’s on the screen. (“As you can see, Commander, the enemy’s ships are approaching from…” “Can you move your enormous hand? Jesus, Lieutenant.”)

There are, of course, exceptions. Star Trek: The Next Generation, for instance, got in on the touchscreen game early. And this led, years later, in some act of devotion’s fidelity so joyous as to approach grace, to fans building their own replica touchscreens. And in the lobby of Die Hard’s Nakatomi Plaza, a touchscreen directory is used to inform the hero that his estranged wife no longer takes his name. These are rarities, though. Total Recall (1990), for instance, manages to envision something not just of Wii Tennis (Sharon Stone taking lessons from an equally Spandexed virtual coach) but also, and more saliently, TSA screening lines, as guards analyze full-body scans of people walking through a securitized checkpoint. Moreover, in that screening scene, it seems the keyboard of the future is indeed just the desk itself, without depressible keys, as the agents clatter away, an unnecessary sound anticipating an iPhone’s fake-click cicada racket. But the keyless keyboard is not itself the screen. That sits next to it, a jutting black and green monitor.

By the time of the baleful remake, twenty-two years later, phone and tablet and phablet lessons had been learned, and the film has become obsessed with this other possibility. Its screens are now indistinct from architecture and ready/eager to be touched, using the palm as biometric identification so that Colin Farrell can have Very Urgent Chats, a hand laid on the surface of the transparent screen like the Plexiglas wall of a prison visiting room.

All in all, most of what I watched over the first two decades of my life was uninterested in the feeling of screens. It was far more hyped about skipping over the messy fingerprint stage and going straight to the vaguely holographic, as if aware that there’s something endlessly throwback and manual about drunk-smearing burrito fingers across Grindr.¹⁰ Because the banal fact that touch leaves traces and that screens need cleaning just doesn’t seem very future for their limited vision, even as I’m still holding out for a director’s cut of Iron Man where Tony Stark struggles for an hour to place a screen protector on his faceplate without trapping any dust under the plastic.

And so, in Minority Report (2002), Tom Cruise does not touch the screen. (The germs, he silently cries, the germs.) More than that, he also wears special gloves, data prophylactics that let him keep his distance. The screen becomes the wall, yet the wall ceases to be something we might rub up against: set in space, yes, but as immaterial as possible, only to be touched in proxy.

The Iron Man films go even further with this, arraying OS windows in the holographic air, letting you crumple up digital documents as if they were paper without even needing glass in the room. This is the principle that got pushed to its necessary extreme in the most stylistically innovative show on television, CSI: Miami, for which the entire precinct is a Constructivist upchuck by way of Lisa Frank, where the partitions are made of light and the lighting effects give German Expressionism a South Beach makeover, where the built and the screened look actually identical. I imagine Horatio walking into walls all day, mistaking them for browser windows and pastel lens flares. So while the entire operating fantasy of the show is one of unlimited forensics, where no image is too lo-res to be “cleaned up” into magically high definition, no trace too minuscule to not bind it back to a jailable body, the screens themselves just hover, neon and pure, as free of smudge and splatter as the cops’ white jeggings.

CSI: Miami ended its gloriously protracted decade in 2012. CSI: Cyber, one of its less vaunted successors, lasted only two seasons. But even in its brief span, you could see the mark of a shift that had been taking place outside its depicted world, that of the real existing ubiquity of touchscreens in most of our lives. As it was a show that was nominally secular and set in the present, its world had to be full of screens, especially of the glass and touchable variety, even if the show wasn’t pointedly about recent technology or the capacity to turn baby monitors into mind-control devices. The way these screens were depicted, though, split into a few variations, from which the full-bore holographic joy of Miami was largely absent (barring a showy digital autopsy scene that takes place in what looks like a motion capture studio that they didn’t bother to green screen).

First, screens that cannot be touched whatsoever, as they exist only for the viewer, not for the character, hovering in House of Cards-esque floating panels, as in the episode where they moralize massively against Uber, under the name of “Zogo.” Second, screens that hang in huge situation-room panels at the center of their office, where they can do military-grade FaceTime but, crucially, still control everything by the keyboards and mice at their desks. And third, screens that respond to touch – and so are endlessly blocked by hands gesturing, tapping, pointing, bumping, and getting in each other’s way. Sometimes these hands are part of shots that try and approximate what it feels like to be absorbed in a many-windowed screen, like the camera rotating around a stationary character, staring at her tablet while snippets of text and voice flutter about. Other times, it’s just James Van Der Beek – or a hand model – literally pointing our attention to an iPad while explaining what a phishing scheme is.

The same basic dynamic is also at work with more future-oriented shows and films in the last years: only after the real existing daily use of touchscreens by millions of people does science fiction grudgingly hoist them into view. And when it does, it reserves them for restricted and obvious uses:

1. Phones of the near-future, which are depicted as essentially the same as those we use to watch these films, only a bit more translucent, like in Robot and Frank or the third season of Black Mirror.

2. A proxy for a form of analysis that’s somewhere on the medico-erotic scale, touchable screens hovering over a body held at a distance or, in Prometheus, literally behind lucite, such that the object of desire is withheld, all of her vitals revealed but out of reach. The HBO reboot of Westworld does this ad infinitum, with the often nude robots sitting placidly as their inner workings (and levels of desire and aggression) are adjusted by technicians fingering tablets in butcher aprons.

3. Domestic/military logistics – like in Oblivion, with a cup of tea resting on the touchscreen control panel that monitors both a blighted Earth and a glass-bottomed swimming pool. Indeed, it’s that moment of screen-as-table that comes closest to the fantasy most of us that I know really have about touchscreens. Not to have them vanish into space, not to become ever thinner until they wish themselves into immateriality, not to have them lilt bright around our heads, but to have them become durable and dirty and lived, to eat off them, to watch Hannibal through a vanishing mosaic of Hot Pockets and give the holographic Ghost of Commodity Future a very sloppy middle finger. It’s the sort of will towards mess that can be seen in Ken Okiishi’s paintings directly onto monitors,¹¹ even if that fleeting urge is dried into an irrevocable stain and touches on a perhaps far deeper fantasy: to mark or scar a screen in a way that even a factory reset can’t erase, to leave a trace that can’t be relegated to data. We see it mostly in passing, this excess that resides outside an interface, this slobscreen of dried saliva and mayonnaise. But it names the edge of our use, the clumsy impracticality shadowing the supposed intelligence of a device. I look at a photo I took of a deer sprinting through the woods in the rain, and I see that it is blurry, because the phone mistook the drops hitting it for so many fingers belonging to some obscure subject who can’t decide where to set the focus, what is worth recording, or where skin ends and rain begins.

_______

Both this basic experience of the blunt but surprising physicality of a touchable interface, and the way that most speculative films and TV tried to ignore it until it became unavoidably everyday, hint toward an awkward and crucial proximity. For all the fixation on the holographic and loose talk of the immaterial, the fact remains that the digital stays rooted in the deeply physical, from the mining of rare earths to human mechanical turks,¹² from the multiple hands at work in compositing to the experience of touching glass. Phones become phantom limbs felt strongest in their absence, as the hand touches an empty pocket into which the rectangular form has gradually creased its shape. Because no matter what we do on them, they are always objects that we hold and carry, leave at the bar and drop into the toilet. However, that physicality is always dual and fractured. A phone becomes something worn and steady, always there and Jack-of-all-trades, polished like stones in the hand over years and chirping beside the bed. It’s an alarm, a flashlight, a reassurance, a last- (or first-) resort vibrator. But it’s also a tenuous and flighty thing, always in danger of being bobbled, juggled, and, finally, shattered.

Prior to touchscreen phones, there were probably only two significant interactions you could have with commodities through glass. You could go window shopping, cruise the arcade to enter a circuit of fantasy and denied fulfillment. Or you could go looting. Those are the options: find some potential pleasure in being blocked by the glass or stop being blocked by it.

It’s in those terms that the opening of Joseph Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950) is so smart. There, the lens of the camera and the “lens” of the shop window double up without telling us, as we’ve taken our position behind the looking glass before the film makes this clear with a reverse shot from the boy’s perspective. So the camera is already a security camera, opening up the possibility of that triangulation which psychoanalytical takes on cinema love so much, here between the apparatus, the hungry gaze of the boy, the promise of the gun just inside the shop window, there for the taking… More importantly, it also suggests the line of invisible demarcation that’s supposed to keep the gun on “our” side, the poor safely on the other. As is often the case, at least in actual history, in this film it takes the rock thrown by the boy to make it obvious where things stand – a rock to make clear that surveillance doesn’t stop when you turn your back on it, because the film doesn’t stop when the window comes crashing down.

With touchscreens, a new variation on this is possible: one can activate commodities, be they in-game powerups or Amazonian toilet paper, by pushing on another commodity layered with alkali-aluminosilicate glass, by pressing your face to the window¹³ without that rock, because touch at a distance can activate circuits of credit and digitally sign on for more. That is the touchscreen’s premise, to be a perfect conduit, able to respond and yet endlessly withstand, and it will be raised to a promise of the unbreakable and unscratchable with versions of Gorilla Glass (a descendent of what Corning first developed as “Project Muscle” in the early ’60s) that get harder and harder.

Still, despite this, all things break in time, and in this regard phones have a strange existence: they get broken, way beyond repair, and they keep getting used.¹⁴ What else can be so busted, in terms of the promises on which it was sold (billions of pixels, the sheen of interactive glass), yet still be handled and used every day? Sure, keys fall off computers and we just hit the button below. Headphones die in one ear, and we rig them with twist-ties to get them to still play provided they are held in exactly the right position. Dissident mufflers get roped back into place.

But there’s something different here. Of course, the reasons not to replace screens are plentiful and obvious – above all, that these things are so expensive to start with, and few people can afford to put even more money toward them, even if they come to feel like a necessary element of how one navigates every day. Nevertheless, I’ve watched people embed shards and splinters of glass in their fingers, tiny motes of blood coming to the surface, because they keep swiping across a shattered surface that holds the cuts in place, bleeding because they had to reduce their pet’s stress level in Kawaii Pet Megu. When I smashed the hell out of my phone’s screen, bobbling it down a flight of cement stairs as it slid out of my pocket wrong, a screen protector kept the shards in formation, laying a permanent spider web at the edge of everything I saw. But sometimes after I called someone, I’d find tiny crystals of broken glass dusting and cutting my ears, like a disaster had been whispering there. I never replaced the phone or fixed the screen, though. In part, this was for the simple reason that it would have been wildly expensive to do so, given that HTC’s contribution to the arm’s race for thinness was to permanently bond the screen to the receptive layer below, meaning that you literally could not replace the screen, no matter how broken. But also, in a real way, it was because I did bond with this thing that I touched more frequently than any single object other than this keyboard and the knife I use every time I cook.

Near the beginning of Alexander Kluge and Oscar Negt’s gargantuan History and Obstinacy, an immediate concern is the difference between types of grasping. First, between the “crude grasp” (Rohgriff) of primitive accumulation – “its particular grasp annihilates what is actually supposed to be accumulated,” as if the Hulk tried to seize a communal rose garden – and a finer one that “resembles a legislative machine,” self-regulating and -perpetuating, not destroying what it snatches.¹⁵ But they also mean “grasp” in a more literal sense:

Of all the characteristics responsible for unifying the muscles and nerves, the brain, as well as the skin associatively with one another – in other words, for the human body’s feedback systems, its so-called rear view [Rücksicht] – the ability to distinguish between when to use power grips and precisions grips is the most significant evolutionary achievement. It is the foundation of our ability to maneuver ourselves, an ability that is most easily disrupted by external forces. These forces are also capable of disturbing our self-regulation. Self-regulation is the outcome of a dialectic between power grips and precision grips.¹⁶

That text was published in 1981, drawing on years of scattered research and insight, so it might be fair to ask if it has been outpaced, given that the outmoding of the hand is part of the story of industrialization.¹⁷ An account of the full vagaries and dynamics of automation is far beyond my scope here, but it’s worth noting that it is hardly a one-way street and that the hand resurfaces with obstinate particularity, especially because of its sensitivity to surfaces and distances so minimal they couldn’t be gauged by the eyes of those who hands feel them out. In 2014, for instance, an attempt by Foxconn to change the labor process at its iPhone factories ran into unexpected obstacles, as their “Foxbots” (their robotic worker-replacements) were incapable of matching the inhuman standard that humans alone could manage.¹⁸ (Specifically, Apple required that their components be installed with an allowed variance of only 0.02 mm, while the Foxbots could only manage 0.05.) In a full echo of the use of child labor in burgeoning factory systems, human fingers, specifically of female Chinese workers, alone have the dexterity to not only place the components exactly but also to sense when something isn’t right, to see with the hands.

That was in 2014¹⁹, and in 2016, sixty-thousand workers assembling phones were recently replaced, so it’s hard to make any absolute claim about just how reliant advanced manufacture will remain on the unique sensitivities of the human hand. In terms of the use of those products, though, it’s clear that our tactile, neurological, and nervous feedback systems have by no means left behind the hand for some purely ocular fantasy of playing Tap My Katamari on Google Glass by twitching our eyes bloodshot. If anything, the sheer facility of fingers has boomed, at least for a restricted set of gestures that belong to a new language imposed wholly by external forces. Most obvious are those that signify only insofar as they are registered in code: the swipe, zoom, pinch, and scroll. But perhaps the strangest of these isn’t one bound up with the software, neither the erotic indifference/revulsion of the left swipe, nor the fact that, in a rather generous act of anti-planning, the swipe-to-text function of my current phone obstinately avoids predictively spelling TOMORROW, offering me instead TIMEPIECES, TINTYPE, TIPTOES, and TIMELESSNESS. No, the gesture that seems so alien to me, alien in just how naturalized it has become, is the maneuver of the sliding grip, a delicate oscillation between power and precision. Because despite being held by hands, iPhones and their competitors were never designed to be held. They are meant to be naked screens. Screens without hardware, ghost screens, guillotine-blade screens. They only allow themselves to be held grudgingly, as a last resort, and we slowly fool ourselves into imagining that these sharp panes of ice feel good in the hand, let alone stable. But how do we hold something that isn’t supposed to be held, whose entire front is intended to be as smooth as possible? What would it be to grip a screen that’s only as thick as its image?²⁰

And so aside from learning how to type and swipe, we learn also that particular move of gripping glass while letting it drift. In bed, trying not to wake someone sleeping on my chest, I grope far out in the dark until I just barely feel that familiar smooth chunk, the one I know because it feels like nothing much at all. I slide it toward me with a minor flick of the middle finger, then pry it up between the thumb and forefinger, drawing the hand in with a gentle wrist’s whip, so that the phone is both held and turns. It rotates over a breakable fall, pinioned without screws by finger’s oils, and comes to rest in the palm. Then I look and see that it is still night and that a bot named “silkfeather_92” liked a photo I took of trees and that in the dialectic between power grips and precision grips, there are no winners.

That grip, a variety of which is also used when we pinch-draw the phone from a pocket and slide it up into the hand with a delicate heave, is not just a grip. It is also a gesture, which to me means that it doesn’t signify or supplement anything. Rather, it stands uneasily between a language and an action, speaking of the limits of the former to make itself felt and the refusal of the latter to stop trying to signify something and make its meaning heard. The gesture is an intermediary that makes it possible to see mediation, to glimpse the machines at work behind the experience of communication, and to stop ignoring the fingerprints that mar the surface.

If you asked me to say to you a list of all the words I know, I’d have the experience of knowing that there are words I’ve read, written, and said but that I simply cannot call to mind, words that I don’t remember that I know. In trying to explain this to you, though, I would have to use words, and, in so doing, likely stumble onto some of those I’d forgotten.

Perhaps that’s how it is with our hands. To draw a balance sheet of what we’ve lost and gained, which forms of touch have been displaced or enhanced or scrapped because we can’t keep our hands off ice windows, we could only do so through moving our hands, passing them over things, tilting slabs, seeing what happens, what registers, what remembers. From what I’ve read, it seems that those who design and manufacture these things, those who pay to mine rare earths and seep thorium into water supplies, those who drive workers to suicide and sleep well at night – that is also to say, we, we who are inseparable from these things, even if we don’t seem to profit from them – still yearn for even tougher glass, far beyond Gorilla or sapphire. The endpoint of that dream can only be a glass so hard that it could only be marked as ever having been touched if it was scratched with more of that glass itself. In this dream, the hand itself becomes glass, and tenderness is banished. Nothing leaves a trace, no matter what falls or who bleeds, and it is little consolation that I finally know how to write TOMORROW on my phone, because there’s nothing to show of yesterday.

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1 Samuel Butler. Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2015), p. 144.

2 One of my earliest and clearest memories is an almost still image of this process: the snow falling on and into the Atlantic. I remember looking out through the glass of the rear window of our lumbering Buick wagon, on the stretch of the 1 between Portland and Falmouth, heading toward the territory where Stephen King erased my actual town from the map to call it Salem’s Lot instead. There, the trees thin out and the highway verges close to the ocean, which becomes a wide screen framed between Great Diamond Island and Mackworth Island. In that space, the water doesn’t freeze until it gets close to shore, the little waves piling up in cracked beige sheets. But the snow doesn’t fall onto ice. It doesn’t accumulate. It just drops into the grey water, melting into ocean and inflecting the temperature with that kind of impossibly small difference that Marcel Duchamp, who thought so much about glass, called infra-mince (infra-slim) some half a century before I fogged up the window trying to see where all the snow went.

3 It especially helps when it ends in d’Yquem and is literally the same wine supped from the gutters when the Winter Palace was stormed.

4 Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, History and Obstinacy, ed. Devin Fore and trans. Richard Langston (New York: Zone Books, 2014) p. 90.

5 Edward E. Baptist’s term for American slavery, as something that he argues should be understood in terms of other technical “revolutions” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

6 One way in which the smartphone can be read differently, simply as the continuation of another technical shift, is in terms of the trackpad. Indeed, I had been using a trackpad on a laptop for years prior to touchscreens, and I’ve surely spent more hours, months, and years sliding fingers across this unmoving surface. However, I’ve noticed, and looked back at old laptops to check, that it is only in the most recent generations of them, from the past couple years, that they have started to have that glassy feeling. The previous ones felt unmistakably plastic, an endless worrying away at old petroleum, accumulating dirt and finger oil in an ovoid nimbus around the center. They felt that way because, at least on MacBooks, that shift actually happened: in 2008, they started putting glass-over-metal trackpads in the unibody MacBook Pros, and I didn’t have one of these until 2011, when I bought a barely-used one from a tech bro in Silicon Valley.

7 “When rust sets in on a razor blade, when a wall starts to get mouldy, when moss grows in a corner of a room, rounding its geometric angles, we should be glad because, together with the microbes and fungi, life is moving into the house and through this process we can more consciously become witnesses of architectural changes from which we have much to learn.” From the “Mouldiness Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture.” Available online at: www.hundertwasser.com/english/texts/philo_verschimmelungsmanifest.php.

8 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Penguin, 2000) p. 247.

9 Ibid.

10 Isn’t this the state of that market these days? Pushing wearables like something ordered from the back of a ’50s pulp mag? Trying to claim that the not-just-old-but-fully-retro is somehow the innovation we’ve all been waiting for…

11 See, for instance, gesture/data, 2013 (oil on flatscreen, VHS transferred to .mp4).

12 See Shawn Wen’s “The Ladies Vanish” at The New Inquiry: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-ladies-vanish/.

13 Barring special conductive gloves, phones absolutely insist on bare skin, but they’re totally indifferent to which parts of the body that skin is attached to – if it is attached at all, as the tricks to evade fingerprint scanners with little slabs of synthetic skin show.

14 As suggested in “Driftwood and Silicon,” this is part of the split reinforced by hardware manufacturers, between the manipulable image and the supposedly inviolable and unsabotageable hardware that displays it, of which the sealed ultra-thin phone or tablet with no way in is the apogee.

15 Kluge and Negt, History and Obstinacy, p. 85.

16 Ibid, p. 89.

17 Indeed, it forms the crux of one of the most influential accounts of that trajectory, Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948): “The hand can be trained to a degree of automatic facility. But one power is denied it: to remain unvaryingly active. It must always be grasping, holding, manipulating. It cannot continue a movement in endless rotation. That is precisely what mechanization entails: endless rotation. The difference between walking and rolling, between the legs and the wheel, is basic to all mechanization” (p. 47).

18 Article referenced is available at: http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/195556-foxconns-robotic-workforce-isnt-precise-enough-to-assemble-iphones.

19 According to: http://www.scmp.com/business/article/1997594/heres-perfect-rebuke-automation-alarmists-who-say-robots-are-taking-over.

20 This is being posed more and more explicitly by the products themselves: look at the creep-around-the-corner of the Samsung Galaxy Edge, as if even the back of the device will soon be swallowed up by the omnivorous pixels, as if a screen was a trembling quicksilver barely contained by surface tension.

OPERATOR ERROR

There’s a fundamental tension at play in how we think about the emergence of new technologies, especially those so significant that they seem to rewire the very paths and categories we use to navigate the world. From a distance of decades or centuries, when one might try and draw a clear divide between before and after, a common temptation is to focus on that initial contact when a typewriter, car, mechanical loom, indoor toilet, or television is first glimpsed and used, the uninitiated gasping in wonder at the alien novelty dropped as if from on high. According to this schema, the shock is one of the truly new, the exotic, and the exceptional, an essentially modernist fantasy of a technological event that interrupts and abolishes the suddenly outmoded, like F.T. Marinetti’s mythicized 1908 car crash or the Lumière brothers’ train racing toward the screen and blowing the minds of a panicked audience unprepped for anything of the sort.¹

Allegedly blowing the minds, that is. Because as far as we can tell, no one ever actually ran from that infamous steam engine – the one in the Lumière’s Train Arriving at La Ciotat and hence at the supposed origin point for cinema,² at least in terms of the first screening for which people paid. In existing accounts of the 1896 screenings of that film, that mythical moment of panicked belief – as the train threatens to roar through the screen and smush the audience beneath spectral wheels… – never appears.³ However, this only amplifies its significance, as a twinned myth⁴ of progress and obstinacy, because it indicates the anxious urge for the story to be true. And it still informs how we work with and against images, in part because it names the inanity of dividing between images and things, in part because the story became central to film history and theory, such as Tom Gunning’s 1989 essay on the matter.

There, Gunning dismantles three distinct inheritances: the story itself, the commonplace explanation (i.e. the naive viewer who mistakes the train as real and/or generally freaks in the face of advanced tech), and the “admirable subtlety” of French theorist Christian Metz’s structuralist take on it. For Metz, the story, however false, was bound to be blown out of proportion by later spectators – by us, by all of us, you can feel Metz chiding… – who use it to disavow our own latent credulity in images through insisting on a historical gulf separating they who shrieked from we who smirk. But this disavowal is made necessary by the fact that it must remain incomplete, because, in a fittingly horror-tale twist, the sophisticated spectator can never get rid of the naive believer. That believer is “seated beneath the incredulous one, or in his heart,” some parasite of blind faith waiting to gnaw its way out of Enlightenment and into blinking day.⁵

Gunning provides an important rejoinder to this, not because “we” do or do not believe but because Metz’s version reaffirms a position that is as ahistorical as the false image of the howling crowd. “Removed from place and time,” Metz’s model reduces the early film spectator into “a projection of an inner deception onto the mythical site of cinema’s ‘once upon a time.’”⁶ What Metz misses, according to Gunning, is how neither the film nor the spectator was ever timeless or without predicate; never some transcendental ideal of viewing at its primal source. The spectators came to those screenings in a context already thick with screens, composited images, animations, and optical tricks and already suffused with colonial and gendered legacies at work in delimiting the public space of the screening, and with the singular embodied experiences of who was watching and how they were watched in turn.

With that context restored, a different bunch of giggles, gasps, and shudders comes into view, especially when we remember, as Gunning reminds us, that the train was not presented as a moving image from the start. Instead, these screenings provided an object lesson in the medium: they started with the film’s first frame projected as a still, then began cranking it into motion. Starting as a still image is crucial, because it engaged already-established familiarities with this new medium and used them to produce its shock. For instance, at a similar screening, Georges Méliès himself started to complain to a friend that he had “been doing [still projections] for over ten years,” before the projectionist started to crank the film, and the image slowly groaned into “all the animation of the street.”⁷ Then, and only then, came the slack jaws, “astonished beyond expression.” Far from being naive viewers, the audience was already too canny, already up on, if not near bored by, what to expect at such screenings. In that way, the real astonishment was neither befuddlement at the capacity for technical movement nor confusion about just how much a projected train can maim. It was a dislocation of slowly accreted media expectation, and it was an experience of gesture as such, a medium coming into view by revealing the process and limits of its construction.⁸

We also have to note how quickly that supposed blow to cognition became available for a gag, like in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), where the titular character is a country “rube” who doesn’t know any better, jumping in mock horror away from the screen’s approaching train – though not before getting in the way of the projector beam and goofing off for the audience, with no evident fear for his life. The fact that this works as a gag suggests a different kind of technological shock, one at work not when we allegedly shit ourselves in terror at a projection mistaken for a window, but when, in the space of only a couple of years, that same experience can become that fable of our old naivety, the outmoded viewer as rube and yokel all agog. Its shock is retroactive, then, and finds us split in time, divided by what has come into the world, as the way we used to be gets corralled into some prelapsian before, our anxieties left behind for archive or gutter or an over-cranked gag reel.

What’s especially important about Uncle Josh playing the fool is that this velocity of a shift to the familiar, with a slim four years separating the two films, suggests a timescale at fundamental odds with that of absolute novelty, yet which comes far closer to the everyday experience of it. Because when we live through these emergent media and technical forms, we don’t experience them as bolts from the blue.⁹ We detect them as a creeping sensation, as we become gradually strange to ourselves, accustomed to profoundly different relations of space, sight, time, and body without ever feeling the shift itself suddenly click into place. Real shudders of novelty take shape retroactively, as aftershocks, when a form becomes naturalized, expected, and unthought to the point that we feel alien to ourselves only without it. It becomes part of our extended assemblage, and we type without looking, reach over the pillow for glass bedmates, and arrange faces into vector planes before the camera flashes. Only then do we fully feel the interval between ways of life, there at the point just before invisibility, its last moment of appearance before it dissolves into normalcy and what isn’t even worth commenting on.

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As media archaeology has done a crucial job of pointing out, it wouldn’t make sense to see such shifts as the result of a technology, given that media forms themselves draw omnivorously on disparate techniques and available procedures, just as we who engage them are slowly constituted by histories that exceed the narrower ambit of the moving image or the touchscreen. In this regard, the hint that the Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben provides in “Notes on Gesture” is a compelling if incomplete one. There, in trying to situate the terrain of the early twentieth century, he suggests that “An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them.”¹⁰ A gesture, for Agamben, isn’t a means to an end, a successful supplement to language or a movement that enacts or communicates: it is instead “the process of making a means visible as such,” a gesturing that always points back to the limits of communication itself, that “muteness inherent in humankind’s very capacity for language.”¹¹ In this case, he also means something more tangible: the tics and frantic gesticulations that mark both the clinical “discovery” of Tourette’s and the staccato, flailing movements of early film actors. His argument is that during the massive cultural transformations gathering force in the Global North by the late nineteenth century, the understanding that individual experience might be communicable or that gestures had a stable grounding breaks down. As a result, “the more gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers, the more life becomes indecipherable.” It is this situation that cinema inherits, as in these films “a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.”¹²

Whether or not one is convinced by his account, there’s a strange absence worth noting. In detailing just what marked that slow loss of gesture (other than the “action of invisible powers”), the only references made are to clinical psychology and to breakdowns in bourgeois subjectivity and culture. What never get mentioned in this essay are the drastic shifts in gesture, motion, meaning, and selfhood that more and more of the world’s population underwent in the century prior to cinema: mechanized work and the emergence of the factory system. This omission is all the more notable for how common it is. In the majority of influential and compelling histories of the emergence of mechanical moving images, the factory goes just as markedly missing.¹³

This signifies something major: that accounts of what cinema might have meant, or might come to mean still, will turn their backs again and again on a form of intelligence, awareness, and contestation that did not come from bourgeois crises about the character of the human. It came from the experiences of those who worked in the factories and were forced to learn to become inhuman – to experience the concrete shattering and reconstitution of their gestures, to live through the difficult necessity of trying to make sense and sight of this new order and its distributed violence that their labor animated.

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While factory apologists propagated accounts of child workers literally whistling while they worked, reformers and workers in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States framed this experience of mechanized work as a threat to the coherence of the human. An especially common variant was to focus on how the monotony and fatigue of such work might generate “bitter recriminations against the social order” (i.e. revolts) and threaten to erase the line that separates “the brain of the civilized from that of savage man.”¹⁴ But as the dual reference to the insurrectionary and “the savage” suggests, any attempted universality of claims about human nature was undercut by historically-specific social anxieties, especially as the labor itself was read as the bleeding edge of some serious gender trouble.¹⁵ In particular, it was thought to destabilize the way in which technical knowledge and capability was held in the body of the craftsman who displayed mastery over his prostheses, his tools. For instance, in the German studies of “horrors of the industrial state” that concerned work where both the human and the machine are mutually prosthetic for each other, the panic becomes unmistakably gendered: as the hand weaver transitions to a “technological weaver,” he is “transformed from a master into a hired hand [Handlanger], from a man into a maiden.”¹⁶

In short, even as claims about machine experience address themselves to the idea of the human as such, they will often be worked out in terms of what it does to the stability of gender roles and family structure: specifically, to what guarantees the reproduction of those humans and who gets tasked with it.¹⁷ This isn’t just a side effect of the slow formalization of specifically capitalist modes of gender control. It’s also because one of the fundamental characteristics of increasingly mechanized work was to confound the boundaries between the production of goods for sale and the reproduction, care, cleaning, and maintenance of the hybrid systems involved in that making, the most replaceable parts of which are human. The monster must be mothered by someone, after all. As Lucy Larcom, a child worker in the Lowell cotton mills, would write later of the machine she tended:

Mine seemed to me as unmanageable as an overgrown spoilt child. It had to be watched in a dozen different directions every minute, and even then it was always getting itself and me into trouble. I felt as if the half-live creature, with its great, groaning joints and whizzing fan, was aware of my incapacity to manage it, and had a fiendish spite against me. I contracted an unconquerable dislike to it; indeed, I have never liked, and never could learn to like, any kind of machinery. And this machine finally conquered me.¹⁸

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As her description suggests, that language of monstrosity isn’t my own recasting of industrialization in horror-flick terms. It was one of the most common modes of depiction from those who witnessed and worked amongst these transformations. Diaries, inquiries, sermons, and broadsheets bristle with these “half-live creatures,” demons and “rattling devils,” “little hells” and tongues of flame, soundless “giant levers” that heave “upwards once in half a minute with a slow motion, and seemed to rest to take breath at the bottom.” In these texts, factories “burst in our view […] as though by magic.”¹⁹ “Had our ancestral grandmothers witnessed the antagonism sometimes manifested by machinery,” one woman writes, “they would have pronounced it bewitched and punched it with red hot irons.”²⁰

Yet if the broadly supernatural and primeval language gives one indication of how little frame of reference workers had for what awaited them in the mills and workshops, the structure of such writing itself belies this lived category error all the more, as it searches relentlessly for adequate comparison but settles on none. In a single paragraph from British ecologist Richard Jeffries, for example, a metal works is described as a “vast incongruous museum of iron”; Proteus, the shape-shifting aquatic God; a “vast wilderness”; “a temple of Vulcan”; the heavens, as “the sparks fly in showers from the tortured anvils high in the air, looking like minute meteors”; and, above all, the figure underwriting not just his but so many nineteenth-century descriptions: Pandemonium and Hell itself.²¹

One might blame this breathless swapping of site and sense on bad writing, at least according to some MFA swill about the dangers of mixed metaphors. That would miss the point that, like Larcom, Jeffries is grappling with a terrain that had yet to become a texture and fixture of daily life, not yet available to be conjured in a reader’s mind with the words the factory, the mill, the assembly line. As David Zonderman suggests, this “cultural or conceptual lag in the language” makes sense, because “there were no terms of reference readily available to describe labor that produced no sweat but was nonetheless exhausting.”²² The language ready at hand had been forged by grappling with a different mode of work, one where movements don’t have to match their rhythm to a lurching synchrony of metal and force, and where it might be maintained with some degree of plausibility that it is you who hold the tool and not vice versa.

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What exactly did Larcom mean when she wrote that the “machine finally conquered me”? It isn’t that she grew to like her “overgrown spoilt child” – she’s writing decades later and still “never could learn to like […] any kind of machinery.” Conversely, it would be wrong to see it as a simple domination, of being bested by and made subject to. In an anonymous 1844 letter signed as the “Lowell Factory Girl,” a more triumphal account of mechanized work’s liberating potential, the author claims that she was “allowed to make more and more money, by the accommodation of the speed of the looms to my capacity.”²³ Whether one’s pace was met or dictated by the machinery, the crux is that one adopted a set of rhythms and gestures that weren’t operative before and only make sense within a total assemblage that’s simultaneously mechanical and human. In this space, concepts and explanations find themselves outpaced not just by the manifest strangeness of a situation but also by one’s own physical self, the fingers forced to quickly figure what the mind doesn’t yet know it knows.

All gestures are perhaps inhuman, because they enact that hinge with the world, forging a bridge and buffer that can’t be navigated by words or by actions that feel like purely one’s own. In Vilém Flusser’s definition, a gesture is “a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation”²⁴ – that is, it can’t be explained on its own isolated terms. The factory will massively extend this tendency, because the “explanation” lies not in the literal circuit of production but in the social abstraction of surplus value driving the entire process yet nowhere immediately visible. We might frame the difficulty of this imagining with the concept of “operational sequence” (la chaîne opératoire), posed by French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan and designating a “succession of mental operations and technical gestures, in order to satisfy a need (immediate or not), according to a preexisting project.”²⁵ In terms of archaeology, operational sequences function as total maps of how materials and processes are shaped to human ends, zooming out, for instance, from a single chipped stone arrowhead to the gesture needed to strike it, the gathering of the stone, the construction of the tool used to hammer at it, the wood, the fire, the food consumed to have the energy to raise the arm… and out from there. In short, the operational sequence moves us away from excessive focus on the visible moment of production to an obscure but still material network, one whose juncture points are each constituted by a distinct gesture that alters the material moving through the web and forms the pivots of the chain, crystallizing a social intelligence only in view when taken in aggregate. It impels us to look far beyond what appears to be the purview of a site of production, like the factory, toward the full network that folds in the slave labor that provides the cotton, the logging and carpentry that makes the looms, and the homes where the workers are cleaned and rested and cared for by mothers and partners.

Obviously, we’re far from the only organisms to be characterized by this transformation of materials to our ends. (The nests of birds, the burrows of badgers, the mycelium network under the trees, the hives of bees…) For Leroi-Gourhan, the difference is that rather than genetically internalizing our species memory as instinct, we externalize our memory of how to gesture and interact with the world, as “only with humans do we see these operational sequences take material form and become more-or-less permanent constituents of the human environment.”²⁶ In this way, we evade “organic specialization” in favor of a biological non-adaptation, as our prostheses allow us to shapeshift across forms – “a tortoise when we retire beneath a roof, a crab when we hold out a pair of pliers” – and construct a materially transformed world to match our needs (or, perversely, to make them impossible to meet).

That’s to say, we build factories. And in those factories, the process of the exteriorization of memory and muscle becomes almost total, as “the hand no longer intervenes except to feed or to stop” what Leroi-Gourhan, like Larcom, will call “mechanical monsters,” “machines without a nervous system of their own, constantly requiring the assistance of a human partner.”²⁷ Besides engendering the panic of becoming caregiver to the inanimate, this also poses the problem of animation in an unprecedented way. Because if a “technical gesture is the producer of forms, deriving them from inert nature and preparing them for animation,” the factory constitutes us in a different network of the animated and animating.²⁸ It’s a network that can be seen in those writings of factory workers, with their distinct sense of not just preparing those materials but becoming that pivot that eases, smooths, and guides the links of an operational sequence. In particular, the worker functions as the point of compression and transformation between the tremendous motive force and the products made, whose regularity must be assured. The human becomes the regulator of this process, the assurance of an abstract standardization. Because as has long been observed, the point of a factory is to produce not only goods but also the persons involved in the process, to enforce and naturalize a lived category of abstract labor. This is captured in a startling poem from Larcom, as she zooms back, as if a floating camera, from her place at the loom to the entire setting:

And in a misty maze those girlish forms,
Arms, hands, and heads, moved with the moving looms,
That closed them in as if all were one shape,
One motion. . .²⁹

The ability to pull off that move isn’t just a mark of her capacious imagination and lifetime of experience. It is part of what the factory means and meant, both the sensation of getting folded into a scattered, synchronized web of gestures and the material production of an image of this process. If any operational sequence forms a map of how gestures are never singular, always just one junction in a dizzying collective interchange of action and substance, then the factory has the distinct capacity to make this evident in any given moment. It is a freeze-frame unmistakable to those involved in it, compressing the whole sequence in miniature into a single misty maze.

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But if the factory sculpts a physical diagram of these disparate forces, the literal images of them made in the nineteenth century, whether by human hand or with camera, show themselves distinctly resistant to grappling with this tangle of gestures. A Giovanni Migliara painting from 1820, The Sala Silk Factory at Castello di Lecco, shares some of Larcom’s pull backwards, depicting a factory floor receding away from us, its high timber ceiling angling in linear perspective, matched by the bobbins below. But unlike Larcom’s writing, which passes from intimate knowledge of the process to this removed position, the spate of paintings, etchings, drawings, prints, and photographs made of such spaces in the nineteenth century follow Migliara’s lead: they keep their distance. With few exceptions, all share that same perspective, raised above the floor and angling down, so that the space is both expansive and yet manageable, architecture and machine and worker all present but never commingled or up close, looking down at the blur of chaff and solder and fingers. This holds even in the rare canvases willing to show the worksite as a sputtering hell, like Adolph Menzel’s Iron Rolling Works (1872-75).

Later photos, like those of Lewis Hine, capture some of the mess, at least at break time, while Jacob Lawrence’s remarkable 1960s studies of a textile mill in Bedford, Massachusetts, forge a scattered graphic dissolution of elements into a chaos where bodies and looms alike are open volumes and ragged lines. But in the images made in the years when this was creeping into prominence as a lived reality across Europe and North America, the distance remains. It is the perspective and position of the boss, he whose hands never enter the frame of the loom, whose gestures are not remade in the process of making. The only trace of such entanglement that appears in these images and photos is the rare presence of the scavenger, the child worker who crouched beneath the threads, body ghosted white by the interference. Above them, the machines seethe and do not rest, leaving stray fibers and dust to be snatched and cleaned, the small proof that they too generate friction, that even what will mangle a hand must still be tended to.

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If cinema steps into a world shaped by “invisible forces,” it isn’t because those forces are immaterial or purely conceptual. It is because they confound any such possibility of critical distance, demanding that thought confront abstractions and alienation produced physically and tangibly in the repetition of gestures. The factory itself, and the forms of intelligence and resistance gathered there, will prove doubly resistant to imaging because it already is an image of itself, a diagram drawn by those workers who are necessary for its motion but always fungible, always subject to replacement. Cinema, though, will be able to do something particular with that motion, in no small part because it makes it possible for vision to literally track from that distanced view to the close-to-hand, to bring the farthest-flung paths of the operational sequence into montage’s proximity, from the mine to the machine, the plantation to the bank, even if it too rarely makes use of this ability.

A full exploration of how moving images both open up this possibility and yet consistently miss their chance to explode the diagram is for another essay, if not a whole other book. What I’m sketching here in this passage through scattered materials of the decades and century prior to filmed moving images is something simpler, a small corrective to insist that by the time cinema was becoming a medium that seemed to offer a novel form of mechanical time, motion, and vision, one that historians and theorists will fixate on as the unique province and promise of film, many of its viewers had themselves already been enacting and struggling against that form for decades, day in, day out. My intent is to place the human operator back in the frame, to ask after those who tended the machine before it was available as a spectacle, and to start to listen to how they understood what they were caught in the midst of. But this is neither a humanist gesture of assuring the centrality of the person in the mesh that holds them nor a historical rejoinder to the erasure of many of these histories. Rather, it’s an effort to suggest that only with the operator’s experience made central can we see the real historical destruction of such illusions of centrality and, in their place, the construction of the human as the tender and mender of a flailing inhuman net, the pivot who forms the connective tissue that enacts the lethal animation around her.

I have no doubt that many viewers of the first photographic moving images gasped and marveled at them, if only because I know how often I do the same more than a century later. But the marvel isn’t and wasn’t because the technology feels alien or provides a magical reconstitution of halted life or offers an unthinkable shock of the new. It’s the inverse of that. It’s because it is made from the circuits and cranks and paths that constitute not just everyday life but many of its most crushing and oppressive forms. In this sense, I think it was and is right to speak of the magic of cinema, just as it made total sense to grasp power looms as demons beholden to an infernal project. Both claims begin with the complication of, and a subsequent refusal to flee from, the limits of gaining clear critical distance. The magic of cinema is that it gave image not only to but also through these animated sequences that had proven so hard to imagine, that so frustrated available language and style even as they slowly remade what it meant to see and to move, erasing the borders between a self and a world with a vested interest in profiting from that erasure.

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1 The film would be reshot in 3D four decades later and screened at the French Academy of Science in 1935, where that imagined moment of the train “coming through the screen” finally got realized, at least stereoscopically in negative parallax.

2 This isn’t wrong, because cinema will be so much about that problem of how to economically animate the already built, the already screened and seen – the answer being loops, loops, loops.

3 As Ben Singer draws out in Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), these same years would be full of spectacles that came much closer to this threat, in stage-spectacle melodramas full of live horses, buzz saws, and, “real fire engines, real patrol wagons and real locomotives” (in the words of a brilliantly acerbic 1894 review of a stage melodrama that “was evidently written to appease the yearning among playgoers for a drama with a real steam pile-driver in it”) (p. 51). Singer also details a 1906 play that featured, in his words, “a four-way race between two automobiles, a locomotive, and a bicycle, as well as a motorboat race, fire engines speeding toward a burning building, and various torture scenes” (p. 152).

4 What Furio Jesi would call a “technicized myth,” following Károly Kerényi: a myth that has been taken out of spontaneity and change, fixed, and pressed into service of a larger historical-narrative assemblage. See: Furio Jesi, Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Seagull Books, 2014).

5 The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 72.

6 Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 115-16.

7 Ibid, pp. 118-19. We should note also how much the entire experience shares with, and draws from, other available media. Its novelty only works because of audience familiarity with projected photographs in magic-lantern shows – the gag is to have that still start to move. It also shares a gesture with personal modes of moving-image viewership, like the Mutoscope. As Erkki Huhtamo notes, such cranking is “actually not so far removed from that of (male) Mutoscope viewers who would arrest the reel to have a better look at a ‘particularly interesting frame (perhaps a half-naked lady)’.” Erkki Huhtamo, “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming,” in Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (eds), Handbook of Computer Game Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 9.

8 That slow acceleration of the film’s frame-rate is itself a gesture, in that it makes a medium appear, here in the dual inconsistency of a still that breaks its terms of engagement and a motion that’s already shown itself to be a sequence of stills.

9 The major exceptions to this are military technologies as experienced by those in zones where such weapons haven’t previously been deployed, whether napalm in Vietnam or the full use of machine guns in the First World War, for which there were no equivalent experiences. The atom bomb in Hiroshima meanwhile was a total shock to the whole world, who had no warning that a truly extinction-force weapon had been actually completed.

10 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 53.

11 Giorgio Agamben, “Kommerell, or On Gesture,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 78.

12 Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” p. 53.

13 This omission is genuinely widespread. In works of Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, Lisa Cartwright, Giuliana Bruno, Pasi Valiaho, Charles Musser, Mary Ann Doane, and others, a significant investigation of the way in which factory experience had shaped the audiences who came to watch is almost entirely absent, even as the same texts suggest at length how the cinematic apparatus itself echoed the machinery of mechanical reproduction, warfare, medical treatment, and scientific experimentation.

14 Angelo Mosso and Marius Carrieu, both cited in Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp. 43 and 38.

15 Including from those in favor of the extension of such work, as champions of mechanization hoped that rigorous and exhausting employment might help ward off bands of dissolute, unwed, and recently proletarianized women leaving farms to come walk the city streets.

16 Robert Wilbrandt, quoted in Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 35.

17 In this way too, the figure and reality of chattel slavery is absolutely crucial for the construction of ideas about what “free” waged work should be, especially as unions and socialists drew insistently upon the example of enslaved Africans to try and sort out what separated “wage slavery” in the factory from actual slave regimes of racialized terror. I address this more at length in my book The Grid Aflame (ICA Miami, 2017) and its discussion of analogy, infrastructure, and colonial networks.

18 Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), p. 226.

19 George Crabtree, quoted in Robert Gray, “The languages of factory reform in Britain, c.1830-1860,” in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 148.

20 Mrs. Ephrain Holt, on women working in textile factories in Petersborough, NH, 1820s, in David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 21.

21 From Jeffries’ Land: A History of Swindon, published posthumously in 1896 (Jeffries died in 1887) and written in 1867 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, Ltd.), pp. 67-68.

22 Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, p. 24.

23 Quoted in Helen L. Sumner, History of Women in Industry in the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910), p. 111.

24 Vilém Flusser, Gestures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 2.

25 Catherine Perlès, Les Industries Lithiques Taillées de Franchthi, Argolide: Presentation Generate et Industries Paleolithiques (Terre Haute: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 23.

26 André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. xviii.

27 Ibid, p. 246.

28 Ibid, p. 313.

29 “The Idyll of Work.” Available online through the University of Michigan library at: http://library.uml.edu/clh/all/lu01.htm

VIOLENT MOTION

A kinetoscope is an innocent looking piece of machinery

– “Reformed by a Picture,” from the inmate-written magazine of Sing Sing Prison, 1901

As far as historians of early film can agree, cinema’s first “special effect” was used to depict its first execution – and its first death.¹ It came in an Edison production, The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, directed by Alfred Clark and filmed by William Heise in 1895, early years for what wasn’t yet a coherent industry, just a nascent array of competing technologies and their accompanying entrepreneurs. It wasn’t filmed inside the crouching spider of Edison’s Black Maria studio in West Orange, NJ, but outside in the surrounding area, in what would later become the ubiquitous suburbs blighting the land, there where the light is bright and unmistakable, so no shadows can be blamed for what gets seen.²

Both the film and its effect are simple enough, as each functions to show just what the title promises: an execution. Specifically, a public decapitation that claimed to be in service of the rule of law. That hadn’t actually happened to a flesh- and-blood British aristocrat since Simon Fraser, AKA Lord Lovat (the Eleventh, for those counting), lost his head in 1747. Nor had it happened on US soil since 1811, when in revenge for their role in the German Coast Uprising of what later became Louisiana, more than twenty-one slaves were beheaded following a show trial (and more than a hundred in the massacre beforehand), their heads stuck on pikes as a warning to future insurgents. However, a wider look at the foundations of capitalism shows just how widespread the use of not capital punishment in general but also beheading in particular was in attempts to quell revolt, transposing symbolic weight back and forth from the major signifier of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European regicide – the head of the head of state… – to the expansive arsenal of colonial retribution against rebellions.³ As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker put it plainly, “Hangings, burnings, mutilations, starvings, and decapitations have filled our every chapter in this black book of capitalism.”⁴ Far from some barbaric inheritance, as colonial apologists would claim to disavow the “excesses,” this work of management as and through terror was vital to the formation of Atlantic power and its development into industrial form, even if, in the judgement of some of the slaveholders and bureaucrats, “such exercises in frightfulness proved of doubtful value” (the words of Edward Long, one such slaveholding administrator in Jamaica who detailed the vicious suppression of Tacky’s Revolt).⁵

What that history poses starkly is that any attempt to draw a clean separation between the acts of extraordinary violence used to maintain a social order and the way they are represented forgets that such violence is already both image and act. To look back across centuries of efforts to police dissent before, during, and after it makes itself openly visible doesn’t only show these acts of murder. It also reveals their explicit display, as spectacles of trauma designed to shame the dead, warn the living to stay in line, and entertain those who gained from the enterprise.⁶ A structure of governance by and through exceptional yet quotidian violence will treat the murder of slaves, rebels, indigenous populations, and the poor as something for public consumption – as what would become, in the language of early cinema, an “attraction,” a selfsame spectacle. The function of such an attraction is hardly accidental: it simultaneously naturalizes the murderous acts through repetition and aesthetic treatment, activates their trauma anew for those viewers subject to the same systems of control and terror, and obscures the less visible forms of slow violence, abjection, and denial that bolster and excuse the architecture of racial capitalism.

As the ongoing casual circulation of video, photos, and audio of black Americans murdered by cops makes amply clear, this basic dynamic hasn’t disappeared in the least. And in this way, coming to grips with some of the uncanny resonance between the landscape of early cinema and the proliferating screen culture we live and breathe now has to include not just the proto-kitten video – see 1901’s The Sick Kitten – but also media presentations of execution, especially the genre of the “lynching film” already present in Edison’s 1895 Frontier Scene and only amplifying from there well into the 1910s. Tracking back from the ubiquity of images of death at the hands of the state today toward those at the end of the nineteenth century, we see how cinema found an extant history of displaying the dead to remind the living of what to expect and how the coalescing film industry wasted no time continuing and refining this practice.

So in a film from the last years of the nineteenth century, a head will be severed from its neck before our eyes, although as sanitized and distanced from that colonial history as could be: a white head, and a royal one no less, from another country, another century. Like so many of the shorts from the first years of moving images, the film will do little beyond supporting this central attraction. It is a gag’s small vessel, a container shaped around the thing it aims to do. Which, in this case, means a cut, both technical and represented, centered smack-dab in the middle of its thirteen-second running time, bisecting the film’s duration as plainly as it splits the body that kneels in the frame’s center. The whole operation will hinge on this atrocious binary switch: head on, head off.

At first, though, Mary is not kneeling. She is standing when the film starts, facing to our left. To her right are two lines of men, arrayed to face her and, therefore, us. Except it is perhaps wrong to say us, because the film was meant for a Kinetoscope, a device for displaying moving images first made public in 1893, two years prior to this film. Contrary to a projector and its prospect of mass watching, the Kinetoscope allowed only a single viewer at a time who must bend her head down to peep in, baring the back of the neck in echo of what is watched here. Better to say, then, that those men onscreen who watch the execution stared out at a singular viewer, at whichever me was watching.

Unlike the bent viewer who had to adopt the victim’s curved spine, the men stand up straight, and with the exception of the executioner himself, they seem continually unsure what to do, what they are there for anyway. (To watch, evidently, in order to remind us that this is worth watching and to show us how to do so.) So they spend most of the film raising and lowering weapons in a gestural sympathy with the axe. None of these men seem more superfluous than the second executioner, who is, we suppose, a back-up or reserve for case of emergency, a pinch killer. He does even less than the others and never raises a hand or a weapon. Once the deed is done, he bends down and stares at the severed neck like it has something else to say or, like a Kinetoscope, has a tiny picture galloping along inside it, an instant replay of the death just witnessed.

The whole layout is geometric, less theater than layers of planes,⁷ and so Mary, played by a man named Robert Thomas (the secretary and treasurer of the Kinetoscope company), is also one shape in a row with others: a woman who faces sideways towards Mary; a stump; Mary herself; and a woman behind her who knots the blindfold. It’s all the more horrific for this static tension of moveable, exchangeable elements. Mary kneels and places her head on the stump. The axe raises all the way up and behind the back of the executioner before it falls, almost drowsily, to cut the head from the body in one slow fell swoop. The head rolls away, and then back a bit. The executioner raises the head. End.

No matter how many times I’ve seen this, I still shudder each time, no matter that the effect is “crude” – or, more likely, exactly because of that. Still, it’s not until my third viewing that I realize the blindfold is already over her eyes, even if not tied, from the start of the film. Cinema’s first execution isn’t seen by the executed. That’s what we are there for.

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The effect of the decapitation itself is achieved with what’s called alternately a stop trick or a splice substitution and will come to form the star technique of more famous films from George Méliès, Cecil Hepworth, and others in immediately following years. It’s simple enough: the operator stops the camera mid-action, everyone in the shot freezes, and some element is changed, moved, or removed before the camera starts again, picking up from the next frame. In this case, it meant halting the camera and action mid-swing to swap out an already-beheaded dummy for the live actor before continuing the axe’s fall so that it traces a cut already made. When watched at full speed, the stop trick’s illusion takes shape, as an object will disappear, transform, get severed, or appear without a transition – which is evidently what we often mean by “like magic,” as if gradualism promises realism.

A half-century or so later, though, special effects will start to get criticized when their transitions are too sharp, when technique can’t smooth its rough patches and the gaps between difference are too wide. No wonder that Terminator 2’s T-1000 had to move like wet chrome, because liquid makes a promise of change without frames or leaps. It’s basically a remix of the star attraction of James Cameron’s previous film, The Abyss, where a sentient puddle/water tentacle roams the hallways and mimics human faces, although there the FX wow-factor comes from the translucent refraction of what is behind the water, rather than the mirrored reflections in the liquid metal of the T-1000. In Terminator 2, the liquid is both the ultimate slapstick material, already a gag – Arnold punches the quicksilver head, unaware that it can just morph around its wound to form a grasping fist – and never very funny, lacking enough stubbornness to build a good joke around. It’s just a humorless cop that endlessly self-repairs, except, of course, when it gets frozen and, in trying to walk, breaks itself into shards to litter the foundry floor like some poor glass horse that didn’t know its own strength.

As for the stop trick, Méliès himself claims to have discovered the technique accidentally. Filming a city street, his camera jammed a moment before starting again. When he printed and projected the film, “having joined the break, I suddenly saw an omnibus changed into a hearse and men into women.”⁸ He first used it intentionally in The Vanishing Lady (1896), whose title says it all, and by the winter of that same year, in The Haunted Castle. There, it turns a dangling bat into a battish man, complete with a small puff of smoke, inaugurating a cinematic line that would find itself, exactly one century later, watching Quentin Tarantino arrange to get himself bled to death by Salma Hayek as a vampire stripper.

The Queen’s decapitation and the vampiric metamorphosis are enabled by the same technique, the stop trick, but the effect works to opposite ends. In Execution, it serves to show two distinct bodies – one human and alive, one inhuman and neither alive nor dead – as identical, joining them together within a feigned unity of time through a split as invisible as possible. The effect shrouds itself in order to direct attention to bigger tricks: to safely kill the living, or, in films to come, to create a novel space and advance a story by seamlessly piecing together objects, bodies, and locations into a single composited shot. In The Haunted Castle, though, the stop trick replaces one body (a bat) with what is blatantly a different one (a man). It doesn’t hide its cut. It brandishes it, there under the sign of the supernatural and the ragged joy of the gag itself.

Despite this difference, there’s a fundamental similarity to the two films. The category of what is a “real” event as opposed to a supernatural occurrence is of less importance than it might seem, and not only because historical drama and vampire shocker are by no means opposed as genres. Given that Mary was executed in 1587, the Edison film wouldn’t claim documentary status the way that subsequent American shorts did when they fudged contemporary events through effects to proffer them as real footage, like the 1898 Vitagraph film Battle of Santiago (burning miniature ships, complete with cigar smoke blown in from offscreen by the director’s wife and a boy…) or American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s 1906 offering, San Francisco Disaster, which depicts an earthquake through the destruction and torching of a table-top model. But what ultimately joins the two tricks, the beheaded head and the bat-man, is a sense of time both seen in the films and seething behind them. That sense derives from one of the most basic properties of mechanical film, and later analog and digital video: that the time invested in recording does not have to be identical to the time it takes to watch those recorded images. There can be a gap, whether slight or yawning.

The most familiar example of this is stop-motion animation, especially hand-drawn cartoons, where any movement we see has to be built from a set of stills. Of course, this is true for any camera that divides motion into discrete captures that are then “reanimated” into smoothness, thanks to persistence of vision or phi phenomena, depending on who you ask. But stop-motion involves a far more extreme sense of building passages from the ground up, laboriously constructing over hours, days, and weeks a series of minute differences that aim to vanish into a unified sweep of seconds. In a sense, this split between the expansive time of animation and the fantasy of a direct cinematic time belongs to an extremely old division drawn by Aristotle in Physics: between “violent motion” (things “whose motion is violent and unnatural are moved by something, and something other than themselves”) and “natural motion” (those that “derive their motion from themselves”).⁹ Animation, in this schema, would be the pinnacle of violent motion, even more than films in general that require the projector or monitor – i.e. “something other than themselves” – to let us process stills as motion. With animation, every single gesture onscreen is pre-loaded with a hoard of others, a swarming nest of movements and often collective exertion crystallized into it.

(My first memory of sensing this: after being told how Looney Tunes was made, I watched, slack-jawed and awed, trying to see the traces of days of work of many hands sunk into a single passage of Coyote falling to his non-death again, hole-punching a silhouette through each purple smog cloud on the way down. Small wonder cartoons get criticized as violent: they’re a bonfire of spent time, a potlatch for the laughs, all that productive force and precision and skill and capital dumped into one more splat, one more trick, pie, unfurling tongue, rabbit in drag, hammered heart, dust of the fallen.)

The same is true of the effect at work in Execution. To make the fall of an axe appear seamless in time, there had to be an entire other set of movements and efforts. Thomas stands up and hustles out of frame, pulling the blindfold off first. Everyone else holds still as possible, the axe wavering a bit, and uncredited persons drag a dummy into frame. I can only imagine that the actors laughed, like whenever we rush to set ourselves up as a frozen tableau in front of a self-timer, and they were probably told to be serious and stop fucking around, this is an execution after all, and laughed harder all the same. Watching the film on loop, I start picking up the trace of a smile on some of the actors’ faces, and this interval feels like its source, like they’ve been trying very hard to remain absolutely still while silently cracking up, a breathing freeze-frame. As with any cut, things have gone on that will not be included in the official record, sometimes in order to make the next elements filmable, sometimes just because a film has never enclosed a whole world, not even of those who make it, and you have to go home, or whatever one names the place that is not the film.¹⁰

Here, in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the cut in time aims to go unnoticed, hiding in the cut that is depicted, the one in the neck. The skin of the film (as Laura U. Marks aptly calls it) and the skin of the filmed body compress briefly into one before coming terribly apart. But even for much less dramatic cuts, like those from a face to its hands or from one location to another, the same split is described by the break and its interval: between a time of automatic mechanical advance and a time of everything else that actually makes that advance go and provides its materials. It’s like what the militant sociologist Romano Alquati heard in his interviews with machinists at the Fiat factories of northern Italy. Contrary to the proffered narrative of efficiency and ease, increased automation of the plant hardly meant deskilling or relaxation for them.¹¹ It meant a constant and anxious effort to tweak, repair, supplement, and route around automation in order to make the allegedly “automatic” process look like it actually worked – that is, to become an image of what was supposed to need none of that constant human support.

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This technical capacity to stop and start the camera, as well as the process of editing out of camera, lets the time of recording and time of watching differ. That’s an obvious point, so obvious that it wouldn’t be worth dwelling on were it not for the fact that so many of the twentieth century’s moving images, and many of the efforts to talk and write about them, came to be structured around the idea that “naturally” (albeit via mechanical processes), the times of recording and viewing should be identical, or at least feel that way in each scene or sequence, and that the attempt to capture a “living” temporal succession is the special province of mechanically recorded motion, if not its moral duty. In terms of film theory, this constitutes a major thread in mid-century accounts deemed realist, most infamously from André Bazin (“for the first time, the image of things is likewise their duration, change mummified as it were”)¹² and Siegfried Kracauer (for whom films that follow the “realistic tendency […] go beyond photography” in the way that “they picture movement itself, not only one or another of its phases”).¹³ Still, in both those cases, the complexity of their thinking goes far beyond any static position about cinematic objectivity.¹⁴ If anything, I draw out those quotes less because they are indicative of what Bazin and Kracauer wrote in sum than because of the way they suggest how these could have become easily paraphrased positions to be followed or pushed against. More relevant for this essay is the tremendous and scattered archive of a century’s worth of films, because in that, we can see how much of what we’ve watched implicitly supported a principle of the imagined simultaneity of production time and viewing time, such that any deviations come to be considered as “special effects.” Theorized or not, the overwhelming emphasis on a set of conventions that put prime focus on the construction of human stories works to insist that despite a few allowable creative dilations for dream sequences, vampires, earthquakes, or, as I much prefer, some combination of the three, representations should appear to come before our eyes as their “pro-filmic reality” (Bazin) did before a camera, with a minimum of distractions or Vaseline between each. Over time, the cycle thickens: the more that films start to do what they were supposed to be capable of doing, like developing narratives that allow only brief exceptions (i.e. “special effects”), the more it comes to make sense for some critics to confirm that capability as film’s most noble labor.

To call something a special effect is no more a neutral designation than to call it natural, however. It draws a line in the sand and traces it over and over again until it becomes a trench, a fact of the historical landscape that our thinking takes shape around. We can see this with stereoscopic/3D film, which gets recurrently posed as something extra, a supplement or cheap trick that requires a literally intervening layer of red/blue or polarized plastic. But the stereoscopic is not a technical exception or latecomer. It was being experimented with and developed from the 1890s on, from before the Lumière workers left the factory and kept sneaking glances up at the camera. So if it is exceptional, it is a historical exception that appears out of joint only insofar as it measures the assumed inseparability of moving images from the movement of capital, relying on an unspoken claim that it is Hollywood’s lumbering steps alone that determine what is contemporary and what is outmoded. According to that tight bond, 3D has only functioned as an occasional spur to help goad viewers back to a medium whose centrality in the global North is uncertain and whose profitability is hemorrhaging.¹⁵ But as American experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ vital work makes amply clear, both in its passages back through early cinema and in its startling reinvention of the stereoscopic from the simplest means, there’s no reason for 3D to be so corralled – other than this narrative of capital.

Similarly, to call the beheading in Execution a “special effect” is only to make it retroactively so, judging it in terms of a mode of filmmaking that wouldn’t come to predominate industrially produced moving images until decades after it was made. Amongst all the stylistic and technical elements that make up that mode, from the development of a syntax of coherent camera movement to classical continuity editing, two major subtending principles are worth noting that are too fundamental and structural to usually warrant mention.

First, the experience of the screen will come to organize a space and time of viewing that encourages paying attention to the film as if it were a text; specifically, a plotted work in line with the bourgeois novel. That link to the novel is more than one of just scope, scale, or length, given that the organization and marketing of films, from the early 1910s on, gradually coalesced around the principle of a story and a plot by which an individual’s progress can be charted, rather than a field of collisions and affects familiar from shorts like Sick Kitten or stage melodramas full of mechanical chaos barely reined in by a flimsy story.¹⁶ Second, there will be a version of screen space that is overwhelmingly treated as a coherent volume. Specifically, the screen will approximate a perspectival view into three-dimensional space, with objects and figures staged in depth towards a vanishing point with nothing that violates this principle.¹⁷ It is the alliance of the cinematic screen and image with what Panofsky noted about the construction of perspectival space:

We shall speak of a fully “perspectival” view of space not when mere isolated objects, such as houses or furniture, are represented in “foreshortening,” but rather only when the entire picture has been transformed […] into a “window,” and when we are meant to believe that we are looking through this window into a space. The material surface upon which the individual figures or objects are drawn or painted or carved is thus negated, and instead reinterpreted as a mere “picture plane.”¹⁸

This seems so familiar in most of what we watch as to become basically invisible, at least until we recall that there’s no fundamental reason for moving images to accord with this sense of peering through, of vision not being caught at layers of information that bear no spatial relation of imagined depth to each other. It’s for this reason that unexpected exceptions can be so disarming, goofy, and genuinely powerful at once, like the blood that spatters the screen in Earthquake, Mark Robson’s film from 1974 that was the first to use “Sensurround” effects, extreme low-bass frequencies that made the audience tremble and feel the titular quake. The blood shocks not because of the graphic gore but because the blood is graphical, just splotches of textureless crimson dotting the screen itself, suddenly revealing a proximity that we didn’t feel until then. Fitting, perhaps, that the film comes just a year after one made literally on the other side of the globe, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity, which superimposes its title in that same stark, flat, and splattered red over an image of the mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima, again processing catastrophic violence that escapes registration through a sudden displacement to the screen itself, breaking any ease of absorption.

Still, these are striking because they are exceptions. Drawing on generic expectations ported from theater and painting alike, the tendency toward looking as if through a window will gradually become naturalized, as dissolves, overlays, titles, dead pixels, blotches, blurs, and anything else that might remind us that screens are not pools or hollows set inside the frame of a monitor will get restricted to title sequences, witches’ spells, scenes of nervous excitation, hardware errors, or films talked about as art.¹⁹ Thankfully, none of that restriction ever worked like it was supposed to, and a century of potentially ordered film has always been undercut by distracting dissolves, overlong musical numbers, werewolf transformations, floods of tears, lens flares, that hair, those boots, those eyes, the surging crowd, the car making the hairpin on two wheels, the balustrades so elaborate you can’t focus on the dialogue taking place along their diagonal axis. Still, the combination of those two tendencies – toward character-driven organization and theatrical space – did coalesce into something approaching a norm, one that provides the basic ground on which the majority of images committed to film (and later, television and video) spend most of their time showing humans do things with and to each other at velocities we learn to think of as living.

This in itself isn’t especially interesting, given that so much of human culture concerns the living in one form or another, from the epic to the sitcom and back again. Yet something distinct happens when this tendency comes to cinema, as it becomes linked not only to genres, styles, or modes of making films but also to claims about the fundamental livingness of things and the untroubled automatic force of that. The discursive work behind this is there as early as the technology itself, inherited from a history of optics, toys, automata, and screens. An 1898 account of a time-lapse film starring a growing flower points out: “This living picture, though no doubt interesting, must, however, be likely to have an unnatural effect, for in nature we do not see plants budding and flowering in a minute.”²⁰ Sure, but we also don’t “in nature” see flowers as a static, oil-painted tableau that degrades only when the chemical compounds of the paint break down or when the gallery is set aflame by floral partisans. Something in the way film moves spurs these questions in ways that other media didn’t face, as cinema will be uniquely judged for fidelity to the way that the mechanical can mimic and enact living motion and the sense of time it implies. Consider the branding of its early devices (and companies): Bioscope, Vitascope, Vitagraph, Biograph, and Kinetoscope, whose pseudo-Greek neologisms we might translate as two versions of Life-looking, two of Life-writing, and one Movement-looking.

That category of the animated but not decidedly alive had antecedents in the countries where cinema first took shape, especially in debates over mechanistic models of life and the importation of those concepts (through Hermann von Helmholtz’s theory of the conversation of force) into the notion of labor power.²¹ But I’d argue that the dread and excitement circling it didn’t properly exist until it exited the terrain of philosophy and political economy to become a widespread experience of the animation of the still, first in the factory assemblage and then in cinema. Only then did this nervous search for a categorical bedrock of the natural, organic, and objective become omnipresent.²² In other words, once the “violent motion” of the camera and projector began to proliferate through daily life, a fount of natural, unspoiled motion and vital time was suddenly found everywhere – and everywhere found in danger of being betrayed by what seemed uniquely capable of recording and reproducing it.²³

That sort of chaotic blurring would be warded off again and again, whether in film theory that insists on the direct presentation of lived reality or in complaints that special effects which muddy the ground between polygon and quadriceps don’t look “real.” But it’s worth noting that some of the earliest efforts to make sense of how film transforms our perception were far more comfortable with these hybrid moments. In Hugo Münsterberg’s “The Photoplay: A Psychological Study” (1916), often considered one of the first works of film theory, the primary point of reference and departure is theater, in order to help decide how a “photoplay” (i.e. a film) differs from a theatrical one. For Münsterberg, cinema’s value will lie in how it pointedly doesn’t capture real motion. Unlike the theater where “the spectator receives everything from without and the whole movement which he sees is actually going on in the world of space without and accordingly in his eye,” when it comes to the “film world,”

the motion which he sees appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own mind. The afterimages of the successive pictures are not sufficient to produce a substitute for the continuous outer stimulation; the essential condition is rather the inner mental activity which unites the separate phases in the idea of connected action.²⁴

I’m not concerned here whether or not this is a correct account of persistence of vision. Rather, I want to draw attention to Münsterberg’s impulse to see the experience of moving images as the product of a lack that must be compensated for, as the rapid passage of frames through the projector begins the animation yet requires the “inner mental activity” of the viewer to complete it. The implication is that the experience of cinematic movement in time will occur at the uneven juncture of animal and mechanical sight. As he concludes the chapter,

[Depth and movement] are present and yet they are not in the things. We invest the impressions with them. The theater has both depth and motion, without any subjective help; the screen has them and yet lacks them.²⁵

Again, through this lack cinema will both invite and require this kind of collaboration with the mechanical, driving us to come to grips with being cyborg in the “turmoil of a technical age”²⁶ (as Münsterberg puts it) well before the Maschinenmensch/Robot Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis gives it early infamous figuration. And Münsterberg’s position wasn’t a unique one. In 1896, one year after The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and two decades before Münsterberg published his study, Léon Roger-Miles wondered, “What is the Kinetoscope, what is the Cinématographe if not devices in which all the delusions of our sight are applied mathematically to provide our mental perception with a sensation of reality?”²⁷ The point isn’t a victory of the mechanical over the natural or vital, nor a threat to the power of our vision, but an often joyous and surreal passage that begins with our defaults, limits, and “delusions” through what feels most opposed to rhythms of life – through the mechanized, the mathematical, the automatic – in order to find its sensation on the other side. It’s a mode of thinking that continues for some later into the century, like Jean Epstein, the brilliant French impressionist director and theorist, who seizes with particular acuity on the way that the camera’s “inhuman eye, without memory, without thought […] an eye outside of the eye,”²⁸ provides the necessary conditions to witness that “an animism is being reborn. We know now that we are surrounded by inhuman existences.”²⁹ Or, in other words, surrounded by, and inseparable from, an expanded terrain of the inhuman that constitutes the social-technical ground of capitalist mechanization to which film bears witness. In this way, it’s been a sloppy cyborg cinema from the get-go, long before green screens and motion capture and fluid effects, before a robotic cop gets frozen, shot, and shattered into a million little pieces without anyone having to yell CUT.

Especially when we exit the terrain of film theory, though, we can see how these brief glimpses toward a more complex grasp of the entanglement that cinema poses too often get shut down in favor of an array of static oppositions, the natural vs. the mechanical, the living vs. the animated. As mentioned, one significant side effect of that closure will be to declare that any disruption of a naturalized rate of motion (where what you see feels like what the camera saw) is a “special effect”: as something that’s endlessly present and always at work behind the screen, but that only becomes visible as an exception. What conveniently gets hidden along with this sense of time is an awareness not just of the human labor productive of it but, more specifically, the inextricability of that human effort from the mechanisms and technical systems that enmesh it. More simply, what gets obscured is the violence of its motion, as viewing skims over the top of a tremendous set of operations, of whole reams of time and work that never proceed cleanly in step. Those operations are at work even in what feels far from cartoons, visual effects, stop-motion, or any other form that flaunts the time sunk into it. When Méliés is caught off-guard by that Lumière projection and how it enacts “all the animation of the street,” he’s right to speak of animation, but we should widen it out to a double sense. The hustle and bustle of the city, the sign of a vital motion, yes, but also the gap that animation names: the work of animating required between that street’s motion and the occluded movements of the projectionist cranking faster and faster behind the screen. It is this work, simultaneously human and mechanical, that brings the horse to a trot and lets cinema look like a lively flow that simply happens.

That said, animation also designates the inconsistency of this camouflaging. Over the following century, this work, its time, and all the thought crystallized into it will be recurrently forgotten, vanishing into the space of a medium itself, an image of neutrality and yeah, but that’s just how film works… Yet this is always a partial disappearance, a magician blowing the reveal, because this tremendous surfeit of spent time keeps resurfacing. It’s there whenever a medium glitches, denaturalizing itself, and when we glitch right along with it, like the toddler who prods the paper of a magazine and cries when it won’t hyperlink. (Like when I, jetlagged and drunk, mute the volume on my phone in hopes that it will shut up the guy yelling at the other end of the bar.) It comes to light when our navigation of a medium goes awry and accidentally gestures to a dense field of motions, tweaks, fixes, failures, refusals, and unseen efforts, all the things that go into the image of the untroubled and breezily unfolding.

In this sense, perhaps we could give another definition to animation: it’s a realism of the offscreen, even as it often gets devoted to the most supernatural, fantastic, grotesque, and speculative images our species makes. Because the horizon that opens up in its small cracks is one that shows how capital isn’t something that can be identified like a content or a topic but is instead a relation of use, force, and fungibility that is always at work in articulating what is allowed to appear and alleged to happen automatically and necessarily. Such a view suggests that social violence is at work at all moments, not only in its spectacular displays but also in the obscured motions that make it available to be seen. This is why animation is dangerous to an order that anchors itself in claims of the living, the natural, the developmental, and the autonomously unfolding. It’s no surprise, then, how it’s been slowly hemmed into that small category of the special effect, where it can be laughed off as a scare or a gag, and into its own delimited genre³⁰ of the cartoon where things get coded as magical, laughable, or just plain unreal. In the cartoon, this nightmare of complicity and continuity gets handed over in full to those who alone might weather the psychic overload it provokes, who know that images always carry more force than they show, and who know how to watch in horror and wonder: kids.

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Post-script, or, one last thought on The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots:

I’ve watched this film so many times, and there’s still something in it that I find genuinely atrocious. Some of that likely has to do with the way it echoes an indelible part of world images now – the ISIS beheading videos. Unlike those, the film has no explanation, no long staging that situates what happens. But like them, the head is held up not to the audience onscreen but toward the camera and those who watch. In both cases, atrocious is the adjective I keep reaching for, likely because a while back, when I found myself saying the word often, I looked into the etymology, which has stayed with me since: an old compound meaning of “fire” and “eye,” designating a threatening appearance but coming to mean for me what sears itself on seeing. A mind’s eye brand, an afterimage.

In a number of ways, this stop-trick animation isn’t as atrocious as the others put to film by Edison’s crew. There are the respective scalping and lynching depictions of Indian Scalping Scene and Frontier Scene, both from 1895. They’re lost, but the remaining descriptions make plain just how thick they were with the air of racial violence and the viewing pleasure it assumed. There is the one that is actually a snuff film, one of the most genuinely atrocious films ever made, Electrocuting an Elephant (1903). And there is Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901). Unlike The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, this does not depict the death of a head of state but of an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, who was responsible for assassinating President McKinley. The span of years from the earlier film is evident, above all in the structure of the film, which is no longer a single fixed take but rather involves a cut that leaps from the outside of the prison (presented as a slowly panning location shot in front of which one train passes while another sits still) to its interior, first at the cell from which the prisoner is taken, then at the electric chair. It’s the same spatial montage structure as A Kiss in the Tunnel, an 1899 short directed by George Albert Smith. There, a traveling shot along a train line that advances towards the dark arch of tunnel, light falling diagonal soft through the haze, is matched to a cut inwards to the train’s carriage (which we haven’t seen from the outside but only presuppose to be connected because of the motion of the camera aping that of a train). Inside the carriage, a man and a woman decked out in finery alternate between reading and sharing a quick kiss, punctuated by the man sitting on his top hat. The passage from outside to within centers on the little spark of a snuck smooch, a cute mishap, and then back to reading, a set of minor pleasures that give pace to daily life. The Execution of Czolgosz, though, condenses around a life snuffed out in full, something awful and final made all the more brutal for how there is no animation here, in either sense of the word I’ve suggested. The actor playing Czolgosz isn’t particularly “animated.”³¹ He doesn’t thrash around in anything approaching a theatrical manner. The Edison catalogue description of the film promised that “the assassin heaves heavily as though the straps would break,” but this is more a projection than accurate account of what is seen. Instead, he moves softly, in a small way, rising slightly and then dropping down when the current is turned off, and the guards are examining him to determine if he is dead. Nothing marks the moment of death, no shudder or flight of the soul, as the body drops only when the current ceases to lethally vivify it, to animate it into rigidity. This bare stillness and uncertain moment of death makes the sight all the more unsupportable because there is also no animation of the other variety, no splice or cut that might allow that other sense of belabored and expansive time to pour in. So the structure mirrors and amplifies the promise of the prison itself: no cracks, no space for the outside world to appear, no escape, no clear transition from the social death of incarcerated life to biological death, no trick that might let us disavow what we’ve seen.

It’s in marked contrast to The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in this regard, because the earlier film not only highlights the cut and its death so as to hide the trick within it. It is also designed to make that shock felt suddenly in the eyes and body of the viewer herself. Spyros Papapetros notes how animation always carries the threat of an “abstract agency that leaps from the opposite side of the screen to enfold the unsuspecting subject with its impact.”³² Here, that is made concrete and tactile, rocking back the body that has bent down over the Kinetoscope as if over the executioner’s stump, transmitting to and through us. And in case viewers miss this force, the film provides an aesthetic education of how to watch, how to feel the cut without losing your head. Specifically, it gives us a literal illustration of what this should feel like: as the axe cuts Mary’s/the dummy’s head from shoulders, the woman facing Mary, who has done nothing yet in the film and so is there to do just this one thing, raises her hands to her own head. It’s a remarkable and thick gesture, surely there in part to act as a counterpoint in the film’s careful play of seesawing vertical motion.³³ But more than that, she touches her own head as if to make sure that it too is still there and that the force of the image hasn’t spilled through sight and decapitated her as well.

This is ultimately why I find the film atrocious. Not only the inanimate heft of the mannequin and how a living body suddenly becomes a mass of stuffing in the space of a single frame, but the way that this cut transmits to other bodies, both to the woman on the screen and to we who watch it and feel our breath hitch in our chests. This transmission was central to its implicit design and the purposes to which it was put. Because if the spectacle of execution in general carries heavy echoes of the shaming and warning of slaves, mutineers, bandits, rebels, the hungry, and the desperate, this specific filmed spectacle was itself circulated and mobilized in the same way. Specifically, it was shown to prisoners in jail. As Allison Griffiths details, in 1901 an inmate-written magazine from Sing Sing featured a story whose author is identified only as “Clinton prisoner number 4,499.” It details the after-effects of a prison screening of this very film, framing its tale as one of redemption, of a fellow inmate who had been “converted” from criminality thanks to the “little picture [that] accomplished more in five minutes than all of his term in prison did, or could ever accomplish, if he was incarcerated for the remainder of his natural life.”³⁴ Watching it not on a Kinetoscope but “projected on a square of canvas” for the gathered prisoners, the men are transfixed by it, according to the author, who explains that,

the execution was done so quickly that it rendered me speechless. Turning to my friend, I saw his face was pale, and if his life depended upon it he could not of [sic] spoken one word. When he recovered from the shock he turned to me and said: ‘That was meant for me, and I’m going to heed the warning’.³⁵

In this way, the film reveals the fundamental ambivalence and split purpose of its body shock. For those not incarcerated, subject to policing, or who couldn’t imagine themselves in any situation that might end this way, the film is entertainment, a gasp and wow. For those in jail or for whom extraordinary state violence is not an impossibility but a lived fact to be survived, the film is a targeted jab, a shaming and warning that doesn’t need to announce itself as such or call itself a morality fable. Because it works all the same on those it sets its sights on, transmitting its phantom cut to the living as a future promise. It seems hardly an accident that the author notes that it’s the voice that is lost, that he is rendered speechless and his friend cannot speak “one word,” as if the screen’s blade had fallen across their throats.

Three years after that story was published, Méliès would put the stop trick to use once again in the Terrible Turkish Executioner, a rampantly Orientalist fantasy that displaces the reality of domestic state-backed murder to an elsewhere that it can code as foreign and barbaric. Even aside from the content, it’s by no means one of his best. It feels long and slow despite only lasting two minutes, with characters standing around and waiting for the action to happen, and the effects are jagged, with splices hardly lining up and bodies suddenly leaping position. In many ways, it relates to The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in the way that contemporary sequels to, and reloads of, past action films do to their own source material: the premise remains the same, but everything is done bigger, bolder, and with showier effects. So once again, the film is about watching a head get cut off, but in this case, it will be four heads, of shackled prisoners brought to the executioner by a cop who places a long wooden clamp around their necks, forming a shelf through which only their heads poke. The expected happens, a splice swapping predecapitated dummies for the living, and the heads resting on the clamp are simply swept off by the sword, as if by a broom. But unlike The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and its blunt, binary finality, here nothing is settled. One headless corpse retrieves its head from the basket where they are stored and reattaches it before doing the same for his companions. They grab the executioner, who has missed all this, absorbed in his lunch break, and cut him in half with his own sword. It’s a brilliant moment in a way, a fuck the police with supernatural forces and VFX on its side, and here, where the sun isn’t up yet, I’m cheering silently at a screen and this small marvel of reversal. But such a reversal isn’t allowed only to those who need it most. Unlike the prisoners, when the executioner is killed he never appears dead, even for a moment, his top half flailing and yelling at the departing men, before he reattaches himself to chase them offscreen. It’s as though once the stop trick has entered the scene and the heads have been restored, death has been cancelled, and so has life. Everything seems to bear its own animation, a nervous, inhuman vitality, no matter the damage that has been done to it. Like the shards of animated surfaces that break along predetermined lines and the software sight of contemporary bullet time, this is a vision of living motion that no longer needs life and knows no permanence, always rewindable and available for recomposition, for changing the terms of its engagement.

The point, though, is that this vision rests on what it can’t acknowledge fully. For every moment of wondrously smooth transformation and rejoining, there are hours and days propping them up, buttressing the ease with what all must be gathered, assembled, and spent in order to make the reversals happen like magic. We don’t often feel that weight that looms behind the breezy freedom of animation’s end results, but perhaps it’s no surprise that when “Prisoner 4,499” described The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots at length, he claimed that it was a five-minute film – rather than one that lasts only twenty seconds. That’s a simple mistake, maybe, but I think it is also profoundly true, in how it detects the buzzing density of the time of production frozen into it, and in how it took someone physically and legally barred by the state from moving freely amongst flows of daily life to feel it fully.

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1 I share Friedrich Kittler’s suspicion about any hard-and-fast search for exact origin, even as I think that the myths around origins cast long shadows. In Kittler’s words: “The trick film therefore has no datable origin. The medium’s possibilities for cutting and splicing assail its own historiography.” Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 117.

2 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 86-87.

3 Consider the other form of public display at work: not in the spectacle of punishment but in the collection of proof of genocide, for instance in the payment of five dollars for every severed head of an indigenous American that white men received at the town hall of Shasta City, CA, in the 1850s.

4 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), p. 329.

5 Quoted in Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 136.

6 The most extensive work on the role that such spectacles of shaming, terror, and forced enjoyment played in the perpetuity of both racial slavery and structures of anti-blackness unchanged by formal abolition is Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also Colin Dayan’s “Legal Terrors” (in Representations, Vol. 92, No. 1 [Fall 2005], pp. 42-80) and its discussion of how the display of bodies and heads were part of not only a shaming and threat that extended into the afterlife but also of “a new colonial form of life that demanded unexpected forms of death” (p. 45).

7 Shades of the kind of axial organization typical of later film technologies that require extremely shallow depth of field (like anamorphic widescreen, visible in the “people-standing-in-a-line” theatrical staging common to early CinemaScope films). Sam Roggen’s essay on this is especially relevant: http://www.lolajournal.com/4/cinemascope.html.

8 The details of his wording are worth noting. Given the anxieties surrounding factory mechanization detailed in the previous chapter, it isn’t surprising that the power of this reversal would center on blurring the circulation of life and death (the omnibus and the hearse) and on the parameters of gender (“men into women”).

9 Part 4, Book 8 of Physics. Available online at: http://www.logoslibrary.org/aristotle/physics/804.html.

10 This is a note gesturing toward a future project, but it would be worth thinking of the 1960s work of Gregory Markopolous, such as Ming Green (1966), in these terms, especially in terms of how that film uses nothing more than the physical space of the home and in-camera editing (particularly the technical capacity to wind the film back so as to double-expose it) to keep depicting the interval of the cut itself.

11 See my essay “Invisible Organization: On Reading Romano Alquati” in Viewpoint for a long discussion of this dynamic. Online at: https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/26/invisible-organization-reading-romano-alquati/.

12 “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 15.

13 Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 33.

14 Kracauer, for whom this direct capture itself raised the prospect of experientially redeeming our lost contact with that world, is especially tricky and rarely resembles the kind of caricatured versions of his thinking that form a touchstone in standard-issue accounts of film theory. See Miriam Hansen’s brilliant reading of the antinomies of his thinking in Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012): both the early discussion of the “chiasmatic relation between the living and the mechanical, animate and inanimate” (p. 10), and the full chapter devoted to Theory of Film where she argues that what “Theory of Film offers us today […] is not a theory of cinematic realism, but a theory of film experience and, more generally, of cinema as a sensory-perceptual matrix of experience” (p. 255).

15 For a historically grounded take on this, see the comments of Michael Brooke, the curator of the British Film Institute’s national archive, who reads the history of 3D explicitly in terms of a series of attempts to keep brining audiences back to what can’t be seen at home (or on YouTube): http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/3d-cinematic-revolution-or-just-a-trick-of-the-light-1925400.html.

16 That effort towards bourgeois narrative form is also in line with the attempt to create tiered class systems of viewing capable of securing spaces where middle-class viewers didn’t have to mix and mingle with the nickelodeon mobs. However, it couldn’t be enacted just on the level of the films themselves but rather required concrete shifts in how the institution of exhibition worked, like raising ticket prices, stopping the booze, and eventually assigning specific start times for a film, thereby breaking the film off from an ongoing flow of images to declare it a unitary, complete thing for which one must on time, as if clocking in for work.

17 As Anne Friedberg describes it, “As moving images follow each other, the shifts of editing offer the viewer multiple perspectives but sequentially and within a fixed frame. Here it will be important to consider how, through most of the cinematic century, the dominant form for the moving image was, with striking consistency, a single image in a single frame.” The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 192.

18 Erwin Panofksky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 27.

19 Of course, a whole array of broadly experimental film has always rejected this, and is, if anything, insistent on the treatment of a screen as a fundamentally graphic rather than theatrical space, a tendency continued in the way that the computer desktop (and its array of overlapping or simultaneous windows) has become a predominant visual paradigm in artist video work recently. And, in a more pop register, this has been challenged by the problem of how to depict text messages without constantly cutting to close-ups of a Samsung screen.

20 Quoted in Richard Rickitt’s Special Effects: The History and Technique (New York: Billboard Books, 2000), p. 11.

21 See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

22 The same holds with the idea that the time and velocity of a sequence should be natural, should have neither more nor less time sunk into it when it is recorded than when it is seen.

23 This is one of the ways that the emerging complex of cinema most clearly inherits not just the factory’s techniques of mechanical flow but also the social anxiety provoked by how such technologies were never experienced as only mechanical but instead eroded any clarity of division between operator and tool, between autonomously alive and animated by the gestures that bind and unbind it from the wider world. We should link this also to the unprecedented literal animation of the inanimate in early film, as the rambunctious circus toys in The Humpty Dumpty Circus (Vitagraph) from 1898.

24 Hugo Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A Psychological Study,” in Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 77-78.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid, p. 160.

27 Quoted in François Albera, “First Discourses on Film and the Construction of a ‘Cinematic Episteme,’” in A Companion to Early Cinema, eds. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), p. 124.

28 Jean Epstein, “L’objectif lui-même,” quoted in Trond Lundemo’s “A Temporal Perspective: Jean Epstein’s Writings on Technology and Subjectivity,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, eds. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 216.

29 Jean Epstein, “Photogénie de l’imponderable,” quoted in James Schneider, “Cinema Seen from the Seas: Epstein and the Oceanic,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, p. 203.

30 This is what Lisa Trahair describes as “a polarization between live-action as representational or (in a sense) realist and animation as magical or simulacral.” Lisa Trahair, “For the Noise of a Fly,” in The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications in association with the Australian Film Commission, 1991), p. 189.

31 A witness of the actual execution, Sheriff Samuel Caldwell, remarked on this quality: “The prisoner’s nerve was evidenced by his conduct from the moment he entered the death chamber. No groan escaped him, and his lips did not even move except when he was making his final statement to the effect that he did not repent his crime.” It’s part of the film’s attempt to claim verisimilitude, and in so doing, adds a documentary sheen to its horror show. (The source of those comments can be found through the University of Buffalo’s library, online at: http://library.buffalo.edu/pan-am/exposition/law/czolgosz/execution.html.)

32 Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 4.

33 The axe that rises, the axe that falls, her hands that rise, the bodies of the executioners that bend down, the head that is raised to the center of the screen…

34 Quoted by Allison Griffiths in “Bound by Cinematic Chains: Film and Prisons during the Early Era,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, eds. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 422.

35 Ibid, p. 422.

FRAGMENT 3

In 1967, Charles Csuri made Random War. It’s a work of early computer art that starts with a line drawing of the ubiquitous plastic toy soldier: legs spread, back straight, rifle aligned directly with the eye like a telescope or sextant. By generating random numbers (and subsequent transformations), the program determines where four hundred copies of this same drawn soldier are placed in their depthless field and how they are angled. It’s an abstract massacre, a war game stripped to its barest dimension, where no input does or can change the arbitrary assignation of not only a name for each soldier (from a set list that includes Ronald Reagan, as well as admin and staff at Csuri’s university), but also their fate: survived, missing, wounded, dead.

LightJet laminates and fragments of plotter drawings are all that remain of the original project. Like printed screengrabs of a video, they make it falsely seem as if the image was the end point for which the whole enterprise was designed, as though the intent was to make a pattern or drawing. But the full work would get remade, in a sense, through a series of transmediations in 2011-12 as Csuri collaborated with younger artists and curators. One of these iterations uses Facebook to populate its ranks. Others involve procedurally generated animations, all of which preserve that basic form of the toy soldier, in red and black, and its framing against a featureless white space. In some of the animations, the original stark outline has transformed into a set of squiggles or recurring lines; in others, into splinters and polygons or a modeled volume and surface sheen that the originals lacked. But in all, they are now staged in time, with a virtual camera that circles around them as they decompose into fragments that

The work briefly did the rounds – first in 1968 at the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at ICA London, then at the Exploratorium in San Francisco – and then was lost.

two hundred red and two hundred black, a smatter of overlaying forms littering the hollow space, shrinking in size towards the top of the plane as if receding into the distance

along with commendations for valor, efficiency, and conduct. Csuri’s own name, too, was entered into the database and in one extant output, he got an all-too-accurate designation for the actual veteran that he was:

wounded

gathered together in the exhibition Fragments That Remain – Transmediating Charles Csuri’s Random War, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb

spread out into space and then reform, back and forth. They’re no longer caught in the blunt finality of a destiny assigned at random. Now, it’s a deathless loop of infinite recurrence, such that either state (whole or shattered, body or scattered triangles) is just one moment amongst others. They are what Csuri called “object[s] as stages of abstraction,” here made doubly so by beginning with what is already abstracted: the iconic stand-in for any fragile body made to go to war. This is shard cinema stripped back to its atomic level of the unstill, the fragmented, and the procedural, looking more than anything like unfinished output from the software of an animator midway through the construction of a death, tweaking the shatter with no point of impact yet assigned.

But what has changed in the roughly five decades since Csuri’s early effort is not just the new style employed in order to tangle with the hellish vagary of war. It’s also the historical context of this style. If the first iterations of the project in the late ‘60s had no easy aesthetic correlate, the remakes in 2012 are a boiled-down version of what has become the house style for the most expensive images of war made. They look, for instance, almost identical to SUPERHOT (2016), an independent first-person shooter game directed by Piotr Iwanicki that organizes itself around just such a reduction to minimum of all the tropes and tricks of shard aesthetics. As a finished game, it looks like a version permanently in beta, a rough render in place of what is to come. There’s no texturing on the red crystal bodies that break like windows. No smudges on the windows themselves, not even when struck, no color to distract on the all-white walls. No movement until you shift your gaze or move your arms to shoot or stab or

In one of these iterations, Deadlock, there are only two figures, one black and one red. The fragmentation has already happened, or it is an image of a gathering-together, the formation of curved volumes, of edges, of faces and guns, from flat polygons that only appear when at an angle, each the thickness of a single pixel. Either way, the explosion doesn’t go anywhere. Nothing expands or collapse. The movement is circular, as it turns or we do, around this double homicide and back again.

In Fragmented Memories, there’s a full platoon, and the bodies are whole, grouped densely together, like a standoff. They explode into tiny delicate pieces before coming back together again, out and in like they’re breathing. The arrangement of the soldiers forms clusters and rings, and, again, they move or we do. It can’t be said, but all the same, suddenly they are passing through and amongst us, our view obscured amidst the little storm of what approximates a single soldier.

other than, perhaps, an extremely morbid children’s wallpaper, designed for dreams beneath a graveyard of anonymous forms locked in a conflict that cannot end

In the promotional words of its studio: See the bullets crawling towards you as you carefully plan your steps and aim your gun. Enjoy the mayhem that is unleashed as you put that plan into motion.

throw. Which means, above all, that it gives you time to look. To plan your next fatal encounters, sure, but mostly to watch things break apart, because almost everything can, and so you must decide what else will join the play of dancing fragments.

In one stage, you begin at one end of a long hallway, soon to be beset by the figures sprinting towards you. To your left are a series of white stands, on top of which are small black sculptures. The white rectangular frames behind and across from them finish the suggestion: we are in a museum, or in any other place where frames hold neither screens nor windows. The first sculpture to the side – the one that the game implies would be of real use to pick up and smash into small pieces against a red nemesis that will itself become more of the same pieces, just red instead of black – is a little modernist dog, like a small and perky Calder. But in the days during which I’ve played this, my dog has been sick, limping mysteriously. She’s finally asleep behind me, fevered, her breath heavy and slow but with a small catch and shudder in it that terrifies me. So time is ticking, and something is coming down the hallway, and I do not move and let time advance, unwilling to shatter even a facsimile of a statue of a dog, made aware anew of how little it takes to signal the presence of the vulnerable.

and so amplifying bullet time’s basic conceit by making its advance contingent upon the attempt to avoid or cause harm

In another early work by Csuri, Hummingbird, made one year before Random War in 1966, a series of lines are drawn over a green background one at a time, to form the shape of a hummingbird in flight, before the complete image is animated. Not by its halted wings starting to beat the air, but instead, in a quiet and wrenching shift, by how the lines twist slowly, counter-rotating against themselves. Perhaps, we think, if we wait long enough they will join again, and the image will cohere, like nothing happened in the interval, like everything was fine. But they never make it to that point. The animation halts before they make it back around, ending as a miniature blizzard of disaggregated marks, the skipping record of a detonation the width of one creature. That’s the exact scale, too, of its object lesson: because it takes so few lines to signal a life in danger of loss, it’s all too easy for them to go missing in a busy fray that starts as war and ends as style.

Part Two

And Finally into Mist

DRIFTWOOD AND SILICON

Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013) is a boring little film, riddled with the same doubt that structures too many films of its variety: it yearns to be exploitation cinema, but it lacks the guts to admit that. It’s the same condition that dominates its interchangeable predecessor District 9, which was supposed to be an adaptation of Halo (i.e. the hit first-person-shooter game) before it decided to retool itself as a giant allegory about citizenship but kept around some insect arms and plasma rifles for good measure. So, like a savvy player of those same game origins, Elysium advances by taking cover, slipping amongst weighty issues (health care! citizenship! migration!) to get to the parts that it, and we, actually came to see. Those are made up mostly of ecstatic haltings of narrative advance – like explosions, things breaking, rich people with nice legs, rich people cowering on the lawns of their mansions, Matt Damon playing martyr and having petty revelations – and the frisson of moments overcharged with genre echoes, like a blown-off face worthy of the best splatterpunk, a very Mad Maxed-out car, and a retrofitting of Blue Collar with cut-rate RoboCop parts. That is what’s at stake here, little more or less. Contrary to the expected froth of interpretation that tailed it like a wheeling flock of The Dark Knight Rises thinkpieces starving for chum, the film is totally uninteresting “politically” or narratively. It tries its best, working double-time to make sure that none of its pseudo-allegories are missed, like clunkily referring to the spaceships of the migrant Earthlings as “undocumented.” But for all that, it tells us nothing that has not already been confirmed by the basic state of affairs in the existing world at large. It merely turns South/North into Earth/Elysium (the orbiting space station where the rich dwell) and marvels at its own ingenuity for a while before elevating Damon to a pseudo-Christ and declaring society cured. Done and done.

However, there is a minor aspect of the film’s depicted world that is of more interest to me, given how it bears on a condition that’s been creeping its way to dominance for years now: its treatment of technology. I’m not talking about the quantity of gee-whiz gadgetry on display, which is roughly the standard loadout for films and games of this genre. Rather, I’m struck by the way that a film featuring hackers able to bring down class structure itself, and bolt a robotic exoskeleton to the bones of a dying man,¹ nevertheless still establishes a tremendous, unbridgeable gulf between the production process of those machines and their near-magical functions once built.

This is all the more noticeable given that the film goes to great lengths to point out how the advanced technology of this future is still built on Earth, by hand, and in factories. Cops may be expensive, automated, irradiated, and Ferrarired drones, but the people who make them remain meatily human, poorly waged, highly replaceable, and still physically enacting that construction.² What the film never displays, however, is any sense that those same workers who assemble the drone cops or the “healing beds,” which the Elysians use to extend their lives, have any knowledge whatsoever of how they function. How do we know this? Simple. Because they never sabotage them to turn the drones to their cause, to turn the gun on themselves, or to at least make them run with a limp. They never tune the healing beds to give the sadistic boss and his family syphilis, the only decent thing to do.

Above all, the workers never make their own versions. The film literalizes its absurd treatment of hardware as the pinnacle of inhuman mystique by showing “migrants” leave Earth on a crowded ship, risk death trying to make it through the militarized defenses-cum-border wall of Elysium, all in order to sprint over verdant lawns into a mansion and onto one of the beds. Wouldn’t it be easier, it’s hard not to ask, to just make a version of the beds on Earth? After all, the film insists, the Earthbound are the ones who make such things. Hell, that’s the sole reason the Cosmic North keeps them around, rather than dispensing with niceties of human rights to just leave the Earth to its own cursed devices. They need the Earthbound to make the tools needed to keep them making, to police themselves and give themselves something to aspire to, caught in a circuit that leaves the Elysians ample leisure time to stay Pilates-toned and polyglot. So rather than make the lethal border/orbital crossing, why wouldn’t the workers copy the design? Or steal it from the factory piece by piece, as the song goes? Or, at the very least, hotwire it to blow in the faces of those who condemn them to live?

To do any of the above would indeed be easier, and it would make a far more compelling film to boot. We are left instead with two options that claim total irreconcilability. On one side, an unapologetic nostalgia for a lost future – a rough-hewn, notably physical version of a generic mid-’90s (and hence late-term) cyberpunk ethos, complete with tatted hackers and shit graffiti. It’s all favela chic and grimy workwear, shallow depth of field and the smudgy sweat of work, carefully balanced multi-ethnic club scenes (à la Matrix Reloaded) and clunky machines with actual keyboards. On the other side, it’s snow-white McMansions, well-tailored pantsuits, and sinisterly smooth tech, with special emphasis on literally flat/transparent forms of touchscreens. Given the plot of the film, the implied moral judgment is plenty obvious. Hardware that weighs, that fails, that can be decorated with spray paint, that bears the traces of hands, and that approximates the analog is “more human,” and hence better; while the manifestly digital, vaguely holographic, and very slippery is in the service of those the audience is supposed to hiss at. The road to the continued hell of class society, the film insists, is paved with aluminosilicate – even as we check our messages during the slow and maudlin parts on just such a screen. (Even as I watch the film a third time on an airplane through a dull sheen of that very material, even as the film was designed for just such a circulation, for its explosions to be peered at, the size of match flames and haltable.)

Between these two positions, the worldview of the film takes shape, constituted around the absence of any possible sabotage or any generative points of crossing between the manually interferable and a surface so smooth it lacks even a port. It is a blindspot evident less in the literally absent act of sabotage – no one puts milk fat and sheep shit in the exhaust system of servo-droids – than in the formal ordering and style of the film, one hardly unique to it. That style consists of filming and digitally animating all locations and situations as equivalent, despite the narrative’s insistence not just that they are irreconcilable but also that objects which pass between them cannot be traced or altered (i.e. sabotaged). But counter to that stated gulf, the film’s style remains constant – other than the requisite shifts of the filters from yellow to blue, but always resolutely crisp – and voices are bound to bodies. The only way it comes close to marking these opposed social orders is when it tightly frames its shots of poor Earth-dwellers huddled closer together, the staging of figures back into receding space and the extremely shallow depth of field combining to result in dense and briefly weird patterns of blur and smudge. That said, it is less a consequence of anything I’d call style than an extrapolation of the divided world it films, hardwired into its vision of spacious Elysian late-modernism vs. crumbling slums of the Earth. And barring that minor aspect of crowded blur, the kind of looking it offers in total is plainly adequate to a built world of mythical wholeness and neutrality that can be “rebooted” with different social content, regardless of the ends for which the means were designed.

This opposition between nostalgia for the handmade and suspicion of the shiny, miraculous things you cannot tear your eyes from is hardly unique to Elysium. It’s taken to insupportable extremes in Oblivion (2013), Joseph Kosinski’s Tom Cruise vehicle concerning a blighted Earth. There, too, the envisioned tech of the future confirms the ordering of its screen space into that same near-moral opposition. Giant, drool-worthy/drool-proof tablets/tables (filmed in austere long shot) = evil and sterile, however tempting. Brooklyn salvage cottage, complete with well-worn wood, a sweat-stiffened Yankees cap to be erotically huffed like paint, and actual books explored in snuggly close-up = good, earnest, and human. In other words, this is an extrapolation of that contemporary fixation that serves as apologia for the gentrification it accelerates: a fantasy of the locally sourced and vaguely artisanal is pitched against the corporate, shiny, and monolithic, and, in so doing, only serves to obscure the ongoing accumulation of wealth through real estate and the pricing-out of communities. Single-origin cacao drives up rent as fast as neon-studded yuppie fusion spots called Aqua Blue. The only difference is which decade they belong to and how honest they are about their complicity in the ruin of this world.

This rampant tendency in contemporary images, one equally at work in films, games, television, and video, deserves to be understood on a ground more specific than its parallel with shifts in café design. Specifically, a collocation of alien hostility with cold, perma-new spaces is part and parcel of a much wider contradiction in how we think through and with images, how we navigate the world and undermine it. It is an autophagy of viewing, a needling suspicion of those smooth surfaces that are not just the film’s represented subjects but also the grounds of its and our vision.

This happens on two fronts. First, and most obviously, is the way in which we watch. It was possible to see Elysium and Oblivion, and most of the other films discussed throughout this book, in the theater, projected big and loud. But as much as that is probably the ideal space to see them, so that they can pull off spare moments of full jaw-drop, they were made and advertised with the full awareness that most of their viewings would happen later, on far smaller surfaces, on airplanes and trains and in beds and hands, on small, shiny, thin, and often touchscreen objects that look a lot like the ones the films find so suspicious. Second, these films, like a major portion of the moving images we watch and interact with every day, including sitcoms and ads and well-mannered dramas that don’t look so markedly fantastic and explosion-ridden, rely heavily on digital compositing, 3D rendering, and particle systems – in short, on some of the most costly, profitable, complicated, and rapidly changing forms of visual-effects computing. The films yearn for the burnished touch of an old plank and suggest that salvation can be found in what has been worn slow by the vagaries of time. But the images of a character having this micro-revelation are produced by programs for whom surface textures are variable after-effects. The gentle weathering of a Finnish cottage in which to rediscover your lost humanity is the consequence of a proprietary software, one that could just as easily make the cottage out of chrome, of glass, of frozen mud and crystal, that could huff and puff and scatter it to the wind, provided the physics engine could handle the micro-collisions of all those vaunted splinters.

The degree to which such films are narratively unwilling to recognize this seems inversely proportional to how much they depend on such effects and how amply aware they are that such effects are the real reason we come to watch them. But in the refusal to recognize this, let alone engage with it fully, the basic opposition between the substantial/practical/”natural” and the weightless/digital/artificial becomes calcified, total, and ahistorical. It’s telling, for instance, how even their fantasies of “rebooting” – whether a very hard nuclear restart in Oblivion, a total network failure in Transcendence, or a gentler one in Elysium’s vision of curing the Global South by changing their designation to “citizen” in a databank – serve only to deepen the split. In essence, they suggest that there is no possible articulation of manifest contradictions and historical messiness, other than a) sheer suicidal exodus or b) sub-Wall-E flight back to terra firma, holding the first tender shoots of micro-arugula and weeping. Neither of those options actually get their hands or eyes messy with the systems they dream of fleeing. They leave intact a magical vision of an integral and autonomous technology, one whose stilted worldview can be seen in a single image from Elysium, when the healing bed actually fucking twinkles, like gossamer, fantasia, or a sequined whatever, all the while removing late-stage cancer from a heroic little girl without a scalpel in sight. It dissolves tumors and heals broken bones, but unlike our fragile bodies, it is never itself seen as capable of breaking down or running riot against itself. These are integral objects built in accordance with a plan that cannot be grasped even by those who execute it daily, who are left instead to tilt at cosmic windmills or flee into the immateriality of code, or, more plausibly, simply to die.

_______

The faceless figuration that Oblivion gives the technical-but-unknowable is apt, though – a telling mark of its whole envisioned world. It’s just a floating, vaguely threatening, and inverted black pyramid with a single red glowing circle that codes roughly as an eye, at once resisting anthropomorphism and begging for it, looking a lot like the iteration-to-come of a Bluetooth speaker that can also kill intruders. However silly, this sharp, levitating, and cyclopean thing does become a complex cipher for the gap between the virtual and the actual – or, more precisely, between the ideal and intended function of a complex technical apparatus and its actual busted, nonfunctional, or murderous state. It emerges in the echoes, international or otherwise, trailing this crimson-lensed bit of hotel furniture. Not just HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, itself later doubled in the Sauron’s eye of the Motorola Droid phone, but also a machine that itself models, manipulates, and renders such digital images, like those in Oblivion itself: the Xbox 360 in its moments of failure, specifically the “red ring of death” of its status light, indicating an endless half-sleep of being on and yet not functioning.

This phrase is, of course, a reference to the blue screen of death (Windows), with further riffs like the spinning beach ball of death (Mac), the yellow light of death (PS3), and now the blue light of death, or “BLOD,” a problem that plagued the first days of the PlayStation 4 system. Despite the BLOD signifying a coma of processing, its pulse is nominally soothing, at least to those removed from the apoplexy of its owners, carrying echoes of Apple’s “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (that little LED that fades in and out in to the rhythm of adult resting breath, twelve to twenty breaths per minute). The BLOD’s slow gliding cobalt shares this vibe, but unlike the Mac, it is not sleep. It is an approximation of life itself in its predicateless form, merely existing, endlessly starting up, getting nowhere, and not working.

As for why these machines were failing to do more than just be: standard failure rate, perhaps; “shipping errors” of the pre-holiday frenzy, as Sony started to claim, perhaps. Yet another explanation floated around. The PS4s were made in China at none other than a Foxconn plant, and the work there involved not just the normal hell of that company but also the “intern labor” of thousands of students from Xi’an Technological University North Institute. They were there “voluntarily,” but like so many allegedly volunteer opportunities, it was a forced choice. If they refused to participate, they lost six course credits, which means they could not graduate. So into the plant they went, where they were paid an entry-level wage, worked full-time, and then were forced to keep going overtime and overnight without extra pay. To be sure, one could imagine tech students gaining “valuable job experience” (in Foxconn’s words) from a potentially complex technical or design task, but not in this case. According to reports, a finance and accounting major was made to glue together PS4 parts. Others peeled off the PS4’s protective plastic and slapped stickers on it. Others took power cords and put them in the box.

What’s the connection with the BLOD? On an IGN Internet thread for that university, someone claiming to be a student explained that they had, in fact, been sabotaging the PS4s. The title of their statement says it all: “Since Foxconn are not treating us well, we will not treat the PS4 console well. The PS4 console we assemble can be turned on at best.” In the body of the statement, it continues: “Foxconn doesn’t treat us as humans. So we don’t treat their products as high quality products. At best, the machine will turn on. Ha ha!”

Here, in years increasingly structured between the double dead-end of magically smooth or preciously repurposed, visible in those same films destined to be watched on PS4s, sabotage of the variety that was first named in the late nineteenth century (and subsequently demonized by the state, bosses, political parties, and unions alike) shows itself wholly operable.³ We’re doubling back to sabotage’s historical role as the “guerrilla fighting” of social war because sabotage – the “knock-out drops” of production, according to Arturo Giovannitti, or the “fine thread of deviation” (Elizabeth Gurley Flynn) – practices a refusal that does not flee from the circuits of capital or dream of exile from its terrain. Instead, it forms a deep bond with the failure, breakdown, frictions, and loopholes encoded in that very arrangement. The hypothetically unskilled, called in on false pretenses to be worked beyond contract, show themselves able to very quickly learn the minor deviations needed to put a complex apparatus out of commission in such a way that goes unnoticed until it has traveled halfway across the globe and become a living room’s accidental and expensive monument to class antagonism.

What kind of relation is there between a sabotaged PS4 that never finishes booting up and the omission of sabotage in a film whose Blu-ray might get played on it, if only it would start? One way into this was hinted at before: the representation of a world split between competing regimes – or at least appearances – of technology, between craft and sheen, between the obdurate and the flickering. Indeed, the opposition at work in Elysium’s grimy keyboards vs. transparent tablets or in Oblivion’s yuppie-driftwood vs. inhuman triangles is hardly limited to those films. In other recent releases, like Pacific Rim (2013) and Battleship (2012), however, it adopts the explicit shape of an even-more-hackneyed contest, digital vs. analog.

In Pacific Rim, for example, the nominal divide between giant lumbering mounds of alien flesh and giant lumbering mounds of robotic metal gets parsed out further, because one of the central plot points derives from the gap between two kinds of “Jaegers” (those behemoth anthropoid vehicles/ mechs piloted from within by humans, because, apparently, the envisioned future has forgotten about the drone and infrastructural turn in military affairs). There are new-fangled digital pseudo-Transformer Jaegers used by everyone but the Americans (in some Rust Belt revisionism gone wrong) and there are old, analog (albeit nuclear) Jaegers, like Gipsy Danger (the one aligned with the protagonists), that still run off more openly mechanical processes but have been decommissioned and sent to – sigh – “Oblivion Bay” in Oakland. In total accord with a yuppie logic that must veil all its choices behind false cries of necessity, the yearning for the simpler times of analog mechanized death gets the narrative excuse it needs. An electro-magnetic pulse from one of the aforementioned fleshy threats (called the Kaiju) puts the next-gen Jaegers out of commission, leaving just ol’ faithful Gipsy Danger to save the day.⁴ There’s no small whiff of an almost parodic old-timer logic at work here: when faced with lethal biological arcana from a parallel dimension, you can’t trust all those shiny gadgets that freeze up on you when the going gets rough. Only Detroit can be trusted.⁵

Battleship, the other recent Transformers-with-more-water-droplets blockbuster, realigns that division into human-analog and alien-digital, complete with AC/DC bro-jam accompaniment as leathered vets pulled out of retirement and hot young things alike rescue Earth from modular, hulkish, and bristling alien crafts with nothing but their standard-issue battleship and plentiful references to The Art of War. Sure, the human battleship is “modern,” as hinted by a shot of Rihanna rotating gun turrets by twisting her fingers on what may as well be a tablet, a shot later echoed from the alien side as if to imply common ground. But both that possible commonality of two battleships passing in the night and the prospect of successful algorithmic war are blown away by the relentless insistence on human courage as the juncture of tough physical exertion with weighty, mechanical stuff. A representative sample: the sailors gruntingly lugging a thousand-pound shell from one gun to another; the DIY firing-up of the battleship’s steam engine; a double-amputee vet beating the shit out of an armored alien through pure determination; and, of course, a good hour of outsmarting the invaders and their slick displays, targeting reticles, and tracking missiles/buzzsaws by literally turning the battle into a game of Battleship, as the sailors reveal that they “can track without radar” because they have mapped the entire theater of operation with that familiar grid from which the entire film is nominally derived (i.e. “B-3…” “You sunk my cruiser!” etc.).

None of this is especially unique, given that so much action cinema from the outset has turned on the idea of the out-gunned and out-manned beating foreign hordes by simpler means, elbow grease, and a generalized commitment to Freedom. (Equally, you could describe two-thirds of first-person shooter games in exactly these terms.) What is different about these iterations, though, is the stark opposition between their visual-narrative schema and the means by which it was produced: by a massive exertion of the digital, with a heft of capital, time, human effort, and processing power that dwarfs the towering fighters on display. While Pacific Rim integrated certain “practical effects,” such as the construction of miniatures for destruction, Gipsy Danger (as well as the other Jaegers and Kaiju, the giant aliens they fight) was a digital model built by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and animated in Maya, one of the leading 3D-graphics programs. Each of their visible surfaces is a pattern, whether bitmap or procedurally generated, that is mapped onto a polygon mesh (a geometric map of a surface that denotes a volume) itself wrapped over a wireframe. That entire assemblage must be first “rigged” in order to be manipulated by animators, provided with a set of joints and control handles to allow it to be moved, and then assigned a set of properties, like mass, resilience, and flexibility, that determine how it interacts with other elements in the frame. And in the case of this film, “interacting” largely means being tossed into and through similar forms (Kaiju, buildings, the Earth) that themselves consist of further surfaces, frames, and quantified volumes. The result is a tremendous splinter and splatter, the jubilee of destruction the film turns so heavily on. It moves in accordance with calculations that crunch the interaction of phantom weight and velocity, attempting to randomize, within a restricted range, the particle effects and debris that produce the appearance of all those unpredictable contingencies that signal the very opposite of carefully computed effects, those small accidents of interaction that result from real matter-on-matter action, the roil of the sea, the inconstant durability of flesh.

The same goes for Battleship, whose visual effects were also helmed by ILM and its various partnerships with VFX teams (Scanline, Halon, The Third Floor) and render labs far afield, including in Singapore. It can be seen in even the most basic element of the film, the thing that takes up more screen time than anything with the exception of ham-fisted American pride and ham-sized biceps: the water in which those ships tumble, steam, and sink. According to Grady Cofer, ILM’s VFX supervisor for the project:

Our goal was to fully represent the lifespan of a water droplet. So if we are recreating a cascade or waterfall, the water begins as a simmed mesh, with all of the appropriate collisions as it bounces along various surfaces. And then the streams begin to break-up into smaller clusters, and then into tiny droplets, and finally into mist.⁶

All of which is to say that even as a green screened Charlie Hunnam swaggers toward his nuts-and-bolts counterpart, even as we’re supposed to be cheered by the return to the ancient human connection to material and mechanical things, the actual method of these images’ construction guts any validity of this nostalgia. The story’s binary of analog and digital is, in terms of the film’s visual and production history, not actually a binary. It is just one more textural modulation internal to a hybrid schema of compositing, a camoufleur’s cladding applied after the fact. In this way, even the most literally analog moments, such as the incorporation of physical-destruction effects into the mix, become a mark of digital mastery, all the more so for how they succeed in looking indistinguishable from what was never filmed in the first place. These passages of seamless incorporation are the true triumph of the VFX teams but not because they are made purely in a computer. Rather, it’s because of the opposite, the way that they involve a managed workflow’s shuttling passage in and out of physical space and software, amongst teams, firms, countries, sets, and programs. That passage starts from the tiny wood models wrecked by hand against a green screen, and moves to a 2D digital video of the action. Then from that video to its conversion into a layer, or quantified volume when required, composited into a single virtual space with the other elements (the backgrounds that replace the green screen, the procedurally generated port city to be ruined, the Kaiju that were never filmed to start). From that initial array of elements to a successive layering of small modulations, the textures and hints of light and filters and particles filling the air. From that approximation on the compositor’s monitor to a set of files to be sent to another studio where laborious rotoscoping will give it the parallax pop-out depth of converted stereoscopic 3D. From that final rendering to the projector, digitally locked so that no one can fix it when it glitches, and from the projector to the light arcing across the air-conditioned hollow of the Regal Cinemas Crossgates 18 theater where I watched it on a blazing day in July, sweat from the heat outside drying on the back of my knees, head filled with a gathering ache in the face of the drifting terabytes of a 3D storm into which thousands of hours have been sunk – though not like battleships whatsoever.

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That said, my point isn’t that there is something fundamentally wrong or fake about such images, at least not any more than any others costing upwards of a hundred and eighty million dollars to produce. Rather than any yearning for practical effects and physically combustive explosions or a familiar insistence that cinema should indexically reveal the “real world,” what I find inane, noxious, and historically significant about Pacific Rim’s operation has nothing to do with its supposed falsity or reliance on digital processes, let alone the idea that Del Toro somehow “betrayed” the noble legacy of men in rubber suits smacking each other around in front of a wind machine. My questions gather instead around the fraught connection where that whole aesthetic fetish for the “real,” the hand-hewn, heftable, or photographed – rather than processed, calculated, and animated – blurs into the dense system of human work, digital processing, technical knowledge, and visual experience that gives form to it and lets it even be seen in the first place.

When we look at that connection, one of the first things that becomes visible is what doesn’t come into view, a recurring sense of the obscured. For instance, if we move back and forth from an animated leviathan fight to the actual hardware that plays the file for us, we find that any real links between how the device was made, how it operates, what it is supposed to do for us, and what it actually does are heavily barred from the visibility they enact. In one sense, these links are hidden in the way that any commodity, especially a mass-produced one, covers the explicit tracks of its path from “rare earth” metals to Foxconn to living room to e-waste processing site.⁷ In short, in the still-active colonial pathways through which the double structure of race and wage was forged and which gave ground to early experiences and understandings of commodity fetishism.⁸ Yet these images hide those passages further than the standard-issue erasure of human work in the process of industrial-scale manufacture. Consider the reigning object that marks “advanced,” and implicitly evil, technology in these films, yet which they can’t help drooling over ad infinitum. It is an object that collapses the gap between image and interface. The touchscreen, be it Oblivion’s table-length tablets or Battleship’s handheld ones. The ubiquitous screens – be it in Elysium or Robot and Frank – of translucent glass on which information can appear and vanish without a trace. Or the furthest extension of barely-thereness: the holographic OS which in the Iron Man films that lets Tony Stark play goateed Sherlock in a neon charnal field,⁹ in the X-Men series becomes a map of all minds in the world, and in Prometheus gives the explorers a floating, glowing mini-Earth to cradle amidst a room-sized data map and marvel at the winsome cosmicness of it all. So, as speculative as the films claim to be, the real-world correlates of all those heftless screens are impossible to miss: phones, tablets, and laptops caught in the arms race of the last decade to be ever-thinner, ever-lighter, shrinking their lithium ion batteries to the point of latent explosion. All approach a fantasy point where what you hold weighs nothing and has no depth yet can still be touched, swept, and pinched, a screen untethered from both its mass and history of manufacture, a window that does not even need glass to frame and show.

Sabotage always stood opposed to the ideal of the smooth and thin, from the first years when it started to take shape as a concept and name a means of informal shadowed revolt against productivity, imperial management, gendered control, and policing, when it articulated a way of refusing to answer to what was supposed, and allowed, to count as politics. It insists instead on thickness, though not the literal roughness or thickness of an apparatus, like some awful steampunk/“artisanal” rewiring of a phablet. (As if the manifestly tangible couldn’t equally become a fetish. As if it hasn’t already.) Rather, sabotage highlights and gains quiet strength from the technical and historical roughness, density, embedded affects, and internal contradictions of things and systems, whether family forms, transportation networks, weather patterns, or assembly processes. It insists on this insofar as it requires a deep connection with the machines, commodities, affects, concepts, and spaces that curse us to endure them, a collusion with enemy materials against their expected social forms and beneficiaries. After all, you can’t sabotage something until you know intimately how it ought to work and hence where the points of friction between ought and does really lie.

In short, sabotage is not only the name of the act that goes literally missing in Elysium and the majority of films I’ve mentioned. It’s also a name for the prospect denied by their vision in total, an incomplete but attempted cancellation. More specifically, this cinema forms the most extensive contemporary visual effort in a long historical foreclosure of the kind of looking, analyzing, and interfering that sabotage describes, and this closure has gained force in the same years when sabotage has shown itself to be an increasingly necessary angle on the bloody stalemate of representational politics.¹⁰ So taken in sum, these images form a sprawling portrait of possible complication and openness that gets thwarted over and over again, even if it never shows itself in anything so obvious as a touchscreen-piloted drone that lacks any discernible nuts and bolts to loosen or an exhaust port to piss in. Rather, the closure comes in what isn’t seen, in the snarls and tangles missing from these passages of driftwood spun from silicon, in these images that purport to hate the machines that make the images but know only how to celebrate them.

Still, as noted above, this is an incomplete cancellation, and I wouldn’t bother to write any of this if I thought all that might be said of such images was what they refused to acknowledge. Because as the Foxconn story suggests, the friction points of, and continued social resistance to, the dispersed networks of capital haven’t disappeared in the least. In that sense, finding any link between the functionless PlayStation and the images that films like Elysium offer needs to begin with the recognition that there is no determinate historical reason why such sabotage should be unthinkable, especially as the very hardware on which it is designed to be seen is still subject to this. To be sure, some of the reasons why this kind of subversion rarely makes it to the screen are the same reasons why it has been excluded from much of the history of capital-intensive moving images: because it has been demonized from the start, because it suggests a counter-tendency, because it concerns visibility at its core, and, perhaps above all, because it suggests that images might be more dangerous than they get taken to be.

But if sabotage hasn’t vanished in the world from which these films, shows, and games emerge, it means that it still is at work in the images, there somewhere, a disquieting openness, a double-hinged trap, a path open to reversal. And perhaps it is only truly blocked from view and inaccessible insofar as we stay with the story and watch it on the terms it expects. Because sometimes watching wrong – watching too much, too distracted, too bored, too sad, too anything, or not enough something – can matter and can open out beyond the limits of the film.

In the theater in that July when I dodged the heat to watch Pacific Rim, it was hard to make out just what was happening. The film’s palette is already dark and dull, already filled with nighttime fights in an unlit sea, and through the mute grey of the polarized 3D glasses, I squinted to see an atomic payload being carried to another world through a hole in the sea of this one, trying and failing to make out who was doing what, what was flesh and what was metal, what was the spray of the phantom sea and what was the smudged dust on the surface of my glasses themselves. I took them off, wondering if I had simply smeared popcorn butter on them. Looking at the screen without them, at the blur of what needs to be converted to make sense, it wasn’t all that different. Something was raging, someone was dying, something tremendous was coming to pieces and being thrown up and down by the wind, in a gale of pixels or screws or foam or blood, and the sea was furious, but then it became air, and then rain, and then hours, and then data, and then money, and then into tiny droplets, and finally into mist.

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1 Note that for all the film’s muttering about healthcare and, hence, attention to the fragility of flesh, it is here so far from a Tetsuo lineage that the very possibility of infection is absent, despite that massive amount of metal getting affixed to one human body allegedly just days from radiation-poisoned death.

2 It is in this regard a truly capitalist fantasy: the threat of automation can be localized into drones, ships, and targeting systems, while leaving the fundamental ground of production still bound to the wage.

3 See my essay “Manual Override,” available at The New Inquiry: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/manual-override/.

4 The nostalgia trip gets even deeper, as Danger has an “appearance, faded blue paint job and romanticized decal [that] invokes the visual design fighter aircraft like Vought F4U Corsair from the World War II era,” according to the disarmingly complete Pacific Rim Wiki site, combined with the stylings of the Chrysler Building and the “saunter” of John Wayne.

5 Even if the one discrete product placement in the film is not a Dodge or a Ford but a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

6 http://www.artofvfx.com/battleship-grady-cofer-superviseur-vfx-ilm/

7 See “Unfrozen” in this volume.

8 On this question, I’d especially recommend Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

9 See “Glass Hands” in this volume for a much longer discussion of the touchscreen.

10 This is part of a longer argument than I’ll fully engage with here, as it is part of a book-length project on sabotage. In brief, though, we can think of the present relevance of sabotage, and the history of its transformation, on two main counts. First, sabotage acts now, as it has for a century, as a counter to the catastrophe of representational politics and the continued insistence that only what shows, identifies, quantifies, presents, and names itself gets to register as political. Such an insistence is not new, but the pastdecades have fully revealed this political vision of classical causality, untroubled representation, and insistence on publicness to be as vacuous as it is lethal. Second, as detailed in the essay “Figures in a Threatscape” in this volume, we occupy and negotiate lived spaces where seemingly innocuous objects, such as a printer, show themselves capable of being activated in surprising and potentially destructive reversals. This has often been hailed as a novel situation, but if we look at the history of sabotage – especially as a form of reading and amplifying the latent possibilities that take shape in the entanglement of social, spatial, and technical structures – we find that this sense of activation, hidden revolt, and collaboration with inanimate elements is hardly unique to digital technologies.

TWO VARIETIES OF COMPLAINT

Through the late ’90s and the first decade of the ’00s, one of the most frequent complaints about digital compositing was that it looked “unreal” – which specifically meant not that the entire thing looked artificial but that it didn’t hang together right, that elements came untethered from the sense of an integral image as if they occupied not just different spaces but different media and laws of physics. Cheekbones become textureless hexagons, and fire hovers in the air as the fist it burns bobs around markedly unscathed while a few goblins skulk the periphery in lo-res like they got loose from a remaindered Dreamcast game. A Joshua Rothkopf and David Ehrlich list in Time Out New York nails a few of the more infamous examples, like The Rock’s head digi-grafted onto a scorpion’s body in The Mummy Returns, or the painfully long moments in Die Another Day when Pierce Brosnan surfs a collapsing glacial wave on airplane fuselage. I remember that scene mostly for how cravenly it tries to cash in on snowboarding’s passing moment in the financial sun,¹ but it’s also one where the composite is decidedly off, flat but popping wrong, as convincing as flapping your arms in front of a cloud screensaver and calling it a flight scene.

My favorite instance of this kind of supposed failure comes in 2011, towards the tail end of this kind of complaint, in the madcap mess that is Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, a sequel that doesn’t want to be cheapened by using the number 2 in its title but nevertheless feels a lot like Keystone Kops plus demons and a perma-drunk Idris Elba, all of which on a budget that’s $35 million lower than the series’ first outing. The film looks, for all intents and purposes, like they simply ran out of money for effects midway through production. But rather than recalibrate or opt for the more subtle and far cheaper Val Lewton route of keeping the monstrous shapeshift offscreen and alluded to with angular shadows, they just fudge some of the demonic transformations and battles. It’s all detached tongues of flame, sudden cuts into a lightless dimension (where you don’t have to bother compositing characters into actual backdrops, just leave them glowing and a bit smeared against flat black), and unadorned triangles unfurling into space, with everything pulled off fast enough to hopefully dodge attention as Nicolas Cage howls like a banshee and tosses off shit one-liners. The Transformers films enacted a similar thing in similar years, but with nearly triple the budget, they make it into a principle of the greatest cost by shooting it all in high frame-rate and letting it unfold at molasses speed, a dump truck turning into a racist caricature one scratched chrome tetrahedron at a time.

To come across these instances indeed provokes an experience of unreality, or at least a sudden recalibration from the conditions of watching that you were just in, pulling you away from any feeling that a screen is a translucent window onto a volume within which little scorpion kings sway and rule. But in that way, it’s a jagged unreality, bristling with inconsistencies and always revealing the pixel-raw edges of its making, a mosaic you can’t squint into smoothness. This is the reason I’ve always found the more cut-rate versions of these moments remarkable, because they keep ruining the sense that what you are seeing took place all at once and on the same set or highway. Instead, they make us aware of the process of being absorbed because, despite their best efforts, they never manage to let that process become total. Instead, things keep feeling too close or too far, at different resolutions, grainy and blockish and threatening to tip into what can’t quite be identified but has come undone from the scene’s ground all the same, stealing attention and refusing to resolve into any adequate figuration, at once a stain, a fang, a nimbus, a tear.

However, in the last fifteen years or so, the relative cost of complicated digital compositing, rendering, and animation has dropped starkly. Versions of all but the most proprietary software have become widely available for sale or torrent, and you can for the most part run them on a consumer-grade laptop. If you’ve got the urge, it’s easy enough to whip up decent fake snow with bootleg after-market effects and a tweaked particle-emitter plug-in – and if you can’t figure it out, there are thousands of hours of YouTube tutorials to explain the minutiae. One tendency of the last decades, then, has been something resembling a democratization of both this software and the aesthetics it tends to enable, opening out to others costly procedures that were once held close by an industry. The consequences range from startling works of experimentation far outside other sanctioned economic support structures to a whole lot of bullet time and melting title effects in homemade skate videos. And like the displacement of GPS from military to quotidian use, I think it’s too simple to treat this as either a liberation of technique or the diffusion of a control schema. Digitally rendered fire has no inherent politics, even if its uses are always partisan.

However, the relative ease of access to making these kinds of images is countered by an opposite tendency, which is evident in the fact that the budgets of blockbusters that rely most heavily on such processes have by no means dropped. Quite the opposite. Even adjusted for inflation, the first twenty-five of the most expensive films ever made come from 2005 and after, with seventeen of those from 2010 on, and a major part of these is their visual-effects budgets. Take Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, at an estimated $378.5 million the most expensive film ever made according to most counts. Like many such films, there’s no publicly available breakdown of its budget, other than rumors of how much Johnny Depp got paid to bug his eyes and waggle the beads. But when people started trying to figure just how it could possibly cost that much, an unnamed film exec noted that the bloated run time² added significantly, given that the cost of those effects was about $1 million per minute. Moreover, a closer look at how this massive capital outlay functioned reveals something telling about the interplay of money and technique in the construction of such images: that there’s no easy divide between material and digital production, between what gets filmed and what gets animated. The huge pirate ship sets in the series, for instance, were first designed digitally as 3D models.³ They were then physically constructed (including with the use of cheap labor in the Bahamas), before getting processed digitally once more, to be made available as a navigable environment or a matte for compositing. One ship, The Black Pearl, had been built for a previous entry in the series using form•Z (a 3D-modeling software) to design a physical skin or shell to literally wrap around an existing steel boat, extrapolating the basic procedure of creating volumetric forms at work in such software generally (i.e. the cladding or wrapping of a polygon mesh around a frame).⁴

A consequence of both these swelling budgets and the increasingly nuanced shuttling back and forth from software to sound stage (and boat yard, when needed) is that a different complaint about VFX in general and digital composting in particular has taken precedence, especially surrounding the most blockbuster of these films and shows. Far from seeming unreal in standing out as effects, the complaint is that they blend in too well, too seamlessly. It’s that they have no real heft or depth to them, not even when they’re converted to 3D after the fact: in short, that they are images adequate to that sort of absolute thinness of sealed hardware, allowing no substance or accident. If the first kind of complaint about CGI and compositing registers an incongruity that can’t be missed, the experience of watching these newer images engender a quieter contagion of doubt that’s hard to identify, even as I think most of us who watch these films and shows are familiar with the sensation. The most common description of it is a sort of weightlessness that becomes most visible in the gait of a character model or the long passages of destruction and debris that typically take up at least thirty of such films’ final forty-five minutes. For instance, a post by Brian McKevitt titled “Please Stop Ruining Everything with CGI” offers a common version: “I don’t believe it when Wolverine smashes against the CGI train and I don’t feel anything when the actor he’s ‘fighting’ gets bounced back a few hundred feet. It clearly doesn’t matter WHAT happens unless they happen to swing him too close to the fan blowing his hair around.”⁵ Elsewhere, we find laments that “CG still has an eerie, weightless, plastic quality,”⁶ that “green screen blockbusters [are] filled with weightless interaction,”⁷ that we watch “weightless CGI creations.”⁸ The creatures “seem to have no heft to them, floaty and weightless.”⁹ We sit through scenes where “even simple walking animation look[s] incredibly weightless and unnatural.”¹⁰ In the Star Wars prequels, “they walk as if there’s no weight to their bodies (things don’t ‘bounce’ when they step as they should), motions are too fluid when they do them, and it looks like animation rather than real life movements.”¹¹ In The Fellowship of the Ring, the “rams bounce weightlessly and effortlessly up the steep cliffs, looking more like ping-pong balls than heavy animals.”¹² In The Hobbit, Azog the Defiler is a “weightless worm of a creature on his CGI’d Warg.”¹³ In Terminator Genisys, “the one-ton robot flying down the highway somehow manages to lightly flip and bounce like a two-pound puppy.”¹⁴ In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, “weightless CGI apes riding weightless CGI horses and fighting a weightless CGI horse is just too much stuff that doesn’t look right all at once.”¹⁵ And in that same Time Out roundup of CGI mistakes mentioned earlier, the authors insist that “the sight of Neo fighting a phalanx of Agent Smiths looks exactly like a man fighting a computer program” and that “the weightlessness of the visuals make the stakes feel so low that the movie can never recover from the silliness.”¹⁶ And on and on.

I don’t disagree with any of this, other than the idea that real-life movements are more interesting than animation or that movies about doing Wing Chun inside a terrible allegory are supposed to “recover from the silliness” rather than own it. But I don’t disagree with the complaint of weightlessness, for the simple reasons that, first, like a lot of viewers I’ve felt that same sense of dematerialization, that heftless crunch where cars collide like paper planes; and, second, what this sensation registers isn’t some mistaken impression. That property of the weightless and free-floating is a real aspect of how visual information is processed and produced by the modeling and animation software chugging along behind such films. In this way, that split suggested previously¹⁷ – between the thick and the thin image – doesn’t adequately explain what is at stake in our unease or frustration with digitally composited sequences. Because this sense of the uncannily weightless, insubstantial, inconsequential, and, yes, unreal is also a consequence of production leaving too marked a trace on the finished image, of never being cleanly delineated or severed from the final product. However, it is a negative trace, only discernible in what is too smooth, too seamless, too clean, and without enough carefully reintroduced qualities of incidence and mass that we would process as physical, leaving us slightly nauseous and with the impression of watching a climactic battle fought by ghost balloons in a retrofitted Apple store.

What strikes me in both cases is the way that although we experience and describe these remnants as somehow “unreal” or “false” because they appear to violate the most seemingly fundamental capacities of our vision (like distinguishing motion that feels living, cohesive, and heavy from the spectral, glitching, and inconstantly substantial), they also signal a distinctly historical negotiation always up for grabs and registering on two quite different levels, however connected. On one side, there’s a sense of unease that comes from knowing that technical forms change faster than we do – or, more accurately, from knowing that we have already transformed in step with these new modes without recognizing it and giving it a name.¹⁸ On the other, though, is an industry response that tries to capitalize on that disquiet. In the last couple years, that has taken the form of a generalized urge to “return to practical effects.”¹⁹ One summation of the Star Wars panel at 2015 Comic Con reported that, “from ‘practical effects’ to ‘real sets,’ seemingly all anyone had to say about The Force Awakens is that Abrams and company are throwing their computers out of the window because they want to make something real.”²⁰ The furor around Mad Max: Fury Road was especially fixated on this, treating it like some messianic rejoinder to the excesses and insubstantiality of the digital: the film, a review raves, “doesn’t have CGI cars bouncing weightlessly across a desert, kicking up weightless sand. It has real cars. Really driving. Across a real desert.”²¹

And this declared thirst for the practical isn’t limited to the techniques at play in production itself. It’s also become a key part of publicity, part of a wider tendency to advertise by explaining how the trick is done even before the magic show begins. Consider the way that AAA/blockbuster games still in beta are shown off to the press, in terms of what happens not only onscreen but also behind it, thanks to the endless patter of a developer-cum-pitchman who moves seamlessly from the new fluid combat system to the expansive open-world dystopia to the proprietary physics engine that makes it all jump. Or the way that ads for Furious 7 not only gave away the film’s fanciest set piece, the cars-falling-out-of-planes-with-parachutes stunt. They also laboriously explained how they really did it, with real cars and real parachutes, a line picked up in breathless news headlines like “Yes, Real Cars Fell From Real Planes For That ‘Furious 7’ Stunt.” Or in the more specialized orbit of contemporary art, consider The AK47 vs. The M16, a 2015 work by The Propeller Group (a collective based in Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles) that involved simultaneously firing a bullet from each of the titular guns into a ballistics gel block so that they collided, the tiny fragmentation and splinters frozen and contained in the pellucid pseudo-flesh. (A “freeze-frame,” in the apt words of the collective.) It looks like nothing so much as a 3D printer still from a sniper game’s kill-cam or a screengrab of the title sequence from a recent Bond film. But in its installation at the 2015 Venice Biennale, the block itself was accompanied by a high-frame-rate video of the collision contained in that very gel right there in front of us, as if marking a corrosive double uncertainty: about the ability of a static object to bear witness to the process of its making, and about the capacity of moving images to prove that what they show “really happened” out in the world somewhere, rather than being created in a physics sim to be plugged into a game or film.

They’re hardly alone in this. The AK47 vs. The M16 wasn’t the only instance of this palpable worry at even that one exhibition. Just around the corner from it was Hiwa K’s The Bell, a dual-channel video that details, on one screen, an Iraqi foundry that melts down metal “war waste,” and, on the other, the process of that same metal being forged into a bell in a Milanese foundry that has been operative for seven centuries. But also present in front of the screens was the bell itself – as if the artist was convinced that the video alone could not transmit its force. This is the acid doubt lurking behind decades of complaints about what doesn’t blend in well and what does too well, what feels clunky and what is tossed around by a nameless wind. We no longer believe images are capable of bearing the traces of what they represent without literally confirming it by showing in space what they show, by explaining the trick, by promising us that the object could be touched even if the museum won’t allow it, or by assuring us that yes, real cars fell out of real planes in a real sky in a real world, even if the car is driven by a stunt double with a synthesis of a dead actor’s face mapped onto it, a phantom light blurring around the edges, really.

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1 The film is from 2002, the same year as XXX’s even more craven attempt to get in on the action, with Vin Diesel parachuting, snowboarding, creating an avalanche with grenades, and then outrunning said avalanche, in that order.

2 Not that bloated in terms of what would come just a few years later, though. At two and a quarter hours, it’s positively snappy compared to the lumbering torpor that is three hours of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

3 In the words of the production designer Rick Heinrichs, “having these boat designs in the computer gave us the ability to send and e-mail the files to marine architects, who determined whether the boats would float or not.”

4 The boat doesn’t appear onscreen in Stranger Tides, at least not in its previous form. Instead, a new ship was once again designed digitally first, before the top half of the retrofitted Pearl was hacked off and replaced with the physical construction of that design.

5 http://thisisinfamous.com/please-stop-ruining-everything-with-cgi/

6 http://boingboing.net/2013/06/03/long-live-real-fake-fx.html

7 http://www.cine-vue.com/2016/01/special-feature-cgis-bare-necessities.html

8 Jonathan Stubbs, Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 152.

9 According to a self-professed “Gundamentalist” on an AR15 message board, in one of the stranger orbits of VFX criticism. http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1713929_.html&page=1

10 http://animationrevelation.com/readables/?p=6022

11 http://www.cinelinx.com/movie-stuff/item/6025-why-people-can-t-enjoy-the-vfx-in-the-star-wars-prequels.html

12 According to none other than Kristin Thompson: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2015/05/24/the-waning-thrills-of-cgi/

13 http://www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/the-five-most-irritating-ways-peter-jacksons-the-hobbit-deviated-from-the-book.php

14 http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-expensive-films-end-up-with-crappy-special-effects/

15 http://letterboxd.com/vrizov/film/dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/

16 https://www.timeout.com/newyork/movies/the-10-worst-cgi-special-effects-in-movie-history

17 In “Driftwood and Silicon.”

18 See the chapters “Glass Hands” and “Operator Error” in this volume for more on this.

19 This mostly refers to moments of collision, fire, mutation, or gore, given that compositing landscapes or backdrops in shots is a technique as old as moving images and no one seems to be suggesting a return to optical printing for films shot digitally.

20 http://www.tor.com/2015/07/27/practically-speaking-why-do-we-hate-cgi-so-much/

21 http://mckeestory.com/the-destructive-beauty-of-mad-max-fury-road-2015/

SHARD CINEMA

… everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down.

– Marshall Berman¹

1. Going to Pieces

If you were to undertake a survey of the largest-budget cinema of roughly the past two decades or, more simply, if you have just watched a decent amount of it, a single situation will be seen to repeat so frequently that it starts to feel conspiratorial in its ubiquity. It can be seen in Constantine, when the Devil comes to Earth and decides to make a splashy entrance, shattering a glass door and strolling through the shards that hang motionless in the air before him. Or in the forest-escape scene in Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, where splinters of trees struck by bullets creep slowly across the space that the protagonists sprint through, time seesawing back and forth between glacial crawl and pell-mell dash – though never once slipping backwards or losing its place. Or in the lobby going to pieces in The Matrix, the surfaces and walls and girders shot to pieces choking the air but never interfering with the various cartwheels, prodigious feats of gunmanship, or leather pants stalking humorlessly through the mess. Or in the force-field sky doing the same in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, crumbling and falling like blue ash onto the open mouths below.²

There’s also the breaking ice shelf in The Day After Tomorrow, its chunks dropping into the abyss in front of a pastel dawn. Or the glass scattering softly over the faces of the sleeping heist crew in Inception, limbs limp and ragged as the van rolls and rolls. There are different cars elsewhere, like the crash scene in Death Proof, replicated in a tripling loop, or the one in Doctor Strange, with glass floating on by the whiplashing Doctor, or the bullet that breaks a passenger-side window on its way to pass through first Ray Liotta and then the other window in Killing Them Softly. There are windows, always windows. One is crowbarred in the credits of Zombieland, where the clear surface only makes itself known to us at the moment that the metal hits the invisible plane, suddenly revealing a division too polished to see.³ Another gets leapt through, eyes closed, in the Ghost in the Shell reboot. And thrown through, to start Ma-Ma’s plunge to her death in Dredd, dropping floor after floor through the open center of the tower, wreathed in haze and glittering glass, falling for a full minute and forty seconds, falling forever.

There’s the death of The Comedian in Watchmen, which seeks out every breakable surface in order: first the screen of a television, then a mirror, then a wall, then a glass table, then another glass table, then a glass picture frame, then a counter, and finally a plate-glass window, whose pieces twinkle and ring like ice.⁴ The supercar that does the same, leaping from skyscraper to skyscraper in Abu Dhabi in Furious 7, exploding from their mirrored skins like some automotive chestburster. The aliens in Edge of Tomorrow, constructed of glass that is cracked even before it is fully broken by guns or swords.⁵ The obsidian shards that make up the creatures of Snow White and the Huntsman, both their interior and exterior, just broken black igneous glass all the way through. The same obsidian redeployed in the sequel (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) as stiffened tentacles that break skin easily but break when touched back, tuning the balance between fragility and stiffness that rivets the movie.⁶ And somewhere amidst all these, that robot worm-python of Transformers: Dark of the Moon burrows through and then strangles the Chicago skyscraper, and the putative heroes slide down the mirrored outside to cry out this cinema’s most basic injunction: shoot the glass!

This image of shards – at once a moment, a technique, a style, a special effect, and a conception of what it is that sight could or should want to take in – isn’t limited to action, science fiction, and fantasy movies. It is present especially in games that might become films and vice versa, anywhere the navigable environment responds to what you do and what you do is wreak havoc on the living, the dead, and the built alike. We can also see it further afield from these spasms of stoicism, glee, and devastation, in other modes that turn on the same technology but to different ends. The shards are there in video work designated or exhibited as contemporary art: in Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun and its glittering fragment swarms; in the disintegrating and coalescing scatter of Ian Cheng’s live simulations; and in Carlos Amorales’ Dark Mirror and its decomposing glassy forms. They’re the core of a Beyoncé commercial for Pepsi, whose exploding mirrors are paired with an injunction to “embrace your past”; and Lindsey Stirling’s music video “Shatter Me,” whose title tells you all you need to know; and the promo gif for Warren Ellis’ e-book Normal, in which the title does what Stirling’s lyrics insist on and shatters, reforms, shatters, and on from there. They drive the Sony Bravia commercials of floating bubbles that turn into ice and then fracture, and the 2016 Mercedes-Benz GLA ad that promises a car which “shatters the molds of design, shatters the molds of performance, and shatters the limits of technology.” That promise is made literal in the commercial, with every glass item or surface of a gentrified Seattle neighborhood coming to pieces in the wake of the car’s leisurely roll, a cataclysm of brunch and barber shops under the sign of ascendant class envy. At one point, the sheer brute luxury of the passing car causes the marquee sign of the Paramount theater – an actual movie palace built in 1928 but now no longer devoted to showing films – to devastate itself, every bulb bursting into tiny splinters and sparks, as though fastidiously ruining the last vestiges of anything that once looked like cinema.

All of which is to say that in these and plentiful other instances, a recurrent obsession has emerged to become arguably one of the most common tropes in films, television, games, ads, and moving images in general. It is to depict the after-effect of one or more destroyed surfaces and to do so in extreme slow-motion, shot in high frame-rate or digitally animated to produce that sensation, often with a camera that orbits around or winds its way unhurried through the chaos. The fragments are decelerated to the point of near-arrest, only barely spreading through the air. Sometimes they clatter gently against each other and other elements of the scene, but usually they touch nothing in particular. For all intents and purposes, this is the breaking of whatever can be made to go to pieces and the application of bullet time to whatever remains. More often than not, it is organized around the passage of few figures through this space, themselves never cut or even touched by the scree and spray. At least until the moment when their own bodies, whether flesh, metal, or glass themselves, become suddenly subject to the same principle and, broken and ruined, become one more thing to come listlessly apart before wide and weary eyes.

Part of the point of this essay, and this book as a whole, is simply to ask why. Why has the image of gradually dissembling or shattered surfaces, objects, and bodies become increasingly prevalent? And despite some notorious precedents, like the climactic exploding house of Zabriskie Point in 1970, why has it become ubiquitous in the specific span of years – roughly from 1999 on – from which all these examples are drawn?

Amongst articles and reviews that touch on these films and games, and in conversations I’ve had with people in the couple years since I’ve become fixated on this, two answers recur most frequently. One: such effects were not possible before now, and large-budget films always use the newest technologies to captivate audiences. Two: the kind of films that both cost and make the most money are those obsessed with destruction and so they spend a lot of their time depicting cities/windows/androids/hearts getting broken in high resolution. Neither of these answers strike me as wholly wrong, but they also don’t tell us more than what we already suspect about the world.

As for the first one, the shards indeed do signal and rely on a novel capacity to generate complex images like this – whether through extremely high frame-rate shooting, an all-CG simulation, or a hybrid of the two, composited into a single shot – that couldn’t be done as easily or at all before, depending on which example we’re talking about. However, the glaring problem with this explanation is how it suggests that aesthetic tendencies can be explained by what is technically possible. At least so far in human history, that’s never been the case. New technological capacities obviously expand certain options that weren’t possible before, like the development of iron and glass architecture in the nineteenth century or of mechanically reproducible moving images. But those options never explain what people choose to do with a medium, whether to build temples or arcades, to shoot forests or tenderness or chariots or fury. Nor do they tell us anything about how those options are enacted or about the manifest gap between the technically possible and the economically profitable, no small point given that we’re dealing with an aesthetic that was first and most intensely championed by productions that cost at bare minimum the price of a Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor fighter jet (around $150 million).

The other immediate answer – that the overwhelming majority of the highest-grossing films in this period are action blockbusters that rely heavily on digital compositing and so are bound to have this kind of image – also gets something right, at least in spurring further thought about how genre expectations, style, and production intersect. Moreover, it drives us to ask whether these shards are just a small mutation in the continuity of spectacular violence at work in moving images from their start, or if there are new coordinates specific not only to a shard aesthetic but also to what that even understands as violent. Still, in terms of making sense of why we’ve all been seeing these fragments, particles, and drifting chaos so frequently in recent years, that answer gets it wrong in at least three major ways.

First, it can’t account for the specific style of shard cinema: not only destruction but the dilatory, dreamy haze of it all, the lingering bagginess of its time, the casual disregard for gravity, the flagrant indifference to realism, the wild delicacy and prettiness that cuts so hard against the narrative fantasies of practicality and masculine glory. None of these properties necessarily follow from the way these images were made nor do they necessarily result from even the more restricted frame of how such a process might depict what we recognize as war, shootouts, planetary collapse, magic, alien invasion, winter, prison breaks, or devastation writ large. The very same artists, studios, camera rigs, software, and even particle emitters, shattering sims, and fluid meshes, could all be used to produce images of carnage that were, for instance, impossibly hectic, top-speed and concatenating, a relentless and brutal flicker that never gives you the time to even try and find sense in the gale.⁷

Second, this answer assumes an implicit causality, whereby a desired content comes before the effects that inflect it, i.e. the thirst for violence drives a hunt for twinkling ice. However, this causality and its order of operations are fundamentally off. I don’t make this point simply because it feels to me that the effects do (and should) take precedence. Rather, I do so on the ground of a brief but hugely telling comment that appears in an interview with the VFX artists on 300: Rise of an Empire (2014), Zack Snyder’s extended trailer for CrossFit spliced with old-fashioned male melodrama and weapons-grade Orientalism. Along with Dredd and the more recent Transformers outings, the film includes the most hyperbolic instances of the kind of time, vision, and experience that shard cinema suggests. It’s a lot like reading de Sade – you can tell how bored the film’s crew and cast were by having to bother with even the skeletal traces of a plot supposed to narratively validate what they were really interested in: the arias of gymnastic sadism; the crystalline spray of materials lingering in the air; and the sheer bravura of an inconstant space where no physical laws hold fast and everything is organized around producing a chain of improbable, just-in-time gestures that coalesce around whatever can be made to splinter or leak.

It’s a film, in short, that speaks to what’s so contradictory about those shard moments. They not only promise but enact a tremendous visual freedom, one that insists that there’s so much to see that usually exceeds us, and that it is worth wasting any amount of time, equipment, processing power, and money to try and see it. They examine what a camera can do that we don’t expect it to be capable of and what happens when a camera is no longer needed in the same way, or at all, to produce images that we nevertheless watch as if they’d been filmed – catching us off-kilter again and again. They open a field for tremendous distraction and reflection, to sit in the dark and get lost in a swarm, to see how skin and space and software can entangle in strange ways; and they give us the room to do that, holding single microseconds open wide to let time breathe through and gather in eddies around a huff of vapor from a horse’s mouth. They do all this, and they also deny almost everything that is interesting about it, slamming the door on all those possibilities by restricting the occasions where they might emerge to only those that verify imperial violence, corroborate the most boring of macho martial fantasies, and cement their alignment with tremendous expenditures of wealth, making images that look like capital and smell like death. They let our sight go anywhere, through any space, at any speed, but they always bring us right back to a ripped chest through which a sword slashes drowsily.

Nothing sums up this contradiction so much as the material in the film that’s most obsessively subject to being shown in this way: the blood. Blood gets everywhere, including on the lens, and in most shapes conceivable, especially as diaphanous and viscous plumes that hang in the air like scarlet scarves or flags for some liquid-crystal nation. It’s so at the center of the whole enterprise that, according to Danielle Plantec (the VFX supervisor at Scanline in Los Angeles and Vancouver), they “actually had an entire team devoted to blood.”⁸ It shows. The blood is decorative, weird, and lovely; but still, it is ever and always blood, so that its aesthetic force, which genuinely exceeds the story, always gets bound back to extraordinary corporal damage, only allowed to appear onscreen when a body is ruined. In this schema, beauty only appears as a side effect of war, its apologia and consolation prize.

And yet, according to that same interview with Plantec, there was no inherent reason why this had to be the case. She notes that “early on there was a point where they didn’t want blood in the film – they wanted to do something different from before. So we were experimenting with other things from chunks of body to crystals to dust to it being black blood.” The admission is remarkable, because what it suggests is that the signature hyperviolence of the film is the narrative occasion, support, and excuse for the effect that was desired, not the reason the effect was deployed. To make it plainer: we don’t see this kind of image because the film had to be violent, even though it was an obvious preference. Rather, the film had to be violent at least in part because that was the most coherent and marketable way to justify those moments of expansive and ornamental dilation. Those are the moments that not Snyder himself but the studio – the producers and financial backers in it for the capital gains – recognize have to be there. You can swap out the material, make it blood, black blood, flesh, crystals, oil, frosting, feathers, cum, carpet, glitter, or dust, but the unspoken constant that the viewers come to see is the effect itself, the shard moments around which the whole film is built. And towards that end, Scanline came up with “a 17 minute reel trying all the different ideas,” which I’d love to see if only for the alternate narratives it might suggest. (The glorious Mediterranean battle between crystal and dust…) But in the end, Warner Bros “decided to go down the blood route,” and so blood it is that once again gets to pirouette, roam, and shine.⁹

This points to a final problem with trying to explain shard cinema primarily in terms of explicitly violent imagery or an action-movie mode of wrecking everything in sight. Because absurdly plentiful as they are, those shard moments are only the most literalized version of a wider tendency. Just as the violence is the narrative support structure for the shattering effect, so too that shattering is itself needed to give some grounding to the more basic impulse: to display a sheer chaos of visual information too complex to process at any one moment yet with ample, slow-motion time to fail at doing so. This can be seen in the way that the air of these images isn’t only filled with what seems fragile enough to become shards, or with the rockier debris that fills any game with destructible environments.¹⁰ Above all, that air is suffused with particles, an endless array of dust, snow, glow, foam, and spray that often has no real narrative explanation, looking simply like points, quanta, and pixels.¹¹

In one sense, these particles serve as a way to extend a shard cinema sense of time beyond the sequences that are explicitly slowed down, because they often float or bob about in a gradual drift even as the rest of the scene occurs at normal rate. The effect, basically, lets you have the dreamy pseudo-sublime of bullet time while suffering through banal dialogue about a mutant’s duty to a humanity that spurns them. Despite this, though, they are for the most part designed to be an indifferent chaff that specifically does not “draw attention” (according to Cinesite’s VFX supervisor Richard Clarke¹²), producing a diffuse sensation that never quite pulls the eyes to any one point. Some films do bring them closer to center, especially when there’s good narrative reason. For instance, the highest-grossing animated film of all time, Frozen, relies so heavily on particles, specifically of snow, that a propriety software called Matterhorn¹³ had to be developed to handle the load and pull off a granular realism of sticky clumps and shearing effects. In order to do this, Matterhorn quite literally computes the movement and mass of each and every particle of snow on the screen, resulting in a wildly dense compression of computing force and render hours present in every second of arctic sing-along.

But Frozen is the exception in having its particles so tightly bound to its narrative. To return to 300: Rise of an Empire again – for what won’t be the last time, I fear – what accompanies all that gore is a genuinely ridiculous quantity of what the crew on the film called “ridleys” (after Ridley Scott, whose 1985 film Legend obsessively fills the air with little particles and motes): dust and wee sparkles, with no reason to be there, filling every space to such a degree that fans proposed drinking games triggered by the sight. (“Drink whenever you see floating particles (dust, ash) in the frame to give 3D customers their money’s worth…”¹⁴) Occasionally they are given some semblance of connection to what else is happening in the scene, but even then, they’re so prevalent as to ruin that connection, like the pollen that wafts through so thick that the sight alone probably triggered an allergic response in any viewer with hay fever. (If Zack Snyder had a trace of humor, there’d be at least one moment of a pissed-off soldier sneezing terribly.) Or the sparks drifting away from campfires but just sticking around, again at such an actually absurd quantity that every shirtless Spartan bro present should be covered in a thousand tiny burns – except, of course, that the nature of these particles in such sequences is to flesh out the hollow volume of the composited scene but never to be present within it. As the VFX coordinator Charley Henley himself explained, they “added ‘floaties’ particles to fill the space and catch light.”¹⁵ To fill the space and catch light, indeed, but never to interfere with what happens in that space nor even be noticed by those gritting their teeth and yelling about freedom.

So why did floaties, broken panes, and the downtempo chaos of shard moments start to appear so frequently in the capital-intensive films, games, shows, and videos of the last two decades – first in the most heavily-funded output of Hollywood and the global games industry and then picked up in smaller productions, all the way down to discount bundles of pre-rendered shattering effects? One of the reasons, perhaps a smaller one, has a lot to do with the way that nominally different media borrow from, and generate interference with, each other, sometimes out of a purely mercenary drive by studios to capitalize on what is hot, sometimes due to artists and technicians learning from each other. (And most often, surely, some combination of the two.) As Scott McCloud put it regarding comic books: “whenever an artist invents a new way to represent the invisible, there is always a chance that it will be picked up by other artists. If enough artists begin using the symbol, it will enter the language for good.”¹⁶ His comment is doubly fitting, given that one of the clearest influences on shard moments is the sense of halted time that comics can handle so well. Reading them encourages, rewards, and teaches a kind of looking where the still drawing is animated by the roaming movement of the reader’s eye across the image, whipping from point to point or snail-creeping across the paper to lose ourselves in the details.¹⁷ And yet like moving-image bullet time, it never remains a complete and total stop, no matter how long you let the pieces hang, because the presence of other panels insists that it is always in sequence and that the pause will end, that we will at some point turn the page and finish the book, even as we go back to that one frame again and again like it has more to say. So given that the major part of recent blockbusters derive more or less explicitly from comics,¹⁸ with varying degrees of fidelity in attempts to replicate exact panels (as in Sin City) or just capture the overall feeling, it’s not surprising that moving images will try their best to mimic the unstill image that comics can create so well.¹⁹

Another one of the tendencies driving the rise of shard cinema is more naked in its profit motivation. Simply, when it began it was a way to show off processing power and technical capacity, not only because that might dazzle and wow audiences but, more pointedly, because it declared in each and every frame that this could not be done on the cheap, that this is not merely expensive: this is a monument to expense, this is 24 crystal pyramids a second, this is a bonfire of cash, hardware, and expertise – that will, of course, make it all back in spades. When someone on an online forum for Unity²⁰ asked, “Could overuse of particle effects have destroyed my video card?,” responders jumped in to assure that it is “almost physically impossible for software to destroy hardware.” The shard moments produced by the biggest financial entities in moving images argue otherwise, insisting that, oh yes, it surely could have – because these effects are not for you to make. As noted, increased processing power for comparatively lower cost keeps widening the capacity to produce similar effects, but especially at their outset and through the first decade of the 2000s (at the end of which they had become doxa), these glass storms were the most flagrant way to flaunt what capital alone could do. They declared that what no plucky developer or group of film students could manage, no matter their skills or heart, was to make images so utterly thick with time, work, software, and money that, like entering a cathedral, you can only gape and marvel, not just because the visual information is so dense but also because it displays itself as beyond the reach of any making and intervention.

Yet the whole point of this essay is to suggest that as much as we need to understand how such industrial operations spur and constitute in often unseen ways the images, styles, and techniques that we come to adopt (and perhaps love) ourselves, those operations are never complete. They never tell the whole story, and they never entirely succeed. In part, that’s because they always borrow rapaciously from what never had any interest in their capital schemes. In the case of these shard images in particular, I want to argue that it is also because something else keeps happening: that far from succeeding in the intended closure and dazzle, such images keep opening back onto themselves and all the contradictions, frictions, and barbs buried in that passage from capital through the labor of the image to capital once more.

That is perhaps expecting a lot from images that often consist of a talking car somersaulting through the plate-glass window of Hot Topic. In hope of making it cogent, I’ll move gradually along two lines, both of which suggest deep links between the finished images we watch and the work and workflows behind them. First, the compositing of space as a fractured mosaic of frames, skins, and layers. Second, the experience of time both enacted and experienced as those spaces are navigated. Or, to put it differently: first, how what breaks is already broken; and second, how a slow passage through a partially thawed freeze-frame comes to look more than anything like the software that made it winter in the first place.

2. Surface Tension

To gain some sense of the way that space is constructed in shard cinema, we may as well start with its smallest units, those ever-present particles. As suggested earlier, the most explicit motivation behind them is to counter the flatness of the images. In the making of Dredd, Jon Thum (the visual supervisor of Prime Focus World) noted that, “[w]hen we first shot that sequence [of a massive shootout in the apartment complex] it looked flat and unimpressive. But that’s when the visual effects kick in, when you add those tracer fires and the dust and the debris, and you add it on top of everything, suddenly it looks incredibly dangerous.”²¹ What’s crucial in his comments is this tension between the attempt to produce a sense of danger – which requires making the depicted space feel inhabited, lethal, navigable, and deep – and the technique used to achieve that, which is to simply add heaps of chaff “on top of everything.”

This is hardly unique to Dredd. Throughout these productions, the superficial overlay of ridleys/floaties/particles is there to restore a sensation of continual and perspectival depth that has been cancelled out in the process of compositing (given that it isolates single elements to join into a shared frame). This is especially true for films in 3D, like Dredd or The Martian, where “practical” bits of fluff and dust were mixed with those generated in a computer, adding layer after layer to extend from the lens on out, “trying to maintain that perception of depth all the way to [the] background” (in the words of VFX supervisor Richard Stammers).²² And it’s all the more crucial for films not shot stereoscopically but converted after the fact,²³ like Edge of Tomorrow.²⁴ In trying to generate a sense of depth for that film, the “particle team” of Prime Focus worked “to generate extra dirt hits, missiles, and spray – not just for the extreme foreground but to fill up some of the mid-ground space also, to make it more interesting in 3D.”²⁵

However, the unique issues confronting 3D and 3D-conversion only amplify a general tendency. Consider the original use of those “ridleys” in their namesake Scott’s early-to-mid-’80s films. Richard Isanove, describing his work with Jae Lee on The Gunslinger Born, speaks of trying to bring that effect into his comics and notes that “If you look at Blade Runner or Legend, Ridley Scott has particles, smoke, and dust constantly floating in the air, which allows him to literally film the atmosphere.”²⁶ Here Isanove detects something vital about how the particles work in Scott’s films, and in film more generally prior to shard cinema. They articulate an urge towards a certain density, carried out by what moving images can uniquely enact: to make the air itself visible by means of what wafts through it across time, letting the screen transmit the sensation of wind to the skin of the watcher, like the waving grass in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

Something different is at stake in the shard moments of the past fifteen years when the ridleys go fully wild. A comment from John Hansen²⁷ about his work on Transformers: Age of Extinction gives a glimpse of this:

Instead of just a solid surface background, we layered in rising steam vents or falling mist like pockets of dry ice, showers of sparks, water drips, pockets of smoke floating in the air. It was a way of giving dimensionality as the camera flies through smoke and gave a lot of character to the spaceship.²⁸

However casual, his mention of “dimensionality” is telling, because it indicates something that isn’t a depiction of perspectival depth or extension in space per se. Instead, it’s a quality or look of dimension as after-effect, as successive layers that can be added in place of a “solid surface background” – yet don’t have to be. Hansen is describing, in essence, a way of constructing a feeling of unified deep space through a set of processes that have no need to make images in that way, no inherent reliance on a lens-based medium in front of which a single scene is arrayed all at once.²⁹ But because shard sequences gain their force from how they deviate from those inherited stylistic expectations (i.e. of what pointedly looks like it was shot with actors arrayed amongst sets in one place and time), the sequences will strive to reproduce that sense of coherent volume as a baseline even as they subsequently erode and explode it. So in come the floaties, filling the depthless space with what declares itself to be mass and matter but codes only as little specks and pixel clusters. They disperse through the air as if every coordinate point of the composited space was illuminated, a softly burning informal grid through which to plot the wayward movement of fragments and limbs.

That sense of cancelling cohesive depth yet restaging it through a set of additional tweaks, tricks, and particles marks a dynamic at the core of shard cinema, perhaps the fundamental motor of all its managed chaos. It would miss the point to frame or judge these techniques in terms of a loss of “real space,” as if the digital nature of their compositing indicated a newly impossible distance from an original realness of touch, weight, and volume.³⁰ Instead, we might think of the work that the particles do, and the work undertaken to make them happen, as part of the negation of a certain understanding of screen space as simultaneous, coherent, and roughly identical to the space in which it was filmed. To say negation in this context doesn’t mean a total absence or simple destruction of that understanding in favor of some brave new paradigm. It’s quieter and slower than that, an erosion of its constancy and familiar acceptance that happens in at least two distinct but ultimately commingled ways.

First, a certain image of how production works – where what we see onscreen is felt to function as a relatively faithful record of what happened in front of the camera, give or take a few mattes and a whole lot of makeup – gradually begins to fray. That image has never been an accurate depiction of how large-scale moving images are produced, given that they’ve always involved a scattered passage through the offices, editing suites, prop closets, motion-capture studios, catering trucks, and all the hands of those who cut, clean, write, pull focus, rig the lights, balance the books, and carry out the other countless small gestures that form the support structure of the film. In this past two decades, however, this carefully managed workflow has become newly circuitous and granular, traversing the Earth not only in pre-production location-scouting or in the eventual distribution of prints, but multiple times in a single day as individual frames and shots are sent back and forth around the world through data networks. Moreover, the increasing use of previs (i.e. previsualization, a low-res 3D graphical rendering of sets, scenes, or potential camera movements) further undoes the sense of a clear division between pre-production, production, and post-production – as well as any idea that the digital tinkering only happens after the fact.³¹ As Janek Sirrs, VFX supervisor on The Avengers, puts it plainly, “there’s not really any distinction anymore between previs and postvis. They both blur into a single continuous task that runs from pre to post.”³²

Second, there’s a peculiar relation between the notion of space used to create digital composites and the ends to which they are put, especially in shard moments. Because while the final images are sometimes castigated for appearing chaotic, insubstantial, breezy, muddled, and happenstance, as if nothing had any solid grounding, the programs that animators and compositors use – Nuke, Maya, Houdini, After Effects, Fusion, etc. – are all structured on absolute precision and locatability. The simulation of a car crash can be enacted to generate suitably random encounters and fragmentation, yet all of the resultant shards will have a precise address in space at every moment, every spark an accompanying set of coordinates. And in composites that involve filmed elements, this digital precision extends out into the practical filming as well, with hardware such as NCam: a sensor bar attached to the camera that continually transmits data about the camera’s angle, location, focal length and which can be imported directly into the compositing software to make sure that all the elements sway and track in unison. Yet for all this mathematical definition and triumph of what Erwin Panofsky called “homogeneous space”³³ – where all elements are “mere determinations of position,” “points […] devoid of all content,” like so many ridleys – the visual consequences are often a dizzying incoherence and total unplaceability, thanks especially to a mode of distributed sight³⁴ whereby the camera can flit from point to point, squeezing itself through any crack. In 1944, György Kepes lauded cinema for “not only the accustomed frontal and profile-views but also the view from above, the bird’s-eye view, and that from below, the frog’s-eye view.”³⁵ Seven decades later, in Deadpool’s stunner of an opening, we share the view of a more fantastic and biologically improbable creature, exiting backwards out the center hole of a car cigarette lighter, through the lid of a coffee cup, and on from there, worming its way without gravity, size, or mass through the gathered debris of a halted moment of a collision, including more than a few glistening glass fragments. By means of a rigorously managed, capital-intensive, and computationally exact process, shard cinema succeeds in producing a crystalline image of something that purports to spit in the face of that management, a chaos spun from absolute rationalization.

But if that screen space of the composite image is negated in this way, what of the specific objects within it? Obviously, the digitally constructed vehicles, bodies, buildings, and glaciers most likely to go to pieces are far more complicated assemblages than the eventual splinters, chunks, or particles they become. They join together rigged wireframes,³⁶ layers with individually simulated physical properties, and polygon meshes, even aside from the final texture map, luminosity settings, and other specifications that will determine whether the skyscraper is reflective enough to let a supervillain adjust his unitard in front of it. In terms of what we as viewers see, though, it is always a set of surfaces. I don’t mean this only in the obvious sense that we are looking at a two-dimensional screen or that the exterior layer of any object, represented or otherwise, might be called its surface. Instead, these CGI forms involve a more extreme sense of superficiality, that of a skin that has been applied as cladding and wrap to a set of disaggregated forms beneath; or, in its simpler version, a skin that encloses nothing other than a skeletal frame over which it is stretched and the empty volume within. Because that is the basic principle at work in the construction of the digitally modeled items we see, especially those that will shatter into a million little pieces and lose any apparent distinction between interior and exterior. Disney’s first CGI animation test – a 1983 adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, directed by John Lasseter (Toy Story) – already poses the principle. As the narrator explains,

Once the vector test is approved, the real work begins. Each piece of vector animation must be modeled and shaped. In this case, the characters were painted by computer. The whole process is like stretching a layer of skin over a wire mesh frame.

The same goes for an even earlier instance, Futureworld (1976), a relative flop that was full of firsts: first feature film to include a digital composite (a set of loosely “samurai”-esque warriors that magically appear), first with a sequence of full computer animation, and first to get a general theatrical release in China.³⁷ What’s startling about Futureworld’s instance of computer animation, which shows a hand in wireframe outline (and later a polygonal face), is how much it works not only within the film’s skin-covered android plot but also as a gesture to the more complicated versions of such animation in years to soon follow. Because after first showing that skeletal hand, rotating endlessly³⁸ on a blank screen and articulating its fingers, the film shows it wrapped in a polygon mesh whose corners align with the vertices of the wireframe, essentially revealing to viewers how the trick works, walking us through the procedure of building such forms.³⁹ Moreover, the screens on which the hands point and turn, both skinned and bare, are not touchscreens. Instead, their operators wobble dials alongside, the film cutting in close to both show the fleshly hand moving over the buttons and the virtual one that has no wrist and so can turn freely and indefinitely in space. There, side by side, are the animated hand and the hand of the animator, each caught midway through their process of making and being made.⁴⁰

Clearly, we’ve come a ways from there, and the spectacles of disintegration so consistently at play in shard cinema turn on complicated volumes that often gather an entire set of differentiated assets with individual properties. But as a method of construction (and, as we’ll see, an image of destruction), this sense of wrapped layers and surfaces perseveres, even into what seems more substantial than a fragile pane. For instance, in the most recent version of Hercules (2014), the shot of a giant boar smashing its way through a tree – with the requisite splinters and shards to follow – was achieved by building a digital tree consisting of successive layers of simulated wood, complete with a “special shattering solver that gave lots of little spikes to simulate the fibers of the wood,” which was then “hidden behind a bark layer, with the sim an RBD [RADOS block device] layer that reveals the shards of wood coming out.”⁴¹ So while the shattering of the tree produces an image of a relatively unified object suddenly and violently broken into discrete parts, the process used to make it already depended upon a similar segmentation. Just like the texture-mapped polygon mesh of a single entity onscreen, these dense assemblages waiting to be ruined are also architectures of display: each individual layer can have its texture, color, and shine changed at any point in the process, thereby separating the process of the shatter from the represented qualities of just what is breaking.

Here, we can perhaps pull back from the details to the wider point I’ve been slowly driving towards. Namely, that shard cinema’s broken mirrors, windows, windshields, and atrium roofs are merely the most explicit form of a condition pertaining to all elements of its composited world: the treatment of the visible as not just a set of surfaces but a mosaic of screens.⁴² The particularity of a screen is not that it presents information but that it can display images, or represent a surface, indifferent to what lies behind it, producing a texture and pattern decoupled from substance. And in the case of these specific shard sequences, the digital “skin” of a polygon mesh forms a wrapped surface which itself acts as a screen to display a chosen texture, be it a serpent’s scales or a skyscraper’s window, yet it also remains ever ready to be dissembled back into a set of smaller shards. Because, in some sense, that’s what it was to start, when you peel back the successive layers of sheen and dust added to bump up the dimensionality.⁴³ When it comes to those sequences and moments that literally look like the slow movement of broken panes, what we’ve also been watching over all these years are exploded diagrams of how the scene was put together to start, breaking a complicated mesh down to its constitutive parts, polygons (the shards) and vertices (in the bare form of particles). To venture a definition of sorts, shard cinema is a kind of watching that takes shape around, and learns from, images for which construction and destruction are simply two frozen moments in the same workflow, temporary pauses in a play of abstraction and specification.

I want to bring this back to our point of departure, though, to not just individual digitally constructed objects, however complicated they might be, but also the detailed labor of compositing that erodes any clear border between the filmed and the drawn, the recorded and the animated. Because at this point, we can see that this confluence of making and unmaking is entirely at work even in things we might not consider first and foremost as either surfaces or discrete objects. Like, for instance, the entirety of central London, which is devastated in 2013’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation by means of a tungsten-filled platinum rod dropped from an orbiting satellite. (Complete with a cackling villain line for the ages: “None of the fallout, all of the fun.”) The prior entry in the series, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009), had its own bravura feat of urbicide, letting “nanomites”⁴⁴ loose in Paris – or, more precisely, firing a rocket full of the rapacious little world-eaters through, once again, a plate-glass window, as if to let us know that oh yes, we are heading into shard time.⁴⁵ And indeed we are, as successive shots offer not only a mech-suited Channing Tatum blasted away from a shattering glass roof but also an intercut sequence with all the requisite elements: the gaping mouths, the lingering shots of architectural dissolution, the gestural camera matched by the ballet of collisions and metal-enhanced bodies rocketing through space. Although here, there’s a small twist, because while there’s no shortage of broken things that fill the air in the next couple minutes of the movie, the conceit of the nanomites is that they swallow all and leave nothing behind. Suddenly, the city has all the substance of a paper castle, as any and all durable materials – cars, cafes, the Eiffel Tower – are dissolved as if they had been as weightless as critics argued all along, thin veils of matter reduced to a kelly-green mist dispersing in the wind.

In Retaliation, the opposite is the case. When the rod hits, the metropolis is ruined like a cracky, shuddering panel, as though London had somehow been erected directly on a mosaic of pieces and plates that, when put under pressure, would break along the dotted lines. As Bill George of ILM, VFX Supervisor for the project, explains, “When the filmmakers turned over the shots to us they explained that they didn’t want to see the typical ‘nuclear blast’ type shots. They wanted the surface of the earth to ‘shatter.’ We explored the idea of treating the ground plane as a thick ‘shell’ that would break like glass when the impact happens.”⁴⁶ And the effect is achieved, no doubt. But the reason that this “shell” breaks as if the city was founded on that unstable mosaic is because it actually was: this destructible London was itself constructed as a montage of discrete “plates.” Having been provided with “helicopter footage over London to use as plates,” these modular slabs dictated both images of London – unruined (the assemblage of various angles and footage into a manageable pattern of surfaces that maintain their properties) and midway through ruination (in George’s words, “this animation of the plates drove ALL the destruction and simulations that would follow”). In short, what we see as a moment of spectacular, if not quite sublime, destruction isn’t a glimpse of an apocalyptic future to be warded off or an anxious reflection of the present. It’s a glimpse backwards, a refraction of the work of an image’s making through a process for which daily life and disaster are two moments in the same process of arranging and dispersing a set of fragmentary surfaces.

The method is hardly unique to that film. It’s the same principle of stitching together a unified and continual surface from discrete points of view that can be seen in, for instance, ILM’s work on The Avengers, where a facsimile of New York was produced through a tremendous (and distinctly human) effort of four photographers spending eight weeks in the city, shooting roughly 1800 extremely hi-res images from street level, rooftop, and precarious heights in between. A second team then painted out anything that wasn’t architecture, erasing all the people, cars, trashcans, dogs, hot dog stands, anything that might betray the fact that the city is inhabited, before it was repopulated with what could be precisely managed: the digital assets ready to be broken and a set of digital cars whose flow was dictated by algorithms that would “create the sort of traffic grid lock any real world incident like this would naturally cause,” as if the normal hell of Manhattan rush hour couldn’t manage that.⁴⁷

There are a number of quite practical reasons to do this, at least when it comes to making a truly panoramic backdrop that will let a virtual camera pull off any motion whatsoever without running into blindspots and unresolved blurs where a coffee shop is supposed to be. But the technique is hardly neutral or ahistorical. Even if it wasn’t used to flesh out the epic battle scene, its roots are thoroughly military. In The View from Above: The Science of Social Space, Jeanne Haffner details a particular labor of French reconnaissance teams during WWI, who assembled what they called “photographic mosaics” from hundreds of aerial photos of battlegrounds-to-be. The terrain was then “schematized” (“so as to be able to locate various features as quickly as possible”) and, like the blockbusters of recent years, turned into 3D images, reestablishing the details and depth (“trenches hidden deep within the French landscape”) ignored initially.⁴⁸ The parallels are significant, not only in the use of stereoscopic technology, but above all in the creation of what the French experts called a “holistic view,” an abstract space within which what was declared important – the presence of troops and materials for war – could be seen without being caught in the details of camouflage and visual noise. This is the same principle driving the absurd labor of photographing New York City chunk by chunk for The Avengers. It’s to create what doesn’t call attention to itself, to create a single, smooth space in order to let the figures appear front and center.⁴⁹ In a sense, even aside from the sheer amount of capital backing up and poured into these images, these are technologies of sight aligned with power for the simplest of reasons: that it can make the messy details of a lived world look like one seamless surface, that it decides on where our eyes will go in the end.

Still, I’d wager that these shard images matter, and in large part because they let us see how these procedures are ongoing in what is less explicitly a time of world war: in the production of images intended for huge capital gains, in the schematization and flattening they manage and celebrate, but also in the strange seams they leave unclosed. In this regard, it is a fitting, perverse tribute that The Shard skyscraper was built in these years of shard cinema. It’s the one that looks itself like a villain in one of these films; the one designed to be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London” (in the actual words of its architect/urban assassin Renzo Piano); the one they inaugurated by cladding in Technicolor red light so it could be that heart’s dagger; and the one where, in a moment of such non-simultaneity as to make Ernst Bloch weep with joy, a fox was found living in the unfinished hull, seventy-two stories above the street. It is also the one nowhere to be found in the Retaliation drop scene.

The reason seems simple enough: The Shard opened to the public in February 2013 while Retaliation had its principal photography start in fall 2011.⁵⁰ Yet by that time, The Shard was already a good 801 feet high, missing only its last fifth of steel spire that’s there to snag the tallest-building-in-the-EU prize. Still, in Retaliation, there’s no Shard in sight, except for its absence, because the first shot of London just prior to impact is from on high, angling northwest past the London Eye Ferris wheel to the other side of the Thames. A shot taken, that is, from a position that may as well be at the top of The Shard.

To call this appropriate doesn’t begin to cover it. This is a POV onto the breaking of London into the plates of surface that it was already constructed to be, from the top of a building that makes this very principle into architecture. It is, after all, a splinter bundled taut in surface, a knife clad in 11,200 panels of glass-curtain wall. It’s a fake crystal scarf raised to heights achievable solely by gargantuan feats of capital, a thing nobody wanted from the start, resisting full occupancy because it was always the heart-staking that mattered anyway. A building already adequate to the unmaking it calls out for, joining the chorus of requests made to foxes or any other bristling spark of life: shatter me.

3. The New Cathedrals

The first iteration of a technique or style isn’t necessarily more meaningful than the second, third, or nth one. After all, accidents happen, and a search for origins too often contributes to a false sense of unified and linear development. Still, considering the quite early uses of a technique can cast different light on what’s at stake in its operations – though not, as according to some overheated modernist imaginary of innovation out of nothing, because those initial efforts contain the bare essence of it. Rather, the opposite holds: as the technique hasn’t yet become second-nature to audiences, there’s a need to stage it in a way that gives some clues for how to process what it is we’re seeing, even if we’re just supposed to wow and flutter.

This is at least the case when it comes to bullet time and its purported dual origin in The Matrix and the game Max Payne (which came out a couple years after the film but was in development concurrently). To be clear, neither of these invented the technique from scratch nor did they bring it to viewers who’d never seen anything like it. Time-slices and view-morphing were already culturally prevalent, thanks to Michael Gondry commercials and music videos, the infamous Gap “Khakis Swing” ad (rightly described by a YouTube commenter as the “whitest commercial ever”), and less-celebrated films like Lost in Space (out in 1998, a year before The Matrix hit theaters). What The Matrix did introduce – other than an unfortunate penchant for mandarin collars and frameless sunglasses – was an image of full (and full-speed) camera mobility around what did not halt entirely, as in earlier time-slices and digital photogrammetry, but continued to just barely move. The consequence of this is that it separates the rate of passage of time affecting the camera from that affecting the items it films (or those animated to appear as if filmed), meaning that the camera can change its position and show different portions of background at a speed out-of-sync with the figures, bullets, spittle, and debris.⁵¹ That bifurcation of time in a single screen space is the crux of the now-infamous effect of a camera swooping around a trenchcoated Keanu Reeves bent backwards as bullets gently plow the air just past his cheek, a blue droplet or two away from a shaving-cream ad.

The other particularity of what The Matrix did lies in how it introduced and framed its novel technique: not just as the showy style it so obviously is but also as an essentially realist depiction, or at least an impressionist warping directly explainable by the story. What I mean is that the perceived distortions in time are treated as the consequence of the particular abilities or sensibilities of an onscreen character who is so good at violence, so adrenally unfazed, or so impossibly quick that nothing is fast for them. When the hero games the system or is just very good at punching, a moment contains multitudes, unfolding for the character – and crucially, for us – at a manageable pace while surely appearing as an inhumanly frantic squirm and lethal shimmy to the enemies subsequently dispatched. In short, the special effect gets coded as eminently “practical,” although in a nearly opposite sense to that intended by the recent fetish for a return to physical explosions and animatronic gargoyles. It is practical in the sense of being driven and explained by the otherwise impossible martial feats it allows.⁵² And in this way, it serves as a soft introduction to the new, or at least retooled, form of looking that it encourages and the unspoken homology that it reinforces: between the character, free from following the rules that govern the space they are embedded in, and a camera allowed the same freedom thanks to compositing technologies and labor at work quite literally behind the scene, creating that previously mentioned rotatable, seamless, adequately generic, and ignorable backdrop that won’t drag the eyes away from the adult gymnastics at hand.

This relation between aesthetic wonder, violent practicality, and distributed sight is made all the more explicit in Max Payne and subsequent games – like FEAR, Vanquish, TimeShift, Red Dead Redemption, and Grand Theft Auto V – that make navigable bullet time⁵³ a central part of gameplay.⁵⁴ Here too, the motivation is “practical” and explained by its explicit link to the central character, letting you aim or steer at normal speed while everything around you trudges through marshmallow. However, situating this in terms of functional exigencies shouldn’t suggest that it is cleanly delineated from aesthetic contemplation or pleasure – because arranging situations, carrying out actions, or producing encounters solely for how they look is also a central part of these games’ mechanisms of interaction and play, rather than an exception to them.⁵⁵ In some sense, games might be the most natural home for bullet time because of the convention of a control scheme that separates the movement of the avatar from that of the camera,⁵⁶ whether between mouse and keyboard or between two analog sticks.

I think this is one of the most critical points of contact between games and other moving images in the past two decades: games make us incredibly familiar with the experience of simultaneous independent control and of decoupling vision from the perspective of a subject, including the one who stands in as proxy for us. This is part of a diffuse visual education in the ubiquity of distributed sight, and it’s a complicated operation that we have come to do without a second thought, piloting a clumsy body or drifting truck through uneven terrain while also adjusting the camera that frames the scene, so that we can not only make it through the crisis but also watch how the sun plays off the water, how the dust rises and falls in our wake. Especially coupled with the prospect of live streams⁵⁷ and sharing feeds and stills from the games, this kind of aesthetic encounter and the staging of visually captivating moments – if not fully-fledged tableaus – can’t be separated from any “practical” point of the game and its syntax of interaction. The game studios know this well. In inFAMOUS Second Son (2014), for instance, you can pause the game at any moment and freely rotate the view around whatever is happening at that point, decoupling the camera yet again because you don’t even have to stick with the perspective you had at the moment you pressed pause. You can zoom out or in, rotate, pan away to other points, and change filters, like Instagram for superheroes, making every moment a shard one, not only in the images of frozen particles, explosions, and shattering that you can capture and upload to your profile, but also in the sensation of being a digital animator yourself.

In this sense, as we move back from bullet time towards shard cinema generally, perhaps the more salient opposition for how these games and films make sense of themselves is not between practical motivation and aesthetic contemplation, but between what treats this dazzle as available to us only as a closed, finished image, and what encourages intervention and manipulation, whether to dodge a sword or keep the moon in our sights or tune the machine to other ends.⁵⁸ This opposition is aptly present in a more recent film, Dredd (2012), surely the most extended, didactic, and stone-faced goofy meditation on slow-motion that action cinema has ever produced.⁵⁹ Like The Matrix and Max Payne, the effect doesn’t go unmentioned but is instead made an explicit part of its narrative, thanks to a sublimely simple excuse, a new drug on the market called – what else? – “Slo-Mo” that serves to slow the user’s experience of time to 1% of its normal passage. This bit of relevant detail dispatched, the film throws its hat in fully with the stoners, dwelling on their Technicolor and quite literally twinkling experience of not only elaborate bullet ballets and busted windows but also more quotidian elements like the swaying curtains in a van, the foaming water in a bath. But unlike those earlier takes on the effect, Dredd’s narrative framing acts as a culmination of the drift away from putative usefulness towards driftiness itself, as Dredd himself doesn’t use the drug to fight, while for those who do at the beginning (in a graceful highway shootout) it doesn’t work out so well. So rather than the interference of time signaling the peculiar aptitude of the extravagantly violent, we share the POV, sluggish advance, and Jolly Rancher color palette of those for whom the encounter is decidedly hands-off, those who have the flayed time to contemplate each and every drop of blood or speck of concrete but are too high and dazzled to do anything about it. In other words, it gives a barely coded portrait of how we are expected to watch these shard moments: blown away and going nowhere fast. It’s a formal partner to the endless depictions of one or more characters moving gradually through the gusting debris with no threat of it touching them, mouth open wide (though with no ridleys on the tongue), a model viewer to scold those in the audience whose eyes wander to their phones that this, this is how you should be reacting, this is how to see the immensity we have arranged for you.

In The Spirit of Cinema, published in 1955, Jean Epstein argued that slow-motion forms a key aspect of photogénie (i.e. the photogenic, in an expanded sense of what cinema can uniquely achieve):

What the mind does not have time to retain, what the eye has neither the time nor the field to see in one expression: the premonitory symptoms, the evolution, the strife among emotional inter-currents [sentiments intercurrents] that compose their synthesis – all this is what slow-motion displays at will.⁶⁰

As the reference to “emotional inter-currents” suggests, Epstein likely had something a bit more subtle in mind than a spaceship plowing into a Detroit parking garage, although he still sought out the catastrophic and staggering (as in his lost footage of the volcanic explosion of Mount Etna). Nevertheless, the initial part of his framing – “what the mind does not have time to retain, what the eye has neither the time nor the field to see in one expression” – is an entirely apt description of what is at work in Dredd, and in shard cinema’s extreme slowness generally. Shard cinema will, however, qualify this in a crucial way: it promises a wealth of time and a mobility of vision in which it is possible to see what cannot be retained, but it also ensures that even with the extra time, there will always be far too much to take in. Rather than a use of slow-motion to isolate and dilate a single small gesture, like the first breaking hints of a gathering smile, shard cinema jams the screen space with hundreds and thousands of these details, all in the highest resolution, so that the only relation possible is a constant searching gaze that skitters across details and will, after two hours, incline toward something approaching a migraine.

Nothing depicts this tension as clearly as the recurrent figure of the frozen yet minutely explored explosion or collision, which has in recent years become the leading candidate for the most showy of shard moments, as in the previously described opening of Deadpool. Prometheus does it as well, albeit under a somewhat more restrained banner fitting its high serious tone of cosmic discovery. There, the alien operating system/archive of all knowledge in the universe is arranged, according to the team of Fuel VFX who handled the sequence, as an analogue of the “big bang,” data stored in approximations of an orbiting set of glowing nebulae freeze-frames. That freezing is quite literal, in that each “nebula in there is basically a frozen moment of a fluid sim that has been run over its course and found that right moment” (in the words of Paul Butterworth).⁶¹ More telling, though, is Butterworth’s further comment that in a mirroring of the impossibly huge data storage that the film depicts with its jazzy alien interface, the images made for the film themselves posed problems of how to store, transmit, and process the information, because “in some of the scenes it would have been 80 to a 100 million polygons in there” and “some of the shots could easily take between a week and two weeks to render.” In this way, the freeze-frame expands, capturing more than expected: rather than the surging processor force disappearing in each passing frame, here it comes to generate a still picture of what it would look like to fully map that time and the pathways of work and expertise involved, even if the main result is to have, sadly and once again, a total slack jaw in the face of the unfathomable.

The most impressive halted and navigable explosions in recent shard cinema come in the Quicksilver sequences in the last two X-Men films, where the superspeed mutant essentially runs, strolls, and cavorts around the expanse of a single split second of time. In the first instance, it’s in a kitchen, as water droplets, bullets, vegetables, knives, and debris hang frozen in the air. In the second, in a mansion where a literal explosion is held still, its fire nipping at the heels of the living whom he spirits away to safety. The gag, and subsequent audience joy (my own totally included), comes not only from how the time is halted or how mellow he is about the impending danger. It’s also in how he can rearrange the materials, in an echo of René Clair’s Paris Qui Dort⁶²: adjusting cops to hit themselves, slightly deviating the course of bullets, shifting clothing, moving allies out of harm’s way. The moment is frozen, the relevant elements are shifted, and then it is reanimated, playing out the new trajectories and interactions he has constructed, as if he was the compositor of his own shot, tweaking the arrangement of the scene and its procedural generations before the final file is output for rendering. Like the cartoon character who reaches out of the drawing to the world of its artist-creator, this is a small reflection of how this exact shot was actually made, given that their use of previs allowed the crew to move objects that the camera would have bumped into before the camera had the chance to do so: “We’d start building the set in previs and then put a previs camera in there and we’d see that something was obstructing what we needed to see, so we were able to tell the set designer that the design might need to change slightly.”⁶³

This gestures to the key point I want to suggest, and perhaps my motivation for this entire inquiry into these kind of images. Just as the kind of disaggregating spatial forms in shard cinema provide a fleeting glimpse of the processes used to make them, the way that such spaces are negotiated and navigated both by characters and by the camera itself allow us to see flickers and echoes of those working behind the scene, the hands of the compositor moving amongst an image so dense and manifestly costly that it will ultimately come to slam that view shut.

The prospect of this reading – and the sense that we’ve all been undergoing an authorless lesson in how to watch these hybrid processes – might seem a stretch. In this regard, looking at the visual difference between the fight scenes of 300 (2006) and 300: Rise of an Empire (2014) is significant, because in that eight-year gap, we can see a “vanishing point” of shard cinema, the way its innovations gradually crystallized into a de facto structure. Narratively, there’s no real difference worth noting, and for the most part, all the signature visual elements are in place in equal measure in both films. There are ridleys in spades, ample slow-motion, and a whole gym’s worth of beefcake. There are speed ramps, sudden accelerations and slow-downs that never reverse time or lose their beat, and there is an essentially rhythmic, rather than narrative, drive to its montage, taking the cue of the action to mark the cut. Last but definitely not least, there is a surfeit of blood, even if its quality differs slightly between the two (more particles in the first film and more of those sculptural geysers in the second).⁶⁴

Yet there is one major difference that takes shape in the relation that the camera – and by extension, the camera operator and our point of view – has to all that action. In the first film, it remains largely, or at least comparatively, steady. It of course makes sure to get in close on occasion to catch the ab glisten, but it essentially treats the materials as a tableau, as a set of bodies and forms that move within the stable parameters of the frame held at a distance, in a way that assumes viewers want to get a sense of what is happening in full and, perhaps, who is winning the day. As though to remark on this and its connection with classical Western schemas of perspective and picture plane, the second film has a peculiar opening that stakes its different ground from the get-go. It passes from the logos of its production companies – staged as two giant metal doors in front of which ridleys dance – to a metal mural of the dead Spartans littering the ground, before their color saturation tunes up and Xerxes moseys through on horseback to sever the head (and reverse shot gaze) of Leonidas.⁶⁵ The object lesson is clear enough, its territory staked, because from this point on, the film will have done with any vestiges of that kind of staging action in space that was still operative in the first film. In this outing, the most dynamic actor onscreen will be the one dictating the motion to start: the camera itself, which sweeps and moves, gets impossibly close, ricochets back as if vibrating from the force of the blow, twirling around in total whimsy and fixating on a bit of blood, a little ruby something that catches the light. Space is no longer presented as a semi-coherent volume, or even a determinable plane with suspicious depth. Instead, it is a liquid quality of attention that condenses and pools around individual gestures, magnetically sucked toward what compels it and causes the advance of time to itself almost halt, before being shoved away again to the next sight in a continual whiplash of redirection and speed ramps.

But perhaps the most notable thing about this scene is the one that took me the longest to see, that didn’t become evident until I started teaching myself the basics of working in 3D graphics and compositing software. What this kind of movement, and the majority of shard movement, looks like more than anything is the experience of working within the software that makes the images themselves, where any asset can be clicked and dragged and rotated, with endless flexibility. Quite plainly, the finished film looks like the work one does in the program, like when fixing the bevels or rigging of a model – zooming in close, pulling back, rotating around it, letting its motion advance slightly before halting it at any moment to see how the light is hitting it, if the texture effects are working or not, if it is worth looking at. The same goes for forms of speed ramping, like in that forest sprint in Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. If one looks for an aesthetic equivalent of the way that it sways between total stillness and rapid acceleration, it isn’t to be found in previous cinema so much as in the timeline of digital video software where one “scrubs” though with a cursor, the images flickering at top speed until the arrow pauses for a moment and everything stops and hangs and waits.

Like the Quicksilver fantasy of stopping the flow of time to rearrange the surroundings, these are what I’ll call allegories of technique. Unlike what constitutes the majority of cultural readings or criticism of these films, these aren’t allegories to be found or asserted in their narratives and how they might correspond to world events or what we deem to be politically relevant. Instead, these allegories of technique display the structures of possible interpretation and exchange that form a threshold between a supposedly finished image and all the human work and computational procedures that went into it. They are elements in a gradual aesthetic education in how to watch and look at images not as a set of end products, finished commodities, and sealed deals but as diffuse processes that never properly finish, an array of techniques and experience in search of transmissible forms.

However, to take stock of that possible roughness and the way that these techniques and visual modes can give surprising pathways back into their social and technical worlds requires that we also be clear-eyed about what blocks that access – or, more commonly, how these same techniques can help exacerbate the worst tendencies at play in them. This isn’t limited to the explicit binding of aesthetic complexity to extraordinary violence, as detailed before. It’s also the fundamental too-muchness of the images and their deep links to fantasies of accumulation for its own sake. For instance, to construct that same beach scene from Edge of Tomorrow mentioned previously, the difficulty of layering backgrounds and other elements around practical explosions meant that compositors were given a fair amount of freedom. So it is a scene, we might presume, where the traces of that making are especially visible and open to the kind of forensic backtracking and doubling enabled by an allegory of technique. As Daniel Kramer explains, “[the compositors] were free to stick their own explosion over it or a crashed jeep somewhere. This was really because the continuity could be very loose. We almost couldn’t be overboard – we just kept adding.”⁶⁶ Except that as anyone watching the scene could attest to, oh yes, you definitely could be overboard, because the result of that freedom is an enormous fucking mess of detail that slams the door on any possible forensics by simply being far too much to take in, with far too little indication of what would actually be worth looking at.⁶⁷ Lacking that kind of basic guidance or principle of selection, we’re the ones left squinting through this mess⁶⁸ trying to determine what is relevant and what is just noise, just “dimensionality.”

The contradiction of this seems not entirely lost on shard cinema itself, at least insofar as the highest grossing-examples of it (The Avengers and the Iron Man series) are concerned, because they foreground that question of how to sort out what to pay attention to by crystallizing it into a single character, Iron Man himself. Consider, for instance, the final battle of The Avengers, set in that digital mosaic of New York City and racking up a digital-damage estimate of $160 billion were it to “really happen.” The battle is an endless chain of collisions, quips, and tracking shots through an animated zone where something is always breaking, falling, or flitting around in accord with its own private algorithms. Yet in the fight sequences throughout, especially in this climactic one, the capacity for Iron Man to save the day is not limited to his ability to fly faster, reach higher things, or carry a nuclear weapon through a portal. It depends instead on his capacity, aided by an in-visor heads-up display that highlights relevant dangers, to look at this total muddle of a collapsing city and decide what does matters and what doesn’t, what is an about-to-die love interest and what is just shards. No wonder that the other salient aspect of those films is his showy holographic OS that makes screens appear “out of thin air”: he is less hero than designer and navigator, the one who mastered the difference between phenomena that can wound, that can be scrolled, and that can be ignored. Iron Man, conqueror of aesthetic experience.

I, like most viewers, have a harder time managing this feat, and the films seem to recognize this as well, insofar as their favorite shot pattern is a one-two punch of 1) chaotic storm of unprocessable visual data and 2) close shot on gape-mouthed character staring at said storm, aping the wheezing cognitive motors of those watching. It represents an archly moronic variety of the sublime, one for which there is no illumination of perceptual faculties, just an epic mess of whirl and clatter that voids those faculties like bowels and, in lieu of experience, proffers a portrait of a character undergoing what we ought to. Charlie Brooker’s quip about the experience of watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – “It was like being pinned to the ground while an angry dishwasher shat in your face for two hours” – is spot on.⁶⁹ The film’s vision of a vengeful Mustang-robot can’t remotely compare to the visual wrath of massively overpowered processors given one hundred and fifty minutes to spill their guts.

Brooker’s comment also points to the other key quality of all this – its relation to time. Shard cinema operates on three distinct timescales, even if it can only acknowledge the first two. The first, and most obvious, is that of sheer duration, well familiar to those checking their eyes for blood seep at the end of Avatar. Second is the temporality of the shard moments themselves, with plenty of time to examine every piece and glimmer even if there prove, always, to be too many to ever count.

But the final timescale of the shard is one that, properly speaking, we cannot see, at least not in the way that we can see a film for two hours or see the slowing of action. Odd, perhaps, given that this invisible time is, quite literally, the very thing we stare at: the tremendous quantity of hours piled up in the form of digital building, animation, rotoscoping, conversion, rendering, and all the other tasks, tweaks, and processes that go into not just the digital models active throughout a sequence but every single composited frame. Commenting on the robot-python-meets-skyscraper scene in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Scott Farrar, VFX supervisor for the film, gushes that, “[t]he render times for Colossus entwined with the Tilted Building were the highest in ILM’s history: 288 hours per frame! And that is just for one eye, and sometimes the computer would choke on a frame and we had to start over.”⁷⁰

Doing the math is as simultaneously ugly and dazzling as the scene itself: 288 hours per frame, thirty frames per second, two eyes per second, equals 17,280 render hours⁷¹ of processors struggling to make it all hang together, not to mention the time for human tweaks, oversight, and fixes, written into every single second we watch. It seems no stretch to say that shard cinema is one of the most blindingly dense encounters with time and money in the history of the species, even if we can hardly grapple with it in the theater or after. These are our new cathedrals, the stained glass busted into shards that fill these tremendous perceptual constructions, within which we are expected to sit quietly and be dwarfed by the sheer marvel of what has mobilized more material, capital, and human strain than we can even fathom. A rich image of the highest order, it alone is a cinema that can never quite be replicated for cheap, cannot be haze-filtered into indie-film competition with the majors.

Hypothetically, such a combination of temporal modes – the near-halted and the thick – might open up that different type of looking, one of not just what shard went where but also where these came from. Because like capital itself, this image of capital writ mammoth requires global circulation and wage differentials to continue being made, here in the form of render labs in Mumbai, Singapore, and anywhere else where the mind-numbing labor of converting shard sequences to 3D is done by hand, vector by vector, frame by frame. And that was exactly the case for Transformers: Dark of the Moon and its densest of sequences. After “all the primary creative work is done” in Legend3D’s San Diego office, the finished frames were “placed in the network queue for the Indian office” where “[a]s America sleeps, the Indian team work, reloading at the end of their day in time for the start of the next American day. From the key frames the day before, India does the ‘in-betweens’ overnight.”⁷² So it is that the cinematic destruction of the accumulated capital of the Global North is fleshed out by the long labor of technicians in the Global South, filling in the “in-betweens,” all the things deemed worth doing on the cheap. Contemporary action film, like history, recites Fanon under its breath, even if it never understands the point.

So if one side of these images is always a visible threshold that might let us think through not just how they were made but also how they are never separate from the process and geography of their making, the other side contravenes this, cutting hard against any form of critique that might begin by knowing the deep histories and idiosyncrasies of what surrounds it. That is its simple equation: for every splinter of glass, this leviathan wealth of spent hours. Data’s lyrical moment, shard cinema hoards time. It pulls it out of circulation and holds it out like bullion to say nothing other than See? See? When we do oblige, as we do, we see exactly what we cannot help but see anyway: capital and time and a dazed human stumbling through a pixel blizzard, looking for something solid to hold onto, simply agog at all that exists.

Still, the good thing about cathedrals is that even if they display such impossible accumulation and effort that they demand to be viewed as marvels, miracles, or anything else beyond our reach and intervention, we know that they were made by hand. We know this because when you sit in their vaulted volumes and let your eyes wander across their surface, you see where the bricks join, where the supports have to come in to handle the weight, where the arch breaks. You see where the chisels slipped, where the fissures remain. And anything that can be built can be taken apart, provided we learn how to read these cracks and joists like a diagram of all the contradictions they bear, a map of unmaking to come.

_____________________________________

1 All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 99.

2 Or in the nightmare of screen resolution and masculinity that is Pixels, where everything is safety glass, and nothing can ever be really destroyed, only scattered into fragments and glow.

3 The trick happens again in those same credits: a body falls through the windshield towards a camera in the driver’s seat, the credits that spell out DIRECTED BY RUBEN FLEISCHER hit too by the falling body, the red words scattering and spraying towards the lens.

4 Other architectures, like the glass ceiling in A Good Day to Die Hard. The “Space Shards” in Doctor Strange, held by no frame, just air opening like prism panes to let the bodies pass.

5 “The idea,” said visual-effects supervisor Daniel Kramer, “was that [the alien] was made out of stones or pieces of glass – its body was very sharp and it could slash and stab […] It even looks mean when it’s put together.” Quoted in: https://www.fxguide.com/featured/live-die-repeat-the-effects/.

6 That balance is there from the start, when a body is turned into triangular shards of ice and shatters on the castle floor, and it continues from there: a translucent ice wall is raised and falls; a golden mirror is frozen and broken, spraying outwards past a body that itself also becomes gold and shatters. It produces a further accidental image: ending in gold what began as just water, as if keeping a real-time tally of the money sunken into the running time.

7 It’s worth noting here that there’s a good chance that we might be at the tail end of a certain version of shard aesthetics: if you look at the whiplash camerawork and editing in Captain America: Civil War (2016), which tends to echo through camera movement the violent displacement of a body onscreen, you see a very different version of how the space and time of such scenes are organized around the collision of bodies with each other and the surrounding architecture.

8 https://www.fxguide.com/featured/inside-the-battles-of-300-rise-of-an-empire/

9 In the words of Bryan Hirota, who shared supervision with Plantec. This isn’t to dismiss the thirst for images of devastation as accidental, as it is as socially marked and gendered as all the other tensions at work in that film. My point is to suggest a counter to the idea that we can read all aspects of image production in terms of its ultimate narrative content, especially the martial violence that ideological critique (and/or thinkpieces) tend to fixate on so doggedly when deciding on the film’s nominal politics.

10 Or the tiny pebbles and dirt that rise from the ground during the IED explosion in The Hurtlocker. Or that Schick Hydro 5 razor ad, where a billiard ball to the cheek dissolves into a halt-time moisturizing splatter that then spells out the product name, quivering in the air. Or the milky shell of the cyborg fraying out into the air in the Ghost in the Shell reboot. Or the same thing happening to the gold coating of the rebirthed queen in The Huntsman: Winter’s War…

11 One of the strangest literalizations of this is another Sony Bravia ad consisting of thousands of bouncing rubber balls rampaging through the streets of San Francisco, albeit in a supposedly joyous fashion, in some obscure demonstration of how bright, colorful, and numerous the monitor’s pixels are.

12 His full comments: “The bulk are soft shapes, that don’t draw attention. For the wider Sparta countryside shots amongst the fields we made a library of ‘chaff’ geo that was instanced onto a standard particle system in Maya.” Available here: http://www.firedbydesign.com/2014/03/21/cinesite-creates-ancient-world-anew-300-rise-empire/.

13 Matterhorn worked as a plug-in for Houdini, a 3D animation program that focuses on procedural generation.

14 http://www.alcohollywood.com/fresh-pour-300-rise-of-an-empire-2014-mr-peabody-sherman-2014/

15 http://www.artofvfx.com/300-rise-of-an-empire-vfx-supervisor-charley-henley-and-cg-supervisors-sheldon-stopsack-and-adam-davis-mpc/

16 Understanding Comics: The Art of the Invisible (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), p. 129.

17 This time of looking, distinct from the narrative time suggested by what happens in the comic, is what Seymour Chatman calls “discourse time”: the time “it takes to peruse the discourse.” In Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 62.

18 Liam Burke, who quotes McCloud on this same point, makes a similar argument for this connection and notes a comment from Jock, a cartoonist famous for his work on 2000 AD, about the “Slo-Mo” in Dredd, for which Jock was the concept artist: “You almost get the effect of a comic panel.” In The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015), p. 197.

19 Another somewhat obvious point of connection and mutual borrowing comes in the relation between video games and more explicitly fixed moving images (films and television, for instance). As discussed below, the first instance of the effect that got called bullet time happened simultaneously in the Matrix and in Max Payne, a third-person shooter game. And there’s little doubt that games pushed the use/overuse of particle effects along with films, where the motes and sparks function not only as a way to produce “dimensionality” but also as an informal coordinate system, letting you more accurately gauge how far you are from what wishes you harm. However, I’ll return in the following section to what I see as the more powerful connection between the two media: the familiarity with a camera that comes untethered from a single position or point of focus.

20 A cross-platform game engine for users to build games, especially independent ones outside of the major companies.

21 His comments can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZr8lTxmG7U

22 https://www.fxguide.com/featured/life-on-mars-the-vfx-ofthe-martian/

23 As recently as 2014, the majority of 3D blockbusters had been “Real 3D,” but in the past two years, conversion has become the standard for almost all films other than entirely animated ones for which the trouble of two cameras and getting the parallax right isn’t an issue because it isn’t filmed in the first place.

24 This film sounds like a particular nightmare to convert given that some of the shardy materials (water spray, explosions, dirt blasting into the air) had been filmed, rather than animated.

25 https://www.fxguide.com/featured/live-die-repeat-theeffects/

26 Peter David, Robin Furth, Jae Lee, Richard Isanove, Chris Eliopoulos, and Stephen King, The Dark Tower (New York: Marvel Publications, 2007), n.p.

27 Hansen is a key figure in recent years of shard cinema (lead artist for ILM on Pacific Rim and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and effects supervisor for Transformers: Age of Extinction.

28 Comments from: https://www.fxguide.com/featured/age-of-extinction-ilm-turns-up-its-transformers-toolset/.

29 As shown by the history of both photograms and experimental cinema practices that involve painting/drawing/marking directly on the film itself, the same holds for analog cameras as well – or at least on light-based media that can do without the camera.

30 As though assembling films with glass mattes and physically cut celluloid gave access to an unmediated and somewhat mystical reality.

31 Consider, for instance, the use of ZEUS, which combines previs with “on-set realtime compositing” and allows rough renderings of CG sets to be “piped in” and moved around by the director/crew to see how they would look in the physical space of the set.

32 https://www.fxguide.com/featured/vfx-roll-call-for-theavengers/

33 Erwin Panofksky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 3.

34 See the chapters “The Vanishing Machine” and “Figures in a Threatscape” for more on this.

35 György Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Co, 1969), p. 91. Kepes argues further that, “The invention and perfection of the camera was by no means the only factor tending to break down the absolute validity of linear perspective. The whole social trend of the contemporary world made such breakdown inevitable” (p. 93).

36 The wireframe must be rigged so as to give articulation to the movement of what is depicted as substantial, making all supposedly unitary things into tethered assemblages with competing velocities and heft.

37 Which feels fitting, given that the most extreme instances of shard cinema are increasingly inseparable from their Chinese co-funding, box-office success, product placement, and alternate materials (like the four-minute-longer cut of Iron Man 3 that explains how he gets his energy: Gu Li Duo milk drink).

38 A key echo of the passage from Siegfried Giedion that I cited in “Glass Hands,” on the promise of mechanization’s ability to outpace the biologically human by rotating endlessly.

39 The hand itself comes from earlier, created by Ed Catmull (who would become a founder of Pixar) in 1972 and considered to be the first computer-generated 3D animation.

40 To add one last earlier instance of CGI, consider the stained-glass ghost knight in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) who leaps out of the window, an image cut loose from its support structure and recognized cultural form in order to confront the disbelieving. The effect was achieved by painting directly onto the film with a laser, and that kind of etched projection still feels present in the finished image, because the knight gains no volume, remaining superflat even as he stalks his way up the cathedral aisle in three-dimensional space, his face bisected by a double scar of cracked glass, like something got damaged in the process of breaking free.

41 In the words of Julian Fodd of DNeg: https://www.fxguide.com/featured/legend-or-truth-the-vfx-of-hercules/.

42 See also “Unfrozen” in this volume for a related take on this question, albeit in a more conventionally architectural sense.

43 I’ll give an extended example of how this works (and how I don’t mean any of this in a simply metaphorical or figurative sense). In Edge of Tomorrow’s beach-invasion scene, we see the predictable slew of damage, especially caused by the obsidian-esque creatures mentioned in my litany of shard moments. They’re the ones that “look mean even when put together,” an entirely fitting turn of phrase given that they exist only as a midpoint in the animation process, a set of assembled chunks all ready to come back apart when blown up or smashed. Yet this is also the case for objects in the film that, unlike those aliens/malevolent piles of silicate, don’t have an easy narrative excuse for being composed of shards. In putting together that beach scene, Daniel Kramer of Imageworks explains, “The artists would assign different material properties to a jeep and say which parts are glass, which parts are stiff metal and soft metal and what can tear […] It basically breaks it down to a finite analysis with all these small tetrahedrons and you give them material properties.” In other words, the composition of an object that is slated to be taken to pieces in the scene consists of abstracting that object to the point that it is just “small tetrahedrons” that can be assigned whatever properties: shards, for all intents and purposes.

44 The nanomites are surely one of the best cinematic villains in the last few years, along with the tire in Rubber and Matthew McConaughey in Killer Joe.

45 The literal passage of the rocket through the window, followed by the dissolution of the outside world into tiny particles of dusty green pigment, suggests an unexpected adaptation of Dolf Sternberger’s argument about the transformation of vision in the nineteenth century: “The views from the windows of Europe have entirely lost their dimension of depth and have become mere particles of one and the same panoramic world that stretches all around and is, at each and every point, merely a painted surface.” Quoted by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 1977), p. 61. We might also follow a different line through his window towards another one that is literally a painted surface, aimed again and again at the Eiffel Tower and just as interested in taking it to pieces: Robert Delaunay’s obsessive painting and repainting of it in the 1910s through his apartment window, including the apt (and proto-distributed-sight title) Simultaneous Windows onto the City. And from there on to Ivan Chtcheglov and Henry de Béarn’s arrest in 1959 for planning to blow up the Eiffel Tower because its light kept shining into their bedroom and keeping them up at night.

46 http://www.artofvfx.com/g-i-joe-retaliation-bill-george-vfx-supervisor-ilm/

47 https://www.fxguide.com/featured/vfx-roll-call-for-theavengers/

48 Jeanne Haffner, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), p. 12.

49 “It is not, therefore, as though one had global (or conceived) space to one side and fragmented (or directly experienced) space to the other rather as one might have an intact glass here and a broken glass or mirror over there. For space ‘is’ whole and broken, global and fractured, at one and the same time.” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 355-56.

50 It was slated to come out in June 2012 but pushed back until February of 2013 to amp up promotion and convert to 3D.

51 To be clear, this is fundamentally different from slow-motion, where a change in camera position, angle, or zoom is registered at the same pace (set by frame-rate) of the other movement onscreen.

52 This is similar to what I identify in the Hepworth film discussed in “The Vanishing Machine” and the way that binding a technique to humanness serves to keep the technique from becoming entirely defamiliarizing (yet also moves it into a stranger hybrid territory).

53 Or any form of slow-motion that only the central character is allowed to experience.

54 In Max Payne 3, as if to signal the kind of shard looking to which the game both belongs and contributes, a cut-scene break through a glass wall in a club signals the moment when the player begins to control the character in slow-mo, to arrange the camera, to set the scene. In this way, it borrows a trope from Gondry’s 1996 time-slice Smirnoff commercial, where the effect seems triggered (and bookended) by shattering glass: first a window and, at the very end, a bottle of Smirnoff that magically reconstitutes itself, as if rewinding, while the action finishes. Tracing further back, I’d link this to Wild Bunch, where the slow-motion is triggered only at the moment that a bullet hits a human, dilating the time – and allowing us to see the face of death.

55 Perhaps the most “hands-off” form of this kind of looking comes in the fixation on gory replay that bullet time in games can encourage, especially as bolstered by kill-cam shots and/or sniper games that follow the path of a bullet itself. But there too, given that a player knows what actions will result in this image, it comes to shape what one tries to do, like line up a perfect headshot.

56 A terminological note: throughout this discussion of games, I’ll simply refer to the “camera,” rather than “virtual camera,” because it is a method that produces the effect of a camera, no matter if it recorded an array of light outside or was generated entirely within modeling software.

57 And getting paid for that, even if that’s more a chased carrot than a reality for the vast majority.

58 To be absolutely clear about the internal limits restaged within those modes of interaction, however, we must note that the “freedom” to halt at any moment in the midst of an open-world game doesn’t change the way that the game and its producers have very particular ideas about what is worth looking at and what will be allowed to appear.

59 For what it’s worth, I think that it is, along with the narratively almost identical Indonesian martial-arts film The Raid: Redemption, one of the best action movies in the past two decades, one that thinks about the conditions that make it tick without losing sight of the fact that it is a body genre, always keeping one eye on the prospect of making the heart jump.

60 Jean Epstein, “Photogénie de l’impondérable,” quoted in Christophe Wall-Romana, “Epstein’s Photogénie as Corporeal Vision: Inner Sensation, Queer Embodiment, and Ethics,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 61.

61 Butterworth’s commentary can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5HvD9GkcDY

62 And later, the Twilight Zone episode “A Kind of Stopwatch” and, later still, The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror riff on it.

63 Austin Bonang of Third Floor, quoted in: https://www.fxguide.com/featured/future-threat-x-men-days-of-future-past/.

64 Asked in an interview how the effects had changed since the first film, Sheldon Stopsack of MPC says that: “The technology between the time these 2 movies were shot has evolved massively. This automatically led to a slightly different style. The trick was to stay true to the style of the original movie, but still push for a more advanced technology. The best example I can give you is probably the blood FX. The original 300 was much more spray/particle-based when it came to blood splatter. Whereas, on this movie, we certainly see much more of a fluid, simulation-based look.” Interview available at: http://www.3dtotal.com/interview/216-thevfx-300-rise-an-empire-by-3dtotal-staff-movie-300-cg.

65 It’s apt that it is the “barbarian” who ends this mode of seeing. In Nicos Poulantzas’ reading of the role of the barbarian in a Western spatial imaginary: “All roads lead to Rome in the sense that Rome is at every point of the sovereign’s moving around: in the towns, in the countryside, in the fleet, and in the armies. To be sure, although this homogeneous site has no outside, it has confines which are its absolute reverse: namely, the barbarians. But these barbarians are precisely a non-site: not only are they not a segment, however distinct, of a single space, they are the definitive end of all possible space; they are not a division of space but a without-space, not a no-man’s land but a no-land.” Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 1980), p. 102.

66 https://www.fxguide.com/featured/live-die-repeat-the-effects/

67 And although someone could try and retrofit an account of post-WWI avant-gardes to claim that this visual frenzy is there to represent the perceptual consequences of the horror of alien-on-human war, this would be wishful thinking. After all, what possible analogy could be made between the hierarchy of decision-making at work in huge capital expenditure ($178 million) and the individual experience of a soldier who has somehow survived the trenches?

68 This is more acutely felt in films than in games. In games with “destructible environments” and hence significant portions of play time spent staring through clouds of drifting debris, the challenge, at its most abstract, is not to survive, kill, or loot. It is to distinguish between phenomena that are relevant (four pixels that signify an alien’s head, i.e. something to be killed) and irrelevant (four pixels that signify a bit of chaff, i.e. something not to waste ammo on). In action films, this impulse is entirely off the table. Even if we get in the slaughtery groove and begin looking/hoping for things that might maim the hero, the film is structurally indifferent to that looking. We have never had any ammo to waste.

69 That said, Brooker is entirely committed to the sort of insistence on what is practically/indexically “real” that I want to dismantle. In this same piece, he writes (describing a recent Die Hard outing) that, “it’s boring. Unbelievably boring. At any given moment, only 17% of what you’re watching is real, and you know it. You’re not immersed in the slightest. At best you’re impressed by the rendering of the smoke plumes.” The article is online at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/aug/03/hollywood-ideas-charlie-brooker.

70 http://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/ilm-greatest-hits/

71 That said, render hours are a notoriously opaque measurement, given that the processors used by ILM are overclocked beasts (and rooms and rooms of them). This description of render hours from a feature on How to Tame Your Dragon 2 gives a better sense of the kind of calculations at work behind this: “The animators then created more than 500 million digital files. It took a fleet of cloud computers in data centers more than 90 million render hours to render the 129,600 frames in the final film. If one computer had worked on the rendering task, it would have taken 10,273 years to complete. But DreamWorks had so much computing power on hand that it could render those frames inside of a week or so for the last cut.” Online at: http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/25/dragon-making-main/.

72 Quoted from: https://www.fxguide.com/featured/art-of-stereo-conversion-2d-to-3d-2012/.

FRAGMENT 4

As squatting became a central practice of the radical scene gathering speed in early 1970s Frankfurt, it did so on a terrain whose space had already been imagined anew, gutted, and repurposed – though for markedly different motivations than those driving the squatting actions and critique of the “housing factory” pushed by the autonomen (German autonomists). During the Second World War, Frankfurt’s medieval city center had been thoroughly devastated, the predictable consequence of nearly 16,000 tons’ worth of RAF explosives dumped from on high. This offered a bleakly rare opportunity to fulfill that perennial architectural and urbanist fantasy of the clean slate, and indeed, Frankfurt became one of the few cities in Germany to get a distinctly modernist postwar reconstruction treatment. The ’60s would see a further remapping of the city, by means of the more diffuse and rapacious force of housing speculation and amplified by the city’s reemergence as a locus of German financial power, thanks in part to the Central Bank’s relocation of its headquarters there in 1957. New circuits of money, naked land speculation, and hunger for office space began to markedly corner the real-estate market, most notably in the city’s traditionally bourgeois West End, one of the districts that escaped the war relatively unscathed – and hence was now available for a secondary demolition at the hands of the banks. The result was that, “[e]ntire blocks became hopelessly overcrowded, while some properties were intentionally left vacant. It was practically impossible for students to rent collective apartments in the neighborhood. It was during this period, from 1970 to 1974, that the Frankfurt squatters’ movement developed.” That movement should itself be set in a wider framework,

Specifically, an axial road structure that provided new car routes along the arms of the compass, and, echoing this, new Zeilenbau housing, i.e. north–south-oriented “row-house” apartments that received facing sun at either rise or set and which had already been prominently constructed in Frankfurt in the late ’20s to early ’30s, such as Ernst May’s Siedlung Westhausen.

Geronimo, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement, trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), p. 54.

The question of the public was and is absolutely vital for German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge. For him, the public sphere is “what one might call the

one that exceeds the physical occupations and even the explicitly militant rhetoric, as it was unfolding amongst a discordant, seething public discourse about both the city and what constitutes the idea of the public itself. It’s visible, for instance, in the acidly mocking nicknames that Frankfurters were spitting back at their own city, and not in some gentle ribbing of the loved: Bankfurt, and, maybe more cutting, Krankfurt (a pun that might be translated as “sick city”). A city sick with money, feeding on itself in development’s name.

It was on this combative terrain that Kluge and Edgar Reitz would make In Danger and Distress The Middleway Spells Certain Death, with specific focus on the Frankfurt Hauserkampf (housing battle) of February 1974, zeroing in on the violent eviction of one of those squats prior to the demolition of the building itself, as if to scrub the ground clear of any trace of social possibility. The film is a slippery, fundamentally dialogic hybrid that combines documentary footage of militant resistance and public outrage with the ambulatory wandering of Inge Maier (a prostitute who steals the wallets and cars of her clients), interviews and meetings debating the transformation of Frankfurt’s housing market, preparations for the city’s annual carnival, and a loopy espionage plot that turns on an East German communist spy who insists that “espionage belongs to the people.” What makes the film remarkable, though, is how it never cleanly delineates these threads but instead tangles them, joining the factual with the whimsical, financial speculation with flights of speculative fancy. Most potently, the film intersperses the characters throughout quotidian situations actually happening during the film’s shooting: the spy attends real

factory of politics – its site of production. When this site of production – the space in which politics is first made possible at all and communicable – is caught in a scissors-grip between private appropriation (which is no longer public in the authentic sense) and the self-eliminating classical public-sphere (its mechanisms of subtraction and exclusion); when this public sphere threatens to disappear, its loss would be as grave today as the loss of the common land was for the farmer in the Middle Ages.” Alexander Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere,” New German Critique, No. 24/25 (Autumn 1981 - Winter 1982), p. 213.

The film was intended, in their own words, to produce “proportions rather than statements; an object with which one can argue.” Quoted in Miriam Hansen, “Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Kluge and Early Cinema,” in Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, ed. Tara Forrest (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 404.

She writes lyrical reports that her contact derides: But you, you write poetry! It’s too general. But class struggle means facts, not generalities.

astronomy lectures and, in an indelible passage, Maier walks, suitcase in hand, through the chaos of the riot following the eviction.

A portion of the riot footage will get reused nine years later, in 1983, to form what has become one of my favorite films ever made, a tiny, precise, and furious two-and-a-half-minute short called Biermann-Film. It’s named for Wolf Biermann, the dissident and resolutely unincorporable folksinger, whose song “Großes Gebet der alten Kommunistin Oma Meume in Hamburg” (“The Great Prayer of Granny Meume, Old Communist in Hamburg”) provides the film’s only sound and dictates its running length, as the images begin in tandem with the song and end when it ends. Formally, the film is exceedingly simple: there is just the song, the riot, and the quiet amidst and after the struggle, as the street is swept clean by those whose job it is to do so, no matter whether the debris comes from a carnival or the daily movement of commerce or an exceptional revolt. It begins with the first line of the song, as riot cops file through our view and line up on the street, identical and interchangeable with their translucent shields and helmets and belted coats, there on a street already strewn with stones as bystanders watch, hands in pockets. The film then cuts to another view of that same junction, but from a distance, off to the side of where the road dips down into a tunnel we can’t see because of a ledge that blocks the way. Someone in a long coat, with a profound collar that could only belong in the ’70s, throws a stone at a police van and backs away, the camera following their movement to show another who throws a stone, and others looking out at the target, gauging its distance. And after a quick cut, to

Like when the spy takes a lift high up the outside of the building, looking down and out over the city being transformed by those projects of demolition and construction, surveying it as if a developer or cartographer. But the shot is intercut with others of her at street level, carrying out uncertain surveillance of a march against such projects. And the shots alternate, caught between these two positions, until, as though the only solution was to flee plausibility and depth alike, there is suddenly a stuffed toy bird that hovers over a rear projection of the city like it’s soaring amongst the skyscrapers, an angel of history with cartoon eyes that don’t blink in face of the monetized chaos below.

The album from which it was drawn, Chausseestraße 131 (from 1968), is itself stunning, an instance of maximal effect from minimal means. Barred from recording in the GDR, the whole record was made with a portable mic snuck in, and so the sounds of the city and his apartment constantly intersperse. Trams and street cars go past and honk, people speak outside, and inside, Biermann simply rages, there’s no other word for it.

God, oh God in Heaven, hear my prayers
To you I cry as I did in my childhood
My short life was long an abundance of poverty
Oh God, what great toil for a scrap of bread
[…]

For peace I cried into the great wars
And what have I achieved?

Soon I shall die

the van reversing in a moment that might be immediately succeeding or prior or minutes later, because we just can’t say, the van is back where it was but advancing now, swaying forward up the road. A water cannon mounted on its roof blasts away from us before a second one rotates around, its spray striking the camera directly in the lens and obscuring the image, big droplets gobbing on.

I’m fascinated by these drops. By the way I find myself recoiling, as though they’ve leapt through the screen and hit my face. Without any didactic explanation, the film poses a fundamental question that runs throughout cinema:

Because as the lens is hit, the camera suddenly materializes. It becomes something in space subject to being touched and soaked and ruined, and in this collision, this immediate manifestation of what sees, it makes us physically present to ourselves too. We’re at once caught in the mesh of the image and distanced from it, as the mechanism of recording is revealed as a physical apparatus and layer of framing and bracketing, severing any transparent absorption and yet transmitting its shock.

But something equally crucial happens, even if it’s more elusive, registered less as an optic splat and more as what’s missing. The film cuts to a different image immediately after being hit by the water, to a smaller van that appears to be an ambulance, and breaks the flow of advancing time, as if the force of the water has caused the camera’s spools to slip and rewind or leap forward. And then once again, we’re back where we were when we were sprayed, or almost, because now we’re further away, taking cover by the buildings. The police van is down

Oh God, grant that Communism triumphs!

Can we be struck by an image?

Yes, it answers, yes, we can

[No words are heard during this entire time, only the sound of a Biermann’s guitar and his voice singing an open ooooooo.]

by the tunnel, blocked from view by that ledge in our way, although we know it’s there because of its obscene spray of water still angling upwards, wetting nothing in particular. With the distance it has moved, it seems as though some rigid chronometric march of time has kept pace, so that in the seconds filled by that other van, this timeline moved forward undisturbed. Yet the lens is clear. There are no drops on it, no trace of what had happened just moments before. Perhaps what goes unseen in this small span of time is that hand of the operator who wipes it dry, a human interference and aid needed to restore the imagined clarity of mechanical sight. Or perhaps the drenched camera has been swapped out for another one. The moments are missing, and we can’t say, other than to know that once we’ve rejoined that advancing time, the lens is bright and clear again, and we’re facing towards that spray that seems unable to hit us. Distance has been restored, and we’re just watchers. That’s the moment when we’re blindsided, literally, by another jet of water that screams from offscreen and blows past, seeming to catch the operator’s body and wrench it. The image jars and rotates to show the source: another van and its water cannon that has just rolled through, sneaking up to attack anyone, no matter if they are filming. And behind it marches those cops from the beginning, batons out, the way cleared for them.

But they pass straight by whoever is holding the camera. As if that person wasn’t worth the bother of chasing away or attacking, wasn’t there at all. It’s unsurprising because sometimes the surest way to remain unseen is to record what you are seeing, to hold a camera in front of your face. Because whatever can get soaked and keep filming,

And so it will remain clear in the footage that inspires another Biermann song, “Chile, Ballad of a Cameraman,” the footage of Leonardo Henrichsen, the photographer who films the very soldier who shoots and kills him during an attempted coup against Allende, the shot captured by the camera that does not stop rolling, not yet

The voice returns:

A quick prayer

whatever has sight that can be magically cleared of any liquid or interference like nothing happened, is something that promises to not touch back, to not intervene, to mind its own business, to barely be there in the first place, just a record, a ghost and its machine.

Towards the end of the film, as the song is hitting its climax, Biermann belts out, voice furious and shaking:

At this moment, the camera is looking up at the sky past a building, as though echoing the addressee of that prayer, the “God in heaven” to whom Biermann sings also the first line of the song. There are kids arrayed on top of the buildings, and the air is bright and clear, with fluffy and decidedly unmenacing crowds. One might read this alignment as an affirmation of faith, that all one needs – or can – do is pray and wait for someone in the sky to handle the undoing of capitalism or at least to strike down the cops from above. But that’s not what the film thinks, remotely, especially given that prior to this, we see that someone inside one of the surrounding buildings has got water of their own and is hosing the cops away, chasing them off.

Besides, that very same line was sung with equal fervor at another point in the film: right when the water splattered the lens, the last word falling dead on the instant of impact. That’s the counterpoint, the film’s grasp of the kind of messy contact and interference at work in the process of dismantling capitalism. Not the utopian dream or the prayer to the endlessly far, but the point at which any fantasy of remove or distance is ruined, and no one gets to be innocent or simply an observer, when even the camera itself can’t be excused for its complicity and can be touched, wetly, fine with the mist of the riot.

Oh God, grant that Communism triumphs!

Grant that my beloved Wolf does not end up
Behind barbed wire as his father did

Grant that Communism triumphs!

Part Three

Distributed Sight

THE VANISHING MACHINE

Once more back to begin again, back to earlier cinema, to Uncle Josh hamming it up for the crowd peering through the other side of the screen. To that train that may or may not have threatened to exit the projection into the waiting laps of the watching…

The focus that film historians have given to the stakes of these images, especially in terms of ascribed misrecognition, audience shaming (in the figure of the rube/bumpkin), and vital contagion¹ from screen bodies to viewing bodies, has been crucial in pointing towards what became of cinematic experience in the decades and century to follow. Still, there’s another future lurking in that assumed collision that I’ve seen less discussion of, one that matters for how it suggests the ways in which we form and negotiate an unstable interface with cameras, screens, and what lies beside, behind, or elsewhere from them. It can be glimpsed in the quite simple fact that in the Lumière film, the camera remains still. It waits for the train to approach. With our gaze so condensed onto the approaching engine and without cuts, moves, or rack focusing to break that concentration, the other machine in the scene, the camera itself, can function without calling attention to its own physical presence, quietly vanishing into an approximation of a viewer’s eye without qualification or friction. This transparency is the precondition for the myth of audience shock, drawing the link between what the camera recorded and what a viewer sees with a minimum of interference.

However, this binding of perspective to machines was put to strikingly different ends even in the few years before Uncle Josh raised his minor hell. Nearly two decades prior to Giovanni Pastrone’s imperialist epic Cabiria (1914), which employs what came to be widely and wrongly considered the “first” tracking shot, filmmakers were busy with “phantom rides” (such as 1898’s View from an Engine Front – Barnstaple), tracing new vistas through landscapes by placing cameras on trains and using that already-existing infrastructure to pull off shots that wouldn’t become a significant element of studio-film language until the ’20s.² The technique wasn’t only restricted to documentary, ethnographic, or actuality film ends. If the tracking shot in Cabiria is in the service of its proto-fascist martial reveries, a Danish anti-war melodrama also from 1914, Holger-Madsen’s Lay Down Your Arms!, uses a train track to enact a stunning reversal. There, the camera is affixed to a locomotive laden with a war’s dead and wounded as it chugs through the pastures, the moving shot enabled by the same industrial technology and networks that the film condemns in anticipation of their very real gore-smirched activation in the next years’ internecine conflict.

But it’s in a short, stark, and atrociously funny film from 1900 called How It Feels to Be Run Over, made by Cecil Hepworth and crew, that possibilities of conjoined eye and camera really find their latent violence.³ Like Uncle Josh, it belongs as unequivocally to early cinema as it does to the image culture of the past two decades, a one-off gag that may as well be a Vine. It’s got all the same weird fury, misanthropy, and suspicion that the whole world is a set of deadly gags waiting to happen that camcorder culture in the early ’90s put to use simultaneously in America’s Funniest Home Videos and Cops, later outpaced by the autophagic crotch-punched masculinity of the CKY skate videos (soon to morph into Jackass). The film consists of a single shot of a dirt road from a fixed position in its middle. A horse-drawn carriage rounds the far bend, approaches our vantage point, and passes by. In terms of expectations, we’re still in the terrain of early film actualities and taking potential pleasure in watching the world on film, especially as no title comes beforehand to give away the plot. Then a car comes into view, flanked by a bicyclist, rounding out the modes of mechanical transport on display and setting up a small object lesson in the violence of combustive velocity. The car gets closer and closer to the camera, swerving all over the road. Its occupants make small gestures, moving their hands and gesticulating jerkily, assumedly to warn the driver (Hepworth himself) away from a collision. But as if drawn by magnets, the car steers back to the target of its crash course: the camera, which can take it all in but not get itself out of the way. And at the moment when the car gets so close it fills the screen, the films cuts to black. One word at a time, each in jagged, jiggling white, silently spells out: “? ? !!! ! Oh! Mother will be pleased!” The end.

If the presumed shock of the Lumière brothers’ train requires a casual correlation between viewer and camera, Hepworth’s crashing machines force that into relief, suggesting a far knottier set of contradictions and elisions largely reinforced over the decades to come.⁴ They pose, in sum, an image of the camera as a vanishing machine, something capable of recording physical space yet excised from it, able to slip in and out of presence and degrees of apparent humanness, to be simultaneously run over and not. It’s a construct that gestures to two distinct timescales and zones of experience. First, within the terrain of images⁵ themselves, it looks forward to the notion and practice of what I’d call distributed sight: able to be everywhere and nowhere at once, less a discrete recording apparatus than an ambient field of registration and perspective. This diffuse condition, worked out through tens of thousands of films and shows over decades and decades, helps dissolve any clear division between production and post-production by opening the prospect of the camera being activated or simulated as a path or vantage point at any moment. It also helps naturalize a lived condition of always being potentially under surveillance from what may well not announce itself or appear capable of perception or transmission. Second, within a wider social sphere, this dynamic places it amongst a far larger array of machinery – productive, domestic, infrastructural, communicative – that become so entangled in structures of daily life as to become its invisible architecture, literally unremarkable until their moments of breakdown, outmoding, or awkward disaster.

In the Hepworth film, these tendencies fuel the basic tension that makes the gag work in the first place, even if the laughter sticks in the throat. Specifically, they build a factious split between the camera as a peculiar and novel mechanical device and the camera as an equivalent of the human eye, affixed to an anonymous body unable to get out of the way of a hurtling and drifty modernity. In an obvious way, the comedy and/or horror only functions insofar as it is possible for the camera to pull off that latter approximation, to make it seem like there was someone at risk in the road. This sort of equation is the one equally responsible for the slasher-film association of shaky camera with a killer’s POV, and a thousand essays on the cinematic gaze. But it also rests on a more basic one, a question not of type of thing but of whether or not it is present in the first place. One of the unmistakable projects of what came to be called cinema, especially of the capital-intensive and narrative variety, will be to pretend that at least when they are rolling, cameras do not physically exist. They can’t be bumped into, destroyed, or even touched by anything else in their shared space. For such a cinema, mirrors will become headache and mortal enemy. Glass, that material so necessary to the function of the camera itself, becomes a threat of reflection every time the angle approaches perpendicular or the sheen is wrong, blowing the shot when a machine and its operator can be glimpsed skittering across the frame and catching themselves unawares. The dominance of this erasure is also what allows the necessary force and inversion of films like Barbara Hammer’s New York Loft from 1983, where the interior of a single domestic space becomes a set of staged encounters with the objects that make it up – including that of the camera itself, the circular lens doubled in the round mirror it films. It constructs an echo chamber of sight, one that opens wide to produce a key parallel between one of cinema’s most enduring double erasures: the gendered domestic spaces typically considered not worth filming and the unseen processes and mechanisms needed to produce recorded images in which they are not supposed to be seen.

Films like Hammer’s are the exception, though, especially when compared with industrial cinema that works tirelessly to keep the shadows of booms and cranes out of the shot at risk of looking amateur. It will save the camera’s innate physicality for gags, like the tracking shot that breaks the window in Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety (and in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, because Brooks knows a good gag when he films it), or for a sudden discrete materiality snapping the view back to adrenal attention, like the kicked chair that hits and shakes the rig in Bad Boys 2, punctuating a sequence where the camera has orbited around and around, cutting through walls without even a glimmer of friction. At the far end of this historical passage comes digital compositing, which constructs its landscapes separately from primary filming, for which a single shot can employ a wholly virtual camera or a whole range of them, the end shot a smoothed field of their assorted angles and information. As if aware that some yearning remains for the way that the camera’s unseen presence guarantees the heft and texture of what is shown, the composite images of shard cinema become positively obsessed with reintroducing physical traces – lens flares, dust, light leaks, shudders – as after-effects to disavow digital origins.⁶

Still, the shape of that arc to follow is already well at work in the Hepworth film, a portrait in miniature of the circuits of this potent anxiety and its indecision. Is the camera something that might be struck and ruined, that could cause a car to crash? Can it strike back? Or is it ever and always out of harm’s way, something that can produce this image of its own destruction without being destroyed, that will continue to record with no loss?

Perhaps it’s telling that How It Feels to Be Run Over doesn’t complete this circuit as images alone. It needs those final words on the dark screen. After all, how do you distinguish between a hard cut and the actual sudden destruction of the camera by a car? The images themselves cannot answer this, because once printed, a cut has no forensic betrayal of what caused it. In this way, the film must reach past the images to written language, dodging the question by instead driving home the implicit correlation of camera to body through what we can recognize as a voice, a voice of a subject that had a mother. So just like the title and its hint of contagious sensation (how it feels…), that last line insists that what we’ve just witnessed is a proxy, if not a record, of human death. But as sinister as this might seem (and as much as it’s in keeping with Hepworth’s other splatter shorts, like Explosion of a Motor Car’s rain of human limbs from the sky), it suggests an attempt to recover a profound comfort that borders on an ontological reassurance. It avoids any category errors by insisting on the primacy of human sight over a hybrid inhuman one where the mechanical and biological become intertwined. Not that it matters, perhaps, because I for one find myself far from assured or comforted, given that the severe weirdness of joining durable camera vision to this plaintive lament to a judgmental mother carries all the mechanomorphic pathos of a suicidal Roomba’s last murmurs. This negotiation of whether or not the camera is an entity to even be acknowledged (or swerved away from) suggests the second of the conditions amplified by How It Feels to Be Run Over: that of the play between what the camera alone can see and the injunction to not acknowledge it, to not watch it back. (This is one of those gestures that will come to stand as a marker of verité: the faces in the crowd that look back, that haven’t been told to act like the camera isn’t there, or have refused the instructions…) Like the uncertain materiality of the camera in space, this process of trying to ignore the recording mechanism also starts at the same time that the project of cinema gets going, there with the lunchtime exit of the Lumière workers from the factory where they make the same apparatus that films them as they pass through the gates and disperse. In Harun Farocki’s essay about the film and his own archival project that tracks the future of this repeated image, he notes a disciplinary function of the camera, one surely inseparable from the injunction of the boss to “act normal” and ignore what doesn’t ignore them. As one woman tugs at the skirt of another as they separate directions, trying to play it cool but still fucking around, Farocki suggests that the tugger “knows this woman doesn’t retaliate under the camera’s stern eye.”⁷ This is to be one function of the moving-image camera in all its varieties, to discipline not because the footage will be used to convict or discipline but because it bears the promise that someone somewhere might watch it, that a crime will retroactively make the film of lethal importance. (As if there are enough guards to watch the world’s CCTV cameras, enough drives and clouds to store all their witnessing.)

For the next century, workers and the actors playing them will rarely be filmed in factories, that site so central to the development of global capitalism and so widely absent from its film representations. Instead, they will gain visibility once they’ve left it behind, coming out the gates, hurtling down roads, walking the streets, drinking, filling hours that don’t count as work, entering homes where the unwaged labor of dusting mirrors and caring for others will too rarely count as of interest. But when the camera itself exits the factory, having been put together piece by piece under watchful eyes, it ceases to be seen and becomes a cunning machine, subject to its own laws, untouchable as a cop. In Hepworth’s film – in the first year of a century where the triple bond of human experience, inhuman vision, and lethal force will come to be central as never before – that bond already shows itself in shadow, as an apparatus that sees all but is never seen seeing, that does not blink or budge but can be driven over, that animates but can’t die, that vanishes into plain sight without missing a thing.

_____________________________________

1 As noted variously by Pasi Valiaho and Wenda Strauven. See Pasi Valiaho, Mapping the Moving Image Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp. 14, 84-86; and Wanda Strauven, “The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch,” in Media Archaeology Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 148-63.

2 Ken Jacobs’ Opening the 19th Century 1896 (1990) both excavates and reactivates some of these shots. See also Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974), a film in close association with Jacobs’ work.

3 For a wider account of films centered on spectacular accidents (and explosions) in early cinema, see James Leo Cahill, “How It Feels to Be Run Over: Early Film Accidents,” in Discourse, Vol. 30.3 (Fall 2008), pp. 289-316.

4 There’s a long history of reading this film, particularly in a psychoanalytic register, that is summed up well by Gregory Robinson’s cogent essay on the film. By focusing close attention on the ending words, Robinson also notes the uncertain status of subjectivity and attachment at work, although to different ends than I am here (and without a focus on the status and physicality of the camera itself). See: “Oh! Mother Will Be Pleased: Cinema Writes Back in Hepworth’s How It Feels to Be Run Over,” Literature Film Quarterly, Vol. 39, Iss. 3 (2011), pp. 218-30.

5 Here I mean image also in the sense of any organization of information into a form that appears coherent and recognizable as something, as a content, to humans.

6 So obsessed, for instance, that J.J. Abrams had to apologize for his rampant application of lens flare to pretty much any shot possible in Star Trek: Into Darkness after his wife gave him shit for it. “I was showing my wife an early cut of Star Trek Into Darkness [sic] and there was this one scene where she was literally like, ‘I just can’t see what’s going on. I don’t understand what that is.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I went too nuts on this.’” Online at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/03/star-trek-into-darkness-jj-abrams-lens-flare.

7 Harun Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), p. 243.

FIGURES IN A THREATSCAPE

It is a narrative of endangerment and redemptive insight: the hero is in the process of making a construction into a calculation, is engaged in the labour of abstraction, at which point the measured space wants once more to prove its actuality. The greatest danger is posed by the objectivity and actuality of things. It is dangerous to remain physically near the object, to linger at the scene.

– Harun Farocki, on Albrecht Meydenbauer’s near-fall from the facade of a cathedral and the origin story of photographic scale measurement¹

You need to adjust to a threatscape that isn’t going to stand still and wait for you to be ready.

– Army Lt. Col. Joseph DeFee, commander of Florida National Guard’s 48th Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team (CST), CBRNE mission²

Joseph Losey’s 1970 film Figures in a Landscape, which I’ll just call Figures from here out, isn’t hard to watch, at least not in the way we usually mean with those words. It isn’t marked by the difficulty of continuing to look at something that, even if not especially atrocious in a single moment, becomes unbearable over a duration, as brevity’s shock stretches into the interminable, the god, it can’t keep going on like this, can it…? For that sense, we’d be more accurate to say that something is hard watching, because it needs that gerund to note how we get implicated in the act and process: squirming through scenes figuratively or literally torturous, enduring the relentless fact of dysfunctional family reunions or meticulous autopsies, weathering Sandra Bullock or Stan Brakhage. Figures lacks all that. Even as it’s a brutally anxious and frenzied slog, one that provides little respite from its ceaseless repetition, the sense of real horror it generates never draws the hands up to shutter the eyes. Nor does it provoke that recognizable pulp frisson of having seen too much yet never quite enough. Rather, this film is hard to see,³ and it’s fixated on that difficulty in all its historical complications and fury.

Noting that it has a real problem with sight, or that the stakes of this problem far exceed strictly aesthetic concerns about structures of perception, is no big surprise, let alone a nuanced reading. It is the film’s explicit concern, literally there in its title, one of those singular names like Vampire Circus or Vanishing Point that describe with absolute precision the narrative and visual world of the film to follow. In this case: two figures – both white English men, one younger (Ansell, played by Malcolm McDowell), one older (MacConnachie, or “Mac,” played by Robert Shaw, who also wrote the script), both nervous, manic assholes in their own ways – have escaped from imprisonment by an unnamed military force. They’re on the lam and trying to make it to safe territory. With no map to guide, they cower, sprint, sweat, swear, steal, yell, and kill their way across an equally unnamed landscape, a mountainous, pastoral, and markedly non-industrial countryside (in reality, the Sierra Nevada mountains near Granada in Spain, the same zone where Sergio Leone, Giulio Questi, and others were shooting spaghetti westerns in years just prior).

Industry is never far though. It’s omnipresent in the form of the helicopter, that martial wasp so central to the military and imaginative terrain of the late ’60s, especially in the global circulation of images of US slaughter in Vietnam. More than anything, it is the shadow of both that war and the helicopter more generally that casts so heavily over Figures, allegorically in the case of the former, especially given the film’s source novel by Barry England, and literally in the case of the latter as the figures are pursued and harassed by choppers that comb the land for them. The film’s poster promises that, “THE BIRD HAS COME FOR ITS PREY,” and there’s no doubt it has, swooping over valleys, rivers, vineyards, and fields, flown by helmeted aviators who never speak a word and are glimpsed only from the ground or from right behind them, as though the camera was third-party to their search, one more soldier on the hunt. But the problem, at least for the battered sanity of the fugitives, is that despite having come for that prey, and finding it again and again, the mechanical raptor has no interest in making the kill. It prefers instead to just hover, circle, deafen, harry, loom, depart, and repeat.⁴

So too the arc of the film. Aside from minor triumphs (the bringing down of one soldier/pilot in a counter-ambush laid by the men on the loose scree of a hillside) and ample shouting, the story is as non-linear as the figures’ exitless passage, a termite fleeing not through that landscape so much as deeper into it, its surface, underbrush, ditches, houses, caves, and dust.⁵ At the end of its run time, there will be a nominal ending with all the dire glee of doom that marks so much of long-‘70s cinema in general and Losey’s output in particular, especially in the 1963 double whammy of The Servant’s autophagy of class relations and the motorboat’s aimless motion at the end of These Are the Damned. Here, Ansell and Mac will make it to what we suppose or concede was their intended destination all along, a border crossed high on a snowy peak into friendly territory, where the non-enemy forces show neither happiness nor triumph at the men’s arrival, just a formal acknowledgement of their intruders as categorically non-hostile. But hooked on the chase and a moronic death match with their inhuman double (helicopter as human skill plus war machine), Mac passes back over the territory’s dividing line, picks one more gun battle with the “bird,” and gets himself shot to death in the process. If the film has any moral, it’s that war is hell, not least of all because one gets too used to it.

The real difficulty of sight at work in this film isn’t because it gives its harried characters the camouflage they so desire. In other words, it’s not as though we are unable see them and have to spend nearly two hours trying to pick them out of the dust and brush. The hard seeing comes instead from how the film frustrates plot and any attempt to locate those figures within either relevant meaning of that word: either a delimited zone of terrain or a narrative sequence. That’s not for a lack of continuity that might hypothetically give us the lay of the land for mapping physical or narrative progress. After all, the film’s style is primarily one of long takes and establishing shots, followed by relentless triangulation between the relevant materials in the shot’s space: landscape, helicopter, fugitives. The film holds this ground with rigor, both spatially and temporally. No flashbacks, no crosscuts to other characters, no parallel storylines, no tough decisions being made by the forces of the “good guys” to get their men out alive, no other locations glimpsed, not even in memory. So like the brilliant rural American noirs of the ’40s and ’50s,⁶ we’re visually tied to their attempt to be unseeable and its failure, our view sharing both the copter’s cockpit and the trails and crannies cutting through mountains, fields, and streams. In other words, we don’t go anywhere until Mac and Ansell do – and they seem to go nowhere without us. As for just where that is, how they escaped, what country this is, or why this war is being fought in the first place, we’re left in the dark, or, more accurately, stuck squinting at what’s going nowhere in an awful hurry.

Narratively stranded yet endlessly situating and reframing in the landscape of its title, this difficulty comes to be what the film is in sum, compounded by how irrevocable that split between these three positions (landscape, figure, helicopter) and their attached kinds of vision becomes, concurring only in nasty and literal collisions, like when the men bring the chopper’s “eyes” (its pilot) down to the rocky ground with a gun. It’s a properly hostile mode of sight, in the way that hostility signals not simple antagonism but an enmity that can only treat its threats as wholly alien to them, beyond any discussion, not just a danger to continued existence but belonging to a different regime of life, thought, and time.

But here, without any cause or purpose to condense around, the hostility can only become diffuse, a toxic filter laid over everything in sight. This strikes me as the source of the film’s peculiar abrasive force, one that gets under my skin for days after I watch it. It seems to arise from the way that this fundamental confrontation between orders of inhabiting, using, traversing, surveying, and surviving lethal space gets nothing so concrete and classical as a state of emergency, stormed beachhead, or overthrown palace. A general condition, its most accurate representation in the film is no representation at all, no image, trope, or motif, but rather its soundscape, which joins the high keen and thumping drone of the score (by Richard Rodney Bennett) to the high keen, thump, and drone of the chopper itself to produce a giant glissando locust’s whine of the new, stuttering and falling over itself, stuck somewhere between twenty-four frames and three hundred blade rotations per second.

Unlike a standard-issue modernist paradigm, whether the acerbic braggadocio of European historical avant-gardes or a subtractive race to the minimalist bottom, this new can’t be measured in terms of what it does to, with, or against what came before. Rather, the stakes of generalized hostility only become apparent with what will be the case, only retroactively, once it ceases to be a local condition of this film, these figures, and this landscape and becomes truly general, epochal, and atrociously banal. It’s like they say about vampires: once you invite a helicopter into your landscape, it’s going to be hell getting it to leave.

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Figures is no point of origin, in any historical sense. It never had the influence it should have and isn’t watched widely still, so it would be plainly false to imagine that it inaugurated anything we could call a sequence. Still, it’s a film that manages to do something rare. It suggests a mode of looking, making, recording, and navigating – of sight, in full – that was not entirely operative or available when the film was made but would take shape equally across war, commerce, entertainment, and the blurry space between them in the decades that followed it. As mentioned in the previous essay, that mode is the consequence of a specific way of thinking about possible relations between camera and space, that of distributed sight: the increasing possibility that any point in space, seen or unseen, might itself be a vantage point, a point of view, a position from which landscapes, figures, and their activities can be watched, without the recording device itself being visible or even material in the first place. It is the kind of sight that has become so central to composited images – and shard cinema, more generally – in the last two decades, thanks to the ability to assign entirely variable camera position and motion within animation software, but Figures will articulate the conditions and undercurrents of it through a rigorous construction and remaking of its own conditions of vision and the way that these operated for much of a twentieth century of moving images.

The specifics of this construction are best moved into slowly, starting with two very recent instances of cinematic aerial looking that help make sense of just what it is that Figures did and does.

The first, an all-CGI architectural video flythrough of a London skyscraper prior to its construction, might raise grumbles about this designation of cinema. It shouldn’t, though, given both the stylistic echoes – it’s nothing more than an extended tracking shot that cuts out portions of its path deemed repetitive or irrelevant – and its preoccupation with the relation between mass-distributed moving images and the construction, sale, and rent of property. The property in this case is not a cinema with seats for temporary inhabitation but the Avant-Garde Tower: a 25-story luxury apartment development in Shoreditch by architectural firm Stock Woolstonecraft “set to dominate the City skyline for years to come,” as their website trumpeted/threatened. On that same website, which has been taken down since the building went up, one could watch a “Video Flythrough” that travels through a digital vision of the yuppie stronghold to come, the entire video set within an ornate gold frame.⁷ It starts innocuously enough, despite the space’s eerie vacancy, swooping through a mixed-style lobby and cutting to a drifting passage through the “Free Spirit Garden” before it enters the building itself. There, it floats arounds like a half-drunk ghost uncertain of how to haunt without history, how to spook the pristine and uninhabited.

So on it goes, gliding through elevators, gyms, bathrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, working its way upwards toward the top floors’ exclusive “Altitude Apartments,” touching nothing, lingering on no details. Beyond the social ugliness behind the financing of such construction and the lives that will unfold there, there’s another moment of horror, a long, creeping one. It has no precise starting point, for the simple reason that the genre of the flythrough conditions us against recognizing what we’ve unmistakably seen, so that we can accumulate this only piecemeal, in little glimpses. As for when it dawns on a viewer, that remains an individual question, and perhaps it doesn’t happen at all, remaining only a niggling angst. But somewhere in the span of these motions into polished elevators, through mirrored gyms, near burnished panels, alongside buffed showers, and towards partially reflective picture frames, it will likely strike you: the camera casts no reflection.⁸

Sight has become a vampire in its own house. No operator, no apparatus, no hint of structure, because nothing is revealed in the mirror that has not already been seen in the unreflected field of vision. Our proxy eyes are weightless, depthless, and entirely transparent, without even a lens flare when traversing the sun-drenched garden. The reason for this is obvious enough – there was no physical camera to start, as the video is an entirely digital rendering. Yet the effect unsettles all the same, because this condo-to-be produces an echo chamber of morbid self-reflection, furnished not just with pixelated settees but also with the only mode of seeing adequate to such a space: military vision.

This is the tautology of a cloaked drone facing itself down in a mirror. Here, it relays data and program execution not from a great spatial distance but a smaller temporal one, from a late 2013 that will not arrive. To watch this flythrough is to watch a broadcast back from what claims to be the future – the pristine condo, unsullied and ready for residents – yet that only exists morally, as an ought, only insofar as blueprints of what should be found there trump both the apparatus that produces that vision and the clusterfuck of the “facts on the ground,” as imperial lingo would have it. Both the computer processor and the homeless are locked out of this unarmed, avatar-less first-person shooter, where there are no targets because everything is enemy. And just like the drone and its data networks, this is a technology for reading the landscape that can only process what it has come to find, constructing the terrain in its quantification and evaluation of distance, coordinate, surface pattern, temperature, and breath. In Yemen, it will find only heat profiles, villages, and life to be named casualty; in Shoreditch, it finds a vacant bed from which to gaze at The City, unblemished by the stain of one’s well-toned reflection, and a dining table set carefully for eight with no bodies in sight, still warm or otherwise.

In The Bourne Legacy (2012)⁹, the object of inhuman flight, looking, and targeting still casts no reflection. It does, however, show up onscreen at length, in the incorporation of drones not just as kind of sight but also as key narrative element. Picking up the question that obsesses Figures – how do you escape being seen when there’s nowhere to hide? – The Bourne Legacy swaps the coterminous man-machine hybrid of the copter for a quieter, nastier world of surveillance networks, satellites, and drones. In this film, the bird hasn’t come for its prey: it’s been sent, steered both by eyes from afar and by algorithms that could care less for the texture of the landscape, reducing all – humans, wolves, trees, snow – to variables in a data field.

When it comes to The Bourne Legacy’s explicit drone sequence, where viewers get the supposed comfort of watching not a Pakistani national but a white American man MacGyver his way out of death from above (by means of lo-fi signal deflection and a genuinely clever transfer of his implanted tracking device into a living wolf), it’s edited just as we’d expect, shuttling between requisite points of perspective. The target as seen from those who control the drone, beamed back in fuzzy video, even if these absent pilots do not target by vision but by coordinates and trackers, just explosively connecting the dots on a live-feed GPS. Those controllers as seen by others in the room where they huddle around screens. The target as seen by the drone itself, unrepresentable but made graphically available to us as a blinking point on a map. The wolf as seen by the man. The man as seen by the wolf, or at least how he’d like to be seen by the wolf. The drone as seen by both, and especially heard, as a low screaming comes across the sky. And lastly, the drone as seen by nothing but the camera, located somewhere above the trees, flying alongside, casting no shadow, causing no interference.¹⁰

It’s the last that fascinates me. Not because the structure of a camera’s movement in narrative cinema is typically given by an element of, or figure in, its landscapes, but because this film goes to such lengths to hint that its own style is adequate to our historical moment’s peculiar mode of distributed sight, from Google Maps to DARPA and everywhere between.

The film’s opening stages this bluntly, with a gliding track out from a medium-shot of the hero (Jeremy Renner, doing his best wounded jock), semi-nude and shivering after diving into an icy river, to an extreme long shot as if from drone which frames him in the uninhabited wilderness of Alaska. The effect, in short, is as though we’ve witnessed the wolf-seeking missile’s trajectory in slow-mo reverse¹¹, as if the camera has taken to the air without taking its lens off its target.

The technique is mirrored at the end of the film, where the protagonist (again shirtless, of course, as the film loves a little ab with its surveillance commentary) and his unconsummated love interest are on a boat off Manila and pithily decide to throw away the map, to see where the very blue sea takes them. The moronic allegory of going off the grid and toward the unknown regions of the heart gets stylistic confirmation by a motion out from the pair similar to the film’s opening, as if to insist that you can never fully escape the hunting eyes of global security networks and, therefore, they will be found, ensuring a sequel. But it’s the motion itself that is odd, no longer the unmanned weapon in reverse but a slow, circling track, a 360-degree spiral around and out from the boat that it hovers behind as they bob off towards the horizon. Like Brian De Palma’s comically dizzying circular track around the passionate kiss in Body Double, the non-axial, obsessively focused motion here gets to stand in for both voyeur and dizzy promise of lust to come.

And yet nothing in the film has moved like this. The drones follow direct lines, on map and in air alike, while the characters move centrifugally toward the post-colonial outskirts of the Global North. Despite all the film’s dour warnings, the most ominous thing about the whole affair isn’t the fact that you might always be watched. It takes that as a given. The disarming prospect is that you are watched by something that does not belong in the landscape, by that which can’t be named, found, sighted, targeted, and brought down, be it with rock or virus, because it can be anywhere and nowhere at once.

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To be sure, the history of narrative cinema is largely one of pretending that the camera doesn’t exist, at least not as an opaque mass that casts shadows, makes noise, runs on tracks, or catches its own reflections unawares. Like vampires, film knows to stay away from glaziers and dressing rooms until the moment can’t be delayed any longer. Figures is no exception on this front. We never see the camera, the crew, their reflection, shadow, or footprints.

Narrative cinema, across nations and decades, also rarely insists that even if we don’t see the camera as a camera, it should follow rules or expectations of sight laid down by previously glimpsed perspectival points or objects that could see, characters above all. Certain genres do dwell extensively on the possibility of binding sight to character, perhaps most famously in the post-Mario Bava slasher, where the Steadicam is bound not only to the potential pleasure and phallic gaze of viewing slaughter but to the already-located threat of a specific killer lurking and stalking. But those are notable precisely for their rarity. On the whole, the movement of the camera in the vast majority of films I’ve seen in my life finds no analogue so concrete and placeable.¹²

The first moments of Figures place us squarely in this complicated terrain where vision, hostility, and subjectivity are all operative but never quite aligned. It opens onto a pastel sea and sky, so dreamily muddled as to be anyplace whatever. A cut preserves that sky, but it marks its time as later, somewhere towards dusk (or closer on the other side, slipping to pre-dawn), with the sun dipping to horizon. The mid-ground is taken up by a strip of uneven beach, and the shot tracks backwards away from two figures running across it. The title appears, naming in white just what it is we are seeing: “Figures in a landscape,” a linear text that reinforces the horizon in triple with the production data on the screen. A cut gives us the sky once more, seemingly lighter, making that twilight seem like dawn after all, and in that sky is a helicopter, one that suggests that what was viewing the figures was just such a thing. But its location and movement are all wrong, out of place and sync with what had been watching the figures run all along, while still coding as perhaps the thing that made them run in fear to begin with.

Zeroing in on this process of binding and dislocation, where we see onscreen something that may or may not have been the vantage point of what we just saw, might seem minor and nitpicky, but that’s only because of how central these moves and confusions have become to images we watch daily. So we should be specific. Because the dynamic comes apart in the other direction, calling into doubt the feeling that we are sharing the sight of the characters. Specifically, it’s the way in which the helicopter appears that undoes the prospect that it is being seen in reverse by those figures: the shot is from a point too high, not angling up from that beach but somewhere in the air, hovering in that vague pastel zone. Same too with the next cut, where the chopper flies straight towards and over the camera without stopping. In these two shots alone, the possible sense of our sight as belonging to, or paired with, the fleeing men will evaporate along with the film’s dewy morning. What it means is that we have been inhabiting an inhuman form of looking, not just in this film’s first moments but in so much of our time with screens.

These are the formal grounds for the diffusion of that general hostility. But as with all technologies within capital, inhuman doesn’t equal neutral. That’s the case here too, where the figures can always be sighted as if by helicopter, just as they actually will be in the next sequence, while the lone helicopter, on the other hand, can only truly be watched and recorded by something that belongs to its own regime of sight: a camera that is free to track, hang, and zoom. That is the basic unevenness, its implicit hierarchy, its teeth and barbs. Because even though we will see the copter from the POV of the figures, over and over again, it is only ever frantically, in hurried, howling motions, ducking beneath its sweep, never with the measured pacing of that which knows how to wait.

What Figures manages to identify, however, is that hostility isn’t a condition decided by those who declare war on each other. It’s a condition dictated by those who control sight and terrain, and it becomes a fundamental mood and ground of that terrain. It can be imposed and articulated by they who, upon sighting an enemy object, may well kill it. But this is only half the story; even more likely, it is reinforced and naturalized by those with the power to survey, pursue, catalogue, map, hound, and terrorize, until the moment where, like Mac at the end, the badgered other must take up arms, if only to shut up that terrible racket, and can therefore be gunned down without retribution, as insurgent, combatant, or terrorist.

The consequence is that it’s not just the figures but the landscape itself that becomes hostile. It always potentially contains enemies, even if sometimes containing just horses, vineyards, mountains, rivers, and plains, each element categorized solely by whether or not it is the target, and, more subtly, whether it might hide that target. Given the latter condition and the existence of camouflage, it means that there is nothing that might not be enemy: there is only target and potential target. A napalm of looking, this sticks to everything it touches, leaving a loathing that’s abstract, indifferent, and impossible to shake off. The task of it is to flatten, to isolate what has been declared target, and reduce it to the mere condition of potential target, to turn a figure into just one more portion of landscape.

“Sovereignty belongs to the one who decides on flattening,” Peter Sloterdijk points out, and indeed, this is a condition of those who not only rule but structure the conditions of appearance, of who and what gets to count as more than just landscape.¹³ But it is in combination with a point that Sloterdijk makes elsewhere that the full force of Figures itself appears. In Terror from the Air, he suggests that we have transitioned from classical warfare into terrorism, in a sense far beyond the limited non-state acts usually grouped beneath that term. The reason for this expanded definition is the way that terror “involves replacing these classical forms of battle with assaults on the environmental conditions of the enemy’s life” and that the “20th century will be remembered as the age whose essential thought consisted in targeting no longer the body, but the enemy’s environment,”¹⁴ a mode of war most visibly inaugurated in the trenches of WWI and the mass use of gas, rendering the air itself lethal, making the basic mechanisms of life itself the mechanisms for delivering death to those who, “unable to refrain from breathing, are forced to participate in the obliteration of their own life.”¹⁵

One of the specific consequences of this atomization of war into the landscape – well before the literal weaponization of atomic particles by 1945 – is that it “voids the distinction between violence against people and violence against things,” suffusing war into the setting itself, rather than any fantasy of a clearly delineated theater of war.¹⁶

In a 2013 interview, Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator involved in missions that killed 1,626 individuals between 2006 and 2011, spoke of watching the thermal images of three men hit with two missiles on a road in Pakistan:

And after the smoke clears, there’s a crater there. You can see body parts of the people. But the guy that was running from the rear to the front, his left leg had been taken off above the knee, and I watched him bleed out. The blood rapidly cooled to become the same color as the ground, because we’re watching this in infrared. And I eventually watched the guy become the same color as the ground that he died on.¹⁷

To see in drone sight means to see in process. It’s the insistence, backed by force, that a “figure in a landscape” must become just more “landscape,” unlived and unheated, merely a surface’s slight ripple, a minor detail for a cartographer’s work.

In Figures, the first mode of vision we’re invited to seriously share isn’t that of Mac and Ansell. It’s from within the chopper, aping the human sight that tries its best to anticipate what drone sight would and will be in three decades, but, in that moment, is still stuck having to read a set of visual patterns and cues. So we look with the chopper in a series of discontinuous shots through its windshield and down onto the lands below where, finding nothing worth investigating further, the film simply cuts ahead, removing the inessential space between, even if a different sort of movie would prefer to linger on the horses galloping majestically through the fields.

The historical echo this calls forth the most, both in its military doubling and its early position in the film’s running time, is not the architectural flythrough but the flyovers of first-person shooter games, both those played online and solo. In such games, the cut-scene prior to the battle/live play – or presented in a pre-DLC (downloadable content) release trailer – often features a flyover of the stage, one from a height that you’ll never achieve in avatar, allowing the reconnaissance of the untethered camera to pull out points of interest. And in these games, that interest will overwhelmingly mean utility – places to hide, places to save, things to break open to find other things inside – rather than distracted aesthetic experience or pretty vistas, even if both of those play a big role in why we play. Moreover, they frequently track backwards from the exit point to where the difficult and bloody slog will start so that one can begin to chart a course through the melee to follow.

The viewpoint is therefore no element in the landscape itself, no point we’ll inhabit, yet it exists to make that landscape readable and to give us bearing. Figures also opens with a military flyover, providing glimpses of the ground to be crossed. But it is of no use to the figures themselves. Not just because they have no map but because they have no access to the form of vision that dominates them and, more saliently, because we the audience also lack the ability to match the two motions, shots, styles, angles, and landscapes. The split is total, even when the two literally come together.

Consider one of the many sequences where Mac and Ansell are threatened by a helicopter. A medium-close shot frames the two men side by side, turning their heads back to the unmistakable sound of the coming vehicle. The film cuts to a long-shot reverse POV (from the men) of the sound’s source barreling down on them. Without cutting, the chopper roars low over the camera/the men’s position, passing out of the frame. But in the cut that follows, which places the camera in the now-familiar position of riding shotgun inside the chopper, we are still a distance from the men, watching them crouch and fall as we pass over them again. Meaning, in short, that there has been not just a disjunction of space (the standard one of montage joined by reverse shots and eye-line matches) but also of time, as the sequence’s temporal progression comes unstuck, stutters, and doubles back on itself.

To speak of landscape doesn’t designate a terrain or region itself. The suffix -scape is related to -ship, as in hardship, the condition of the difficult. Landscape, then, means the condition of being a region. No wonder, then, that landscape paintings don’t take the elements of a countryside but rather the whole complex by which one can make sense of it as having a set of conditions, organized around ground, figure, focus, and depth. And as I suggested, the landscape, as the manifest condition of seeing a region in total, proves to be far from neutral. It belongs to those who patrol its skies, who have the maps, who draw the borders, who flatten, and who, depending on mood, either leave coordinates aside momentarily to take pleasure in contemplating the terrain or take different pleasure in the ruthless hunting of those who can only look up at the invaders, as though heaven is raining down on all who live on the surface of hell.

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There’s one element, also present in the film’s first sequences, that throws an ocular wrench into this whole assemblage. More specifically, there’s an eagle.

Less than two minutes into the film, the disjointed shots from within the copter are interrupted by the first clear shots we’ve had of it from outside: not drifting across a sickly dawn/ dusk sky, not swooping fast and close, but plainly visible, in the light of midday, ascending diagonally across the frame. It’s a shot that, like those first ones, belongs to no one, or it belongs perhaps to the camera itself, the camera that will, of course, remain unseen, unshadowed, untouchable. But the next shot after that of the chopper is one of a golden eagle in flight, first gliding, then beating its wings to maintain altitude in the current.

Of course, this functions to provide the doubling echo suggested by the film’s tagline, as well as to register both the strangeness and strangely natural fit of the flying machine within this pastoral space. But it also serves as a reverse shot. In other words, it gives a ground, albeit one that is aloft, to a mode of vision that can see and make sense of the manifest source of hostility. This is a grounding located neither in what the chopper itself hunts nor in an element that will be considered central to the narrative. It resides in a different figure, an element of that landscape, a bit of avian ornament made into the point from which to take aim. The eagle won’t return, won’t – alas – claw the eyes from the pilot, won’t get eaten by Mac and Ansell like Pasolini’s Marxist crow. But all the same, this brief exchange inaugurates a condition of vision, a difficult and explosive one that can’t be shaken free, because it shows that all elements of the landscape can become not figures to be seen but techniques of seeing. Such that when we see, in the nearly two hours that follow, an ample number of shots from positions and with motions that we can’t place or assign to our trusty raptor, we nevertheless watch within an order of counter-sight where such a situating is possible, where trees, rocks, streams, eagles, houses, and dirt itself become particles of potential insurgency against those who doom us to their literal oversight.

In the last few years, a strange term has emerged in global security culture, pushed especially by the weapons, targeting, and logistics management firms aiming to cash in on the proliferating war on terror. The word is threatscape, which Deborah Natsios reads as the consequence of “civil space […] becoming coincident with state security space,” producing a densely layered zone of information technology, infrastructure, and the potentially inflammable interactions between the two.¹⁸ More broadly, I’d define threatscape as the historical condition where the availability of terrain to sight, management, and control – that is, its quality of being landscape – becomes inexorably linked to the capacity to make that terrain resistant against itself, to make the support mechanisms of regions, buildings, or cities into their own worst enemies. As one of the endlessly alarmist security-industry reports puts it, “the Threatscape is already within our inner circle, searching for any unsecured entry point.”¹⁹

The panic is well-warranted, though, at least for the squires of state power. Industry analysts have started to compile a sort of quiet doomsday scenario: not the tsunami or the quake, the nuke or the plague, but the everyday, lived-with objects of the built world, as antagonists to a nation, land, or social order find ways to make flamingly evident how the apparently neutral landscape of capital has long been wired to blow. In one of the more striking examples, a security flaw in Hewlett Packard printers, coupled with the fact of remote access, allows one to make a printer catch fire, through simply sending instructions to continuously heat its fuser unit.²⁰ In other words, you can commit arson, without matches, gasoline, or triggers, from anywhere in the world, leaving no trace other than an apparent accident of faulty office equipment. Echoing the collapse of the divide between civilian and combatant, the landscape comes to bare itself, joining warzone and workplace, convention center and battleground. Not simply because printers are flammable, but because commodities can be activated to commit sabotage against the ends for which they were designed. We can see from within their own inhuman sight, make routers into spies, sprinklers into the death of server farms. Through their non-eyes, we can take a fresh look, from inwards on out, at the innate hostility of what obviously does not escape the total vision of capital and military, but which, all the same, that vision didn’t think worth noticing or couldn’t process as threat, as tool, as heat to be exterminated.

Figures doesn’t reflect this, either per se or at all. It was made in a time prior to the threatscape, at least insofar as the multilayering of cartography, data transmission, risk analysis, and infrastructure had yet to be thickened and autonomized into the powderkeg of the present. But now, no doubt, it is our condition. The opposing forces in the contest over terrain – and of lives that try to persist within, below, and across it – are both impossibly close and irrevocably split, with all the non-communication of the hostile. On one side, the inhuman sight of the security network, the drones of military and police, the supply chain, and the satellite. On the other, not the vision of the human figures in the landscape trying to flee but the third mode of sight, from and of the landscape itself, the supposedly neutral made into unseen threat. These two sides form two varieties of distributed sight, sharing the same basic conditions: that capacity to see without being seen, to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Any serious political, critical, or historical moving images now, whether we call them cinema or not, will need to grapple with the fact that this is the fundamental capacity and exploit within sight that already dominates, even if we are just now starting to creep our way toward feeling, listening, seeing, and burning not only within our own fevered bodies but through a built world ready and waiting.

Figures opens this up. It shows, however briefly, what it looks like and marks out a zone where one might start to process what it could mean for a landscape to become a terrain of threat yet without the visible presence or influence of hostile forces (like, say, a helicopter or a platoon), whether overlaid by surveillance mechanisms and opened up from within by threatscape activations. In this film, there will be no exit for our figures, and even less so now, as the antagonism of the hovering, terrorizing helicopter has been outmoded by its total diffusion into all realms, from the phone in the pocket to a missile over the sea. But, as they say, for every precinct, a printer, and for every chopper, a raptor.

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1 Harun Farocki, “Reality would have to begin,” in Thomas Elsaesser, Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), p. 194.

2 Quoted in Phil Leggiere, “Port & Cargo Security. CBRNE Today: Understanding The Threatscape,” online at: http://www.hstoday.us/focused-topics/port-cargo/single-article-page/cbrne-today-understanding-the-threatscape/0fcfa4e6b9ad4776b66ff0889b68480a.html.

3 In that sense, it really is horror, properly speaking, insofar as it is the experience of a category error – in this case, a functional disjunction of matter and measure, of the unruly ground and the attempt to capture it from above – that will not resolve.

4 In this sense, its alternate tagline – “LIKE A HUNGRY BIRD OF PREY IT PURSUED THEM... TOYED WITH THEM... THEN STRUCK TO KILL!” – is more accurate, provided we leave out the concluding phrase.

5 My passing reference here is to Manny Farber’s sense of “termite art,” which “goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” In that infamous essay, the primary examples in film are almost entirely focused on the performances of actors themselves, marked by a particular restlessness or “slothful-buzzing acting.” Figures raises this to a manic, hellish principle of being stuck with two brilliant actors with nothing but scenery to chew, to the point that the whole thing becomes burrowed and consumed in this “unkempt activity.”

6 See here the cave and countryside of Crashout (Lewis R. Foster, 1955), the desert of The Prowler (Losey, 1951), the mining town in Framed (Richard Wallace, 1947), and the farms of Tomorrow Is Another Day (Felix Feist, 1951).

7 The site’s designers are evidently less than aware about the general resistance of historical avant-gardes to gilt frames, let alone providing pseudo-cultured housing for bankers. Or, more viciously, they are probably all too aware.

8 Not coincidentally, this is the exact same condition I noticed in a Restoration Hardware catalogue from the same year as the video – although there, 3D graphics cannot be held up as the culprit.

9 The film, directed by Tony Gilroy, is the fourth take of that post-Bond series of joyless practically and the first to lack its titular hero, here reduced to just a “legacy” and a trace of obligatory parkour.

10 As such, we get the wonky pleasure of a ‘50s sci-fi or noir communications montage, but with the added pleasure of being not a set-piece of stock footage and phone operators but direct temporal binding to the target figure in the landscape.

11 The sense of the telescoping of an extremely HD satellite remains as well, even if the shot is clearly a slightly readjusting track of some hidden observer.

12 With the exception of the way that the majority of conversational scenes are staged at roughly head height and hence suggest an invisible listener snooping in.

13 Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 101.

14 Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 16.

15 Ibid, p. 25

16 Ibid, p. 25.

17 Online at: http://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182800293/former-air-force-pilot-shines-light-on-drone-program.

18 Deborah Natsios, “Towards a New Blast Zone: Washington DC’s Next Generation Hunting Forest,” in Architectures of Fear (Barcelona, Centre de Cultura Contemporimia de Barcelona, 2007). Gijs van Oenen has also been theorizing a similar situation. In the words of Stephen Graham: “Such transformations lead the philosopher Gijs van Oenen to propose that the current period is marked by a shift away from the modern urban ideal of interactive citizenship towards what he calls an ‘interpassive security-scape’: This, he suggests, is marked by an urban culture where ‘the primary quest is not for encounter or confrontation, but for security.’” Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege(London, Verso, 2010), p. 103.

19 DKC Marketing Solutions, “Operating within the Threatscape: Understanding the impact of an evolving threat to the Federal Reserve’s Information Security, assessing the costs, and implementing solutions,” online at: www.dkcmarketing.com/pdf/Agy_Wh_Paper.pdf.

20 http://www.itproportal.com/2011/11/29/printer-vulnerability-could-cause-real-world-harm/

FRAGMENT 5

In L’Inhumaine, Marcel L’Herbier’s 1924 film, a man is trying to woo the titular “inhuman” woman, a famous singer, by demonstrating his new invention in his laboratory – which, like the film itself, is an ultra-modernist marvel of rampant technophilia. A hybrid of existing radio technology and global simulcast that promises of satellite networks to come, the invention allows sound, like the singer’s voice, to be beamed around the globe and heard simultaneously. They test it out, and we watch them watch a screen mounted in the laboratory. According to the opening intertitle:

In Rat Life and Diet in North America, Joyce Wieland’s film from 1968, a group of gerbils – not rats, but this is an allegory, after all – are trying to break free from their jailers, who happen to be cats. Like Robert Kramer’s Ice two years later, the film uses the simplest of means to sketch horizons far beyond the single apartment in which it is shot, gesturing to an insurrectionary jailbreak from what an overlaid title marks as

POLITICAL
PRISON

And so, in a montage of fire, flames, and cats’ eyes, complete with the sound of explosions, “FULL SCALE REBELLION IS CARRIED OUT,” and the gerbils make a break for the outside world.

THEY GO TO THE UPPER HUDSON
REGION AND MAKE CAMP…

stealing food from a millionaire’s house (a kitchen table over which they roam and nibble on bread and fruit), before finally they reach Canada, free of their feline tormenters, and “take up organic gardening.” All is well, until the CIA learns that Canada is “3 per cent communist” and invades. End of film.

Much of the writing about the film that I’ve read treats it as a soft-edged fable. That’s in part because of the use of animals, even if they’re stand-ins for the brutal suppression of revolutionary groups in the US in those years. And it’s in part because of the putatively happy

On this television screen you will be able to see, while you sing, the people who listen to you all over the earth

Indeed, it’s not only a television – as they literally use that word, télévision – well before the technology would be quotidian. It is even a flat-screen of sorts, a frame in which is stretched a diaphanous weave that maintains its trace even in the displayed images. And as listeners the world over gather around phonograph horns and find themselves transfixed by the voice, the inventor flips the channel from site to site across empire’s reaches. A generically Orientalist “Arabic” interior. A straw room where a black woman carries out the colonial fantasy underpinning the sequence by marveling at the device and holding it to her ear, as if this object had been sitting in her house without her knowing what it did all along. The reach seems endless, a glimpse ahead toward the prospect of how it is to never be outside the range of transmitted media, and also to beam it out oneself, to become a content provider and

travel, without moving, through abolished space…

into a crowded city street, a painter’s studio, from place to place

across the joy and pain of others…

and into other homes, where people are given succor by the song. Out into the open air, on the road where a man being chauffeured around in a droptop kills time by tuning in on headphones while jotting some notes on a pad.

ending. After all, in their Canadian utopia, there is “NO D.D.T. USED,” even if the invasion is sure to change that. But when I read those takes on it, I often wonder if we’ve seen the same film, because what happens later cannot erase what unfolds near its beginning, in one sequence that takes up a full two minutes of its sixteen in total. The gerbils are in jail, not yet having broken out, and a pulsing prison siren blares over the image. Suddenly, the sound goes dead, and the screen goes black before a single word appears on it.

LISTEN

It’s not an intertitle of printed words like the others. It is a piece of white fabric, onto which the word is stitched, and as if extending this, when the film cuts back to one of the cats behind the window’s metal screen, the pattern is a diaphanous weave that pixelates the image, even though it was shot on analog film. The camera drops, quickly, and it cuts, returning with a shriek of blaring saxophone and again we see the gerbils, scurrying around the window’s edge, sniffing at the air, frantic, moving back and forth with nowhere to go. This lasts for two minutes, while free jazz caterwauls continuously, giving no respite to them or us. And here, something has been added that wasn’t in the film before: neon red crosshairs that overlay the entire image, intersecting in the middle to split the screen into four identical quadrants. The effect is as plain as it is intolerable. When the camera moves to keep its subject in the center of the frame, as cameras often do, the crosshairs remove any neutrality of the operation. Something is drawing a bead on them, keeping them

What never gets explained, though, is something obscured by all the focus on the depicted sound: what exactly is recording the image of the people in those locations? What kind of camera hides in the corner or chases the car but can’t itself be seen? Do those it films register that they are being watched? Do they know in whose scope they have been sighted?

targeted at all moments, and our own vision becomes complicit. It becomes that of a jailer, a cop. Not one of the cats, though. No, we are made into those who look from too far to touch, safely on the other side of the screen, but whose presence and intent can be felt all the same. So the gerbils scramble furiously, seeking escape, as if they know in whose scope they have been sighted.

Part Four

Stills from an Unmade World

UNFROZEN

Then we should have a paradise on Earth and would not need to gaze longingly at the paradise in the sky.

– Paul Scheerbart, on what would happen if glass architecture was everywhere¹

Before the accusations of exactly who was trying to start World War III in Kiev, before the takeovers of police stations, the uniforms of unmarked but obvious origin, before the peacocks and tall ships and koi and garage full of Rolls and the Crimean back and forth, before all that, there were scenes of rioting that news outlets clickbaitishly couldn’t resist calling “apocalyptic.” For instance, Reuters deemed what took place in Maidan Nezalezhnostia (Independence Square) in early 2014 to be “Apocalyptic Kiev,” a “surreal warzone.” Business Insider went the Buzzfeed route and made sure to quantify: “15 Apocalyptic Pictures From The Protests In Ukraine.” The Washington Times couldn’t help themselves: “Apocalypse Now.” Meanwhile, Hypervocal thought themselves equally clever, asking: “Ukraine Protest Photo or Post-Apocalyptic Video Game Cover?”

Why that particular designation, though? Why do they or we name something that happens now as apocalyptic, especially when it isn’t intended to suggest that the event in question will be the creeping start of The End?

The appropriately flat ABC News title – “The Kiev Protests Look Apocalyptic” – makes it plain. It has almost nothing to do with what is happening. Nor, indeed, with what that could mean for a geopolitical “apocalypse,” as social compositions and national allegiances tacitly in place get brought into stark relief through catastrophic turbulence. Instead, the designation gets made because of a distinct relation of content to texture in the images: not just the riot, nor the riot plus toppled statues flanked by fire, nor even the riot + statues + fire + ice + DIY armor + an old man carrying a scrawled-on flag through the shell of a city, while cops gather for a Little League team portrait with riot shields over their heads, Roman-centurion tetsudo formation resurrected for a new millennium.² Rather, it’s the combination of all of this – the fierce and the incompatible and the atrocious – with an off-setting haze of floating particles caused in part by this very content, as smoke, ash, slush, trash, and tear gas get suffused with winter light and backlit by a week-old skim-milk sky from which the snow drops soft. All that, taken together, is what underpins the designation of apocalyptic, especially thanks to two specific visual properties at work in all the photos.

First, there’s that flat light in which shadows aren’t cast, even if much of the photo is taken up with shades of grey and black and dusky brown. There’s a pallor or shade over everything, yet it comes from nowhere in particular, not falling from a body, a burnt bus. And so too the light. No sun to be seen, but still things are bright amongst the grey. The sky itself simply is light, a tablet of light, a light box on its last legs, a blank screen without distance or scale. It is sight in José Saramago’s Blindness (“a thick uniform white colour as if he had plunged with open eyes into a milky sea…”) but as a condition in the world, not in the eye itself.³

Second, this null clarity and consequent flatness gets counterposed by minute details that demand attention all the way through the volume of the photographed scene. Snow falls in the extreme foreground but can’t be held in focus if we are to see the riot in the back. Iced branches too pretty not to dwell on hang at imagined arm’s length. Figures in dark jackets throw objects from one plane to the next, near to far, as mid-ground smoke blocks what stands behind and signs and wires pop through that. Further back, ghosted buildings recede into the half-light. Through all of it, pavement and air both are littered with assorted bits of city, small collections of rubble and flakes and dun puddles that reflect the edge of a passing flame.

What gets labelled apocalyptic, then, is not just a color palette joined to a checklist of adequately busted, tossed, flipped-over, and scorched stuff. It’s also a distinct way of constructing images of space, particularly of a built world on uncertain social ground. It combines a sheer buzz of detail and dense patterning with a flattened light to produce images where recognizable forms that might be precisely located and historically specified (this riot, that city) threaten to tip into a depthless surface of effects, of particles, motes, chaff, splinter, and cloud. In short, into shards, because what these photos look most like are the kind of images at the center of this book, the kind that cancel depth so as to restage it and assemble the sources of their making into a single unified space where you can always feel the stitches, no matter how seamless.

There’s a major and obvious difference between these photos and the sequences that constitute the heart of shard cinema: these aren’t in motion, not even in a languid creep of bullet time. However, the photos gain their force entirely from how they gesture to motion, especially in the bodies they show, and in how they rely upon the moving sequences we already know from those games and films. What Hypervocal got wrong in their snarky question – protest photo or video game cover? – is that these don’t look like covers: they look like stills, screen captures from within the game or from any Marvel film, not its climactic battle but the slow-motion prelude where scrappy partisans hold out against an indefatigable enemy long enough to amp up the pathos but not long enough to make the Hulk irrelevant. As became clear to me when gathering images for this project, a peculiar aspect of the shard aesthetic is that stills from its passages can’t capture the crucial dynamic at work in them, in a more extreme way than is true of most moving images. Perhaps this is because those sequences often look so much like animated freeze-frames themselves that something gets short-circuited. But what especially eludes the stills is the way that this entire aesthetic only works fully when in motion, because otherwise the specks, fragments, chunks, and motes, which are often blurry in any single frame, could be read as simply visual noise or a problem of resolution. Only in dancing around do the dots do their work of providing “dimensionality,”⁴ mapping the space like illuminated vertices and giving a pseudo-volume to the screen across which composited figures roam and hurl Molotovs. Only by moving can the particles be made to not move, to fully enact the almost-stillness that shard cinema’s ubiquitous extreme slow-motion produces and adores, letting it suggest that all the world has condensed around this one moment, a tiny yawning pocket of reflection amidst world-historical chaos.

In other words, these photos model themselves after not just moving images in general, but specifically moving images that entirely hinge on an interplay between motion and stillness. This interplay gets especially activated by how a point of view passes through and navigates the visual field, whether through the perspective of a game’s avatar (in first-person POV or over-the-shoulder/third-person) or the film’s frame. Severed from both that motion and that sense of practical movement through space, the Maidan photos take on a strange quality that has only amplified for me in the time I’ve spent looking at them. In their zone, probable cause seems to vanish into an undecided either/or: things loll in the air or are thrown, billow upwards or hang aloft, are fired or happened to fall, are on fire or are hotboxed with tear gas and soot. So much hangs on the balance of what happens, all the small contingencies that add up to how the riot unfolds, how it makes use of the city against its flows, how it drastically shifts the terrain of a political situation and becomes part of a different sequence and cycle of struggles. But these images of that happening can tell us only that it was very dramatic, it was like a game, a movie, it was snowing that day, it was beautiful indeed.⁵ So a highly territorial situation where control of space and its social parameters are fought over bitterly comes to generate the conditions for images indifferent to these concerns, images for which the fact that it was snowing that day cannot matter for how it changed the ground of the fight against the armored cops, but only for how it made it look magical, timeless, like a game, like anything over which snow or ash or sparks can be laid without changing the stakes. (Available Instagram filters: Hot Winter, Burning Square.)

This points to the second obvious difference between the photos and the images they model themselves on: the photos are not composited in software, stitched together from elements that were filmed, animated, and rendered. Instead, they depict a montage in and of the world, a dense combination of all these bits of daily life suddenly made into protection, weapon, barrier, or trash. But the fact that the images were shot, rather than built piecemeal, and the fact that not only their content but their style was constant enough to warrant all that excitement amongst websites hungry for clicks, means that they were taken, or at least selected from the hundreds taken by each photographer, because they aligned with that shard aesthetic. Something has been inverted, at a point of torqued crossing that can’t quite be located. Rather than the force of those games and films deriving from how they obliquely draw on and transmute images of the lived world in chaos, as they often do, here the photographers and editors frame a moment of social turbulence as if it belongs to a game.

Specifically, to a game set amongst an end of the world. Because this quality of light, drifting material, disarray, and spatial consequence – the whole importation of shard cinema into photojournalism – doesn’t only correspond to a look familiar in Halo. It also crosses into what has become doomsday de rigeur, dominating the last decade and a half of post-apocalyptically-minded visual culture. There we find the same vaguely bright grey in which fires pop, lava-hued and redolent, in which a dour hero is expected to stand very firm and still over the tumult and to peer down, full of vigor and sobriety, ass clenched so tight it might itself shatter and join the wreckage.⁶ And in a more fitting confirmation of this pattern, consider a digital image of apocalyptic Maidan made by Ivan Khivrenko, a video game artist and illustrator, well before the riots there. It features a fallen angel statue, tattered flags, and, of course, a thickly grimed/frosted ground on which water pools – all the better to reflect the wrath of heaven/sky by Thomas Kinkade – while smoke above thickens illumination into beams and stains. It was possible for it to be made before and look like the landscape of the Maidan photos not because Khivrenko is especially prophetic, but because the photos were taken in such a way as to ape just this sort of image that’s ready to be slotted in as the terrain for the third boss stage in a tactical shooter game where Europe has been overtaken by aliens/Nazis/alien-Nazis/whichever variable fits the present bill.

But if “apocalyptic” has come to indicate a certain way of constructing spaces and revolt as historically and visually flattened images, it also serves a secondary spatial function, an ultimately territorial one that polices the blurry edges of division between global North and South by deciding just where that mess belongs.⁷ Specifically, apocalyptic hyperbolically designates that which no longer fits within a history of allegedly progressive and coherent capitalist order. Apocalypse becomes the plain name for a situation that has finally stretched that order too thin, causing a break not just among its zones, territories, and regimes but with its history in full. Calling the scenes in Kiev “apocalyptic” therefore means: not the North anymore, not the West we once knew.⁸ However, through this very process, apocalyptic serves to all the more distinguish its named terrain as presently West and North, because it claims the eruption or damage as exceptional. So exceptional, in fact, that it can only be grasped beneath the sign of total break in order and history. It forgets that riots are no exception to civil society. They are its necessary product, a punctuation of unmaking. So when referring to Europe, this arrangement of social upheaval, destruction, and lingering smoke gets called apocalyptic. But when that same mode of looking moves South, towards, say, countries in sub-Saharan Africa, it gets read as Wednesday, as a quotidian recurrence or general condition, neither an emergency nor a break.

Indeed, when the term occasionally gets linked to images from sub-Saharan Africa or to other zones often considered “lost causes” by centers of power (and hence as entirely beyond the scope of apocalypse’s judging function), it does so in terms of spectacles that align clearly with certain recurrent concerns of the North, such as the destruction of wildlife (treated as nature distinct from social history),⁹ or, more strikingly, with the North’s literal waste, finding in scenes of salvage and ruination a similar Saturnalia of exchange and use to the one in Maidan’s barricades.

That’s the situation with Agbogbloshie, an e-waste burning and salvage yard in Ghana nicknamed “Sodom and Gomorrah” by those in the area. The site has captured the attention of Northern media in recent years, largely, we can be assured, for the ugly reason that it photographs “well.”¹⁰ In the accompanying stories about Agbogbloshie, it’s described as “an apocalyptic painting come to life”; “almost surreal like something out of a Hollywood post-apocalyptic film”; “apocalyptic ruin”; “hell on earth”; having a “strangely apocalyptic look”; “ashen and apocalyptic”; “seemingly post-apocalyptic”; “a scene that looked like something out of the apocalypse”; “a sense of apocalyptic calm in the mayhem of e-waste”; “an apocalyptic and strangely idyllic wasteland.”¹¹

But this isn’t a one-off occurrence. Each of the above phrasings comes from a different article. And when you look at the images described by, and accompanying, those texts quoted above, you find that they are uniformly photographed in a mode extremely similar to that used at Maidan. Indeed, if you consider an even wider range of photos taken of the area (especially those by Pieter Hugo, a South African photographer whose book and exhibition of Agbogbloshie photographs is called Permanent Error), it quickly becomes clear just how visually specific this mix of flat light and muted palette actually is, despite its absolute omnipresence in “apocalyptic” images. The soil is a dark brown, edging toward charcoal, or it is ashen. The sky is that now-familiar white-grey. The composition itself recurs across the images of the site, especially those that read more as posed portraits¹² of waste workers and scavengers: an often centered and mid-ground staging of figures in front of the smoke and activity, with a centered horizon line, further echoing that kind of solitary landscape-contemplation on ceaseless display in the films, shows, and games that self-define as apocalyptic.

In short, it’s always noon on a cloudy day. In photos taken by Hugo and those of Kevin McElvaney, the light is mute and the color dull, like a tweaked Kodachrome that keeps the reds hot but subjects everything else to a grey that’s less a haze than a sapping, an evacuation. Yet if we look at other photographs of Agbogbloshie, specifically those not marketed on the artier end of photojournalism but linked more to research projects, we find that the sky is plenty blue, shadows are long, and dirt is a relatively standard-issue brown. Which is to say: the washing out of McElvaney’s photos, and the others mentioned before, is at the very least a choice, rather than an unavoidable condition that confines the image to appear like this. It was decided upon before the shot was taken, to accord with that diffuse aesthetic of the apocalyptic, or it was actively aligned with this during color correction after the shot.

I’m not interested in passing judgment about this decision to seek out or produce a certain quality of light, let alone adjudicating what a “real” representation of that site would be. Besides, if ever there was a plausible candidate for physical conditions that produce exactly this kind of sickly half-light and poisonous particulate, then a guttering fire of plastic, paint, chromium fumes, rubber, and copper surely is it.¹³ However, the fact remains that there’s an unmistakable visual correspondence 1) between the photographs of these two far-flung instances (Maidan and Agbogbloshie) designated as apocalyptic, and 2) between those images and the digitally composited ones of a near-future apocalypse. This is neither an arbitrary connection nor a mere sign of how truly prevalent that digital aesthetic of the doomed has become. The resonance is stronger than this because the content getting explicitly labelled apocalyptic in Agbogbloshie is neither the nearly-unthinkable toxicity of the work nor the obvious echo of this wastescape amongst global depictions of hell. No, it is the physical jumble of the cast-out: computer monitors, hard drives, DVD players, camcorders, iPods, printers, all the hardware of digital storage and capture and creation. Not just a mass of images that themselves circulate through such devices, these photos of the site are portraits of digital circulation as a now-useless hoard, the cracked tail end of a commodity chain where products of exchange and allegedly “immaterial” use are hammered apart and melted down in the most material way possible, stripped for whatever final remnants of value stay hardwired within them.

The apocalyptic in this sense isn’t a measure of the impossibility of life in such a landscape. It marks instead the “impossible” transformation of the hardware that the generic, and perhaps specific, we who look at these photos are using to do so, the machines we’ve saved for, bought on credit, lugged around, tweeted on, written essays with, almost dropped, home-sextaped-with, actually dropped, lived beside for years, not bothered moving off the bed prior to sleeping, sworn at, listened through, slowly gotten used to, become inseparable from. In Agbogbloshie these things join together and are destroyed, indifferent to origin or purpose or who wrote what with what or on what screen we saw what photo that saw us at our weakest as we hesitated over it, putting in the trash before taking it out and hiding it in another folder. All that ends up as just the faintest trace of exchangeable value that can barely support the life of a community dying from such work, poisoned by the cancer-in-waiting that are these things we write with, pose for, talk to. Glass stared through for hundreds and hundreds of hours becomes something maybe worth stripping and probably stout enough to be walked on. For the user of a computer, between memories of it and its own memory, what remains is a puddle of molten copper and sores that don’t heal on the body of someone who isn’t you.

From a liberal perspective, though, this social relation amongst the inanimate – the burning mound of hard drives, the bridge of old monitors – can only belong to a different social order in full, some unmoored fragment of history before or after capitalism, a lost cartography on the wing. It can only be post-apocalyptic, as in: well, the circuits must be burned for heat, because the sun has gone out and the Eurozone has gone to shit, or they are being melted down because there is no more electricity so routers are being pounded into plowshares, or… Pieter Hugo’s gallery in South Africa, Stevenson, plays on this explicitly, claiming in their PR statement that:

There are elements in the images that fast-forward us to an apocalyptic end of the world as we know it, yet the alchemy on this site and the strolling cows recall a pastoral existence that rewinds our minds to a medieval setting.

And on and on, insisting that it is not an image of this age, this order.¹⁴ But, of course, it is an image of nothing but that, fundamentally so. It’s just the last twist of the ordinary circuit of capital that never actually comes to a stop, not even when the commodity has “transferred all its value.” It does not rest but is instead flung further out and away from its sites of consumption, as materials and embedded time get leeched out in decreasing returns. Dumping grounds are just way-stations, however informal, and the days and bodies of humans are still far cheaper than any automation, provided money knows where to look. And it always has.

Of the designation apocalyptic, this final element – the arrangement of matter in a way that the ideology of progressive capitalist order can only comprehend as belonging to another time altogether – also lies at the quite-literal center of the Kiev scenes and is why they received that description: those barricades made of tires, wood, wire, vehicles, municipal furniture, trash cans, trash cans on fire, penguin statues (oh yes), and, above all, a huge volume of snow and ice. Like the e-waste mounds, it’s a montage of circulation gone wrong, at least according to the perspective of functional order. During the riot, “neutral” and quotidian goods are turned askew, and elements of the regular flows of bodies, goods, and waste pile up in order to restrict and channel those flows against their continued invisibility, because an unblocked road is never seen, merely driven on.

The loop of misuse is smaller in Maidan than Agbogbloshie, not a bonfire at the end of supply chains but the broken economy of traffic and infrastructure in one city, folded back onto itself and made to burn, in part for reasons concerning who benefits from the traffic and flows between that city and its country, that country and Europe, between Europe as a failing concept and Europe as a heteroglot patchwork of contiguous and patrolled territories. In this way, like the e-waste dump, it too is a dense compression of capital’s network, wide geopolitical circuits crammed into single sites, streets, squares, and fields – and, from there, frozen into an image of that order choking on a piece of itself.

In Maidan, this was amplified all the more by the fact (and attendant photographs) of quite literal freezing, as the barricades and pretty much everything were sometimes covered with a thick patina of ice. In a bleakly comic instance, the water sprayed from hoses onto rioters froze solid to form an accidental ice rink for the cops to slip and slide across at their own peril. (Maidan – the Home Alone of nationalist urban uprisings.) In others, the ice bound things together: not like bricks and mortar, but a clear glue that lasts only as long as winter. Like the glass of shop windows, they present combinations of objects as what cannot be altered but cannot be made permanent, always ready to be unfrozen for the next arrangement, whether put back where they belong, hauled off to the dump, taken home, shoved to the side, or chucked at one’s enemies.

In that way, those ice barricades were an odd, fleeting inversion of one of the more famed elements of modern cities: the glass and iron arcades/proto-shopping malls built in Paris in the early nineteenth century and outwards from there on, recurring throughout critical theory thanks largely to Walter Benjamin’s extended fixation on them. Like Maidan’s frozen piles, the arcades also constructed a dense montage of all that forms the reach of an empire yet can be found in a single city – often quite directly, given that Passage du Caire, one of first arcades in Paris and opened in 1798, was explicitly built to celebrate Napoleon’s conquering return from Egypt. Architecturally, that reach was crystallized into a fixed yet non-monumental space where the building is arranged with the dictates of giving space to see the variable, the inconstant, and the purchasable¹⁵ that pauses momentarily in accordance with the timescale of fashion that Benjamin identified: here to be seen but never to stay. Yet this peculiar quality of the static yet temporary wasn’t only a function of what was on display within the arcades’ shops. It was also frozen into their physical structure and inseparable from the history of the materials used, especially iron, whose increasingly refined engineering across the nineteenth century was driven by the development of both railway networks and “transitory” buildings not intended to endure but only to display, such as cast-iron and plate-glass exhibition halls like London’s Crystal Palace. As if joining those two modes, in the arcades the possibilities of glass and ferrous construction were used to build arguably the first architecture with no dictate of form other than the image, rather than the function, of the circulation of commodities.¹⁶ Specifically, they use iron, along with as few substantial materials as possible, to form a series of windows for those goods to be arrayed behind, lit partially from above by the sunlight that projects through the glass-paned roof. Within those frames transitory contents can be changed without altering the physical space of the wide corridor that the looker moves in and through.¹⁷ The image of circulation, then, consisted of the ability to display objects as images, generating an aesthetic encounter with goods available to be seen by any but only touched by those who paid, blocked for the rest by the glass that both displays and divides.¹⁸

I think we can see in this the germ of a peculiar version and vision of the built world that over the last two centuries has become not only diffuse but expected. Reading back from our moment, we can understand that what the arcade develops and begins to normalize is an anticipation of experiencing a navigable mosaic of screens, insofar as the promise of a screen is its capacity to depict any content without changing its own form and to display color, texture, light, and movement that leaves no permanent trace. In other words, to envision a space of everyday life as a proliferation of screens is to sever surfaces from their support structures and to enact a tremendous mutability, so that the places we pass and live through can look entirely different on each encounter while changing not at all. As suggested elsewhere in this book, this creeping sense that everything we see is potentially a display mechanism becomes the real ground of the kind of looking at work within the films, games, ads, and videos of shard cinema. Yet looking away from what we recognize explicitly as a screen suggests that this didn’t happen on a blank slate or as a consequence of surging processor power. Rather, it inherited and modifies a long history of daily experience that bristles with billboards, posters, flashing signs, televisions, and phones as distinct entities of display in public space.¹⁹

That experience is also suffused with a basic conception of shared space as one where sight and interaction are severed from each other and where images come loose from their processes and histories of making. Unlike a phone’s screen, the windows of the arcade weren’t haptic in any obvious sense. Placing fingers (or tongue, or breath) on the glass over a coat that you wanted wouldn’t inaugurate a process of one-click purchasing and shipment to your home. It would either get you invited in, provided you looked rich enough to allow a few tactile eccentricities, or chased away by owners and cops. Yet as distant from computing as they seem, it still makes sense to see those windows and their views in the framework of the interface, giving figuration to what Alexander Galloway calls in his work on the topic a “control allegory.”²⁰ In the formal sense of the word used in physics, an interface designates the surface that forms a shared boundary between two volumes or substances or spaces, the point of their negotiation, passage, or – crucially – blockage. In this regard, the arcade’s windows are quite literally sites of interface, denoting a split between two pseudo-public spaces (the shop and the policed corridor) that is itself materially produced by how the glass functions as its image of divide, a translucent barricade. And perhaps they are also closer than it seems to the way we often speak casually of an interface now, such as the apparatus that transmits and translates communication between, for instance, an operator and a machine, a user and a computer, in which only certain kinds of input are registered and all else receives an error message or silence. Because in the model of interaction promised by the windows’ image of purchase, they only became porous when provided with a single kind of input: money, and behind it, a tremendous number of unspoken qualifications and passcodes that go into the social judgement of who wants to enter and who is seen to belong.

In full, the effect they produce is a frozen portrait of a divided world. For those with the capital to make the built world circle and dance, everything is available to be grasped, handled, or ruined. For those without, it is available only as image, as multiple, or as scrap. And whatever doesn’t adhere to this split, whatever is out of place, is deemed apocalyptic. Of course, like most interfaces, there’s always a more direct workaround. Windows too can be hacked, and always have been, provided that one has the basic tools: a hammer, a crowd, a well-timed winter, and the courage to know that glass is temporary and all images are up for grabs.

_____________________________________

1 From Glass Architecture. Quoted in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), p. 32.

2 As for the night fires, they have more of the vibe of John Martin’s paintings, coupled with gas-mask nightmares equally at home in doomsday games, but they draw the adjective apocalyptic less than the half-light versions.

3 José Saramago, Blindness, trans. Juan Sager (London: Hartcourt Brace & Co, 1997), p. 21.

4 See the chapter “Shard Cinema” for a discussion of this.

5 “But now follow the path of photography further. What do you see? It becomes more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it can no longer photograph a run-down apartment house or a pile of manure without transfiguring it. Not to speak of the fact that it would be impossible to say anything about a dam or a cable factory except this: the world is beautiful.” Walter Benjamin on the photographs of Albert Renger-Patzsch, in “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review, Vol. I/62 (July-August 1970), pp. 83-96.

6 As in the poster for Resident Evil: Retribution.

7 Given Ukraine’s recent past, it’s also shot through here with a secondary division: that of West and East, East standing in as zone of influence of Soviet and Chinese socialism.

8 And in this way, it’s a bad twin of decadence, insisting that the new will be arranged out of the leftovers of the old, rather than the claim made by decadence’s conservative theorists – Spengler, Nordau, Gibbon, etc. – that the old will decline into sclerotic caricature before the genuinely other will displace it in blood and industry.

9 See, for instance the photos of lions by Nick Brandt, who speaks about the impetus of his work in terms of how “Elephants are being wiped out at a rate of 35,000 a year. It’s not hyperbole to say that it’s an apocalypse of destruction.”

10 There have also been more sustained and serious takes on this that dodge that catastrophile’s impulse, such as David Fedele’s documentary e-wasteland.

11 The phrases here come, respectively, from Deutsche Welle (2014); Mongabay (2012); Earth First (2014); Gizmodo (2013); the Patriot Ledger (2011); the Mail and Guardian (2010); Alternatives Journal (2013); the Washington Post (2009); Planet Harmony (2010); and Artsy (2013).

12 In terms of staging, there are also interesting similarities to portrait-photo traditions closer to Agbogbloshie, such as the studio portraits of Malian photographer Malick Sidibé.

13 As Jenna Burrell notes in Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), the images that have circulated more widely are not of the scrapyard itself but the bola, the site where the burning happens, and indeed, in watching Fedele’s documentary, we can see a similar, though less dramatic, visual shift happen when we go from the scenes of mainframe breaking to those of burning.

14 Thereby accidentally confirming in full Walter Benjamin’s infamous point about how an image of a new social order/disorder to come is always suffused with the archaic and long-past.

15 A strange counterposition: Passages des Panoramas (the Panoramas Arcade), which is often considered the first true arcade, takes its name from two large rotundas in which some of the earliest painted panoramas were displayed – including one of Paris itself. Visitors paid to go in and perform a human tracking shot of sorts, spinning around to take in the full 360-degree view. If the arcade serves as a chunk of the city designed to frame mobile commodities as screened images (through the shop windows), the panoramas do almost the exact opposite, creating an immersive environment of a fixed image of the city.

16 Compare the arcade, for instance, with an open-air market where goods are on display but not behind glass and where seeing, smelling, selecting, and purchasing them happen in the exact same place, rather than the arcade where the image of the displayed happens outside, through the window.

17 Anne Friedberg identifies this dynamic with her characteristic clarity: “Glass was a material that featured both transparency and protection, could keep the outside out and at the same time bring it in. As the window grew in relation to the wall – shedding its mullions and posts – it became more and more of a permeable interface. Its transparency enforced a two-way model of visuality: by framing a private view outward – the ‘picture’ window – and by framing a public view inward – the ‘display’ window.” The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 113.

18 It’s the architectural equivalent of the “prophylactic” defense mechanism – having a “blasé” attitude, that is – that Georg Simmel identifies a full century later in 1903 as the defense mechanism engendered by the “modern” metropolis.

19 We also might place this in a history of how experimental and expanded cinema worked through this, including with a quite literal mosaic of screens, in Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie Mural and Movie-Drome projects.

20 Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press 2012), p. 31. My thinking on this issue – and on avoiding the standard grasps of interfaces (especially screens) as either windows or thresholds – is indebted to this book.

THEN AND NOW AND NEVER

The lantern that blew out
left us in the dark
when the mine exploded
and the gods took advantage of us
and demanded some glass beads from us
And since we had no glass beads
we are dead dead dead.
And me I sounded the alarm. I survived
I raised my hands without weeping
or crying for help
and because they were my friends
they let me survive.

– Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, “Survivor Among Millions”¹

As I’m writing this, the search for survivors of the earthquake in Amatrice is still underway, still prying open that slim and obstinate moment of optimism that says the search for survivors, rather than the search for the dead. Sometimes it’s rightly named, like with the ten-year-old girl found entombed but alive seventeen hours after the shock, and it makes every effort necessary. All the sifting of the dirt, all the shared silence to listen for murmurs, all the dogs who come from afar to smell life through meters of rock. But often, as happened today, when a broken chunk of city is lifted up, the survivor is revealed to not be a survivor, to not have been no matter what the search was called. The moment and its maybe slam closed, and the ex-survivor becomes a contribution to the death toll continually updated in the news.

I loathe the term death toll, how it’s trotted out every time a disaster is suffered through. When it was first used, it wasn’t applied to “acts of God,” as claims adjustors and fans of theodicy call such things. It was instead linked to death in the service of a cause, the consequence of taking one or the other side in a struggle whose severity meant death would inevitably occur. According to Michael Quinion, the first usage in English, at least that he could locate, is a report on rioting in India from 1897 (the same year as the Assam Earthquake there that killed around one thousand five hundred people).² There it marks the latently political discrepancy at work in how, and how many of, the dead are counted: “600 to 1,000 rioters were killed during the recent rioting in the vicinity of Calcutta and it is added that native circles put the death toll as high as 1,500.”³ One side downplaying, the other just counting. In the other instance Quinion cites, a 1909 Blackwood’s Magazine article on the 1842 retreat from Kabul, the toll has been flipped, describing those killed in the defense of that same colonial enterprise. There, the “gallant division [of British soldiers …] paid its toll of killed and wounded,” the deaths read as the unfortunate but nobly necessary price paid for maintenance of imperial might. In both cases, to call these deaths the “toll” for their competing projects of colonization and decolonization makes some sense, because this is how they were explained and justified, even if it’s little stretch to imagine that for many of those who did die and for those they left behind, there was never any sense whatsoever to the whole idiotic enterprise of accumulation and dominance.

The term has since drifted in meaning and become generic, used without a second thought and available for shitty puns accidental and otherwise, like the Daily Mail title “Smartphones are blamed as death toll on our roads jumps by 13 per cent.” Yes, a death-toll road, yes, how apt. Yet it’s an open question as to whether it makes sense to call the deaths in Amatrice a “toll,” even as casually as news outlets do, given the way it suggests that death caused by gravity, weight, tectonic disturbance, and the material instability of a city is a required blood payment to some thing, some movement or nation or cause, a geological antagonist that is partisan, that cares one way or another, that keeps count: seventy-seven or seventy-eight survivors who do not survive. One hundred and twenty who could not. Two hundred and thirty-nine who wouldn’t.

There’s obviously nothing new in this way of dealing with disasters, treating them like the measured or careless work of a vengeful god or two. Sixty-five years ago, in 1951, as though working through the lethal Kansas River flood of that same year by displacing it overseas, American newspapers framed the flooding of Italy’s Polesine region in just these terms. When a hundred and fifty thousand people had to be evacuated from their homes and the farming capacity of the region was decimated, burying fertile land under six feet of sand, the Chicago Tribune laid the blame on the Po River being “a bad actor for more than 2,400 years.” A strange choice of phrase, as if the problem was that the Po didn’t really sell the role, like it wasn’t method enough. In truth, it wasn’t, and some weren’t fooled, refusing the idea that, as the article put it, “all man’s efforts have been in vain; the winner is always nature.”

Because as the Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga saw in that same catastrophe’s pre-history, event, and aftermath, the flooding was no more “natural” a disaster than any other. A flood, earthquake, forest fire, or tsunami may well begin as an unauthored and apparently nonhuman occasion. But it amplifies a set of specific, vicious, and entirely unsurprising social conditions that dictate just who will once again bear the brunt of calamity, even as disasters recurrently get framed as the rare instance of common purpose and national unity. Such generous collaboration and selfless work is, of course, a real and moving thing, but the ground on which it moves, and into which it digs desperate, is long marked by the patterns of what Rachel Carson, riffing off the poisoned robe of Medea to understand insecticide poisoning, called “death-by-indirection.” That indirection routes the blame and damage alike along contours of racialization and class strata that align all too clearly with what is downwind of the smokestacks or built on shaky foundations, what infrastructural maintenance gets put off year after year. A disaster seems to strike all, but it is also deictic, pointing too late to which corners were cut and expenses spared, usually in the roofs over the heads of those most precarious to start, poorly waged, if at all, and with little recourse to legal protection.

This isn’t speculative in the least, as the 2012 earthquakes in Emilia-Romagna showed. Much of the international media coverage turned its attention to the damage done to the Parmesan industry (two hundred million euros in lost profit) and, as is happening again today, to concerns about the loss of “historical” buildings and sites deemed culturally important. (The BBC headline: “Deadly northern Italy earthquake hits heritage sites.”) What got shoved under the rug, though, was how most of the deaths occurred in recently and shoddily constructed industrial buildings that collapsed entirely, never shored up with the kind of support needed for an earthquake-prone area. Five workers on night shift, including a Moroccan national, were killed when the factories and foundry came down, and as reports noted, if the quake had happened during daytime, which it just as easily could have given that tectonic pressure is not nocturnal, it would have been a total massacre of those doing low-waged and repetitive work. In the 2009 earthquakes in Aquila, where three hundred and nine people were killed, the guilt was shoved onto scientists who were convicted on manslaughter charges (though later acquitted) for giving what was judged as an inadequately alarmist warning report after initial tremors. What never received remotely that kind of attention and attempted scapegoating was any prosecution of those – especially construction outfits managed by organized crime, along with their well-greased government liaisons – who had saved money by ignoring building standards, including the use of sand in place of concrete elements. It proved easier and somehow more comforting to blame those who did not warn in the days immediately before rather than those who had profited for decades on the ongoing construction of death traps.⁴

For Bordiga, these accidents are never haphazard, even if they can’t be precisely predicted. They are part of a necessary dynamic within capital, a “murder of the dead” (i.e. of “dead labor,” in the form of the already-made) necessary to spur new output and rejuvenated circulation, clearing the ground for large-scale investment that otherwise moves outwards in search of better returns. The devastation of large-scale war is one mode, an earthquake (or shipwreck, or urban fire) another. In this way, “death toll” may well be the correct and bleak term, because it is a penalty paid, albeit to no subject, cause, or movement, just to the maintenance and renewal of the status quo.

Yet a disaster also points beyond the specific patterns of social power at any given moment, its arrangement of neighborhoods, roads, dams, and electrical grids. It gestures out towards some of the longest-term tendencies of the world order, ones almost too broad to take in a single view until the collapse of function and accumulation makes it possible to see what was at work, even if it means starting with the fragments and lines of failure after the fact.

Seeing those tendencies requires that, as Bordiga was doing more than a half-century before the word “Anthropocene” came to haunt a thousand academic conference panel titles, we backtrack through a complicated mesh of decisions and actions that can’t separate the willed from the accidental, the technical from the social, the economic from the ecological, the weather from the price of cheese.

What this requires, above all, is a timescale that exceeds both easy culpability and media attention span. It is most immediately evident in the unspoken – or at least publicly unspoken – decisions made about who can afford to live where and where the emergency funds go after breakdown, if they go anywhere at all, spreading the consequences out and out into the future for those left without capacity or credit to return to previous forms of life and for whom the disaster never ends. And it is on this last point that Bordiga moves toward a thought I’ve found more and more necessary, one that exceeds his effort to see capital as the vampire of vampires, that prolific murderer of the dead, and instead works toward a slippery understanding of how our very grasp of time and loss is so bound to recognizable cycles and sites of production and valuation. Because unlike the capacity for accelerated output and mobilized industry in times of war,

a pool of hydrological and seismological organisations cannot be formed, at least not until the great science of the bourgeois period is really able to provoke series of floods and earthquakes, like aerial bombardments.

Here it is a matter of a slow, non-accelerable centuries-long transmission from generation to generation of the results of “dead” labour, but under the guardianship of the living, of their lives and of their lesser sacrifice.⁵

It is somewhere between fitting and perverse that Bordiga structures this particular text, like most of his Sul filo di tempo (On/Along the Thread of Time) essays of the 1950s when he roars back into critique after forced silence during the fascist years, around a stark opposition that divides the bulk of the essay under the headings of “Yesterday” and “Today.” Because despite that split, one of the prime contributions of his thinking was to work towards erasing that division, seeing yesterday, today, and tomorrow within an ongoing struggle for survival and quality of life that can no more be answered by resettlement than it can by building apartments from sand. After the flood, he wonders,

So what then if the peasant reclimbs the slope where nothing can ever take root and the very bare and friable rock strata itself does not permit the rebuilding of houses? And the workers by the sea, what will they do? Today they can no longer emigrate like the Calabrians of the unhealthy lowlands and the Lucanians of the “damned claylands” made sterile by the greedy felling of the woodlands which once covered the mountains and the trees that spread over the upland grazing. Certainly, in such conditions, no capital and no government will intervene, a total disgrace of the obscene hypocrisy with which national and international solidarity was praised. It is not a moral or sentimental fact that underlies this, but the contradiction between the convulsive dynamic of contemporary super-capitalism and all the sound requirements for the organization of the life of human groups on the Earth, allowing them to transmit good living conditions through time.⁶

Here, then, is a different search for survivors, a search carried out by those who do survive but, in so doing, must scour the transformed landscape, the inland beach that drowns the soil, for something, anything resembling a way of going forward.

_______

KERRY SANDERS: This looks like it might have been some kind of birthday party.
ANDREA MITCHELL: Let’s make sure we don’t… KERRY SANDERS: OK, Here’s the first picture…
ANDREA MITCHELL: Let’s make sure we don’t…
KERRY SANDERS: …we’re seeing of a child…
ANDREA MITCHELL: Let’s not… let’s not show the child, Kerry.
KERRY SANDERS: [continuing to flip through stacks of photos of children as the camera records] …and I’m sorry, Andrea, this is sort of unfolding live as we’re doing it. So I’m not sure what the next picture is going to be until I pull them open.

– Transcript of MSNBC’s “FIRST LIVE LOOK INSIDE ATTACKER’S APARTMENT,” Dec 4, 2015, San Bernardino

To grapple with the histories fractured and heaped by the earthquake, even from afar and even in thought alone, takes time. It resists either consolation or distillation into single examples, the two processes that seem, for better or worse, most needed in the days following a disaster, whether for genuine grief or the attempt to garner clicks. Perhaps because of this, as the search for survivors begins, so too does a search for images to try and picture the particularity of what happened and to narrow it into something adequately human-scale, even if that particularity lies in how it ruins that very scale and those who form its measure. Early on, in the first hours following the quake, The Guardian not only participated in this, as it always does, but also reflected on the process itself and the drive for an iconic image, noting that the photo of the nun – bloodied, propping herself up, looking at her phone, sitting before a blanket-covered corpse – is “likely to be one of the most enduring images of the earthquake.”⁷

It is a remarkable image, no doubt, one that cuts hard, in those small indices of what so exceeds it: the small red feet of the ladder chromatically echoing the blood on her head, the way that the covered body has become horizontal on a stretcher made of a ladder meant to reach up beyond what the human can manage when it lives and stands. The fact that we cannot tell, without a caption, what is actually under the blanket and yet know all the same.

The image stings, as it must, but I suspect that it will be enduring for the way it participates in two genres. First, it is part of a mode of photographing the aftermath of large-scale violence and war that tries to isolate moments of pause, the single individual pulled briefly from chaos and mourning into something quotidian and spare. (I’ll come back to this shortly, in terms of what this does for that problem of scale mentioned above.) Second, the image also fits with a particularly, though not uniquely, Anglophone vision of Italy as a nation of temporal contradictions, fusing the traditional and the modern, so that the image of a nun on a cellphone – only odd if one has never witnessed nuns obsessed with Candy Crush, as some definitely are – comes to mark this untimely juncture, a life of supposed repose and care thrown onto the new universal of the screen to find out what is happening and if friends are safe.⁸

But in the attempt to make the shock available to readers from afar, The Guardian also mobilized a tactic that I’ve never seen deployed quite like this, titled “Before and after pictures of Italian towns devastated by deadly earthquake.” Below the title, and its strapline that instructs us to “Move the sliders to see images of the towns before and after the quake,” there are a set of generic, essentially clinical views of roads and buildings in Amatrice and Arquata del Tronto: generic, because the images were not taken by a photographer for the story but were pulled from Google Street View, leaving the superimposed street names (“Corso Umberto I”, “Strada Provinciale”) hovering close over the roads they mark. Above each photo is a slider, set all the way to the left, with a single word to the side:

Then

If we do as instructed and pull the blue button to the right, the word slowly changes. Or rather, it cross-dissolves on its way to reading Now, the words commingled at the midpoint.

So too the images themselves, as the composite photo gathered by a many-lensed camera mounted on a car trawling the streets of Amatrice bleeds into one taken in the wake of the tremors, where the buildings are broken into shuddering hunks, and the street is no longer clear of pedestrians but full of those standing, staring, and carrying stretchers. It is a small act of cinema, one for the era where the hand once again advances the frames, where the finger on glass drags the next page, next image, next duration. If we leave the slider in the middle, the images become impossible compositions, freeze-frames of cross-dissolves from an unmade film of the street both whole and not, not a transition but a sudden, shattering cut stuck between frames.

I’ve been staring at these, perhaps in a proxy of return to a place through which I walked a few years ago, and can’t help but feel that something goes wrong in their attempt, other than what obviously went terribly wrong. The kind of energy that Bordiga generates between his Yesterday and Today – spilling out to what came far before and what will persist after, until it is taken apart by those who refuse it – is missing in this Then and Now. That absence isn’t due to the effort to switch from the stability of the single image to an open problem of form and technique, of possible montage. If anything, that’s where the force of the effort lies, the fact that it doesn’t quite work and never really adds up. But the ease of the slider, the way that it’s the same motion one might use to accept or refuse a potential hookup, to unlock a screen, or to scroll along an array of variously colored sweaters, serves to paper – or pixel – over the starkness of the split in time. And this split must be first acknowledged and made total, in order to then move past it and tangle with those long-running tendencies that provide the continuity of any contested attempt to “transmit good living conditions across time.”

By contrast, I’m reminded of a startling film, Sicily: Earthquake Year One (Sicilia: terremoto anno uno), directed by Beppe Scavuzzo, itself dealing with a massive Italian earthquake.⁹

The film was shown in 1970, though it is set across a scattering of time: in January 1968, when the earthquake came, in the days and weeks of its immediate aftermath amongst the rubble and crisis, and in all the days and weeks and months after that, adding up to the Year One of the title, at which point the promised aid still had not come, despite one hundred thousand left homeless. It doesn’t stop there, looking beyond to what it could not possibly have filmed, a decade not yet happened but sure to come all the same, when sixty thousand of them will still have no homes, living in tents and shanties, and will still be told to wait. And it goes the other way, too, reversed and rewound, because the film finds the causes of this vile neglect in the decades before, in the indifference and profit-hunger that gave the catastrophe its full force.¹⁰ It opens out wide to a whole century of condemnation of the Italian south as backwards, messy, and beyond repair, such that the ruination of towns by an earthquake just makes them align with the image already held by those with the resources and power to do something about it.

In the film, in its very first seconds, the sense of the shuddering shock of the quake and its sprawling time is handled, as with The Guardian’s sliders, by a formal move distinct from what is shown. The film opens onto a helicopter passing above, filmed at normal speed, but when it cuts, it is not to other footage that advances sequentially in time. It is to a still image, a photograph over which the camera will move and record at twenty-four frames per second, the only motion its own motion, as if it were itself a helicopter, tracking the lines of the gestures of those depicted, the villagers who point in rage and desolation at the helicopter which should have brought help but did not stop. Its question is plain and difficult: how can one show this sense of time, this thing that is both a sudden wrenching event and a continual process of judgment, neglect, and deterioration? For this film, it is shown as a gap: a profound gap not processed as that impossible Then and Now, to be blurred with no entanglement, just overlay, but rather in the time and ground of waiting itself, between the casual mobility of the emergency aid that is supposed to come and the territory where it will never arrive. It puts in place an interval that measures the uncrossed air dividing the helicopter that won’t land from the people who cannot wait but are made to do so all the same. If ever I’ve seen a refutation of the idea that formally disruptive or innovative techniques are somehow elitist and counter to the political potential of art, this is it, in all its ugliness.

This doesn’t happen with the sliders. I don’t want to flatly castigate such an effort that tries to share with others afar some sense of how the unthinkable but inevitable came to happen. It would be easy and wrong to simply chalk it up to a gimmick for clicks, because I don’t doubt that many of those involved felt the awful gravity of what was shown. Moreover, to measure a brief attempt in the midst of an unfolding catastrophe against the critical frame developed by Bordiga, arguably one of the sharpest writers of the communist left, would make little sense, if only because the time and thought put into each diverge so obviously. Still, there is an aspect of these sliding dissolves that we need to understand and be willing to refuse, because it goes far beyond the imaging of disaster to face an entire mode of navigating our worlds through shared images.

Another example from the extended archive of Italian disaster photos can make this clearer.¹¹ In the research I was doing on the history of Italian society and the radical critiques of it, I came to look at photos from when Turin was filled with smoke and rubble, not from the riots that marked it from the early ’60s until the late ’70s, but in the aftermath of Allied bombing in the Second World War. One in particular stuck with me, taken from inside the Fiat Lingotto factory famous for its rooftop test track. The track survived the bombing, but the explosions tore holes in the hull of the building. Here, the light falls through the silted air to point from newly open sky down to a single figure standing apart from a group in the distance, leaning on a cratered column, looking back at us.

Like the photo of the nun, the photo and its brief moment of solitude hurts. But when you look through the other images made of Turin bombed, it starts to look less singular.

In these photos where we confront violence done to buildings, and the implication of what it did to any within or beside them, the figures always stand alone. Sometimes there are several in a single frame, but when they are simply looking, they do not stand together. There is no hand placed on a shoulder.

When an action is being done, the rule changes, and a group is shown, putting out a fire or cleaning up the bricks.

And at other moments in the imaging of Turin, when the bombs are long in the past, groups are not just allowed but demanded to bolster the way that industry sets its sights on the city.

In a Felice Casorati mural commissioned by Fiat ten years after the war ended, figures stand together, clustered around the car whose fluorescence lights their faces. Behind them, Turin is laid out like stars or ghost food, its perspective broken and canted, hanging in the balance between moon and Cinque Cento. And the stellar form finds itself repeated later. In a promo film of the postwar boom, the company describes itself as a “Fiat constellation,” its capital sites blooming down the peninsula in tiny fires.

But in the photos of the ruined cities that were to enable that ignition on the back of migrant work, there are no such swarms to be seen. When it comes to contemplation, a single figure seems to be required: a yardstick to measure the damage, a model for how to see solemnly. An impossible privacy of feeling, closed frozen in the sight of what had been sighted from above and transformed. This is a task given to photography, not to moving images. In one photo, a man stands in a field that had no contour and now has a crater. There is no before, no then. Only after. In another, the photographer himself is shot beside a crater, camera in hand, an operator made into image, alone on a world made moon.

It is this sense of human scale that most misfires in the Then and Now sliders, with an effect that would be comic in a different scenario, as giants stride up the streets and dwarf vans, lumbering past the crooked clock tower. In others, the effect is more precise: the body of a rescue worker dissolving into place to peer over the newly ruined wall of a cliff. But this friction and failed match-up is what ultimately haunts these photos. It arises because they are joining two incompatible types of image.

The Now photos are conditioned by the disaster itself, only taken because of what happened and the people that move through it. This is the principle that determines this street rather than that street, the image condensed around these actions, so that the angles the photographers seek come to lack the axial plainness of Street View. They are photos of the absolute breakdown of daily life, only grounded by those doing what they never wanted to, in the way that those photos of bombed Turin sought a human frame for what otherwise had no sense.

The Then photos are fundamentally different. They are images made within and for a project of total functionality, wherein the navigable cartographic grid of coordinates encompasses all. Their aim is to let nothing be unmappable, to stamp a street name onto every nook of the world and to promise that you can say, OK Google, take me to 13 Corso Umberto, no matter where you are, and know that it can be done. They aren’t without people and small particularities, but the people are always incidental. The same angle would have been taken no matter if they were present or not, no matter what they were doing. Humans are accidents and bystanders for such images, photographed just because they happen to be there, as they turn to watch the car roll by with its many-lensed and mirrorless satellite of a camera on top. If it recorded audio, there’d surely be at least one: OK Google, fuck off.

There isn’t audio, at least not that Google admits to having recorded, but to treat the Then photos as single, still images wouldn’t be right. As the oddness of the slider dissolve makes accidentally clear, they are cinema stills, frames that only make sense within the sequence that surrounds them. For much of the twentieth century, an apparatus that took a continual set of photographic images at mechanically determined – and later, as in the case of the Google camera, digitally determined, with an electronic rolling shutter – intervals would be shown as moving images, as film animated by a second machine that restores the motion both of the camera’s displacement from one frame to the next and of all that is recorded in its view.¹²

Most commonly, we’d think of this kind of continual spatial exploration as a tracking shot, the camera moving without cutting, as when one was literally taken onto that roof track of Lingotto, mounted to the hood of a Fiat to go round and round. But the image of Google Street View, the one that the slider hopes to join to an image of suffering, belongs to a different order of moving images, the kind at work in contemporary blockbusters, where a range of discrete still images of a space are not played sequentially in time but stitched together out of time, on the screens and drives of the VFX studios, to produce a single mosaic of space that can be navigated, as if staring from the inside of a globe at its surface, and within which a green-screened Hulk can rage. Each Then photo is therefore not a single photo, however automatically taken: it is a composite of many photos stitched together into the plane of a moment, to show a world frozen in time yet with no edges, nothing offscreen that can’t be scrolled over to.

More plainly, the Then photos are meant for a world in which earthquakes do not happen, in which nothing is lost that can’t be fixed in post and all gaps are problems to be solved by the same procedure, just smoothing the cracks. In joining the two images this way with the slider – overlaying an already multiple fragment of corporate cartography with something taken later in that location to mark the scrambling desperation of those amongst the waste – these pre-existing street views become crime scenes in waiting. The everyday becomes prelapsarian, the calm of quotidian commerce waiting to be ruined, waiting to be laid alongside and over its downfall. So every street is made into a Then, a precursor and template, rather than its own Now, the way that when someone commits an act called terror or is killed by cops, all their past photos are sifted through, as if the piled debris of a life, and are judged suspect in turn: Was it visible in this? Was the t-shirt a tip-off? Look at the hand, how it clenches. A fist? Is it raised? Do the fingers seek to curl? Was the smile wrong? Did it promise violence? Is that a laugh of laughter or a laugh of inconsolable solitude?

Yet unlike the photos we take of ourselves and our friends, ones that might later become evidence in the public trial of the past, the images made by Street View’s cameras and proprietary software do not and cannot be organized around details or their urgency, around the way the edge of a neck is made bright for a moment by the light coming off the sea and how you will come back to this again and again. Street View has neither tenderness nor forensic impulse. It records some of everything but only enough to be the analogue of a lived world that we drive through without stopping or looking back.

_______

The future is finished. It’s finished. The future is finished.

– Marissa Di Tommaso, after the quake

1857 was the year of the “Great Neapolitan Earthquake” that killed roughly eleven thousand people, one of the worst in Italian history. In its aftermath, a Scottish geophysicist named Robert Mallet traveled to the area to carry out an extensive and hugely foundational study of seismology, published in 1862 as The Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857: The First Principles of Observational Seismology. The two-volume behemoth is a fascinating work, not only for how it incorporates photography as evidence but also for the way it joins then and now. Adopting a rigorously forensic approach, Mallet scours the ruined yet still standing buildings of the Campanian region to determine, on the basis of their cracks, fissures, and dislocations, how they’ve deviated from their original form – and in this, the signs of the depth and direction of the past earthquake itself. But he doesn’t have that original form, no precisely isometric illustrations, no annotated diagrams, and, above all, no photos. In this way, he can measure the unseen only through new intervals forced into the seen. The damage and distance must be found in the broken itself, rewinding on the basis of what persists – and in doing so, activating the past and refusing to let the atrocity be simply a force of nature, because it can’t be known separately from the marks it leaves on the homes of the living to which they can’t return.

A slider can’t achieve this. It doesn’t wish to and surely didn’t promise to anyhow. It judges all the past as a site of disaster to come and promises that any future violence will be able discover its Then. That when the next calamity comes, we can just type in the address and find the precursive match, anywhere in the world. Yet unlike Mallet’s attempt to read across time, to follow the fissures towards obscure cause, it does this without framing the present any differently, without thickening the web of forces feeding into it. It just confirms the earthquake as a closure and dead end, an act and fact of slaughter divorced from the history it mobilizes and disrupts – like the declaration when faced with selfies taken by a white nationalist shooter that no one could see it coming, even though that’s clearly a swastika flag hanging behind him and his rifle.

And so they don’t match, and they can’t match, even if the algorithms could fill the gaps, square the perspective, and lay the rooflines parallel and faultless as plates. That would change little, because their purposes are incompatible, and so the bodies will remain the wrong size, a Now towering over the gawking Then. The name of the road will remain pristine white no matter the blood, and the same tower doubles itself and goes nowhere, the whole thing as obscene and outof-joint as an earthquake itself. Because its sense of time, where precedent can always be found but its finding changes nothing, where there is always the content one needs but only if its particular techniques and origins and method are considered irrelevant, has been building for a long time now.

In the aftermath of the Amatrice earthquake, as buildings fell over and over, the stone shearing from itself, it feels all the more crucial, in whatever minor way, to think about how to cease participating in this need to know the answer and address, this need to have an image for everything. If one task is always to refuse to let the present become naturalized, eternal, and free of the history that constitutes it, the other is to know when to let there be no Then, to move in and with all the decisions made whose meaning was never guaranteed, to follow instead the lead of the dogs who walk beside the cranes and caterpillars and shovels and cannot help but bark at the buried murmur of a life still clinging scrappily to Now.

_____________________________________

1 Trans. Mary Hardy, in Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, ed. Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), p. 186.

2 http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dea6.htm

3 The source is the Friends Intelligencer and Journal, a Quaker publication, and though the riot is not specified in this small item, another on a following page suggests that it is the Talla riots. (In addition to noting that “Recent outbreaks and riots in India have caused anxiety among the English population, and the London journals, a dispatch on the 2d inst. says, intimate their fear that the mass of the natives are less contented under British rule than was generally believed, and that a disturbance of unpleasant proportions may be threatening.”) For more on the Talla riots, see Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Communal Riots and Labour: Bengal’s Jute Mill-Hands in the 1890s,” in Past and Present, No. 91 (May 1981), pp. 140-69.

4 Those questions started to be posed in the immediate aftermath of Amatrice, both discussing what it would take to stop mafia-tied construction firms from getting rebuilding contracts and, more generally, asking why so few buildings that had been retrofitted or constructed after revised earthquake building standards were adequately supported. There is no simple answer to this, of course, given that in many cases, the extremely high costs of retrofitting – particular to reinforce resistance to shear stress – would fall not just on landlords and real-estate firms but those sharing small homes and apartments. The wider point is that an architecture devoted to the utmost care of the human body is incompatible with the open market, unless it is content to only give that care to a tiny portion of the species.

5 “Murder of the Dead.” First published in Battaglia Comunista, No. 24, 1951. Online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/murder.htm

6 Ibid.

7 She was later identified as Sister Marjana Lleshi, an Albanian woman who was texting friends and family back home after having been pulled from the collapsed convent. Given that much of contemporary Italian racism centers on Albanians, the image fits all the more in a narrative that sees disasters as the occasion where social lines are crossed and communities pull together, all evidence before and after them to the contrary.

8 In a similar framing (but decidedly not sad memory), recall the shattered Virgin Mary statue – horrors! – of the 2011 Rome riot, that photographers made sure to get from every angle, flames lapping away at sedans in the backdrop.

9 For a more extensive take on this film from which some of my comments here are drawn, see my “Seven Gestures of Revolt,” for the Europa, futuro anterior project at Tabakalera, online at: http://europafuturoanterior.com/en/interventions/.

10 There are strong echoes in how Israeli attacks on Palestine use language that frames Gaza as “medieval” and pre-modern, relegating them to a situation without infrastructural necessities so that when the bombs come, they enact what has already been promised in words.

11 Part of my effort in this research was to move out from the sites that most often got and still get highlighted, the piazza and the factory, particularly in the industrial cities of the north, like Turin, where Fiat’s enormous auto plants are set in its periphery. In so doing, I tried to get a wider sense of the factory, to see it as something itself situated in those long timescales, rather than an exceptional site of both production and dissent, and embedded in landscapes where it forms a crucial node, sure, but only one among many.

12 Therein lies the uncanny experience of watching a film shot during an earthquake: both camera and what it films are thrown violently, each subject to the same tectonic forces yet all with their own trajectories, aligning at some moments, coming apart at others…

FRAGMENT 6

Here, again, there are stones on the ground, and here, too, there is blood. But there’s been no earthquake that would blur a still photograph taken at exactly the right moment. Instead, it is the image itself that moves, in all senses of the word, to film what no longer does: the blood on the pavement of a street in Cairo at night, the blood that no longer courses through the body of someone who lived and refused the forces of order. The blood forms a trail and marks a course, as if it leads to something other than just the eventual point where it must stop, because there is only so much in a body. Along each side of it, people have placed rocks and fragments of stone, one after the other, hundreds of them, to form a continual line that frames the stain. And it is this that is filmed, the camera shaking in the hands of whoever holds it as they walk along the stone-framed path and angle the lens downwards. The blood goes on and on, impossibly long in slow-motion, so much that we only know that they have died, and there is no sound.

The shot comes in Four Days of Death in December, a film made by the Egyptian collective Mosireen during the riots and rebellion of December 2011. The shards that fill this book mark the way that a certain technique goes in search of what can allow it to occur, and what it finds are images of devastation, of the world being taken to bits along with whoever gets in the way. Here, it is the very opposite. The technique is a handheld tracking shot, but this did not decide what would be shown. What came first was the blood and what dictated the need for this technique was the violence of a state, which produced the obscene length of this blood trail, too long to see at once without taking to the sky to look down.

The frames of the video advance. The camera moves over the ground. And no one who sees it can remain unmoved. This is its promise. Before it comes onscreen, a woman sits on the stairs, holding a bloodied rag, and says:

I’m sure of it, they will take to the streets, your parents
and the taxi drivers, if they see this now, if you show
this to a taxi driver he won’t be able to sleep, he
won’t be able to take it, he will go down to the street.
They will all take to the streets, I swear to God.

The camera is not fast glass, as they say: the image is blurry when it moves too quickly. But over it are written, with absolute clarity at the center of the screen, the names and the ages of the dead, one after the other, until we reach the ones who have not been identified:

unknown

The word repeats four times, and then the sound comes back, swelling in slow, and the voices are chanting:

This coming Friday, the revolution’s coming. It’s coming.

But we haven’t even reached the end of the blood or the stones, which continue on through the legs of the crowd that blocks the path of the camera.

So it can only be shown as a duration, in order that the image might take it all in and prevent any accusation of choosing a single angle that makes it look worse than it really was.

Still, a decision was made in the gap between the shooting of the video and its appearance in the film: the decision to slow it down, to make it hold. And in this space of silence, on a screen that swerves back and forth to follow the trail, we see not only the blood and the other hands reaching phones out to photograph it and the legs of those who stand by its side. We also see the stones that give a skeletal frame to this loss, like the beginning of a mosaic that would fill the city’s streets in order to point to this again and again, to not let it become unseen.

And in order for this frame to appear, there was not only the courage of those who took to the streets and threw rocks and died doing so. There was also this hidden and slow work of composition: to grasp whatever rocks were at hand and to assemble them into an outline that made this a moving image even before the camera followed its lead.

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