Please note that the following is a companion piece to this previously published video essay: https://longvoyage.substack.com/p/theinterval (it is recommended to watch the video first, if possible).
In Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books, he draws on Henri Bergson’s theses of movement to develop the basis for his theoretical writing on film. This involves the principle that movement as duration is indivisible and must be understood as constant change. Movement occurs always between two given positions, in the interval between them, so no matter how we try to measure time, it will always exist as movement in these gaps, in these intervals. For Deleuze, cinema gives us images (or an imaging) of movement that manifest in different varieties. The first of the central three varieties is the perception-image which focuses on what is seen or perceived; the second is the affection-image which focuses on feeling and the process of being altered; and finally the action-image which focuses on the result of such an alteration when a change/action occurs. The affection-image is a limbo space where anything is possible, between realized states of the actual, it is where the virtual and actual touch. It is like an interval of sorts itself. Affect-in-itself is what occupies the interval. Deleuze argues that the affection-image possesses its own singularities, which is to say that even though it is a processing that exists between perception and action, it has singularities that do not exist in either perception or action. In other words, there is something in this interval of becoming-becoming that is lost once it becomes action. This makes me think of something else in relation to cinema: the act of watching it and how there is something lost between what we see and its being seen, or between the seeing and having seen. Something autonomous to the affective encounter with cinema is lost on the other side of such an encounter—lost in an interval. Cinema is slippery and has no fixed ontology. It is a medium de fuite that perpetually eludes and evades, rhizomatically developing from one second to the next. It is the active machine-assemblage of spectator, the screened movie and its contents and its maker(s) and everything that that entails. It is a transient encounter. Our experience of cinema (cinema itself?) is lost in the interval.
I wrote my first movie review in my grade one notebook, in June of 1996, towards the end of the school year. It was of Eraser starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. My dad and I had seen it at Esplanade Theatre near Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver—just around the corner from Yic’s Chinese all-you-can-eat smorgasbord restaurant which we would frequent, often before showtime, before it was eventually shut down by the Board of Health (the kitchen was apparently populated with rats, but ignorance is bliss and I wish it hadn’t closed). I cannot recall if we had Yic’s that night. As was our tradition, we would pay for one movie and then stick around and sneak into a second one. First, we saw Brian de Palma’s Mission: Impossible. This was my dad’s pick. He had loved the TV show in his youth. I recall being indifferent to the movie in comparison to how Eraser, my pick, subsequently had me enthralled. (Aside: I have since dramatically reversed my opinion of these two movies; I would like to think that my taste has evolved from when I was a six-year old). I do not remember what I wrote about Eraser. My mom has the notebook in a box somewhere but she has a nasty hoarding habit and I’ll be lucky to ever set eyes on it again. I do know that I had crudely drawn a picture of Schwarzenegger fending off a crocodile with a gun in hand above my (surely illuminating) text. So, even then my instinct was to respond to cinema not just with words, but with images.
I grew up idolizing Siskel and Ebert, looking forward to the new episode of At the Movies every week, often attempting to leverage their thumbs ups to convince my dad to take me to movies he would otherwise prefer to avoid. I remember I wanted to see Josie and the Pussycats (I had a crush on Rachel Leigh Cook and had interpreted our shared surname as a promising sign). My dad, thinking that he would be in the clear, proposed that if either Ebert or Roeper (who had since taken over from Siskel after he passed away) gave it a thumbs up, he would take me. Ebert trashed the movie as my dad had expected but Roeper swept in to save the day. We saw the movie shortly thereafter. Ebert would turn out to have been right.
I had told my mom that I wanted to be a film critic when I grew up when I was still in Elementary School. My aunt Debbie had suggested that I submit a review to a local newspaper at the time, that they might actually be receptive to the novelty of a kid critic. In hindsight, it was a good idea, but I was far too shy. It wasn’t until late high school that I resumed the vocation I had flirted with back in Ms. Jacobs’ class in ‘96. I started a film blog. Almost no one read it but I was satisfied just to have an outlet. At this point, I never imagined that a career was possible. I figured it was resigned to being a hobby. To my surprise, a series of serendipitous occurrences opened up unexpected possibilities. I’ll save tell of that for another time but fast forward to my undergrad at UBC where I majored in Film Studies and my film criticism was already being published in major outlets. I grew frustrated in the academic environment. I didn’t like how cinema was looked at from such a distance. The faculty would look at cinema for purposes other than cinema itself, as if it wasn’t an artform but some unconscious imprint made by culture and society. Movies were naively reduced to specimen, to evidence. Where was the encounter? Where were the images? And sounds? Cinema was nowhere to be found in these classrooms—save for that of Mark Harris, may he rest in peace, and to whom I owe eternal gratitude for his boundless knowledge and infectious love of movies—so I had to go try and find it myself. Meanwhile, I became dissatisfied with my own writing. Something was missing. When I finished a piece, I would look at the page, and I could sense that something was lost. I started to include the context of my viewing within my writing. When I would travel to film festivals, I would write about the environment, the conditions, the peripheral details. This led to some interesting results but something was still missing.
A couple of years earlier, in the cafeteria at Capilano University, a friend opened his laptop and told me he had something he had to show me. It was Godard’s Je vous salue, Sarajevo, a two-minute film composed of an abstracted montage of a single photograph. Sun shone through the giant windows of the cafeteria, the glare making my friend’s laptop screen barely watchable. The room was crowded and the cacophony of other students’ voices made it difficult to hear the sound coming out of the speakers. In spite of these obstructions, the film changed my life. Arvo Pärt’s Silouans Song swelled on the soundtrack…images of soldiers, one of whom holds a cigarette in one hand and a gun in the other as he is in the motion of kicking a civilian…these details revealed as we see more portions of the photo, eventually seeing it in full. I remember wiping tears from my face in that cafeteria. In two minutes I had come to know something I hadn’t before, something about cinema, about images, and sounds, about encounters—and therefore about life. Something I could not put into words then and cannot put into words now, twelve years later, after having seen the film, without exaggeration, well over a hundred times. What I can put into words now as I ruminate on the limits of film criticism and theory, my continual frustration with it, and my desire for an affective criticism that centers the encounter and points to the interval where cinema is lost, is that Godard’s two-minute masterpiece is in itself an act of affective criticism, using images to “discuss” images, using cinema to reveal cinema. As I scratch at some vague sense of a new path for my own practice, it seems that part of the answer was there, essentially from the beginning. And yet it still escapes my grasp even now. But I’m reaching out…Becoming-becoming…Is that the interval ahead?
Around the same time that I first saw Je vous salue, Sarajevo, I read Serge Daney’s The Tracking Shot in Kapo, which remains my favourite piece of film criticism. It too changed my life and shifted my understanding of cinema. Daney recounts how Jacques Rivette’s Cahiers du cinéma review of Pontecorvo’s Kapo describes a particular shot that contained a morally objectionable camera movement:
“Look however in Kapo, the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt.”
This description served as an epiphany for Daney who recognized immediately what Rivette meant. It helped form his own aesthetic principles. Reading Daney’s essay then had a similar effect on me. Rivette provided the image, the only image Daney needed of the film, he does this in turn for the reader. He would never actually watch Kapo. Neither have I.
Using only words—and a deeply personal engagement with his own life, history, and relationship to images—Daney creates an affective film criticism that imparts more than its words contain. Reading this essay is an affective encounter that too cannot be measured, where its affective qualities disappear into the interval. Written film criticism has its own infinite potential to use the word as form and there is no limit to the possibilities of approaches. But just as cinema itself has no essence, no fixed form, no predetermined set of possibilities, so too can film criticism bend and morph and become whatever it wishes to be. As my frustration mounted at UBC, I started to play with images and video. I became an obsessive screencapper, and often posted film stills on my blog or on tumblr. I eventually dabbled in video essays, which I found to be a liberating experience, though the results of my attempts varied (this one worked, I think). As part of a collective of sorts, I took part in a project (though it was barely conceived as one in any certain terms) to subvert conceptions of film taste and evaluative conventions by starting a tumblr called “Vulgar Auteurism”. We would post stills from films perceived to be trash or low art. Movies by directors such as Paul W.S. Anderson, Tony Scott, and Michael Bay. I discovered that the isolation of an image had revelatory power that the written word did not. Qualities that somehow otherwise remained dormant could be brought to the surface and made not just apparent but obvious. Images cannot be denied. But they too have their limits: while a series of symmetrical images of corridors in the films of W.S. Anderson reveal aesthetic care and beauty, they may not reveal much else. Always something missing…
An affective film criticism seeks to expand the machine assemblage of cinema to include new parts. As with Rivette to Daney to me (and many others). The conjuring of images through words and uncovering of images through images. When I was younger, I thought that perhaps images may be the only adequate way to address images. What I realize now is there is no single way to do so. No one form is suitable for all purposes. The form of criticism possesses its own powers that cinema does not. Its own singularities. It can respond to cinema and echo it. It can point to the interval. It can point to the encounter. It can be an encounter with an encounter. There is no set of ingredients to accomplish this. It is different each time. It is as infinitely variable as cinema itself and each instance can be as singular as each film.
As a cinephile—or a wannabe cinefils à la Daney—I share with many a romantic view of cinema and a nostalgia for cinemagoing. How I would love to be chain-smoking in the front row of the Cinémathèque Française. Or even just back in my favourite seat in the fourth row of the cinematheque in Vancouver where I would spend most of my nights between the age of 19 and 26 seeing countless films projected on 35mm (although the installation of a digital projector somewhere in that timespan reduced the number of prints they would screen). Then unaware of my narcolepsy, which I would be diagnosed of at the age of 27, I didn’t understand why I would struggle to stay awake during the movies, regardless of how much I loved them. I started to bring toothpicks to screenings. If my eyes became heavy, I would retrieve one and stab at my gums to keep myself awake. Later, I would try holding extra strong Fisherman’s Friend mints under my tongue, hoping that the ensuing burning sensation would do the trick. Most of the time it worked but sometimes it didn’t. I wonder how many beautiful images washed over my closed eyes? I miss those days. I was discovering cinema almost every single night. My first encounters with the greats. My world perpetually expanded. When JV was the projectionist, he never brought house lights up until the credits had finished. When AR took over, he would bring the lights up as soon as the credits started. I remember how much this infuriated me. (Aside: JV was an alcoholic who eventually moved to Paris and, reportedly, got sober. A few years ago, he discovered that he had a long lost uncle who happens to be a millionaire and wanted to fund a film festival in Tilburg which JV then founded. So, it’s nice to think that, in the south of the Netherlands, some movies are being projected with great care.) But now I wouldn’t complain about being able to see anything projected. I feel less entitled to perfection. And as I re-interrogate film criticism and my relationship to it for the first time in years, I find my romanticism waning.
In fact, as I type this out on a word doc, I am engaging with my primary gateway to cinema. I currently have five films downloading from Karagarga. I have two hard drives connected to my computer and several more at the ready nearby, each loaded to their capacity with movie files. I watch films via VLC media player, connected to my TV by HDMI. I also use VLC to screencap the movies after I watch them. I have hundreds of screencaps saved on the hard drives. Sometimes I use the images in my work. Or I post them alone. Or I just look at them for my own pleasure. Also on my computer are countless notes on cinema that will never see the light of day, others will become part of pieces that do. Some of them inform this piece you are reading now. Using Adobe Premiere, I can take excerpts from movies and make something with them. Still images and words too. Music, sound. My desktop is my cinema interface where the lines between the medium, my engagement with it, and the critical tools I have at my disposal are blurred. So many possibilities at my fingertips. Past and future encounters. And encounters of encounters. The encounter is inseparable from cinema. It’s not simply about how a movie makes you feel but rather the conjunction of your affective experience and the affective function of the movie. That is cinema. Now, I can almost touch it…The interval…
I am interested in a renewed commitment, personally speaking, to film criticism, and one that is explorative and amorphous, one that embraces the avenues I have available and restlessly does not stick to one form, one approach. I wish to discover and rediscover cinema and criticism. Ideally, an affective film criticism is one that acknowledges its limits and understands it cannot fully illuminate, but can engage with, point to, open up. The right combination of words, of images (still or moving), of feeling, of affect, of anything, can unlock something for the spectator. Sometimes the spectator only needs a hint. Affective film criticism aims to hint. It doesn’t even have to be analysis in the true sense, at least not exclusively. Alienation and capture as tools. Appropriation that seeks to serve that which is appropriated. The isolation of images, or juxtaposition, the creation of concepts. Taking leaps, risks. Opaque but revelatory. A way of stimulating the pensive spectatorship identified by Raymond Bellour in a different context. Interruption of temporality to reveal temporality. Time itself as a tool. The manipulation of or interaction with durée to reveal the nature of the infinite temporalities of cinema. As suggested by Mulvey’s concept of the possessive spectator, today’s cinephile can initiate new relations with the medium enabled by technology. Cinema as a medium or a multiplicity of sub-media is too complex to not beg a response that adapts and shifts and seeks to answer its questions or question its answers through its own formalism. Cinema and its infinite temporalities offers clarity regarding our own reality, our own ambiguities of perception—cinema requires a fluency in temporalities. To equip oneself for cinema is also to equip oneself for a world of images. Affective film criticism can rise to the challenge (and opportunity) cinema offers us.
I do not always have a coherent internalized response that can then be written or verbalized, sometimes it is merely a sense of understanding. I can point to the power of a film, I can bask in its artistry and be close to it, but this may not mean it has some derivable message or meaning ripe for conventional analysis. Sometimes it will, but sometimes there is a risk of explaining away this power, the words can then obscure the sense of understanding. A forced, written or verbalized form of articulation that is ultimately inadequate replaces this sense. Films are mistranslated, the experience we have with films is lost, and the reader and spectator not only do not gain access to understanding but in its place a potentially harmful and distortive description that can impede visual literacy (a worrisome thought that occurs to me: how much damage has the history of film criticism caused?).
Currently, I am working on a thesis paper on the films of one of my favourite directors, Tsai Ming-liang. I worry about the loss between encounter and writing that could happen. Again I feel frustrated by limits, restrictions, conventions. But I could be mistaken. Perhaps there are no limits. Maybe I can push forward as if they are not there and find out. At least there is always the beauté du geste. Cinema is so slippery, the actual encounter so fleeting. Just as the moment-in-the-moment is actual for a blink of an eye before it returns to the virtual. Virtual then actual then virtual (but actually there is no “then”). Like us, our lives. Like all things. Nothing ever ends, everything always is. So where does that leave us in trying to figure out what happened and where we are going? Perpetual engagement with the virtual. Attempting to retrieve (but not actually) what is lost in the interval and therefore creating new possibilities. It’s even happening right now. Possibilities are unfolding. The virtual almost touches the actual. Before I typed this I was in a state of affection, ideas and memories and possibilities swelled up, the future was already here. Then I typed this sentence.
“Distinct, but indiscernible, such are the actual and the virtual which are in continual exchange.” – Deleuze, Cinema 2
The person who showed me Je vous salue, Sarajevo is no longer a friend. The film still makes me cry sometimes. It did just now when I watched it to take screencaps for this piece. I encounter the interval. My hair stands on end. The sunlight shines through the cafeteria windows and I discover cinema again.