Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 40, November 2003
Jan-Christopher Horak
Change and Nothing But Change:
Rosen's _Change Mummified_
Philip Rosen _Change Mummified: Cinema,
Historicity, Theory_ Minneapolis and London:
University
of Minnesota Press,
2001 ISBN
0-8166-3637-0 445 pp. The title of Philip
Rosen's new book is taken from an Andre Bazin quote and is
admittedly an oxymoron, but one that perfectly encapsulates
the central premise of the author's new radical theory of
historiography. While traditional histories attempt to
capture and stabilize the past from an equally static
position of presentness, Rosen argues for a new subject
position that would not only create narratives of pastness
that are destabilized and in a constant state of flux, but
that would also define the subject position of the historian
in the context of temporality, embracing constantly shifting
relations between present and past. The lynchpin for such a
historiography is the recuperation of Bazin's concept of the
indexical in the image. While 1970s film theory consigned
Bazin and his Catholic inflected theory of realism to the
position of 'other', Rosen argues that all moving-image
media, even digital media, can only be made intelligible
through referents of indexicality. In a series of chapters
dedicated to fiction and documentary, classical Hollywood
narrative and Third World cinema, analogue early cinema and
digital imaging, Rosen attempts nothing less that a
synthesis of classical and poststructuralist film theory,
while also moving the latter from its previously ahistorical
positioning to a firm contextual grounding in
history. In 'nuancing 1970s film
theory's opposition to Bazin', Rosen argues in his first
chapter that 'the construction that is history is
necessarily to be read against some standard of the real'
(7), in other words, both the construction of history and of
film theory implicates the defining of a relationship
between the subject and the universe of objects, whether
they exist in the present or past. Not some ideal
objectivity is at stake, if one reads Bazin against the
grain, but rather a subjective investment in the image as an
indexical trace of some form of objectivity; as a referent
that actually existed in the past. In discussing Bazin's
metaphor of 'the mummy complex' in 'The Ontology of the
Photographic Image', Rosen then switches gears, defining in
psychoanalytic terms a 'founding desire' for the creation of
all representational art, namely 'the sublimation of this
impossible impulse to defeat death', to exist outside of the
temporal (21). While previous readers have focused on
Bazin's ontology of the moving image and it's inherent
properties as a medium for realism, Rosen argues that the
subject is indeed central to Bazin's theory. According to
Rosen, the subject's perception of the real in images is a
function of its 'preservation obsession' -- the need to
defeat time by freezing it in the image. Yet since history
can only be defined in and through time, Rosen ultimately
concludes that the weakness in Bazin's history lies in his
attempt to negotiate time through a timeless
phenomenological intentionality of the subject. Which brings Rosen to his
second chapter, 'Entering History: Preservation and
Restoration'. Rosen begins with a discussion of the French
architect Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, whose concept of
*l'unite de style* was extremely influential in 19th century
architectural restoration, and the critique of that concept
by John Ruskin, who favored preservation over restoration.
The fundamental difference between these two positions is
their relationship to history. While restorationists look at
the past as a moment in time that can be isolated and
encapsulated, in order to be viewed from the present as a
fixed later moment in time, preservationists see time as an
unbroken continuity, which can neither be reversed nor
tampered with. One school sees the historical past as
knowable, available to the present through the scientific
methodologies of historical inquiry, the other school
emphasizes the chasm between the present and the past,
between life and death, making any knowledge of the past a
matter of complete conjecture. For restorationists this
meant in practical terms removing all traces of
modernization when 'restoring' a building to its original
architectural style, while preservationists are apt let
conflicting styles from successive epochs remain visible,
while structurally securing a building for the
future. But the differences
between preservation and restoration soon begin to break
down in Rosen's discussion of Greenfield Village (Michigan)
and Williamsburg (Virginia), two attempts to reconstruct the
past physically. While 'preservation' bases its truth value
on the fact that all its parts are corroborated traces a
real past, restoration emphasizes the reconstruction of a
historical whole, even if its individual parts are not
actual artifacts. Indeed, much more important than these
differing versions of a historical imaginary, is the fact
that the impetus for preservation and restoration is the
same, namely to recuperate a 'spirit of the past'. In other
words, ideological concerns cannot be divorced from the
project of historical reconstruction, 'objectivity is in the
service of subjectivity' (67). In the reconstruction of
historical villages, as well as in many historical museums,
America's pre-industrial and agrarian past is put on view
for the contemporary visitor, thus disavowing the anxieties
connected with the rise of a predatory corporate capitalism.
As historians know, the 'good old days' were hardly as happy
as the images these edifices suggest, while their actual
existence in the present allows the subject to believe that
there are still other traces of the past in the present. So
objectivity is again only possible through the obliteration
of the temporal, of history itself, through a fetishistic
investment in parts to construct a historical totality from
an implied static position in the present. Rosen's solution
is to suggest a history that avoids as much as possible the
transcendence of the temporal by maintaining a 'dynamic
consciousness of temporality' (77). Given the centrality of
time (as opposed to Bazin's space) in Rosen's text, he next
turns in Chapter 3 to Western conceptions of temporality.
Referencing Foucault and others, Rosen notes that the
nineteenth-century impetus to control and manage time was a
necessary step for mass society to reign in and standardize
human subjectivity, allowing it to produce capital
efficiently through human labor. It is no accident that the
mid-19th century sees the invention of inexpensive time
pieces, available to even workers in the factories, while of
course the central tenant of Taylorism in the early 20th
century is time management. Quoting Reinhart Koselleck,
Rosen then demonstrates the way the construction of history
itself evolved from these new notions of controlling time:
while pre-Enlightenment historical temporality was always in
a sense timeless, mixing past and present, myth and
theology, historical explication and future prediction,
modern historicity segments time both linearly and
directionally, articulating cause and effect relationships
to explain historical development in time. The empirical
segmentation of the past utilizes critically authenticated
documents as proof not only for the existence of a given
past, but also for the correctness of its chronology. In
other words, indexical traces are again brought into play to
create historical sequencing, *pars par toto*, assuming of
course that the present is an absolute, a fixed
subjectivity. In point of fact, the present is in a constant
state of becoming the past, so that the historian's
positionality must necessarily remain unstable. Like the
cinematic subject, the historian is tied to an impossible
undertaking, namely the recuperation of the past into the
present. Rosen moves to specific
case studies in Part II, beginning with a discussion of
mainstream film, in particular the way the classical
Hollywood studios privileges research to give credibility to
the historical narratives in their costume pictures. As the
former director of Universal Studios Archives, which
included the now defunct Research Department, founded in
1916, I can attest to the truth of Rosen's statement that
'research has been a constant in film history' (149).
Universal's Research Department was a library of universal
knowledge, including a smattering of books on virtually
every subject, while its document, clippings, and
photography files were organized according to a topology of
human knowledge. While Universal had the oldest research
department in Hollywood, all the major studios maintained
such departments in the classical period and invested
substantial funds in staff and acquisitions. (At the end of
the studio era, research departments fell victim to
'overhead' cost-cutting, and eventually most were sold or
donated to non-profit libraries.) But to what end did the
studios invest? According to Rosen, the
historically 'accurate' details supplied or confirmed by
research departments -- indexical traces all -- allowed for
a referentiality to a historical past, when the profilmic
event itself was a reconstruction. Referring to Bathes,
Rosen sees in the construction of historical film narratives
a double conversion from the camera's pastness and from the
pastness of the diegesis to the subject's present.
Importantly, the spectator's investment is not in the
documentary force of the image *per se* (its indexicality),
but rather in the film narrative as an indexical trace of
the past. Narrative is a social ordering of time, hence
ideology. This point is elaborated
in Rosen's next chapter, where he discusses the transition
from early cinema's *actualities* to Hollywood classical
narrative in the post-1915 period by analyzing _A
Policeman's Tour of the World_ (1906), which mixes
documentary and staged studio footage. While the film does
attempt to create an ideological orientation through editing
and a final apotheosis, it is clear that the indexicality of
early cinema here has yet to be harnessed in narrative.
While the narrative frame attempts to construct a Western
imperialist view of the Third World, the actuality footage
seemingly needs a lecturer or other intertextual
intervention (as would have been the case in most early
travelogue film programs) to support such a subject
position. According to Rosen, the film's actuality footage
continuously removes the subject from the diegesis, so that
the subject's position remains unstable, trapped in the
'fragmentation, inconsistencies, and textual
indeterminacies' (212) that the narrative can neither
contain nor force meaning onto. More importantly for
understanding the development of classical narrative as an
efficient means of ideological control, _A Policeman's Tour
of the World_ puts the subject in an ambiguous and untenable
position by constructing a central character for possible
identification who is a thief, and thus a negative social
model. Rosen concludes that the film 'lacks the means, and
perhaps the will, to decide even this narrational
ambivalence textually' (213). Classical narrative would
learn from such 'mistakes'. From early cinema's
origins in *actualities* Rosen turns to the classical
documentary and its utilization of modern historiographical
methodologies. The author begins by contrasting the 'live'
television coverage of the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy with the documentaries produced after the fact,
noting that while the former hungers for images of the real
(live location feeds not yet being a technological
possibility), the documentaries of the same event
consciously construct history from the same footage. In
discussing the documentary idea, Rosen returns to John
Grierson, who in fact coined the term, as it relates to
film. What for the modern historian are documentary
artifacts, namely indexical traces of a past that is no
longer directly observable, are for the documentary
filmmaker filmed images of the real world. As Rosen
notes: 'Modern historicity
constructs meaningful, unified temporal sequences, and
whatever the rhetorical and disciplinary importance of
documentary evidence in asserting their factuality, the
pertinence of documents in intricated *a priori* with the
*ex post facto* significance of the historical sequence.'
(239) The very same statement
can be made for the Griersonian idea of documentary, namely
that the form creates meaning through historical sequencing
of images of the real. In contrast to actuality footage,
then, the documentary is nothing less than an ideological
project to harness images of the real to historical
narratives that firmly address and form the subject, and it
is no accident that the documentary form appears at the same
time that classical Hollywood narrative is
institutionalized. Just as classical narrative is organized
around the perspective of a central character for audience
identification, so too is the documentary constructed from a
unified authorial voice (what later *cinema verite*
proponents would decry as the voice of g-d.). Grierson's
ideological perspective is that of a liberal elite, seeking
social good in the face of the chaos of mass society.
Furthermore, 'both Hollywood film and
the documentary tradition, in their insistence on craft,
skill, and sequence -- in short on aesthetics and meaning --
provide a function for a specialized elite in the
implementation of significance for the spectator by means of
the configuration and organization of documents'
(245-46). Interestingly, Rosen
concludes the chapter by maintaining the (at least partial)
relevance of Griersonian ideas in the era of television and
video, even as he refutes Baudrillard's thesis that the
endless reproducibility of significations of the real in
postmodernism obliterates the intellectual elite's ability
to construct history and by extension control social and
political power. After all, history is still being written
and documentaries are still being taken seriously as
constructions of a real past. Next Rosen turns to a
'radical historicity' as articulated in Ousmane Sembene's
fictional history of the conquest of Africa by Islam in
_Ceddo_ (1976). In contrast to Western historiography,
Sembene understands history to be 'the interplay of
collective groups and forces' (271), where no single
narrative emerges as dominant. Rosen explicates the way
Sembene deconstructs classical shot/reverse shot
constructions and the use of close-ups through an open
spatial construction of a scene, in order to explode the
authority of a single unified narrative voice addressing the
subject, constructing instead multiple representations of
history which, even in conflict, form the basis for national
identity. Not the individual psychology of the agents
involved in the discourse is at issue, but rather their
collective identities in the historical process: iman, king,
ceddo (common people), griot (oral historian). Just as
important as Sembene's construction of filmic space is his
attitude towards temporality, specifically the positionality
of the historian. By imagining not only what was, but also,
through the creation of dream sequences, what could have
been, Sembene dissolves the chronological inevitability of
western historical narratives, i.e. he deconstructs the
cause and effect thinking inherent in much modern
historiography, in order to create a space for radical
alternatives. This notion takes us beyond the cultural
specificity of Africa, the Third World, and Sembene's
project, 'to construct a self-consciously postcolonial
national cinema in Senegal' (200) -- to imagine the
historian's positionality as fluid in time, rather than
fixed, thus inviting the subject to participate in the
construction of a different kind of history. Finally, Rosen turns to
that most significant of paradigm shifts, the supplanting of
analogue by digital media. The author first makes the point
that in the postmodern era analogue media are actually
equated with indexicality, whereby the digital is defined in
contradistinction to 'archaic' imaging systems as 'other',
and is seen as superior to them. Unlike photography, film,
and even television, which rely on the physicality of light
to create indexical traces of the real in these media, the
digital is constituted solely as an infinitely malleable set
of binary numbers. Indeed, the digital seems to destroy the
relationship between image and its referent, between the
present and the profilmic past, and thus eliminates the
historicity inherent in the reception of analogue images, as
discussed in Rosen's previous chapters: 'Digital imaging is
not just a matter of technically efficient inscription, but
of sundering the contact between world and image, and
between machine and reference, which is the very currency of
the indexical.' (306) The break between image and referent
makes it possible to manipulate the image to an
unprecedented degree. However, while these assertions seem
to have much currency in present discourses on digital
media, Rosen characterizes them as being in fact
constructions of a digital utopia, rather than an analysis
of a digital ontology; predictions about our digital future,
rather than descriptions of the digital present. Rosen's first point is
well taken: Even the digital is subject to indexical
referentiality, if it is to create meaning. Thus, the pure
numerical data from an observation satellite, as well as the
digital camera's ability to transform light intensities into
digital code, depend on referents in the real world if they
are to be made intelligible. Without them the numbers remain
just that: abstractions in code. Rosen theorizes that the
digital in fact mimics photography, film, and television,
relying on their compositional and technical codes, making
the digital a hybrid, just as photography, film, and
television had previously co-opted earlier forms of image
making. For example, the computer based construction of 3-D
digital spaces which appear to be real have only been
realized through the utilization of Renaissance central
perspective and its math of Cartesian coordinates. Indeed,
Rosen quotes theorists who have asserted that digital
imaging has lead to the rebirth of perspective, after
modernism had declared it as dead as a doornail. In other
words, the digital is hardly new, but rather its
intelligibility relies on 'prior histories of mediated
representation on screen surfaces' (314). Focusing on a digital
future, on the forecast, as Rosen puts it, allows digital
utopians to circumvent issues dealing with its hybridity,
but does not change the fact that such utopian discourses
are based on an idealism, much as Bazin's realism was an
idealistic construct. The digital utopia hinges on three key
concepts: practically infinite manipulability, convergence,
and interactivity. Rosen counters that: 1, even analogue
media are malleable, so that the digital is only a matter of
degree, rather than of a sudden appearance of such
capability -- however, digital media, supported by a
discourse of conquest, can also manipulate all preexisting
analogue media and images, thus obliterating their past
histories; 2, the ideal of convergence, of infinite
reproducibility and transmittal among media machines
(computers), while a technical possibility, is subject to
the parameters of the marketplace, i.e. to the exchange
value generated through such distributions; 3, interactivity
at present, while allowing for manipulation in the act of
reception remains highly dependent on finite and
preprogrammed technical options. Digital's supposedly
radically new interactivity implies the total immersion of
the subject, but Rosen asks: was that not also the ideal of
other preexisting media from the stereoscope to Hale's Tours
to IMAX? More importantly, the ideal of complete
interactivity rests on 'the dialectic between subjective
interiority and objective exteriority' (341) typical of all
representations of the real. Crucially for digital
interactivity, the subject understands that the images it
perceives are merely derived from numerical code, but the
manipulation of the image, the navigation of digital space,
is indeed real, investing the interactive experience with
the truth value of the real, rather than the images
themselves. 'This makes the image an indexical
representation of the action of its spectator' (343),
concludes Rosen, and with that, the digital is no longer
radically new, but only another point on the continuum in
the history of the subject. Ultimately, then, Rosen's
complaint about discourses on the digital seems to be that
they too disavow history, creating a fetish of the new. Like
the discourse on the 'birth' of cinema, which, as a result
of early cinema studies, is now seen as just a further
evolution of previously existing visual media, rather than
as *sui generis*, so too does Rosen wish to place digital
media in its proper historical context as a medium in a
constant state of flux. Where does that leave us?
Clearly Rosen equates -- as did most 1970s film theorists,
including Laura Mulvey -- the unified viewpoint of classical
Hollywood narrative, whether constructed in fiction features
or documentaries, as an ideological position that is
untenable in a non-authoritarian world that recognizes and
accepts racial, ethnic, and gender difference. Not only does
classical Hollywood narrative force a single, presumably
reactionary ideological point of view of history on the
subject, it also disavows the subjects own positionality in
time, transporting them into a timeless state outside
history. Rosen suggests that by deconstructing the formal
conventions of continuity editing and character
identification through shot/reverse shot constructions, the
subject is given the freedom to enter into history, rather
than deny it. History itself is seen not as giving
monolithic meaning to sequentially ordered events, but as a
continual series of never-ending, never quite resolved
conflicts which defy causality. Referring to Walter
Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', Rosen
instead suggests that the historian anticipate the
transformation of social relations and subjectivities,
rather than react defensively against them. It is an
admirable and lofty goal, given ordinary human's intense
desire for stasis and stability. Hollywood Entertainment
Museum Hollywood, California,
USA Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Jan-Christopher Horak,
'Change and Nothing But Change: Rosen's _Change Mummified_',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 40, November 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n40horak>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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