Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 9, April 2003
David Sorfa
Why Bother with Cinema?
_The Death of Cinema:
History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark
Age_ Preface by Martin
Scorsese London: British
Film Institute,
2001 ISBN 0851708374 (pb)
0851708382 (hb) 134 pp. In _The Death of Cinema_
Paolo Cherchi-Usai reflects on two main questions: What is
film? and How is it to be preserved? Neither of these
questions are as simple as they may at first appear,
especially since many will already be familiar with
Cherchi-Usai's work on early film preservation in _Burning
Passions_ (updated in 2000 as _Silent Cinema: An
Introduction_) [1] and might expect some rather
prosaic comments on the problems of averting the physical
'death' of cinema (or, rather, film). While his earlier
books deal explicitly with the practical, physical problems
of archiving film, _The Death of Cinema_ tackles the problem
of film and its continuing existence in terms of ontology
rather than epistemology. His move into the area of
metaphysics is also signposted by the form Cherchi-Usai has
chosen for the book: a collection of 52 aphorisms (some a
sentence long, others a whole page), each faced with a
beautifully reproduced still that in some cases clearly
connects with the aphorism at hand. Reading this volume
brings to mind the aphoristic zeal of Roland Barthes in _The
Pleasure of the Text_ and _The Lover's Discourse_, as well
as the obscurantism of Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_,
and while some of the aphorisms are thought-provoking and
imaginative, others merely seem to be clever sounding
dead-ends (and perhaps a few resonances may have been lost
in the translation from Italian). In tackling the question,
What is Film?, Cherchi-Usai first makes reference to an
anonymous article in an 1897 (or rather 01897, the year
format that Cherchi-Usai insists on using throughout the
book) issue of _Le Natur_, wherein the author arithmetically
works out how long an individual frame in any film is
physically made apparent in the putative three hundred
screenings of a cinematographic film before its
disintegration. He (or she) concludes that an individual
image's 'effective life is in its totality one-and-one-third
seconds' (5), far shorter than the ephemeral existence of a
firework. Thus Cherchi-Usai seems to ask what it is that we
consider to be a film. Is it the original negative (or
positive) onto which the image is initially recorded in the
camera? Is it the total number of copies originally struck
from that negative and edited into a commercially releasable
form? Is it the set of varying versions that may exist of
any one film (due to censorship or international,
directorial, or other re-editing)? This then leads to the
phenomenological question of whether the film only ever
exists in the minds of its viewers and, as such, its
preservation would no longer be a matter of physical
conservation. Cherchi-Usai states this problem rather more
elegantly in his first aphoristic chapter when he writes
that 'without the images . . . imprinted on motion picture
film there would be no cinema', and goes on to conclude that
cinema 'is the art of destroying moving images' (7). If
cinema only exists when film is viewed, and if the viewing
of film necessarily destroys that film, then cinema exists
at the expense of film itself. From the very beginning of
the book, then, Cherchi-Usai sees the destruction of film as
a necessary condition for the existence of cinema and not
merely an unfortunate result of inferior technological
processes that could be averted in some way. Cherchi-Usai here seems to
be making a logical leap from the physical to the
metaphysical. If every viewing of a celluloid print
inevitably leads to its eventual destruction, this is not
merely a physical problem that can be solved by copying the
images of that film onto another medium. He argues that this
destruction is in some way constitutive of what he calls
'cinema'. This reasoning seems to echo Barthes when he
famously writes that 'the birth of the reader must be at the
cost of the death of the Author'. [2] For
Cherchi-Usai, the birth of cinema must be at the cost of the
death of film. This also implies the inevitable death of
cinema, since its existence is dependent on film, the
material that it necessarily consumes in the perpetuation of
its existence. Put this way, Cherchi-Usai is making an
ecological argument in which he implies that cinema will
eventually destroy all film and therefore itself. The
problem here is Cherchi-Usai's insistence that the physical
method of turning film into a cinema (or perhaps this should
more properly be called an alchemical method) is a metaphor
for the way in which we comprehend the moving image itself
(this moving mage is, of course, merely an illusion created
in the mind of the viewer). Does our understanding of the
meaning of a film necessarily depend on that film's
destruction? Or rather, on the possibility that our
understanding of what that film might mean is
mistaken? Let us try to think this
through in what may be termed a 'science fiction' approach.
Imagine that you are the only person alive and that you have
in your possession a projector and a can of film, the
contents of which you know nothing. Imagine that you can
screen the film only 300 times before it is no longer
viewable. Since you have nothing else to do except wait for
your own death, you decide to screen the film once every two
months (this will take 50 years). Is the film's inevitable
disintegration on its 300th screening in any way linked to
your understanding of what that film might be about? If so,
the only subject that that film (or, indeed, any film) could
have would be the death of cinema. The problem of whether or
not 'cinema is the art of destroying moving images' would be
the subject of that film regardless of its overt subject
material. Cherchi-Usai's second
question, How is film to preserved?, is predicated on this
answer. He quickly points out that any chemical process of
copying film is inevitably doomed, and he also claims this
to be true for any digital copy of a film. This latter point
is not rigorously argued from a physical point of view.
Cherchi-Usai does not really go into the details of digital
as opposed to chemical preservation. He merely assumes that
digital reproduction is also hopeless. This attitude is
summed up in a reader's report on the manuscript of _The
Death of Cinema_, that Cherchi-Usai includes as an appendix
to the book, in which the reader (who might possibly be a
fictional construct of Cherchi-Usai himself) heaps scorn on
those who 'invoke the digital goddess to spare us the guilty
knowledge of impending and irredeemable doom' (113). The
logic of this conclusion is based on the understanding that
the thing we call 'cinema' only exists because it will
inevitably be destroyed. Film preservation, therefore,
becomes a doomed, romantic endeavour that is carried out by
enthusiasts who realise that their efforts will inevitably
come to nothing. What then is the preservationist
enthusiastic about? Why bother preserving anything if, by
definition, that thing cannot be preserved? Here
Cherchi-Usai offers two possible explanations, one
explicitly in his discussion of the role of Film History,
and the other more covertly in the publication of this book
itself. In aphorism 10, 'Primary
Goal of Film History', Cherchi-Usai writes: 'The subject of
film history being the destruction of the moving image, its
primary goal is to recapture the experience of its first
viewers, an empirical impossibility' (25). Let us return to
our science fiction example in order to think more clearly
about this. If we assume that no one has seen the film in
our can before (the editor having dropped dead after the
final edit), we can therefore say that the first screening
of the film will be the object of film history. Every
bimonthly screening after that will be an attempt to
recreate the experience of our first viewing, which, since
the passage of time inevitably implies change of some sort,
must be 'an empirical impossibility'. The time between each
screening could be spent producing tomes about what it had
been like to watch the film the first time and each
subsequent screening would be a fleeting reminder of what
that experience may have been like. The capture of what
Cherchi-Usai terms the 'Model Image' (one of the earlier
proposed titles of the book) becomes the impossible goal of
Film History. In this sense, the word 'recapture' is
equivalent to the semiotic impossibility of the term
'perception'. Cherchi-Usai goes on to say that neither film
history nor political utopia 'would have any interest
whatsoever if their goals were realised' (25), that is, if
Film History ever managed to recreate the Model Image it
would be obsolete. It is therefore the gap between image and
Model Image that allows the existence of history as
such. The second answer to the
point of film preservation is contained in the book, _The
Death of Cinema_, itself and particularly in its
reproduction of stills. Some of these are obvious to the
point of being visual cliches about the difficulty of the
visual: Bunuel slicing the donkey's eye in _Un Chien
andalou_ (1929); the spiral/eye from Saul Bass's _Vertigo_
credits (1958); Malcolm McDowell's forced viewing in _A
Clockwork Orange_ (1971); an eye gouging from Pasolini's
_Salo_ (1975). Others explicitly revel in images of the
destruction of film: a strip of decomposed film from 1925; a
burned out nitrate film storage room; a Douglas Fairbanks
Studio employee using an axe to destroy unwanted film;
Taliban students torching films in Afghanistan. There is
however a third category of images: those that depict human
death and suffering (a burned Chinese baby; John F.
Kennedy's assassination; the emaciated corpse of a
Bergen-Belsen inmate) that seem to make an analogy between
the destruction of film and the destruction of human life.
This is a metaphor that also appears in the text itself:
when describing images from distant and (to us) obscure
cultures, Cherchi-Usai writes that their 'relative distance
leaves us with the same lack of involvement we feel at the
news of the passing away of a person we have never heard of
before' (97), while in the reader's report an equivalence is
drawn between choosing which film to preserve in the face of
economic necessity and the choice a doctor might have when
faced with 'ten thousand patients, and there's enough
medicine to cure perhaps a hundred' (114). There seems,
then, to be an argument here that in the quest to preserve
film, we are in some way also preserving human life. Or
perhaps, that the desire to preserve film is the same as the
desire to preserve life. For Cherchi-Usai, then, the doomed
attempt to preserve film would appear to be the same as the
doomed attempt to preserve humanity (and
civilisation). While _The Death of
Cinema_ is in part theoretically provocative, it seems to
work itself into a nihilistic dead-end from which escape is
only possible through that which has been proved to be
impossible: cinema itself. Martin Scorsese's Preface seems
to completely miss Cherchi-Usai's point while at the same
time entirely understanding the aim of the
project: 'Paolo has drawn with
clinical precision . . . the picture of a worldwide crisis
that commands our unconditional concern. His portrait of a
culture ignoring the loss of its own image is a devastating
moral tale: there is something very wrong with the way we
are taught to dismiss the art of seeing as something
ephemeral and negligible.' It is unclear however why
we should be concerned (unconditionally) with the
preservation of this image (especially considering the
impossibility of this task). Perhaps it is merely a
restatement of the cliche that those who forget history are
doomed to repeat it, but this book never moves beyond that
cliche. Liverpool
John Moores University,
England Footnotes 1. Paolo Cherchi-Usai,
_Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent
Cinema_ [1991], trans. Emma Sansone Rittle (London:
British Film Institute, 1994); _Silent Cinema: An
Introduction_ (London: British Film Institute,
2000). 2. Roland Barthes, 'The
Death of the Author', in _Image/Music/Text_ [1968],
trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 148.
Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2003 David Sorfa, 'Why Bother
with Cinema?', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 9, April 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n9sorfa>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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