BY ALEX HO

In print | March 27, 2008

For anyone who has taken Intro to Film, the name Laura Mulvey may induce either an intellectual orgasm or a gag reflex to profundities of film theory. While I always wrestle with how to study film in a substantive, relevant way, I still have the former reaction. I read Mulvey’s cornerstone 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in that intro course while I was gradually becoming cognizant of how film could be approached from a psychoanalytical perspective as evidence of our base human impulses towards pleasure. 30 years later, Mulvey has come out with a new book “Death 24X a Second” that approaches film as a contradictory fusion of life and death, a haunted illusion of liveliness constructed from utterly dead units, still photographs demarcating time that can never be retrieved. In celebration of Mulvey’s month-long residency at UPenn (or perhaps as a cop-out for this column since I already have to read her book for a class, take your pick), I thought I would talk about Mulvey’s meditations on this apparently inherent deathliness of film in relation to today’s media landscape.

Amidst the book’s huge range of ideas, the argument that I found most fascinating was Mulvey’s take on our current digital era. Mulvey says that, pre-digital, the death and stillness always implicit in film was nonetheless elusive since a film could only be viewed as projected at 24 frames per second. With the introduction of VHS, DVD and now Internet video, cinema can willfully be paused and manipulated, giving greater consciousness to the still photographs that make up film. For Mulvey, the nature of film spectatorship in today’s world changes from reveling in the fleeting present to incessantly harkening back to the past. The observation made me think about the bottomless resource that is YouTube. I can watch an interview with Leslie Cheung, who committed suicide in 2003 or watch any number of fan videos that remix films and repeatedly mull over the time when they were shot. The effect is a compulsion to consume as much of the past as possible.

Mulvey notes that the beginnings of cinema coincided with the movement of Spiritualism that was infatuated with new technology’s uncanny ability to bring the dead to life through magic shows, zoetropes and finally film. Similarly, the new digital age has a haunted eeriness about it. In particular, I’m thinking about J-horror, which may just act as a commentary of our media-driven world. Admittedly, I know little about J-horror beyond its crappy American variations, but for Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring” and now the film “Shutter,” videos and photos are objects of menace. The interesting reading of “The Ring” made by many critics was that it was really indicting the avant-garde embodied by the fatal video. Is “The Ring” then Hollywood’s manifested anxiety over the death of the good old-fashioned narrative film?

There’s also something lifeless about digital media. Digital effects and post-production filters trying to pass as shrewd cinematography ultimately detract from the visceral potential of films and were the main problems I had with recent fantasy films and graphic novel adaptations. These films have more in common with animation, constructed in an almost painterly manner. Another recent essay of Mulvey’s titled “The Clumsy Sublime” (which I snagged off of Professor Bob Rehak’s blog) talks about the oddly impossible space created by a technique called rear projection that melded shots of actors with separate background shots, as in Marion’s guilty drive to the Bates Motel in “Psycho.” Mulvey discusses how these shots were so fascinating because they were so visibly artificial. The computer-generated effects of today are the exact opposite — hardly clumsy as they have been streamlined to perfection, and far from sublime.

The history of film has always been a futile attempt to recreate and reanimate life, and now that we’ve reached an age where technology is no longer susceptible to the aging of celluloid or clumsiness of claymation, the result is more lifeless than ever before. Maybe cinema is dead after all.

Alex is a sophomore. You can reach him at aho1@swarthmore.edu.

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