On some limits to film theory (mainly from science

On Some Limits to Film Theory Mainly from Science James Elkins This chapter is an informal elaboration of a PowerPoint presentation and comments on stills and QuickTime movies rather tha

On Some Limits to Film Theory

(Mainly from Science)

James Elkins

This chapter is an informal elaboration of a PowerPoint presentation and comments on stills and QuickTime movies rather than making a continuous argument.1I hope that the heuristic purpose of the original will make this version useful

The presentation was a look at some ways that recent film-making technologies, especially those developed in science (and some specifi-cally in the military), should make it difficult to keep using concepts

such as still, film, motion, and picture in the ways they are used in film

criticism It was a speculative presentation, proposing that films made outside art can contribute to current theorizing in film studies I pre-sented several kinds of scientific films, arranged according to the trou-ble they might cause for conceptualizations of the instant, the frame, temporality, the movement-image, mimetic representation, the gaze, and the spectator’s role Looking back on the material used to construct this chapter, I notice that a more general provocation was simply the existence of an enormous body of filmic work that has nothing explic-itly to do with the human body, with narrative, or with social interac-tions But that is not how the presentation was structured

The first topic was the erosion of the concept of the instant (and of the

24 fps orthodoxy) by scientific films that take millions of frames per sec-ond Then I mentioned, in telegraphic fashion, four other topics: (1) films constructed from nonvisual data, (2) excesses of the visual (when there is too much to see), (3) films in which light itself is a convention, and (4) films in which objects themselves are conventions The presentation ended with a second look at the erosion of the instant

PROOF

This is an essay addressed to film theory, from the point of view of science; it asks if scientific films might have something to contribute to contemporary film theory

It was originally published as “On Some Limits

to Film Theory (Mainly from Science),” in Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories and Practices, edited by Bruce Bennett, Marc Furstenau, and Adrian Mackenzie (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 [New York: St Martin’s Press LLC]), 53–70

Please send comments to the author via

www.jameselkins.com

Pdf uploaded April 24, 2013

The end of the instant

My opening example was several films of plasma events, made with a Kodak fast-framing camera called an EF1012, running at 1,000 to 2,000 fps (Figure 3.1).2The films are negatives of plasma events; in the posi-tive, the plasma would have appeared as a bright flash against a black background The scientists were studying the effects of injecting ele-ments like lithium into the plasma stream, but that is not important here What counts is the extremely short duration of the frames Each frame in such films is about 200 microseconds, or 0.0002 seconds: more like an “instant” than the typical frame of a 24-fps film camera

As a second example, I offered Sam Edgerton’s images of atomic explosions, made with his magneto-optical camera called a Rapatronic These pictures, which have only recently been published in any quan-tity, revealed a moment in the detonation of an atomic bomb that had only been surmised before Edgerton invented his camera.3 The phe-nomenology of an above-ground atomic explosion used to be described

as a bright flash, followed by an expanding fireball, which in turn gave way to the familiar mushroom cloud That is how Oppenheimer and other early observers described it Edgerton’s camera revealed a phase before the bright flash, which passed by too rapidly for the human eye

or for ordinary mechanical-shutter cameras The Rapatronic camera captured uncanny images of enormous, soft-looking spheres expanding over the desert (Figure 3.2).4

In this image, the explosion is expanding outward from the bomb, which was placed on top of a tower in the desert in the southwestern United States Three jets of fire travel down the guy wires that support

54 On Some Limits to Film Theory

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Figure 3.1 Plasma event

PROOF

the tower, crashing into the desert floor Joshua trees (desert plants, which are about 10 feet tall) are silhouetted against the swelling explo-sion These images were largely unknown until they were published a few years ago, and even now most have no dates or locations (Researching these, I came to the firm impression that the Department

of Energy, Livermore Laboratories, and other government-funded insti-tutions have many more of these photographs, but that can’t be proven.) There is at least one film of these explosions, pieced together from individual frames made by Rapatronic cameras set up in banks (The cameras could not be wound fast enough to make a film, so Edgerton had to make many cameras to produce on film.)

For me, the interest of these images is their sheer strangeness and the way they make the mushroom cloud seem almost benign and familiar

by comparison Here, I want to point to their unprecedented approach

to instantaneity: each Rapatronic image captures just a millionth of a second – a thousand times closer to an “instant” than the typical one-thousandth-of-a-second digital camera snapshot

I prepared this table to indicate some of the possibilities.5I gave an example of the picosecond range, a film – not very interesting to view, perhaps – recording 90-femtosecond (90 quadrillionths of a second) laser pulses striking a silicon surface (Figure 3.3).6 The film is recorded in frames labelled in picoseconds and nanoseconds (trillionths of a second

James Elkins 55

Figure 3.2 Rapatronic photograph of atomic explosion, Sam Edgerton

and billionths of a second) As the film plays, a shadow shifts across the disk; it’s the laser, carving out a concavity in the surface In the resulting reconstruction, which I am not reproducing here, the spatial axes are in nanometres Distances and temporalities this size aren’t available to

intuition, as Kant said, using the distinction between Zusammenfassung and Auffassung; but the point here does not concern the disputable

divi-sion between what can be taken in phenomenologically and what can-not Rather I am interested that we are seeing here something wholly other than the “instant” or “still” familiar in film criticism As I gave the presentation, I suggested that film criticism does not have a way of

excluding such examples – they cannot be irrelevant, for example, just

because they are not meant to function as art

(Incidentally, in regard to Table 3.1, all of the advances were funded by the government of the United States, and all of them were at least partly for military uses Nanosecond gated still-video cameras were developed

to study the effect of high-impact projectiles on tank armour.)

I drew two conclusions from these materials:

(i) Ordinary film stills are not still: they are samples of enormous stretches of time (1/500th second, as opposed to 1/5,000,000,000 seconds) Movie stills are more like Lessing’s idea of temporal accu-mulations, and perhaps they should be theorized in those terms (ii) The ordinary 24 fps “flow” of cinema can be reconceived as an

indef-initely prolonged sequence of these “stills.” The apparent unity of

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Table 3.1:

Millisecond One-thousandth sec 10–3 sec Ordinary cameras

Microsecond One-millionth sec 10–6 sec Edgerton’s Rapatronic

cameras; multiple image-capture framing cameras (1,000 to 100,000,000 fps) Nanosecond One-billionth sec 10–6 sec Gated still-video

+ CCD); resolve down to

100 ns Picosecond One-trillionth sec 10–9 sec (no cameras specific to

this range) Femtosecond One-quadrillionth sec 10–12 sec Smear or streak cameras

resolve down to 300 fs = 0.00000000003 sec Attosecond One-quintillionth sec 10–15 sec (not yet resolved)

PROOF

the frame – its function as an irreducible sign or morpheme – can come to seem artificial The sense of instantaneity, of the momen-tary, of excerpts from the “flow of time” alters

Pictures constructed from non-pictorial data

My example here was a wonderful brief film made by astronomers, showing what appears for all the world as an orange pinwheel spinning

in outer space (Figure 3.4) (It has been reproduced many times on the Internet and is worth looking up All the scientific films in this chapter are on the Internet, and ideally this chapter should be read with a browser.)7The object is a binary star system; the two stars revolve around one another, and one of them throws off a streamer of gas as it revolves

James Elkins 57

Figure 3.3 Frames from two films showing 90-femtosecond (90 quadrillionths of

a second) laser pulses striking a silicon surface

Time resolved surface image (90 fs FWHM, Fluence of 1.5 J/cm2)

In ambient air Under vacuum

t = 0

0.2 ps 0.8 ps 1.2 ps

2.0 ps

10.0 ps

t = ∞

50.0 ps 100.0 ps 3.0 ps 5.0 ps

80 µm

t = 0

0.2 ps

3.0 ps

50.0 ps 10.0 ps

2.0 ps

0.8 ps 1.2 ps

5.0 ps

100.0 ps

t = ∞ Silicon as a target material - typical semiconductor, low bandgap

PROOF

The little film appears to be a movie made through a telescope, but actu-ally it is elaborately constructed out of several kinds of nonvisual infor-mation The arts do not have anything like this, so I will describe it briefly

Each single frame of the movie began with data from three tele-scopes The resulting frame was not an ordinary photo for at least four reasons:

(i) Each frame represented infrared wavelengths (used to cut through interstellar dust), so the star system would not have been visible to unaided eyes, to begin with

(ii) It was false coloured, which is typical of many astronomical images

(iii) To generate the frames the astronomers used heterodyne detection.

That means that slightly different signals from two telescopes were combined, creating a lower frequency The frames of the movie were made with radio waves carried in wires

(iv) Most interesting (and counterintuitive), each frame was generated using an interferometer array In interferometry, each telescope

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Figure 3.4 Binary star system

captures a single bit of data, not a full image The combined infor-mation from two telescopes is a “one-dimensional” interference pattern like this (Figure 3.5).8

It takes three telescopes to make a “two-dimensional” picture (I am using dimensions loosely here, to underscore the fact that no telescope generated any image.)

In regard to this kind of film, I proposed three things:

(i) In cases like these the concept of picture, and therefore of film, does

not depend on the act of looking, or the problematics of the gaze

It is constructed to appear as if it did.

(ii) The real is differently elusive than it is in Lacan: the actual object

is unimaginable as an object of visual attention and so is not approximated by the film

(iii) The fact that the image itself is built out of what is not visible (several times over: wavelength, interferometry, heterodyne reduc-tion ) has a significant corollary, because the film itself serves non-visible ends – and by that I mean that it’s the astrophysics that counts, not the film itself, which was made just as a curiosity

James Elkins 59

Figure 3.5 Interference pattern

90 95 100 105 110

Fringe Frequency [Hz]

Excesses of the visual

Another wonderful film is the distributed-computing simulation of one billion atoms in a block of copper (Figure 3.6).9

The film shows a block of copper, with channels cut at the top and bottom When metal is stressed, atoms shift position, causing the mate-rial to harden (provided the force is not sufficient to break it) The ren-dering routines omit any atoms that haven’t moved – that is why the first frame looks like an empty box – and show only atoms at disloca-tions, demonstrating the “zippering action” of crystal deformation The film is the result of a prodigious calculation, since the interactions of all one billion atoms had to be calculated to produce each frame in the film Before I draw a conclusion about that film, I will give another exam-ple, which represents a common kind of film in science: a rendering of the folding of a protein molecule (Figure 3.7).10

This is the way a protein naturally folds itself, from a more-or-less straight form to a tight curl.11In the original film the effect is squiggly

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Figure 3.6 Dislocation dynamics with a billion copper atoms

PROOF

and nervous looking, not at all the way I imagined molecules in my body moving This kind of film is increasingly common in biochemistry, because computers now allow scientists to calculate all the forces that act

on every atom in a protein (simplified in this film into a single thread, but actually a forest of atoms) The Internet is full of such films, some of them odd enough to rival anything produced in arts animation.12 Regarding films that are the products of intense, often distributed computing, power, I drew two conclusions:

(i) These are sums of individual images, or averages of them, not

indi-vidual images or montaged images, as in the arts This phenome-non has not been studied in the arts, as far as I know, but it has been theorized by the historian of physics Peter Galison, who sees

“logic tradition images” like these as a different kind of image from “image tradition” pictures made in the conventional way.13 Twentieth-century physics, he argues, mixed the two: the arts have remained largely only on one side of the equation

(ii) These films contain too much information to be seen: they are effectively available only as tokens or samples of an excess of visual information In that special sense, they cannot be seen, and their partial (or predominant) invisibility is different from the invisibil-ity of complex or fast-moving scenes in the arts These are a new possibility in the current interest in the unrepresentable.14

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James Elkins 61

Figure 3.7 Protein folding

Films in which light itself is a convention

Images of individual atoms have been common in surface chemistry and atomic physics since the invention of the electron microscope It is not as widely known that movies of atoms have been made They can

be entrancing: the atoms shuttle back and forth as if they were restless,

or they fly around one another like dancers in fast motion One of the virtuosi of such movies is Jan-Olov Bovin at Lund University, Sweden For a number of years he has been producing films of atoms precipitat-ing into the surfaces of crystals (Figure 3.8).15

Here the top row of atoms in a gold crystal changes shape as individ-ual atoms settle in place In other films, atoms can be seen in the vac-uum surrounding the crystal Researchers at IBM have made films in which pairs of atoms spin around one another, attracted and repulsed

in turns (Figure 3.9).16The scientist’s description of this film reads like

a romance “When two atoms approach,” he says,

they feel an attractive force As they approach closer, this attractive force turns into a repulsive force This can be seen in real time: sum-marized by the frames labelled by time In this case, two atoms approach, circling one another (indicated by the arrows) Then one

of the atoms moves rapidly away to a spot about 0.5 nanometres dis-tance away Finally the other atom follows

In these examples light is a convention in the sense that the light that enables us to perceive these films and their still was not involved in their production The images are electron microscope images, meaning that electrons were the “illumination.” Electron microscopy has a long history of imaging techniques that make the contrasts generated by

electron transmission (or reflection) look like the behaviour of visible

light In the case of films of individual atoms, light is also conventional because the objects themselves are near the wavelength of the illumi-nation (the electrons), and so by the laws of physics there is no way to make the atoms sharper, to bring them into focus Nothing lies beyond these pixellated blurs, although it’s a convention of ordinary digital film and photography that blur is inherent in the camera and not the object

Here I drew two conclusions:

(i) The object is present but cannot be seen with light There is a

ques-tion regarding how to understand the expression “seeing” in this