Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

264 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida
precision provided by a much more detailed film image. But maybe this isn’t
all that matters to create a percept (Deleuze’s definition of a work of art). 5
At the core of the difference between silver-based film and digital is the absence
of the shutter. No more flicker. No more heartbeat. The persistence of vision
isn’t called to the rescue to make possible the reproduction of movement
using photograms. Film is made of still photographs after all. But the digital
film is not. Underneath there is a grid of pixel-size slots, and it is fixed. Somehow
the pixel makes what you see an icon; it is graphic and not sensorial.
In those experiential films, time is inscribed in the emulsion grain, which
constantly trades places and spaces from one frame to the next. The grain became
to the experimental filmmaker of the late ’60s what feathers and lipstick
were to Jack Smith, an endless source of fascination and performance hubris.
But what this shifting grain creates is the constant reminder of a change from
the preceding frame, reinforcing the demonstration of time passing.
In the world of digital, time is encoded in a bit-map, and there can be no entropy.
In the compression algorithm of a digital image, only what changes in
the shot is renewed. That which is the same in the shot stays the same in the
digital image, in contrast to the constantly changing emulsion grain from one
frame to the next in the film image. The inscription of the decaying body in
Wavelength is therefore not possible in digital, even in HD DIGI. 6 Time is not
transformation anymore, the essence of film in which there is a change twentyfour
times a second. Now time is geography and is inscribed in layers on a set
screen with bit-size slots. When you dig into these bit-size slots to see what is
there, you find bits of time memory one on top of the other without chronology.
You travel through time now by traveling through layers of pixels. And
the space is totally in front of you without shadow. It would be optimistic to
say that you are traveling in your memory in the way that you move through
Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Desert (Marguerite Duras, 1975). 7
Time is fixed as in a map in digital and is totally repeatable with no degradation
due to copying loss, while silver-based film is structured by time as entropy,
therefore unrepeatable. The unpredictability of time passing and time
past, the slippage between one and the other, and the pathos of their essentially
ineluctable difference are lost.
On my arrival in New York City,I find myself in the middle of the night.Everything I
see is dirty, and I can’t find a pay phone that works. The names of subway stations,
which can bear the same name, such as 42nd Street, but be in three different locations
blocks apart, mystifies me. What happened to the idea of international standards
and clarity? Descartes is far away. I feel like I am in the middle of a Third
World country, and I don’t speak English. I have doubts about why I am here. But
two days after my arrival in late October 1970,I am invited to a private screening of
a new film titled Eyes. I discover what an ‘untutored eye’ can see and do. 8 The film