Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

28 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics29that we experience most pictures as closed spaces; the image or picture exists only inside theframe. Images in magazines, on television, on the walls of our apartments, and in museums allhave closed, non-extensive, non-transparent borders. As Bazin writes, if there is an impressionof spatiality included in the framed image, then this spatiality points towards the inside:Space, as it applies to a painting, is radically destroyed by the screen. Just as footlightsand scenery in the theatre serve to mark the contrast between it and the real worldso, by its surrounding frame, a painting is separated off not only from reality as suchbut, even more so, from the reality that is represented in it. Indeed it is a mistake tosee a picture frame as having merely a decorative or rhetorical function. The fact thatit emphasizes the compositional quality of the painting is of secondary importance.The essential role of the frame is, if not to create at least to emphasize the differencebetween the microcosm of the picture and the macrocosm of the natural world in whichthe painting has come to take its place. This explains the baroque complexity of thetraditional frame whose job it is to establish something that cannot be geometricallyestablished - namely the discontinuity between the painting and the wall, that is tosay between the painting and reality. In other words the frame of a painting encloses aspace that is oriented so to speak in a different direction. In contrast to natural space,the space in which our active experience occurs and bordering its outer limits, it offersa space the orientation of which is inwards, a contemplative area opening solely ontothe interior of the painting. 9For Bazin, the edges of the cinema screen are not equal to the frame of a painting – rather,they are analogous to the edges of a mask. In a similar vein, Noël Carroll differentiates photographsfrom paintings in the following way:You can always ask, of an area photographed, what lies adjacent to that area, beyond theframe. This generally makes no sense asked of a painting. You can ask these questionsof objects in photographs because they have answers in reality. The world of a painting isnot continuous with the world of its frame; at its frame, a world finds its limits. 10The distinction is clear. The moving image achieves its difference through the process ofscreening. The screen is not like a canvas, rather, for Carroll and Bazin it is a piece of realitythat does not exist at the time of the screening. Deleuze picks up on and actualizes Bazin’scentral theory. For Deleuze, the frame is determined through the formation of sets or ensembles.The image on the screen is extracted from the rest of the world spatially, but more especiallytemporally. Shots express the qualitative change of sets. These sets divide and multiply.The movement-image is an image of changing space or space covered. 11Of course, from the perspective of a practitioner, the screen is graphically limited. But thereare a variety of graphical techniques to break these constraints through positioning, size,tone and color inside the image or on the screen. The screen also breaks its boundariesthrough object movements and directional shifts inside the frame. As a simple example,let us imagine that we see an object moving from left to right. When the object reaches theright-hand border, our eyes will immediately jump back to the left side of the image, becausewe are used to writing from left to right and stopping at the right-hand edge of the paper. Ifthe object moves from right to left, it takes the viewer longer to return to the image. If theobject moves up, we continue to attend to the area above the frame, as this is always theregion of our dreams; if the object moves down, we instantly jump back inside the frame. 12We are tempted to compare the cinematic experience with our natural vision. In everydaylife we can turn our heads or move in order to see beyond objects and borders. The frameof the cinema screen prevents us from taking this action and therefore forces us to imaginethe outside the film.A scene in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) plays intriguingly with this limitation.The film’s director of photography, William Fraker, recalls the scene in which Rosemary, whois played by Mia Farrow, allows Ruth Gordon to use the phone in the bedroom. Fraker himselfattempted to frame the shot from Rosemary’s position in the living room, as she looks throughan open door to the woman making the call. However, Fraker writes:Roman looked through the viewfinder and said, “no, no, Billy. Move to the left”. I movedto the left until all I could see were her feet hanging over the edge of the bed. I thoughtRoman was crazy until I saw Rosemary’s Baby in a theatre, and watched some 400people in the audience leaning to the right as though they were trying to look aroundthe door jamb to see what she was doing. 13The composition of this shot in Rosemary’s Baby builds a frame within a frame. Polanskireduces the space inside the image to strengthen the visual effect. The additional actof framing becomes equal to an exaggeration. There are numerous examples of this typeof frame-within-a-frame composition in key scenes in cinema. In Tystnaden (‘The Silence’,1963), director Ingmar Bergman uses the figure of frames within frames. He films throughdoorways, so that the vertical separations introduced by the doorways symbolize the emotionaldistance between the sisters who are the film’s protagonists. The final scene in TheSearchers 14 presents the viewer with a similarly constrained image. With the camera insidethe farmhouse and Wayne outside, Wayne directs a final look back at the farmhouse – a lookthat also seems directed towards the spectator – before heading into the exposed landscapeof the American West. Or, consider the shot in The Graduate 15 in which Mrs. Robinsonseduces Ben Braddock. Her bent knee forms a triangle, a window through which we look9. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1967, p. 165.10. Noël Carroll with Jinhee Choi (eds) Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, Malden: BlackwellPublishing, 2006, p. 70.11. Gregory Flaxman (ed.) The Brain Is the Screen, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000, p. 19.12. Johannes Müller, unpublished lecture notes taken by Andreas Treske, Munich: HFF, 1992.13. Yazan Düd, ‘Kareler 2: Rosemary’s Baby’, Eylem Planı – Bildigim ˘ Kadarının Anlatabildigim ˘Kadarı, http://www.eylemplani.com/kareler-2-rosemarys-baby/.14. The Searchers (dir. John Ford, 1956).15. The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols, 1967).