To understand is to destroy form.
— Valéry

at a farewell party for kalatosova who performed the ‘jewish wife’ in leningrad
for front-line troops i get into conversation with odets. i praise spencer tracy’s
acting in the SEVENTH CROSS for a few almost sublime expressions which are otherwise thin on the ground here. odets hadn’t noticed and was annoyed when i advised him to see the film again. he kept clutching his chest and insisting that he hadn’t noticed anything. for him the cinema is a kind of electric-shock machine and he just registers its discharges. impossible to make him understand that you can go into a cinema and watch carefully to see whether some reflection of reality might not pop up on the screen, buried under childish plots, hidden in ‘stock characters’. characteristics that are very easy to miss. 
— Brecht, October 44

Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinema (through
editing, that is, through the change of shot – which is the basic unit of film
construction) has access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space. 
— Sontag, “Theatre and Film”

[...]

I want to know why I go, and why so many others go. What can we hope to see? Especially in the big spectaculars. I assume that they tell us something more specific to our times than what are now called small films, or, smaller still, video art. It is punishing.

[...]

For myself, I first noticed something new had happened in the blockbuster watching one of the Christopher Nolan productions of Batman. As to plotting, this certainly was not three-act. Somewhere this was called two-movies-for-the-price-of-one, since the phasing from one part to the next was nothing like prologue into main story. Unwieldy, careening, littered with baldly articulated big themes to keep the audience bound, the intention is to produce a scale to justify the multiplex package. The business model is familiar, as is the competition from ever more television content. It is possible that the two-movies is also an accommodation to the episodic rhythm of the small screen.

[...]

A few years later there was Prometheus. While it had a prologue proper – almost an extended title sequence – about the imagined, intergalactic transmission of selfish genes, this sequence did not fade into the main body of the film, but into that same unbounded, grand scale of the Batman. I left asking myself, are these even movies anymore? The story has no integrity and is increasingly dependent on its starkest aspects, such as the plot twist. The film itself seems to be breaking apart and from time to time one half expects another story, or, more importantly another image altogether, to appear out of the screen. But it rarely does.

[...]

The description of what is bad in cinema will bear more than a passing resemblance to what is best. The question is: what are the present conditions of this discontinuous use of space? To begin, a few factors that are a matter of degree: the more immediate intervention of finance and of insurance actuaries, the expansion of digital work flows, and the use of actors who have learned their gestures almost exclusively from advertising and television, which has fine-tuned the feedback loop of the seemingly natural in human expression.

[...]

The coercive incoherence of the product is experienced as a runtime. Runtime – as opposed to film, cinema, or specific genre – might best name the absorption of the sensory apparatus, of the image-space of sight and audition, into the object’s naturalized rhythms. The unity of the film is the unity of its assault, which appears in one element of the production after and on top of another. We grow used to film’s rhythm, and it is of a piece with the rest of our days. Such a coercive, incoherent rhythm has a stabilizing effect. It puts on display a range of behaviors to model or to avoid when social life has reached such a level of disjointed and erratic gesture, of obscurity in hierarchies that are nonetheless in force.

[...]

For instance, we can see the individuated incapacity we all now inhabit when, on screen, we are confronted with the narrow space in which the actors move. These films are really small stage productions. An old rule of thumb had it that one should avoid putting specific weather events, especially snow, in a script since you do not want to constrain production to something so changeable. Now that the vfx house can conjure up the snow, these infinite, and infinitely modifiable, vistas come right up to the actors’ skin, hair, clothing, breath, right up to the few material objects afforded to the actors. The space of material beings has shrunk to a minimum. The world drops off at the edge of a muscle spasm, stray lock of hair, or staircase. So close together, the actors must speak across infinite distance. Their gestures so naturalized as human, cannot even reach across the space of a kiss. A paradox, then: as the actors are ever more perfectly synthesized with the imagery that surrounds them – as they become ever more adept at feigning human expression in a void – they appear all the more alone. Orphaned from the imagery that surrounds them, they cannot face each other. The ground of the sound stage is firm underneath their feet, yet they walk in a murky haze, their eyes unable to adjust focus to an appropriate distance. In early cinema, too, the actors were off balance, but then they seemed to be trying their best not to knock over the flimsy set. We no longer tiptoe; the floors do not creak and the doors between the rooms have been torn out.

[...]

But perhaps the latest runtime that appears above us is better imagined on one of those flimsy sets. Picture to yourself an old film for a lost Titanic, for a lost WWII espionage on the North Sea: imitation icebergs placed over a pool of water, a painted backdrop representing still more icebergs scattered in recession to the blurred oceanic horizon. The latest runtime is like this old set. Each element of the production is the tip of an iceberg that does not sink below the surface, is not submerged and immersed in the surrounding depths of the sea, and because of this lack of submersion is rigidly isolated from all of the other elements. Film is turned motionless, atemporal, a vast, still expanse of surface events.

[...]

We have an inclination to attribute the spatial integration of technical materials into a runtime to the subjective agency of a director. Apart from an egregious performance, the director is the only person to hang, even for a poorly designed alien. In truth, the director’s prerogative seems generally quite narrow, and one would assume that, within a highly competitive, highly compensated employ, focus on two aspects of the production fall most essentially within their purview: in that space where the actors’ bodies encounter each other and in the digitized space that surrounds them. These are the spaces of vision and feeling: the intimacy of the performance, the emotional connection meant to bind the audience to the film, and the overpowering or distinctive imagery. These are what the director can hope to take with them to the next production.

Whether the director is considered as single person or as creative team with managing figurehead, limit is placed on their capacity to form the final product. Each technique deployed in a film has its own inertia, a combination of specific limitations of the machine in use and the necessity of the operators of those technical processes to look out for their own interests. If we are to consider the real absence of qualitative time within a runtime, the techniques the director oversees to produce the semblance of intimacy and environment must be set side by side with other aspects of production: previous iterations of the intellectual property, the various stages of script writing and approval, the effective subcontracting, internal and external to the parent company, and so on. All of these elements will appear explicitly or implicitly within the final runtime. As such, the final, timeless object that appears on screen is hypothetically divisible into an infinite number of discrete moments.

There are an infinite number of hollowed-out protrusions within the final product. The plot – with its moments of barely anticipated revelation, its intimations of a truth no one would ever seek to find, its collision of wills that at any moment seem ready to give up the effort of their rage, to drop their arms and wander off, listless – this plot is a number of such protrusions. It exists scattered, next to any number of other isolated occurrences.

Plot, sound, imagery – each of which are themselves divisible into specific techniques and sequences – are supplemented by other, seemingly heterogeneous elements of the production: an Anselm Kiefer painting in the background of a scene seems just as insignificant, hence just as significant, as a plot twist. The crashing of waves, the ocean itself it seems, against a crashed transport vehicle that, for all of the work of inserting the vehicle amidst this real force of nature, is then simply submerged below the ocean’s surface by the uniform, continuous motion of a hydraulic system. This conspicuously artificial movement is just as important as the incongruous sound selected to accompany that same vehicle’s steady descent. The film is a raw accumulation of such effects, smoothed over, to arrive at a runtime. Even this smoothing over of a rough incoherence is a distinct element of the runtime, a device, a sum of techniques for the coordination of technical materials. Often enough, such techniques of binding the product together include making the film even more incoherent, through increasing the pace of cuts, speed of motion, or the assault of sound, to make sure that the audience stays in. This unity appears not in the binding of distinct elements to what they are not, but acts as a direct coercive force on the isolated elements. In the case of the new Blade Runner, this coercive smoothing out occurs through attempts to increase the intensity, but also through the use of an opposite technique: the imitation of the glacial unfolding of vistas and the central character’s interiority. This glacial reserve is meant to give the film the sheen of what in the news falls under the predicate cerebral.

[...]

Although the film is unable to resonate within itself and within the spectator, it wants to deepen the surface with a slow pace. Techniques of the evocative and the understated borrowed from the history of cinema are used in the film as alibi for violence, a nihilistic interpretation of the writing workshop edict: “show don’t tell.” The summary execution of a replicant in the first sequence, the mass execution by precision drone bombing of the poor and excluded who dwell in a massive garbage dump, the wasted, uninhabitable landscapes, the real and virtual subjugated women, the pace itself is supposed to pass judgment on this violence but can only serve to screen the audience off from any reflection on consequence. Because there is no real reckoning, the dystopian mechanism of power is not confronted with justice or right of any kind, but only with the theme of authentic feeling, cribbed from the Pinocchio cartoon. It pretends to a gritty, unflinching portrait of a bad world but is nothing of the kind. The producers must gravitate to the alibi of feeling, they are executing a deeply soulless and inauthentic object. Feeling functions both as positive justification within the story and is the primary mechanism ensuring the audience’s submission. The sheer quantity of manipulative techniques that have been fine-tuned over generations takes on the innocent mask of connecting with an audience.

[...]

The sovereignty of feeling, its unimpeachable validity, is not the antidote to chaotic and arbitrary state violence, it is the dangerous and immoral alibi for the state to do anything it pleases. We see the consequence of unimpeachable feeling in the ever more impenetrable barrier between an imperial power and a people that does not know itself. Imperial catastrophe is justified by the worth of individual life, not the life that is snuffed out day in and day out but individual life in the abstract, ours, worth living on the grounds of an intensity of feeling. We must be protected from harm, physical or mental, because of how intensely we feel. Not on our own, because we have lost the capacity to speak of our own lives, but through the representations of feeling we see projected in films, television shows, pop songs, social media. And so people can die in the streets, can be summarily executed, can be bombed half-way across the earth, all in order to preserve a feeling being, all the more sacred because their feeling will never pass into words, never be expressed to others and across the time of generations, will be ever more thoroughly rid of past and of memory. It is not for nothing that when the film’s replicant hero finds out that his memories are indeed real, but belong to someone else, he does not speak but laments, cries out in rage, and breaks something. This is the essence of feeling for us. This cynical imagery is self-fulfilling. As the individual is ever more emptied out and vulnerable, their feeling becomes all the more ineffable, hard to explain, hence in need of protection from experiences that would threaten it. As such it serves as justification for everything in our world to get worse.

[...]

Criticism sometimes finds an unthought possibility within the fabric of a film, some promise that the object reveals, even if unconsciously. In the denouement of the new Blade Runner, K. the replicant tells his “father” Harrison Ford several times to go see his daughter, the new hope for humanity, just through the doors inside a research facility. In this act K. the replicant steps out of the way. A character that seemed fated for death from the first scene finds fate to be in abeyance. He stands there in the snow, at the foot of the stairs to the research facility, now in a sort of fateless afterlife. Perhaps he is not dying of his multiple, action hero wounds after all, we viewers have not been schooled in the limits of the replicant body... But this Epicurean tranquility holds no promise. The creative team wanted that quality of not pinning everything down, so they withheld fate. But such permissiveness is only the other pole of state violence, not the glimmer of emancipated life. Industrially organized consumption has come to enforce enjoyment, its permissive morality goes hand-in-hand with brutal inequality and the necessary security apparatus to maintain it. The film’s pace was supposed to pass judgment on the reality it portrayed and ultimately on its viewers for participating in the climate collapse that is the backdrop for the film’s vistas and its violence. Instead of telling us how well things are going, this form tells us how badly things are going. But this impending and existing doom serves as argument that things should continue on as they are. Hollywood will continue to produce these dystopian vistas as messages of our climatic fate and throw us a few characters left over from destruction because they feel, or because they love, or because they have families, something that makes them relatable. Oh, if only we had listened to them. If only we had prevented what they saw in their mind’s eye from a balcony at the Four Seasons.