Filmic Materiality and Authorship

The assertion made in Walley’s The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema that cinema was a conceptual phenomenon existent prior to any of the most primitive forms of the apparatus seems vicarious of the chicken and the egg debate. However, is it possible to define cinema the pure psychological image that Bazin is inferring? If film is existent beyond the material and history of the medium, it would be almost reductive and the finite resolution of declaring any image to fall under the term cinema. It also makes me question to what extent does authorship determine whether something can be determined to be a work of art since the exterior projection of an image seems to be the only thing separating the cinematic experience from the individual conception of the image independent of any interference or intention of the artist. I am concerned as to how it is truly possible to regulate a version of cinema without any medium specific constraints (the regulation of light and temporality) enough to constitute as a specific experience since the individual experience is being foregrounded. While I commend this conceptual take on the evolution of film in its ability to escape the filmic exemplification of the material structure of the film itself, I think it is important that it lacks enough division from referencing art in general versus cinema to be considered a purely cinematic construction.

When I later found the Hollis Frampton piece, these thoughts seemed to be put in a more complete framework of metahistory. Frampton seems to acknowledge the use of cinema as a metaphor for the universe at large and the role of machinery such as the filmic apparatus as ways of clarifying the general production of meaning. I found a particular part of the passage interesting in the way its discussion of temporality fits in with Andy Warhol’s Empire. “The illusion of movement is certainly an accustomed adjunct of the filmic image, but that illusion rests upon the assumption that the rate of change between successive frames may vary only within very narrow limits” (Frampton 137). This sentence seems to point to Warhol’s use of extended to projection to foreground the structural elements of the medium in his use of extensive long take.