“The Invention Without a Future Records the Ends of the World”
The Invention Without a Future Records the Ends of the World
Matthew Noble-Olson
Review of Ends of Cinema edited by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece and Richard Grusin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020
On December 13, 2021, a series of photos were posted to the Reddit forum r/pics that depicted the aftermath of a series of destructive and deadly tornados in Mayfield, Kentucky, and its surrounding areas in the western region of the state. One photograph quickly went viral and became one of the most affecting and circulated images of the event.1 The photograph is taken from the back of a movie theater, as though from the vantage of a film viewer, but the screen has been torn away to reveal a scene of destruction beyond rivaling any that had ever been projected in the theater. The images of destruction that the screen once held are no longer safely confined to the spatial and temporal distance of the projected image but are revealed to be encroaching upon the space of the theater itself. From the perspective of this photograph, the view now available to the cinematic spectator is one of permanent and enveloping catastrophe. The viral popularity of this image prompts an urgent set of questions: Why does cinema function as a site from which to imagine our contemporary catastrophe? What does the vantage of cinematic spectatorship offer to the representation of the world’s ends? And is this representation of the world’s ends implicated in cinema’s own often repeated ends? The essays collected in Ends of Cinema, edited by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece and Richard Grusin and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020, address these and related questions. The essays of Ends of Cinema theorize the present and historical catastrophe of capitalist modernity through the figure of cinematic ends, urging us to move beyond the eye-rolling at the cliché of cinematic death that Szczepaniak-Gillece mentions in the introduction to take up the task of theorizing the synchronicity that is becoming apparent between the ends of cinema and the ends of the world. It asks us to consider what lessons the repeated ends of the invention without a future might hold for a world confronting its own vanishing future.2
Figure 1. Photo taken of tornado destruction in Mayfield, Kentucky and posted to the Reddit forum r/pics on December 13, 2021. Image courtesy of Shawn Triplett.
The discourse of death envelops cinema at moments of crisis in its ontology, especially as it confronts changes to its technological or social constitution. Numerous engagements with cinema’s death or end have appeared over the past quarter century, primarily in response to the incorporation of digital technologies into cinematic production and exhibition.3 John Belton, in an emblematic instance of this recent discourse, frames it as a crisis of identity that produces a question: “is what remains after digital technology simulates film still ‘the cinema’?”4 This and similar questions have been renewed and reinforced amid the restructuration of viewing habits towards streaming and away from the collective theatrical experience of classical cinema that has been further reinforced by COVID-19. Ends of Cinema argues that the history and ontology of cinema are always intertwined in its ends, whether explicit or not. But it also proposes that cinema’s deaths might be understood to provoke a range of different goals. As Szczepaniak-Gillece asks in the introduction: “Are cinema’s many deaths bound to another kind of end: what we understand to be the goal of cinema, whether political, aesthetic, representational, theoretical, or technological?” (viii).
Szczepaniak-Gillece and Grusin address the question of how the idea of the ends of cinema should be understood in their concluding discussion. They note that Ends of Cinema grew out of a conference of the same title that was held at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in May 2018. Their dialogue begins by noting how the theme of the conference moved from “post-cinema” to “ends of cinema” and how that theme was partially chosen to mark a transition as the center began its fiftieth year. “Because cinema played a crucial role in the Center’s first decades, and because the Center itself was instrumental in establishing film studies as an academic discipline in the United States and abroad in the 1970s and 1980s,” Grusin writes that to him it made “great sense for C21 to host the first major international conference on post-cinema” (199). Szczepaniak-Gillece argues that the shift from “post-cinema” to “ends of cinema” moved the concern from one of “a defined historical moment and a definitive break” to an engagement with “the discipline’s longue durée.”5 Szczepaniak-Gillece argues that the latter term is both more polemical and ambiguous regarding the present status of cinema, while also recalling the medium’s “. . . privileged relationship to its own conclusions” (203). In response, Grusin emphasizes how cinema’s concern with its own obsolescence is matched by an investment in novelty: “[C]inema was from its origins equally concerned with newness and beginnings, with animating images and bringing them to life, as much as with their inevitable ends” (204). This discussion clarifies that questioning cinema’s ends focuses the entirety of the medium’s history through the ontological problem of its self-definition within the field of film studies.6 The volume’s proliferation of potential understandings of ends shows the productive potential of the question but it also presents a challenge. Are cinema’s ends necessarily a matter of multiplicity or is a more precise theorization of ends, and their relation to cinema, possible?
Theoretical Ends
The volume’s most dedicated theorization of ends in relation to cinema appears in James Leo Cahill’s chapter, “What Remains, What Returns: Garbage, Ghosts, and Two Ends of Cinema.” According to Cahill, an understanding of the cinematic object is always enacted retroactively by claims about the ends of cinema: “How one contemplates the ends of cinema inflects the conceptualization of the very object(s) of inquiry: each notion of cinema has its ends, and each end summarizes a particular notion of cinema” (85). For Cahill, the end is an ontological gesture that carries with it a particular approach to the understanding of cinema itself, which he analyzes through specific conceptual ends. Cahill argues that the concepts of garbage and ghosts—recovered from Siegfried Kracauer and Georges Bataille—are emblematic of our own late moment, asking us to consider cinema’s ends as constitutive of the medium in their repression: “Garbage and ghosts manifest the negative surplus of cinema: the excessive forms of material and ideational absence constitutive of the medium that it must refuse or exorcise to function but from which it cannot be wholly separated” (85). This radicalizes, or at least clarifies the stakes of, Cahill’s claim that inquiries into cinema’s ends always institutes an ontology, and vice versa. Here, the conceptual figurations of excess are understood such that the ontological inquiry in cinema is a necessarily retroactive one; knowledge of the cinematic object is only ever possible through a conception of its end. In other words, cinema must end so that we may know it. Cahill concludes his consideration of Kracauer and Bataille with a question: “So what cinematic or postcinematic forms might materialize ghosts adequate to our age?” (97). The answer offered is the work of the Japanese cinematic artist, Momoko Seto, whose “climate chaos surrealism” shows how cinema might begin to envision its own ends and their synchronicity with other ends. How then can we understand the retroactive task of constructing cinema’s ends from the vantage of the photograph with which we began? How are we to understand the adequacy of the ghosts in that image to our present moment?
Cahill’s understanding of ends as an epistemological retroactivity makes clear that the present state of emergency does not demand a turn away from cinema to more pressing matters, but a consideration of what cinema’s ends tell us about these other, seemingly more urgent, ends. In this light, it is worth emphasizing Szczepaniak-Gillece’s claim in the conclusion that Walter Benjamin is the prophet of film studies. She posits, echoing themes that Cahill highlights in Kracauer and Bataille, that Benjamin’s interest in elegiac ruins has insured that film studies always understood cinema’s end as a necessity, even in its earliest moments (202). But the Benjamin that inspires the volume’s critical contributions, and that seems more urgent for the study of cinema’s present ends, is the one for whom melancholy is always infused by a sense of revolutionary hope and purpose. We see this feature of Benjamin’s thought in “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” when he writes: “Film is the art form corresponding to the pronounced threat to life in which people live today.”7 We might read this volume as insisting that film still corresponds to the pronounced threats of our moment. As Cahill writes: “. . . certain end(s) of cinema and the end of the world as we have known it are becoming synchronous.” Yet, as this claim by Cahill notes in its parenthetical acknowledgement of the multiplicity of ends, the collection contains several understandings of how to understand “the end” of cinema amid its growing synchronicity with other ends. Two broad approaches to the question of cinematic ends appear in the volume. First, there is an understanding of ends as extinction and/or death that is addressed most explicitly by Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Caetlin Benson-Allot, and Michael Boyce Gillespie. Second, there is an understanding of ends as expansion and/or excess that is addressed by Mary Ann Doane, Francesco Casetti, and Amy Villarejo.
Extinction and Death
The essays that understand cinema’s ends as extinction and death are varied in their approach to that conclusion, but the casting of cinema’s ends in this fashion places cinematic history, exhibition, and form in an explicitly political frame. Against the melancholy tone of much work on cinema’s ends/deaths, these essays understand cinema’s ends as a transformative vantage onto specific historical and political circumstances of extinction and death rather than as a figuration of the extinction or death of the medium itself. Peterson’s chapter, “Cinema, Nature, and Endangerment,” focuses on three nature documentary films from the 1920s that serve as records of a now vanishing conception of an eternal nature. In this moment of urgency—as we “learn about the ecological impact of all this when it seems too late to do anything about it . . .” (56)—these films are presented as an opportunity for a “strategic ahistoricism” (59). For Peterson, the images of a past eternal natural can be activated now to reveal the urgency of a transformation of our present relation to nature. Each of the films that Peterson discusses show how “. . . the nature study films of the early twentieth century register today less as films that cultivate a love of nature and more as melancholy chronicles of loss” (64). It is not merely a melancholy glance at a ruined and disappearing nature that Peterson finds here. If the initial intention of these films was to produce an understanding of nature as eternal, as a resource to be extracted, and as a repository of beauty that might renew the human spirit then, as Peterson argues, watching these films from the present reveals that “. . . what we call nature is not as eternal as we thought” (65). The study of these historical nature films demonstrates the historical character of nature and in this way shows the historical background of Cahill’s claim that cinema’s end/s are converging now with other ends. Through her reading of these early nature films, Peterson proposes that cinema’s ends show us ways that we can confront the deaths of various ecologies amidst the crisis of global climate change: “If photochemical film has reached the end of its first life cycle, perhaps film history can help us come to understand another, much larger death now under way: that of the natural ecosystems and the animals and plants they support, commonly referred to as the sixth mass extinction” (53).
Gillespie’s chapter, “Pieces of a Dream: Film Blackness and Black Death,” understands cinema’s end/s as death not as a matter of ontology or technology, but rather as a means through which to understand aesthetic form in a particular historical juncture. Gillespie argues that recent works of experimental cinema by four black women filmmakers stage specific formal dimensions of cinema as places of political contestation that register and resist antiblack violence. Gillespie analyzes works that “. . . exquisitely suspend, disrupt, and disturb . . .” The works considered are Leila Weefur’s Dead Nigga BLVD (2015), Nuotama Frances Bodomo’s Everybody Dies (2016), Ja’Tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience (2015), and A. Sayeeda Clarke’s White (2011). Across their varied thematic and formal practices, the works of these filmmakers “. . . are a circuit, a cinema of ends, that thinks through black death across the formal experimentation and the capacities of film as art to contend with an enduring urgency: the precarity of black life” (151). For Gillespie these are instances of “wake work” that “. . . pose a range of formal propositions and critical interventions about black death . . .” (134). Gillespie’s theorization of a cinema in the wake, which explicitly builds on the work of Christina Sharpe, “emphasizes a shift from the portrayal of horror to a concentration on how film and video enact a critical and aesthetic resistance to the horror of antiblackness” (133).8 Gillespie is the most explicit about the question of form among those authors who consider cinema’s end/s through extinction and death because for him the expression of the horror of black death and the qualities of black being necessitate a traversal of cinematic experimentation. Formal cinematic experimentation counters the ongoing threat of anti-black violence: “As cinema in the wake, these films are an assembly composed of incitements of film form, materiality, temporality, and conceptions of black being” (151). Even as Gillespie conceives of cinema’s end/s in terms of black death, it is through experimentation with cinematic form that resistance to this violence might be found. Formal filmic experimentation with the end of cinema becomes a potentially utopian project in this understanding.
In presenting cinema’s ends as extinction and death, Peterson, Benson-Allot, and Gillespie’s chapters demonstrate a sense of urgency and engagement that stands in contrast to conceptions of cinematic death that ignore the deeply intertwined political problematic of history and ontology.9 While the essays on cinema’s ends as extinction and death might be understood to take the Kentucky theater’s former screen as a vantage through which to view the world beyond in a manner that is definitively altered by their perspective from within cinema, those considerations of cinema’s ends as expansion and/or excess shift the focus back upon the architectural frame itself. Rather than considering how the space of the theater transforms the view of the world beyond, this second set of essays is concerned with what the opening of the theater to the world beyond has changed within the structure of the theater. In other words, the essays by Doane, Casetti, and Villarejo approach the problematic of cinema’s ends, at least initially, as one more explicitly internal to the medium.
Expansion and Excess
Doane’s essay, “Scale and the Body in Cinema and Beyond,” focuses on how the cinematic experience has shifted with the emergence of IMAX as a medium of excess, which contributes to an expansion of the moving image beyond both the space of the theater and beyond the scale of the human body.10 The IMAX participates in this expansion of the spaces of the cinema through its own visual excess, attempting to, “exceed the eye in all dimensions so that the image appears to be uncontained” (10). A reading of this argument through the image of the Kentucky theater punctuates the different forms of the expansion of the cinematic image beyond its conventional spaces of exhibition. What is presumably so alluring—that is to say traumatic—about the photograph of the Kentucky theater is that it shows a transgression of the screen, an opening of the space of the theater, where one could confront the dangers of the world with the safety of spectatorial distance.11 Doane’s emphasis on IMAX is even more significant in this vantage. IMAX shifts the terms of infinity within cinema, which traditionally found unbounded extension within the terms of classical perspective, such that the illusion of infinite depth is contained within the frame. The excess beyond the frame exemplified by IMAX, or beyond the scale at which the frame still delimits an image for our vision, produces an immersion that “would seem to rescue the body from its nullification by both Renaissance perspective and the Kantian sublime, making us once again present to ourselves” (14).
In this emphasis on the shifting site of infinity in cinema—an absent ending perhaps—Doane’s essay finds a common concern with Peterson’s delineation of cinema’s participation in the construction of “nature,” imagined as infinite in both its ahistorical character and as a site of resource extraction. Doane also considers nature, in the way that IMAX is often used for documentaries on nature and in her invocation of the sublime, but her emphasis is on how this ideological manifestation of expansion finds its shape in the production of a feeling of presence to oneself in the increasingly abstract space of global capitalism. If IMAX provides an expanded spatial experience for the cinematic subject that manages to balance immersion and safety, the image from Kentucky serves as violent rejoinder. Thus, if the sublime of Burke and Kant is a matter of confronting an excess beyond a limit, an infinity beyond the comprehension of the subject, the immersion produced by the IMAX sublime presents an imagined self-presence where “everything is infinitely representable, screenable” (18). Ultimately, the excess of the IMAX sublime matches the infinite expansion that is the core logic of capitalism while securing the ideological emplacement of the subject within the flux of such an ever-expanding world. The image of the Kentucky theater demonstrates the limits of an infinitely screenable world and the horror of an expanse unmanaged, one in which the screen itself has been destroyed and the terror of the sublime must be reckoned without the mediation of the cinematic image, whatever its scale.
Amy Villarejo’s chapter, “& Mediation: Television’s Partial Visions,” begins with a consideration of how different terms within the study of media are related to one another through a theorization of the conjoining function of the ampersand. Villarejo understands the role of the ampersand, linking “film” to “media” or “culture” or “screen” or other terms, as ultimately a matter of mediation: “. . . the ampersand interpellates us into language and image: it insinuates itself into our habits and habitus, into our ways of speaking and methods of inscription. In a word, it itself mediates” (184). Villarejo situates the problematic of cinematic ontology within the disciplinary histories of the study of cinema and media, demonstrating that the problematic of cinema’s ends—the evolving ontology of the medium and its social functions—are mediated through the study of these forms in the disciplinary formation of film studies, media studies, and related fields. And that the formation of these disciplines and their boundaries is itself a site of political contestation. Villarejo interrogates the multiplicity of terminology, and even the means of multiplying and linking the various terms that identify our distinct but often linked objects of study. Ultimately, Villarejo seeks to jettison the concern with terminology, and even ontology, in favor of what she understands as a set of more generative, and urgent, questions: “what happens when minoritarian or marginalized intellectuals and artists take up a new medium, let’s say, image-making, when they have been subject to an ethnographic or racist or misogynist or homophobic gaze engendered by that very medium?” (188). As there is a commonality of concern with limitlessness in both Peterson and Doane, Villarejo’s question gestures towards the essays by Benson-Allot and Gillespie. Villarejo shows how a particular approach to media emerges through an attention to concerns beyond those of terminology and ontology in favor of precisely the sorts of questions addressed especially in Gillespie’s concern with the specificity of cinematic form as a way of countering the violence of antiblackness. Villarejo most explicitly raises the question of what the end might mean for other media, or rather what the presence of other media might mean for the understanding of ends: Is the question of an end specific to cinema? What are the stakes of the end/s in video and television versus film and cinema? Villarejo’s essay does not explicitly answer these questions but instead highlights the ampersand as a mediation of thought that does not reduce the question of the various media to issues of ontology and periodization but rather of the manner in which the question of media remains vital in provoking the political implications of these forms of thought: “It’s not ‘new media,’ it’s not old media, it’s not cinema, it’s not television: it’s a way of thinking, opening the spaces in between” (197).
Villarejo and Doane both raise a question of medium-specificity regarding the understanding of cinematic end/s. Villarejo shifts the focus to how the question of medium-specificity must necessarily unfold into a broader set of concerns that move beyond ontology. Doane’s theorization of the relocation of the moving image out of the traditional bounds of the film theater and into galleries, shopping malls, public spaces, and cities marks this displacement as another measure of the medium’s apparent ends. Seen from the vantage of the Kentucky theater, this relocation might be understood in a different manner. No longer is it the celluloid being displaced by the digital image or the theaters that are abandoned for the moving images of a billboard or iPhone that is the sole concern of the ends of cinema, but the framing of environmental catastrophe through the already elegized spaces of cinema. Cinema no longer provides a space of protection where violence and catastrophe may be confronted at a safe distance.12
Images of Ends
What is apparent from the proliferation and repetition of the ends and deaths of cinema throughout this collection is the generative character of a problematic that is seemingly endemic to the medium. In the conclusion, Szczepaniak-Gillece specifies a triptych of questions that might follow from the title of the volume: “When did cinema end? How many times? And what are its ends in terms of its limits or even perhaps its overarching goals?” (200). Each of these questions concern cinema’s end as a manner of mediating both the present and approaching crises and the problematic of ontological definition. Cinema’s ends insist upon the concurrence of these issues. In this vein, we might return to Szczepaniak-Gillece’s claim that Walter Benjamin is the prophet of film studies to frame cinema’s ends as a set of dialectical images, as ways of arresting moments of crisis.13 This would cast each perceived end as a crystallization that is illuminated by a particular constellation of cinema’s past, present, and future (202). If we adopt an understanding of cinematic ends as dialectical images, Ends of Cinema provides numerous temporarily arrested moments of crisis. If we are to confront our historical era’s numerous crises through the mediation of an aestheticized political spectacle, then the ends of cinema must be understood as opportunities to bring the politics of art into momentary focus. This is what Ends of Cinema attempts.
Matthew Noble-Olson is a scholar of visual culture with interests in film theory, cinema, moving-image installation, and aesthetics. He is completing a manuscript titled “Exile, Trauma, Ruin: The Forms of Cinematic Lateness.” His writing has appeared in Discourse, Modernism/Modernity, Cultural Critique, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Michigan.
Notes
This photo was originally posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/rfwd9y/pics_i_took_from_the_tornado_destruction_in/. It subsequently became viral on Twitter through posts such as: https://twitter.com/rexchapman/status/1470873445223354378?s=27
For discussions of the Lumière quote see, Tom Gunning, “Moving away from the index: cinema and the impression of reality.” differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 29–52; James Leo Cahill, “. . . and afterwards: Martin Arnold’s Phantom Cinema” Spectator, no. 27 (2007), 19.
There have been numerous texts that have announced the death of cinema or theorized this discourse of cinema’s ends. Susan Sontag’s 1996 article in The New York Times is sometimes mentioned as an important touchstone and we might add Martin Scorsese’s recent pronouncements on the issue as well. See Sontag, Susan. “The Decay of Cinema.” The New York Times. Feb. 25, 1996 and Scorsese, Martin, “I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.” Nov. 4, 2019. A partial list of recent scholarly contributions on cinematic death includes Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books, 2006; D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007; Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age, London: British Film Institute, 2001; Philip Rosen, “Old and New: Image, Indexicality, and Historicity in the Digital Utopia” in Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 301–349; André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015; and, finally my own contribution, Matthew Noble-Olson. “Reviving The Elephant; or, Cinema Plays Dead.” Cultural Critique, vol. 97, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 84–104.
John Belton, “If film is dead, what is cinema?,” Screen, Volume 55, Issue 4, Winter 2014, pp. 465.
For a similar understanding of cinema’s ends see George Baker’s contributions to Malcolm Turvey, Hal Foster, Chrissie Iles, George Baker, Matthew Buckingham, and Anthony McCall. “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art.” October 104 (2003): 71–96.
We can also note here that Fredric Jameson begins his essay on Postmodernism by noting the varied ends that have been announced recently, though in that context cinema is missing. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 1.
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” Grey Room 39. Spring 2010. 33.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Here we could mention as exemplary D.N. Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
This chapter presents ideas that are taken up at greater length in Doane’s recently published, Bigger Than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
Here we can note the way that this connects with Caetlin Benson-Allot’s essay in this collection.
In this vein, it is helpful to consider Francesco Casetti’s chapter, “A Countergenealogy of the Movie Screen; or, Film’s Expansion Seen from the Past.” Casetti begins with precisely what is missing from the Kentucky image, the screen, attempting to expand its figural understanding within film theory and criticism beyond the constrained choice of either a window or a mirror. Through a theorization of these alternative figurative spaces and surfaces, Casetti argues that “Cinema discloses a latent side and becomes a visual art that also works as an environmental medium” (41).
For his most dedicated theorization of the dialectical image see, Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. 456–488.
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