Film as a Machine

The filmmaker Hollis Frampton, in his essay “For a Metahistory of Film”, writes that “Cinema is the Last Machine”, later suggesting that 

“the sum of all film, all projectors and all cameras in the world constitutes one machine, which is by far the largest and most ambitious single artifact yet conceived and made by man (with the exception of the human species itself). The machine grows by many millions of feet of raw stock every day. It is not surprising that something so large could utterly engulf and digest the whole substance of the Age of Machines (machines and all), and finally supplant the entirety with its illusory flesh. Having devoured all else, the film machine is the lone survivor.”

Dziga Vertov is perhaps the most famous theorist of film’s more machine-like tendencies: he envisioned a completely automated cinema guided by an imaginary automated man. Film, and humanity, and society, were in Vertov’s mind best represented as a kind of clockwork that was strict, regulated, and precise. One result of this philosophy is Vertov’s iconic 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, a slice of Soviet life that unfolds wordlessly throughout a day or so of mundane, humdrum activities filmed through the lens of Vertov’s obsession with mechanical precision. It’s both a beautiful film and a horrifying one for its representation of life as a kind of ever-spinning cog wheel.

Fast-forward 50 or so years to Godfrey Reggio’s feature-length film poem, Koyaanisqatsi. Deeply indebted to the techniques used by Vertov, Reggio — alongside composer Philip Glass and cinematographer Ron Fricke — nonetheless envisions a counternarrative: film as an extension of nature, into which humankind has ruthlessly intruded. Human beings in Koyaanisqatsi are living, as the film’s title is translated, “life out of balance”, thanks in part to the dehumanizing machine-like nature of day-to-day life.

The vision of Reggio’s Qatsi films contrasts with Frampton’s idea of cinema as a kind of ur-machine. For Reggio, film seems to be less a massive mechanism than an organic compound waiting to be shaped. Beyond semantics, the competing visions of the medium reflect the stark contrast between not just artistic motives but broader ones: cinema as a capitalist engine (in that sense, driving the true ur-machine of human society) vs. cinema as an engine of humanity (able to produce truly radical works that serve the people). I’d like to believe one over the other, but this is not a space for wishful thinking; Frampton is more correct than he ought to be.

Watching modern pop cinema, from Marvel to Tenet and back again, it’s hard not to agree with Frampton that cinema is one massive machine, one that serves the agenda of another. At least Tenet had the guts to be a little confusing ; most films, driven by economic imperative, are as clear-cut as possible. Films that divert from the machines’ true purpose are ornate filigree, distracting from the people crushed under the economic machine that film helps propel forward. Can a capitalist system produce truly anti-capitalist cinema, or is it all a cycle by which pressure is built up and then vented from the machine, preventing its own destruction?

I see no starker contrast than Parasite‘s wins, including Best Picture, at the 2020 Academy Awards. The film’s aggressively radical critique of stratified class relationships seems out of place at the lush, ostentatious ceremony dominated by wealthy people wearing clothes that probably cost more than I pay in rent each month. In giving Parasite the top award, the film was drained of its radical potential and absorbed into the machine. It’s a different sort of tokenism.

Another key Bong Joon Ho film, Snowpiercer, dramatizes this machine much more literally as a giant train divided into upper and lower classes in the front and rear. Snowpiercer may well prove to be the more important of the two films; where Parasite‘s class-centric critique can be ignored in favor of the film’s justifiably lauded artistic achievement, Snowpiercer plays out as an exploitation film: raw, exposed, and overstated. It’s much more difficult to assimilate a film like Snowpiercer into the ideological machine that made it. The train is doomed to fail.

Snowpiercer, of course, dramatizes that very process by which radical ideas are assimilated and drained of their transformative power. When Curtis reaches the front of the train, the rebellion is revealed as an elaborate, pressure-relieving hoax, and Curtis is offered to take charge of the train.

Lately, the thing I’ve been putting on to fall asleep is Mythbusters, a silly but fun diversion into a world of elaborate, pointless experiments and overly alliterative narration. I enjoy the show, but I’m always troubled by their attitude towards film, specifically whenever they deal with a “myth” that comes from a movie. For the Mythbusters, every frame of a film is a claim or an assertion, as if film were an act of declaration of fact. To the Mythbusters, storytelling is only as good as it is factual, and film is a machine to be taken apart and put back together again. Stories are just engineering challenges in potentia.

All this contributes to the idea that films are simply machines made up of physical interactions between moving parts. Even looking at something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which obviously doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny, the Mythbusters philosophy can be applied. There’s nothing lurking under the surface, no meaning to the relentless assault of colorful moving pictures. Just bodies in space colliding, and endless series of myths to be busted.

Philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, perhaps best remembered as a prop for Woody Allen’s inner fantasy life in Annie Hall, famously wrote that “the medium is the message”. For McLuhan, “it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action”. McLuhan describes “the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.”

Let’s put things another way. In an Atlantic piece called “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun”, Evan Selinger details the ways in which we are shaped by the technology we encounter, and how in turn that technology is shaped by us. Drawing on Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, Selinger points out the ways in which relationships between humans and technologies affect both parties in a way that defies easy assignations of agency. Writing in the context of guns, for Selinger this means that the NRA’s aphorism that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a misunderstanding of the way that firearms influence who we are when we wield them.

In the context of media, film specifically, we might note the ways in which film is different because we watch it and we are are different because we watch a particular film. It is a mutually constitutive relationship. We are an extension of film, and to McLuhan’s point film is an extension of us: film is an alteration of humanity, one that (like all media) makes us, in one way or another, post-human. If film is a machine, then we become machine-like as we engage it; but if we are human, then film becomes a living entity as it engages us.

This is an idea that is ignored by the proliferation of film as content. I voiced my frustration recently over this philosophy ; content is a willful ignorance of the phenomena of media. Content is merely the operation of the machine. Film, the medium, is an extension of the viewer. But viewers are encouraged to maintain an artificial distance.

If you want to bear witness to the ways in which human and machine mix, give Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man a view. This particular masterstroke of body horror involves a man transmuted into metal. Owing to sources like Akira and David Cronenberg, Tetsuo is the ultimate mixture of man and machine, a film in which (like Cronenberg’s seminal Videodrome) the act of viewing is intertwined with the act of becoming.

To quote visual theorist John Berger, in Ways of Seeing: “The invention of the camera changed the way men saw. The visible came to mean something different to them.” Having previously quoted Dziga Vertov — or “I, the machine”, as Vertov calls himself in the quote — Berger writes that “Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera — and more particularly the movie camera — demonstrated that there was no center.” Where Vertov had claimed that “I explain in a new way the world unknown to you”, Berger suggests that this quality of cinema — one Vertov attributes to being machine-like — that was its very destabilizing element.

But at time wound on and cinema progressed, cinema has incorporated that destabilization into its mode of operation. Cinema became a well-oiled machine.