film "FILM" film/film

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

In my comments on backwardness and reversal I guess I gave
the impression that I thought or Pynchon implied that film
was, well let me quote myself, yes, now that I reflect on
this narcissistically, I'll quote myself....

Snip snip snip snip (this deconstructive strategy of
snipping off a post in mid-meaning and mid-paragraph is a
baneful practice, but hey, Derida does it to Plato, right?)

"Film reduces--and Katje looking with the
pleasure of the cameraman's eye is a good example--the
reality outside the self. Film perverts what it seeks to
preserve, record, recount, REVERSE." 


The word film (re-constructed) does not carry the meaning of
the word "Film" (oh, don't you love this play with
language). I was referring to film as used by Katje and
company. Now, I noted that my post was a jumbled mess, and
snipping it only made things worse, but that's OK, I have no
time to waste as I'm late for everything these days, busy,
very busy, but here's more on film if you care to read it. 

TF



One way in which culture is transmitted is by record--
buildings, monuments, inscription, and so forth. Wood
engraving and copper etching and printing brought huge
change to the records of history.  The black and white
image, color-image, sound, the moving image, have all become
part of the collective cultural record. An important aspect
of these recordings is that they can be duplicated by
mechanical and chemical means. These recordings changed the
world in no small way and they reacted upon our conceptual
world as well.  If I could find them on the net, I would
include Charles Sheeler's "The Artist Looks at Nature, oil
1943, and the preceding photographs and sketches that are
brought together on that single canvas. In the painting the
artist does not look at nature at all, but is exposed as a
picture-making machine, articulating an existential fear
concerning the creative self's place in the world. The
camera and the duplicating process are direct challenges to
the Humanist concepts of autonomy, uniqueness, and
originality in art. This is a major concern of Thomas
Pynchon, as evidenced by the early stories, it is spelled
out in bold letters in V. and continues as one of Pynchon's
chief concerns in GR, VL and M&D. Pynchon mocks those that
would practice or pretend to practice an art for the sake of
hubristic illusion, but he turns again and again, to the
artist's human prerogatives in the age of the machine. In
his beautifully crafted and masterfully composed fiction,
Pynchon's most striking passages are often  those in which
his prose seems to be immersed in an increasingly
mechanistic image producing art until it  "burst out into
sudden blaze" as poetry. I do not read Pynchon as
incorporating film or formulating "more appropriate"
artistic expressions in a "progressive" "democratic"
society.  I read Pynchon as a poet that will bring the
entire encyclopedia to the page, but for all his high art
and low art, I say Pynchon is not a leveler. Pynchon knows
the history of photography and film. He knows that
photograph, to begin with, served as an independent
objective check on scientific observation. In part, the
value of scientific experiment lies in the fact that it can
be repeated and verified by independent observers. But we
have Hector, who wants Frenesi-the "observer/participant"---
and Mason and Dixon and Cherrycoke, and Mondaugen's Story
and the recurring metaphors of planetarium projection and
dreams mixing with ancient cultural ghosts and voices and
drugs and madness. Take the case of astronomical
observations in  M&D for example, the slowness and the
fallibility of the eye can be supplemented by instruments. 
M&D is the story of America at the end of the twentieth
century as much as the Age of Reason. Today the camera
records images from space and these photographs can give the
effect of repetition to what was a unique event, never to be
observed again.  The camera can allow for instantaneous
cross sections of history, so one can turn on the tube and
watch "communism's collapse" and a "new world order" rise
from the ashes. With film, man has the power to arrest
images in their flight through time. But history, Pynchon
implies is neither recordable, repeatable, nor reversible,
for to divorce an object from its integral time sequence is
to diminish its complete meaning, although it does make
possible some grasp of spatial relations that may otherwise
defy observation.  This is one of the values of the camera
in fact, its ability to reproduce that which in any other
fashion can not be reproduced. The moving picture (and
someone that knows Bergson can comment) altered conceptions
of the flow of time and challenged our most ubiquitous and
most profound technology-the clock. 
Brief digression:
Pynchon loves the Richard Plays of Shakespeare. Richard II
is not as familiar to many as Hamlet or Lear, but to my
strange aesthetic, it is one of Shakespeare's most beautiful
plays. In any event, in that play, the most important prop
is a mirror. Shakespeare holds the mirror up to nature and
is nowhere to be found, but the Queen when she sat for this
play declared, I am Richard II. These were the days of
mirrors, when one produced biographical portrait and wrote
introspective biography. In our day, Ronald Ray-Gun acts for
the motion picture. The change from Shakespeare back to
around the 11th century to our day is radical. In V. Pynchon
uses mirrors, voyeurism, tourism, and fetishes to reveal the
decadence of narcissistic an inanimate history beneath the
decaying skin of individuals, arts, institutions, and
culture. After V. he introduced the introduction of TV in
"TSI."  And from "TSI" to CL, GR and VL Pynchon captured the
radical change from the mirrored world to the canera's eye
or from an introspective to a behaviorist psychology. Today,
Ray-Gun's biographer (though he might be mad I think) notes
that the actions of men are public when the camera's eye is
present and even when that camera's eye is absent in
reality, people improvise it wryly, with some part of
consciousness or in Ray-Gun's case, fall asleep to dream.
The Brady Buncher has no time to for Zoyd's self
examination, his tubal-detox is like  Jerry Springer
self-exposure. When no one knew but god and you, we had
tortured confession, but now there is a tube in every space
a camera's eye sees Slothrop's sex life and Mondaugan says
we surrender the privacy of dreams to the recordings and the
"WAR." 

As I read Pynchon, his world is in flux and the soul in
flux. In such a world, we find characters with cameras for
pornography, for solopsistic history, for control,
exploitation, for propaganda, as substitute for genuine
relations, as a passive substitute for experience; it may be
used to counterfeit other forms of Art, but rarely, and
perhaps only by Pynchon in prose form is it used in its own
right, to concentrate and intensify and express new forms of
experience. In Pynchon's fiction, the camera can not combat
the process of deterioration and decay, for it can not
restore in spirit and it can not reproduce as life. In all
instances where Pynchon ironically endows the inanimate with
the capacity for renewal and  for procreative power he does
so first to satirize and second to articulate his concerns.
Three such concerns are the individual, art, and the
extension of the collective memory.