End title of the end credits from Jean-Luc Godard's Le Weekend (1967)
How to Destroy a Film
Notes by Richard Burt, February, 2013
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment on, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of a Web.
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II eds. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 131.
Projecting a film will become first a special circumstance, then a rare occurrence, and finally an exceptional event. Eventually nothing at all will be projected, either because nothing at all surviving copies will be worn to a frazzle or decomposed, or because somebody decides to stop showing them in order to save them for future duplication onto another format the few prints that remain.
--Paolo Usai, Death of Cinema (123-24)
The three main areas of research in this class are:
1. Film Preservation as the "Death" of Cinema (Paulo Cherchi Usai) See Passio.
2. Silent Cinema as "Deaf" Cinema and Digital Soundtracks (Michel Chion, Film, a Sound Art)
3. Staggered sound and image synchronization (Michel Chion, Film, a Sound Art)
Film Preservation and Restoration are commonly understood to be the opposite of film degradation and destruction:
Degradation of image and sound quality due to digital compression.
Degradation of film print (dirt, scratches, holes)
All roads lead to the destruction of a film, if at different speeds and by different means: both storage (vinegar syndrome) and projection. How do you destroy a film? Watch it or don't watch it. In either case, a film will self-destruct over time no matter what you do to preserve it.
Intentional degradation as so-called experimental / avant-garde cinema
Stan Brakhage-handmade scratches on film stock
Bill Morrison, Decasia as an archival problem (it "saves" what archivists couldn't save).
Silent film as commonly understood (mute cinema).
Sound is generally not an issue in film preservation; anachronistic soundtracks are sometimes found objectionable. (See course description.)
How to Destroy a Film
I. Film preservation archivists and avant-garde cinema are equally invested in some ideal version of the film—uncut, pristine print, never shown until you see it. Criticism of streaming video on youtube is based on a notion of infidelity to projected film. The real celluloid film projected in a theater is thought to be much better than a streamed video. It's bad. Really, really bad. Streamed video is terrible, a travesty, even an abomination. OK. We get it. Streaming is unfaithful, a huge deprivation of the audience's experience compared to their watching the film projected theatrically. But think about it for a minute. If fidelity to film projection in a movie theater is taken to be the critical criterion for the evalution of streaming and for digital transfers, to what kind of viewing is a non-streamed, "good" transfer supposed to be faithful? to what an audience actually when the film was released theatrically? or on television? or should we think of destroying a film a second way: is the transfer supposed to be faithful to what the audience never actually saw, namely, the print before it was first projected? If the former, why is the first viewing the default? Why not see an old, beat-up print, since many viewers did? What about fidelity to earlier kinds of film destruction, like pan and scan on cathode ray TV broadcasts of widescreen films? And since the projected film image is phenomenologically different from the broadcast image, should all viewings of a film on a TV be discounted? Did people who saw a film only on TV, not in a movie theater, not see the film? If not, WHAT did the see? If what audiences saw in theaters is the criterion, shouldn’t every viewing of every print be reproduced with micro-degradations invisible to the naked eye, including drive-in theaters? Shouldn't every print get its own transfer? In other words, wouldn’t the gradual destruction of the prints that were actually exhibited have to enter into what is being preserved and saved digitally? Would DVD editions have to include transfers that "destroyed" as well as "restored" a given film? (See, for example, the blu-ray of White Zombie and Kino's Buster Keaton Shorts blu-ray for the films "The High Sign," "The Boat," "Cops," and "Baloonatics" are from damaged prints and you can watch the restored and the unrestored versions of each film if you wish.) And what about censored versions of film prints that Usai describes in The Death of Cinema? Shouldn’t we have to be able to watch all the versions and copies Usai places under the heading of the film’s title? (Obviously this would be impossible to do even if you wanted to do it.) Is every film not restored like, for example, D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, is full of scrtaches, dirts, and other defects, should we not watch the DVD? If the transfer is based on a print, not the negative, should we not watch it? And if a restored film, like the fullest version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis to date, can repair some of the film much better than other parts, should we not wacth it? If what the audience never saw is the criterion for the best transfer, we arrive at a different and more acute paradox: a digital simulation of what was never seen, even an improvement on the original print, as in Criterion edition of The Red Shoes, is what the viewer sees and sees only on a home entertainment system.
And what about audiocommentaries? Since talking during a movie theater is considered rude, why is someone or some people talking over the film a good thing? Is it a good thing? Is film preservation as commonly understood really possible? I suggest that we may we safely conclude that the belief in film preservation without destruction is delusional (certifiably). Film preservation is mistakenly thought to restore an ideal essence of the film in its "original state" of being, projected or yet to be projected. Film preservation conflates the ideal film with the material film prints. Thus film preservation inevitably crosses the limits of film destruction, espescially when the preservationist thinks she or he has stopped short of destruction. (Think of Martin Scorcese's comments on the superiority of The Red Shoes on blu-ray to the three strip technicolor print struck when Powell and Presseburger made it; or consider the trailers on the Warner's Gangsters Collection DVD sets for films that played before the feature when it was theatrically released.) The new and improved version of The Red Shoes is impossible to differentiate absolutely from the film's ruination since the "better" replaces (leaves behind and destroys) the original one we can no longer see. This kind of problem is articulated and debated openly by art historians and museum curators. (Consider the example of the Sistine Chapel restoration. As philosophical idealists whether they know it or know, film preservationists and avant-garde filmmakers are trapped in delusional and paradoxical deadends. What is the point of showing someone a film on youtube in order to denigrate its image and sound quality, saying it looks nothing like the wonderful image when projected theatrically, given that it is impossible for that same someone to see the film projected theatrically? And if the streamed version is so horrible, why bother to show it at all?
II. “How to Destroy a Silent Film?”
“How to Destroy a Sound Film?”
Instead of assuming we know what we mean when we say “How to Destroy a Film,” what happens if we ask questions to which we do not know the answers in advance such as: “How to Destroy a Silent Film?”; “How to Destroy a Sound Film?” If we pursue these questions, we depart from a different set of assumptions about film preservation than those articulated above in section I. First, film preservation and restoration on a continuum with film degradation and destruction. Second, we take the destruction of film rather than its preservation as our critical default. The museum of unseen films in Lisbon Story is our default archive. Third, we may ask how something dead in one kind of film survives in another, even if we have trouble hearing or seeing it, not ask how to stop something bad from happening that will happen no matter what we do. Fourth, we may appreciate the ways in which the history of technological developments in the history of cinema are non-linear history (see Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art). Fifth, we that sound and image preservation is paradoxica to the extent that what one person reasonably regards as restoration may always just as reasonably be regarded by someone else as damage or even total destruction. We may put these paradoxes under the heading "Audio-clash."
Here is a question about the future of film presevation that Jake raised after class:
Now that all cinema is digital, film preservation will no longer present the kinds of problems it did when cinema was an analogue medium. How long will it be before film preservation is a kind of footnote to the history of media, cinema being part of merely part of the pre-history of media, as Lev Manovich has argued in The Language of New Media?
Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II (130).
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe. . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-“ is without superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-called as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)
This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living experience is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living experience,” but “tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors and derails “tissue” skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like death in life or life in death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this this clothing. For, on he contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance, comprehended, they live and die, they live to death as the very inextricability of this weave. It is against the groundless ground of this quasi-transcendentality of living to death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one hand, one can say that “Robinson Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the book, were, according to a first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and desire attested to by this book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or metonymy, [were all] buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can and one must, one must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like ours, I mean . . the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the family and/or State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II (132)