Cinema Surface Design
Abstract
The author analyses the matter of the surface: the surface of cinema and of the screen, a space that seems to be flat but at the same time hides and reveals a strange depth, a folded volume. Looking at the first films of the brothers Lumière and other examples of early cinema, and using Tom Gunning’s metaphor of “absorption” and “swallowing,” the author attempts to describe the strange moment of collision between the spectator and the energy of film, the space of cinema. The gesture of this contact is like a swallowing. What awaits the spectator at the projected point of collision is an imaginary depth that opens from the other side of the screen. Lippit explores the question of the cinema as bilateral reality, where the surface is the border between inside and outside. What we get is a fascinating psychology (or maybe rather psychoanalysis) of cinema, of its movement. The early cinema being the forgotten, but important trace.
- The text is a translation of the chapter Cinema Surface Design from the book Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) by Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2005. © 2005 by The University of Minnesota Press.
Due to copyright restrictions the article is available in the print version only.
Keywords:
surface, early cinema, Tom Gunning, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, psychoanalysisReferences
Abraham Nicolas, Maria Torok, Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation, w: The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, tłum. N. T. Rand, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1994, s. 128-129.
Google Scholar
Baudry Jean-Louis, The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema, w: Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, red. Ph. Rosen, tłum. J. Andrews, B. Augst, Columbia University Press, New York 1986, s. 310.
Google Scholar
Bazin André, Painting and Cinema, w: What is Cinema?, tłum. H. Gray, University of California Press, Berkeley 1967, s. 166.
Google Scholar
Benjamin Walter, Dzieło sztuki w dobie reprodukcji technicznej, w: tenże, Twórca jako wytwórca, tłum. J. Sikorski, Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, Poznań 1975, s. 88.
Google Scholar
Burch Noël, A Primitive Mode of Representation? w: Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, red. T. Elsaesser, A. Barker, British Film Institute, London 1990, s. 220-221.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781838710170.0022
Google Scholar
Deleuze Gilles, Painting Forces, w: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, tłum. D. W. Smith, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2003, s. 48-54.
Google Scholar
Deleuze Gilles, The Logic of Sense, red. C. V. Boundas, tłum. M. Lester, Ch. Stivale, Columbia University Press, New York 1990, s. 9, 93, 103-104, 125, 155-156, 199, 203, 208, 211, 213, 217, 221, 223.
Google Scholar
Dickson William Kennedy-Laurie, Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kinetophonograph, Museum of Modern Art, New York 2000, s. 43.
Google Scholar
Dulac Germaine, Istota kina – wizualizacja myśli, tłum. I. Dembowski, w: Europejskie manifesty kina. Antologia, red. A. Gwóźdź, Wiedza Powszechna, Warszawa 2002, s. 170-178.
Google Scholar
Dulac Germaine, Visual and Anti-visual Films, w: The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, red. P. Adams, Sitney, tłum. R. Lamberton, Anthology Film Archives, New York 1987, s. 31, 32, 34.
Google Scholar
Freud Sigmund, Człowiek imieniem Mojżesz a religia monoteistyczna, tłum. A. Ochocki, J. Prokopiuk, Wydawnictwo KR, Warszawa 1994, s. 117.
Google Scholar
Freud Sigmund, Nieświadomość, tłum. M. Poręba, w: Zofia Rosińska, Freud, Wiedza Powszechna, Warszawa 1993.
Google Scholar
Freud Sigmund, Poza zasadą przyjemności, tłum. J. Prokopiuk, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa 1994, s. 22-26, 70-71.
Google Scholar
Freud Sigmund, The Ego and the Id, w: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tłum. J. Strachey, Hogarth, London 1961, s. 26.
Google Scholar
Fried Michael, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1980, s. 50-51.
Google Scholar
Gunning Tom, An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator, w: Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, red. L. Braudy, M. Cohen, Oxford University Press, New York 1999, s. 819-820, 822, 826-827, 829.
Google Scholar
Gunning Tom, An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film, w: Film before Griffith, red. J. Fell, University of California Press, Berkeley 1983, s. 355-366.
Google Scholar
Kittler Friedrich A., Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, tłum. G. Winthrop-Young, M. Wutz, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1999, s. 115.
Google Scholar
Kracauer Siegfried, Teoria filmu. Wyzwolenie materialnej rzeczywistości, tłum. W. Wertenstein, Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, Warszawa 1975, s. 69.
Google Scholar
Lewin Bertram, Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen, „Psychoanalytic Quarterly” 1946, nr 15, s. 419-443.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1946.11925652
Google Scholar
Marks Laura U., The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Duke University Press, Durham 2000.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381372
Google Scholar
Marks Laura U., Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002, s. 8.
Google Scholar
Merleau-Ponty Maurice, Oko i umysł: szkice o malarstwie, tłum. S. Cichowicz, słowo/obraz terytoria, Gdańsk 1996, s. 33, 50-51.
Google Scholar
Musser Charles, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, University of California Press, Berkeley 1990, s. 38.
Google Scholar
Niver Kemp R., The Biograph Bulletins, 1896-1908, Locare Research Group, Los Angeles 1971, s. 27.
Google Scholar
Sobchack Vivian, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, Ungar, New York 1987, s. 256.
Google Scholar
Authors
Akira Mizuta Lippitkwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
University of Southern California United States
Profesor na Uniwersytecie Południowej Kalifornii (School of Cinematic Arts, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures). Współpracuje także z wydziałem Media Studies na Josai International University w Japonii. Autor książek Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000) i Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005). Kończy pracę nad kilkoma książkami: o współczesnym kinie japońskim, o kinie i widmowości, o twórczości Davida Lyncha.
Statistics
Abstract views: 40License
Copyright (c) 2009 Akira Mizuta LippitThe author grants the publisher a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY 4.0) to use the article in Kwartalnik Filmowy, retains full copyright, and agrees to identify the work as first having been published in Kwartalnik Filmowy should it be published or used again (download licence agreement). The journal is published under the CC BY 4.0 licence. By submitting an article, the author agrees to make it available under this licence.
In issues from 105-106 (2019) to 119 (2022) all articles were published under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. During this period the authors granted a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY-ND 4.0) to use their article in „Kwartalnik Filmowy”, retained full copyright, and agreed to identify the work as first having been published in our journal should it be published or used again.
