Nicholas Rombes - 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory

10/40/70

For Nicholas Rombes, every film is an oracle. In 10/40/70, he proposes a new method of divination: stop the film at arbitrary points, and give a careful account of what you see. The result may be an intense formal analysis, or a new appreciation of narrative subtleties, or a kind of emotional weather report, or a dense train of subjective memories and associations. But in every case, Rombes uncovers unsuspected depths, and show us cinema in a strange new light.

Steven Shaviro, author of Post Cinematic Affect and Doom Patrols

With his 10/40/70 essays, Nicholas Rombes breaks the habitual cycles of film criticism, forcing himself to approach familiar films from odd angles. He delegates to chance the task of selecting a films defining images, and the results are a series of revealing observations about movies caught unawares; often, he finds new points of entry to films we all think we know inside out. 10/40/70 can find a films vulnerable spots, those moments we rarely notice, whose significance we only gather in freeze-framed close readings. Sometimes the images are well known fragments of the iconic scenes that comprise our shared film culture, but more frequently, they are the unsung or incidental pieces that hold a film together, unassuming but always ripe for re-examination. By bringing into focus these triptychs of framegrabs, Rombes finds fresh perspectives on well-known movies, and demonstrates that there may be riches buried in their every frame if we compel ourselves to look.

Dan North, author of Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor

Rombes dives into the self-imposed constraints of his critical project with both feet, and the result is an innovative splash. Arguing that digital desire predated digital cinema, this experiment in film writing pushes readers to re-frame our critical practices and to embrace new cinematic experiences and interpretive acts. We need more books like this.

Julia Leyda, Sophia University, Japan

First published by Zero Books, 2014

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Text copyright: Nicholas Rombes 2013

ISBN: 978 1 78279 140 9

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Nicholas Rombes as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Plagues of Meaning

As for ideas, everyone has them. What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis.

-Jean Baudrillard

In 1931, around the time that Stalin expressed concern that Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet director and theorist, had deserted the Soviet Union during his prolonged absence in Mexico and the United States, Eisensteins essay A Dialectic Approach to Film was published. In cinema, Eisenstein wrote, the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents as an element the greatest difficulty in manipulation. Since that time, as the cinematic frame has become unanchored from its embodiment in nitrate, acetate, and polyester film stock. This is not a nostalgic lament for embodied cinema. Rather it is a question: is it possible, now that films are embodied primarily on mobile screens, to detect in their frames traces of something that was always there, and yet always hidden from view? Having become too abstract to conjure, film as a digital code has also become, paradoxically, more present than ever. It exists everywhere and nowhere. It is always. Today, film never dies.

And neither do we. It has become evermore difficult to escape ourselves; we are reflected and reproduced everywhere, our intentions and desires mirrored across the interwebs, in targeted ads, the ubiquity of ourselves reaching an ever higher-pitched madness. The interpretation of moving imageson television, in the theaterwas once the province of mystery. Elusive, these images were, prior to the advent of the VCR, tricky to capture. In Barthes 1970 essay The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills the grainy, reproduced images from Ivan the Terrible and Battleship Potemkin have an aura that could be said to constitute a fourth meaning: the mystery of the appearance of the film stills on the printed page. By what process did it arrive there? How did Barthes freeze the film long enough to decide which frames to capture? By what process did they make their way from the screen to the page? If the inarticulable third meaning lies in the inside of the fragment of the film still which is taken from the film as a whole, then the fourth meaning lies in the mechanics of the stills reproduction on the page or, today, on the mobile screen.

It could be said that the relentless demystification of the world todaywhether it be through the Large Hadron Collider or WikiLeaks or the sequencing of the genetic codeis simply an accelerated version of what we have always done: attempt to know and control ourselves and our environment. In the realm of cinema studies, even the culture industry pessimists must admit that films today come with a ready-made demystification apparatus. This is partly because, as Robert Ray argues so elegantly in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, audiences themselves have adopted a generally ironic stance towards films for many reasons, but especially because the migration of movies from theatre screens to television in the 1960s (and then to mobile screens in the decades since) has eroded their mythic aura. But this demystification also depends on the ability of even the most technically handicapped users to capture video and film frames, a process which began with VHS-era home viewing technologies and migrated subsequently to DVD and then various web-based video on demand platforms. If part of the aura of film was its fleetingness, the impossible-to-stop movement of images across the screen, the ways in which the audience remembered and mis-remembered certain moments, and the general availability of film which meant that, if you missed seeing it on the big screen then you might never have the opportunity to see it, then this aura has vanished.

And of constraint, imposed from within, what can be said? Oulipo did it. The Dogme 95 movement did it. Fragments are the only form I trust, says the narrator of Donald Barthelmes story See the Moon? In freeing ourselves from our own creative and interpretive tensions, we are inevitably bound more deeply to them. What Claude Levi-Strauss called the deep structure of myth is present in the naming of the myth itself. The breaking of the world into fragments and minutes and binary codes may be, at some level, an impossible, beautiful, failed effort to make it whole again. The minutes 10, 40, and 70selected with little forethought and yet with an eye toward the beginning, middle, and end of a filmalso correspond to ages in life: the ten-, forty-, and seventy-years old.