Cinematic Apparatus Reexamined
- Xiaoman Chen
- Aug 28, 2019
- 17 min read
“Something changes between 22 March and 28 December 1895. Between the scientific presentation and the start of commercial exploitation, the screen is fixed in its definitive place. The spectators are no longer set on either side of a translucent screen but have been assigned their position in front of the image which unrolls before them—cinema begins (Heath, 1976).”
For most audience, cinema is just cinema, the place for watching motion pictures in the dark with other anonymous strangers. What they do not notice, as cinematic apparatus theorists would suggest, are the fixed geometric mechanism they are in and invisible associations with it (Elsaesser 2011). Different from classic film theory which deems that cinema is to render the reality of the world, cinematic apparatus theory is less reactionary by illustrating what exactly happened to the audience when they are watching films in the cinema. In this sense, cinema as apparatus would combines two concepts: l’appareil, the basic technological machinery for recording and reproducing sound and images; and le dispositif, the basic psychological, social and ideological machinery that informs the spectator’s relationship with the film (Lefebvre & Van den Oever, 2014).
Throughout its life of over 120 years, cinema as an apparatus runs the risk of continually adapting its model to emerging media technologies. However, what traditional apparatus theory did not expect is technological changes would ultimately overturn the basic rules previously set of “being a cinema”.
Rewind: From Marx to Lacan
Before entering cinematic apparatus theory, first we need to go back to Karl Marx to talk about ideology. Cinema, he would say, produces particular products which are manufactured within a given system of economic relations and involving labor to produce. A certain number of workers, which in this case are filmmakers, work on transforming the product into a commodity, possessing exchange value, which is realized by the sale of tickets and contracts, and governed by the laws of the market. The economic base determines the ideas to comprise its superstructure so that ultimately, as a result of being a material product, it is also an ideological product of the capital system. For Marx, ideology is a camera obscura, a distorting lens. It is being used by the power holders to make the rest share the thoughts according to their interests trying to keep themselves in control (Marx, 1965). The superstructure legitimates the base by certain means: religion, politics, education, family… none of which is directly related to the production in society. Max Horkheimer takes a closer look at those dehumanizing institutions and suggests that culture surpass all those above, becoming the new opium for the masses because of industrialization (Horkheimer, 1972). Cinema, as one of those cultural institutions, has been used to reveal dominant ideologies as natural, unquestionable, and desirable. These ideologies, however, are not imposed by cinema on the viewers. It is given by the hidden machinery of cinema.
The specific way of cinematic ideological representation can be referred to a key term in Louis Althusser: “interpellation”. It explains how individuals perceive the world from a specific position, in a capitalist setting with a bourgeois point-of-view. In cinema, the spectator is interpellated into a fixed position and follows the dominant perspective as directed by Althusser’s so-called Ideological State Apparatus. Different from Repression State Apparatus, Ideological State Apparatus functions on individuals’ value orientation not by coercion but in a gentle, nonviolent, unconscious way. As Althusser defines it more precisely: “Ideologies are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects, which work fundamentally on men by a process they do not understand. What men express in their ideologies is not their true relation to their conditions of existence, but how they react to their conditions of existence, which presupposes a real relationship and an imaginary relationship.” The word “imaginary” thereof is borrowed from Jaques Lacan’s famous “mirror stage”.
In Lacan's view, the reflection of ideology on reality can be divided into two stages: the imaginary and the symbolic. During the infancy when human development of cognitive organs is incomplete, she observes the image of herself as whole through the mirror. Because of the immaturity of this observation, the self-image is considered to be a perfect form, the ideal “I”. This stage is “the imaginary”. When the child grows to the stage where she begins to learn language, her consciousness is gradually incorporated into the existing social normative ideology system based on language and starts to recognize her own fragmented, chaotic body. The second stage is “the symbolic” (Lacan, 2014). For Althusser, the ideology cannot simply be attributed to the mirror image of the material reality, or the social form, but an imagination of the existence (Althusser, 2006). When Jean-Louis Baudry introduced this theory to film studies, he further strengthened Althusser's idea that ideology is not merely an imagination of reality, but an illusion of reality (Baudry, 1970).
In “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus", Baudry analogizes watching a motion picture to looking upon a mirror. Cinema creates a huge dark room for the spectators for straight-forward gaze. Spectators in the room are “chained, captured, or captivated (Baudry, 1970)”. The camera ends up somewhere in between an “objective reality”, subject to the conscious mind of the operator, who then imbues the final product with an ideological value through their use of framing, perspective, lens, and many other aspects of mise-en-scene and montage. The enormous screen reproduces the mirror stage by allowing for the illusory constitution of the subject. Spectators, the subjects themselves, recombine and identify the information in the image and then assimilate those images on the mirror with their own understandings and psychological expectations for the reality—but not the reality per se (Baudry, 1970). It is also what Christian Metz’ identification indicates. Identification consists of mainly two phases: the act of looking to the images on the screen and the spectator’s identification with the characters on the screen. Metz, with the influence of Sigmund Freud and Lacan’s mirror stage, also proposed that the reason film is a popular art because of its ability to be both an imperfect reflection of reality and a method to delve into the conscious dream state (Metz, 1982).
The dream-like effect partly explains why people during the Great Depression (1929-1939) would keep giving their hard-earned money to the cinema. Through the silver screen that presented bourgeois dreams weaved by Hollywood, people forgot the high unemployment, bankruptcy and war in the outside world. Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo demonstrates this tricky self-deception by toying with the essence of reality and fantasy. “The mystery is that even if we know that it’s only staged, that it’s a fiction, it still fascinates us. That’s the fundamental magic of film. You witness a certain seductive scene, then you are shown that it’s just a fake, stage machinery behind, but you are still fascinated by it. Illusion persists. There is something real in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it.” (Zizek, 2006) Though possessing an extremely volatile life form due to the protean technological landscape, one thing that never changes in cinematic apparatus is its purpose for creating the dream state and hallucinatory reality.
Play: Spectatorship in Changes
“Cinema is an invention without a future”, Antoine Lumière claimed. As the most complex and collaborative medium, cinema apparatus has been in identity crisis since it was born by being “transformed by”, or “lost in” protean landscape of new media technologies (Friedberg, 1997). Most important identity crises need to be traced back to pre-digital age, notably when television and zapper took control the condition of spectatorship.
Between 1947 to 1953, the population of suburbs began to grow. Since those newly built areas lacked movie theatres as well as public transportation, people showed increasing interests in low-cost, domestic entertainment. Then television programs found them. The coming into stage of television made cinema truly face the battle with this long-time rival. Because of the popularity of television, during the 1950s movie theatres shuttered, once mighty studios closed, and some great Hollywood filmmakers stopped making films. The apparition of television cornered cinema apparatus into a new stage of identity crisis (Blakemore, 2019).
As we can tell from our current time, film industries did find a way to survive this battle. Film and television are now closer together than ever before. The current drive of this integration of film and television by media conglomerates is not something new but with a historical precedent. The advent of network television broadcasting in the 1940s provided Hollywood with its real competition for American’s leisure time. Big studios such as Warner Bros., The Walt Disney Company, etc. quickly sought to engaged in television for actual programming given that it was hard to convince people to put attention away from a cheap medium right in their living rooms. It is also undeniable that television along with the new delivery system of video, cable and satellite has become an extraordinary vehicle of advertisements of films to an ever-growing audience (Rossellini, 1977). Till now, in Europe for instance, film production has largely depended on television as a major source of funding and revenue. Indeed, television once put film industries on a brink of death but to some extent it also ensures its survival (Gaudreault, 2015).
Nevertheless, in the view of apparatus theory, the migration from big screens to small screens in domestic space has always been a huge threat to cinematic experience. Screen is the mirror for spectators to identify, to encounter with their fascinations. Dream-like state, illusion, fantasy…everything in cinema begins with that moment when people took movies into themselves, when they teared out of empathy or ducked for cover as the murderer was moving toward them. All those happens through the screen, an indispensable part of hidden mechanism of cinema. The higher the first number in the aspect ratio, the more impressive the spectators are going to feel (Mitchell, 2018). The mirror situation cannot be more fitting to television than a cinematic screen with a 1.37 : 1 ratio or even greater. In wake of the invention of its potential rival, television, trying to keep exclusiveness in cinematic experience, widescreen processes were developed by major Hollywood studios alongside sound in the early 1930s. Due to the Great Depression when studios cut back needless expense, it was not until 1953 that wider aspect ratios were used again to fightback television, e.g. Fox Grandeur.
Analyzing the history of cinematic apparatus theory, it can be argued that the theory was first and foremost designed to emphasize the difference of spectatorship between these two media forms (Verstraten, 2008). In cinema, the audience are positioned on their seats, so they are hardly given any other choices but take in the audio-visual content presented by a set of apparatus. Television, on the contrary, needs to attract viewers’ attention constantly in that most of the time televisions are placed in the public space where viewers are free to move and to choose activities other than watching programs on the screen. The factor to make this difference, once again, is the screen size. In discussion of science fiction, people are fascinated with those “Big Dumb Objects” for its mysterious, unknown and immense power. Similarly, this power occurs when the big screen overwhelms the audience in the dark. According to Metz, the dream state where audience reside in during a movie leave them immobile (Metz, 1982). Thereof the environment they are positioned is to make sure that their dream states would happen.
Based on comparison analysis above, these two media were designed for different purposes in terms of viewing experience. While viewers can attend a movie with a bunch of anonymous others, the way the cinema is built still makes watching movie a solitary experience. An experience that can enables viewers to immerse themselves in the amplified details, takes away their concepts of time, and leads to the dream-like realm. Television, by contrast, gives audience a shared experience (Vielen, 2018). The environment of television allows for distraction so that television programs need to grasp the audience’s attention within short time by, for example, a relatively rapid pacing in editing, a regular time schedule by which each program would not last too long. The fact that the increasing popularity of television has irreversibly altered the audience’ viewing habits and lowered their patience threshold, in turn, influenced how motion pictures tell stories. Movies began to show features previously prescribed to television programs: high-speed, dynamic, entertaining. The solitary experience in cinema has been more a shared one; stories that cinema told showed early signs of shifting its gears from the narrative to image attractions (Vielen, 2018).
At the early stage of television, one could still say that television was not the right medium to present motion pictures especially when they are, Andrei Tarkovski’s for instance, since his movies are mostly slow, and the audience would easily lose attention in a public space full of distractions. Rather, people would expect a cinematic experience in a dark quiet environment and an enormous screen for movies like Tarkovski’s which perfectly present “beautifully crafted work that suffers from dwelling too much on the visual and aural qualities of its landscape and milieu” (James, 2010). Because of the existence of cinematic apparatus--widescreen, stereo sound around, and film projector functioning behind--spectators achieve the sense of ceremony in awareness of being positioned in a powerful fantasy-making machine. That is the point of apparatus theory used to distinguish cinema from nontheatrical medium such as television. In “Decay of Cinema”, Susan Sontag expressed her concern that by the end of 20th century, cinema was becoming a decant art form, a re-combinatory medium for commercial entertainment. Cinema is not that special anymore. It is true when she said “perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia -- the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired was, however, special (Sontag, 1996).” Supposing there is a The Godfather type of movie on cinema, telling a gangsta family history in slow narrative without any strong sensory stimulations, it is hard to imagine young people today would buy tickets for it, sit three hours long and make it the highest grossing film of all time.
For all that, the apparition of television was part of the factor that makes basic cinematic apparatus in disuse. What dramatically redefines how movie spectatorship could be is a new fantasy-creating technique right before our eyes: digital technology. Motion pictures are undergoing this digital revolution that may have more profound impacts than the introduction of sound, color, and television. Movies nowadays are either partly or entirely digital constructions that are created with computers and eventually retrieved from our drives or streamed to large or small screens of our portable devices (Belton, 2014). The coming stage of digital age transforms filmmaking from production to post production, through high definition video and computer-generated imagery in amateur budgeted videos as well as Hollywood blockbusters laden with visual effects (Vielen, 2018).
In terms of cinematic spectatorship, digital technology redefines how immersive a theatrical experience could be. It satisfies the spectator’s trill-seeking aspect by fully utilizing the large screen as a canvas for presenting digital hallucinatory scenarios (Vielen, 2018). To some extent cinema still owns its purpose as apparatus for creating haunting memories but by shifting its gears from narrating to making audio-visual spectacles or combining them both. Jan Simons already likened modern Hollywood blockbusters with roller-coaster, describing that movie watching experience is more like going on a roller coaster (Simons 2002). The box office hits of all time would tell how audience are fascinated with roller-coaster effects: Avatar, Avengers: Endgame, Titanic, Star Wars: The Force Awakens… Top 100 all remind more of their stunning visual effects rather than narratives. The discussion upon whether cinema should be more praised and advertised for tis technological aspects than for its ability to tell stories has lasted for long. According to Tom Gunning, cinema of attractions characterizes pre-1908 filmmaking practices. Spectators did not come to see individual films but instead the machines that projected them: the Cinematographe, the Vitascope and the Biograph (Gunning, 1990). After a satisfying sensory feast, they probably made same comments as nowadays people do on IMDB: dazzling, awesome, striking, surreal, etc.
Nevertheless, even though digital technology has indeed upgraded theatrical experience to a brand-new level, it meanwhile discards “theatre” as a medium to delivery motion pictures. If there was still a chance that the introduction of television did not fully deprive the cinema’s identity as apparatus in that people were not given any media choices for movies, then the coming stage of digital technology trying to make it by negating the cinematic experience itself. As once the inhabitant of a theatre where motion pictures have been displayed, cinema of digital time has migrated to various sizes of small screens of nontheatrical platforms. Motion pictures are increasingly consumed privately or semi-privately on small screens ranging from television sets to portable devices. Bloomberg reported that movie theater attendance in the US and Canada in 2017 fell to its lowest point since at least 1992 largely because of the threats from streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, etc. The movie-going experience has clearly devalued by the rise of streaming services, which construct current digital cinema apparatus—meaning no projector/film, no fixed position for the gaze, no enormous screen, and no stereo sound systems—but a “blackbox” of data transmission and signal conversion that puts every heavy set of physical apparatus mentioned above in an unnecessary position. Previous configuration of technical machinery is diminished into a combination of small screen as an interface with a handful of speakers. Immersive theatrical experience has been replaced by the mere act of watching and hearing; light and sound is translated by zeros and ones.
“The recent thorny issue of Netflix, which favors a digital release over the theatrical experience, has divided the French cinema industry”, Screen Daily reported on 22 February 2019. The open letter written by French Association of Arthouse Cinemas challenged the decision by Joel Coen and Alfonso Cuarón to release their works via Netflix, one of which, ROMA, won three Oscars two days after the letter being republished. Filmmaker Stephen Spielberg also asserted in March that he would petition the Academy to ban Netflix movies from Oscar contention and declared he was a “firm believer that movie theatres need to be around forever”. Radical transformation of movie distribution ultimately returns us to the consideration of basic cinematic apparatus and its essential role in stabilizing the identity of cinema as a technology. If a motion picture theatre has no longer been a prerequisite for current cinematic apparatus, then what is? Is there a point where we must acknowledge that cinema is no longer cinema?
Forward: Beyond Apparatus
“The end of cinema”, a significant essay of cinematic apparatus theory written by Anne Friedberg, tries to apply the basic model of cinematic apparatus to emerging new media technologies. For Friedberg, transformations of apparatus have decayed the essence of cinema. No matter it was television or digital devices, as discussed in this article by illustrating the case of CD-ROM, all of them erode the basic identities of being a cinematic apparatus. Screens merely serve as “displayed and delivery formats”. Films are “storage medium” in multiple forms like videotapes, hard disk drives, and inter frame compression. Spectators are simply “users with an interface” (Friedberg, 2010). Admittedly, some physical identities of cinema are becoming the mechanical past: 70mm film, celluloid, film projector, something that most of Millennials, Gen Z and other digital natives cannot even tell what is. Technology has developed way beyond imagination. If we could still tell a few cinematic features from television, for instance, in terms of being a traditional apparatus in theatre, such as usually being placed indoors with a fixed seat to watch, then we barely could see anything in common in the case of mobile phone or iPad to be a cinematic apparatus, except the act of watching itself. It seems to be the right time to abandon basic cinematic apparatus model in that it fails to predict how future technological changes would impinge on cinema as an apparatus.
However, there was still a reason for apparatus theorists spending so much efforts studying on how different screen sizes, spectator’s positions, or film formats would influence on viewer’s film watching experience. Imagine X was watching ROMA in cinema while Y watched ROMA on his phone on the metro back home. Did they watch the same movie? Yes, theoretically. But no. The mobile phone as a medium of motion pictures gave the new meaning to what Siegfried Kracauer called “consumption of a state of distraction” (Kracauer, 1987). Y could not even hear the lines clearly in a public space or recognize each character’s face. A in cinema, by comparison, could see every detail on the set of the street in 70’s Mexico City, subtle expressions of characters, the life-size seascape and even hear the quiet breath from the character… all of which led a different story with Y. Clearly, X had a much more immersive dream-like experience. Metz’s identification process could only happen in the scenario of X. The contradiction of the whole issue of Netflix releasing ROMA and other films and running for Oscar or Golden Palm lies here: those movies were born natives in Netflix, which means most people’s first time to watch those movies would be through small screens. If not for qualifying ROMA for awards consideration in the first place, there was a possibility that Netflix wouldn’t arranged theatrical releases at the very beginning, then the viewers would never get a cinematic experience and truly appreciate its value as a work of audiovisual art. Debuting movies online essentially goes against apparatus theory in a way that those platforms are not qualified as the medium to offer the experience which could be called “cinema”. Regardless what the specific technology transformation would be, to a certain extent, our experience of watching a motion picture will define what a cinema is: “big screen with the projection of life-size or even bigger images before audience; everything else is movies (Belton, 2014).” Cinema, after all, is more than just an apparatus but an experience of the apparatus. This is what never goes outdated in apparatus theory.
Nonetheless, experience does not come from apparatus only, but also something besides apparatus. While Susan Sontag lamented cinema for becoming a decant art form, a brazen combinatory medium, she suggested the DNA of cinema lying in its special narrative (Sontag, 1996). Hopefully, beyond basic cinematic apparatus, arguments upon how cinema, as an exclusive artistic expression, tells stories would give another part of the answer.
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