Three Phantasies of Cinema—Reproduction, Mimesis, Annihilation

Author(s): AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT

Source: Paragraph , November 1999, Vol. 22, No. 3 (November 1999), pp. 213-227
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/43263569

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Three Phantasies of
Cinema - Reproduction, Mimesis,
Annihilation

Among the great expectations of cinema, unfulfilled to the extent it was

anticipated, remains the unrealized dream of a viable three-
dimensionality. The technical advances that characterized the evolution
of cinema during the twentieth century seemed to destine cinema
toward a fantastic state of total representation, a phenomenography of life.
To accomplish this, cinema needed to surpass, at some moment, the limi-
tations of the basic apparatus - screen and projection - and provide a
synthetic experience of the world, not just its reproduction. Cinema
would have to move, at the very least, from the confines of two-
dimensional representation to the plenitude of three-dimensional space.
Stereoscopy came to serve as a focal point for this projection, promising
the transformation of flat cinema into a voluminous supercinema, and
ultimately a form of anti-cinema. The drive to complete cinema, to per-
fect its mimetic capacities, suggested the eventual elimination of cinema
as such. At the end of the twentieth century, a period marked by the
profusion of cinematic images that have, despite their occasional thrust,
remained fundamentally flat, the medium continues to be haunted by its
failure to overcome itself. This article considers the phantasy that has
fuelled the idea of a 3D cinema.
The question of 3D cinema inevitably returns to the very idea of
cinema itself. For 3D cinema externalizes an aspect of cinema already
embedded within the basic apparatus, the illusory representation of
depth. The camera lens, configured according to the principles of linear
perspective, inscribes within the apparatus a longing for depth.1 In
striving to traverse the threshold of two-dimensional representation,
stereoscopic cinema raises certain questions about the boundaries of
cinema, its proper topography. Because the discussions of 3D cinema
have often veered toward the history and theory of optics
(nineteenth-century explorations of stereopsis, techniques of 3D
rendering in film), its relation to genres of excess (horror, soft-porn,
exploitation) and its function as a precursor of new media (virtual real-
ity, interactive media), the persistence of 3D cinema as a recurring but
wishful dream has been elided. That is, although each line of inquiry has

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214 Paragraph

yielded compelling insights into three-dimensional visuality, the

emphases on technique, history, genre and future configurations have
distanced the discourse on 3D cinema from the larger framework of a
theory of cinema.2 The subject of stereoscopy, as Jonathan Crary has
shown in Techniques of the Observer, served as a prominent philosophical
as well as scientific concern during the nineteenth century and contin-
ues, in its newer incarnation as VR (virtual reality), to elicit speculation
about the potential for human beings to interact with synthetic,
image-based environments.3 The basis for these speculations on virtual
subjectivity and artificial space is already contained within the film
apparatus. At work in the apparatus is already the mechanism by which
the spectator comes to assume a central position within the spectacle.
Subjectivity, like film and theater productions, is always staged. 3D cin-
ema can be seen in this light as a kind of tangible phantasy.4
The impulse toward stereoscopic cinema is sustained by a funda-
mental cinematic desire to eliminate the last vestige of the apparatus
from the field of representation, the film screen. Like Bertram Lewin's
dream screen, the film screen maintains a parergonal function, facilitat-
ing the mechanics of representation without intervening as an
element of it.5 The screen remains visible, restricting the phantasma-
goric grasp of cinema to the scopic regime. 3D cinema strives to
restore the objecthood of images and expand visual perception to the
registers of sensual consciousness. In this light, stereoscopic cinema
can be seen not only as a technological extension of flat cinema, a sur-
plus dimension, but as the dimension of its unconscious. 3D cinema
represents the desire to externalize the unconscious of cinema. To
borrow Slavoj Zižek s formulation, 'The Unconscious is outside, not
hidden in any unfathomable depths.'6
3D cinema is unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense because it
exists at once within and without cinema, as parasite and supplement.
While not an essence of cinema, 3D film protects a set of phantasies that
is crucial to the survival of the medium - namely, reproduction, mime-
sis and annihilation. The three phantasies of cinema form in sequence a
kind of phantom history of cinema.

1. Reproduction

The one-hundredth anniversary of cinema, celebrated with fanfare in

1 995, served a number of institutional purposes: it validated an art form,
promoted an industry, established an international canon and endorsed
a narrative of technological and commercial progress. Inadvertently,

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 Three Phantasies of Cinema - Reproduction, Mimesis, Annihilation 215

perhaps, it also conferred upon cinema the status of a body. The recog-
nition of an official birthdate secured the discrete, historical limits of
cinema, which now had a prehistory, a genealogy, an infancy, a dynamic
corporeality, a memory and a finite existence in the world. By defining
the ontology of cinema within history, the medium assumed a genetic
structure. 'Like the embryo in the womb', claims Siegfried Kracauer,
'photographic film developed from distinctly separate components.'7
Cinema had come to occupy a proper history, evolving from the de-
scription of a material (film) to a concept (cinema), from an apparatus to
a world. But even before the maturity of film was recognized by history,
for having a history, the cinematic body had begun to reproduce. 'Im-
ages are born', Antonin Artaud wrote in 1927, 'are derived from one
another purely as images, impose an objective synthesis more penetrat-
ing than any abstraction, create worlds which ask nothing of anyone or
anything.'8 Other bodies appeared from the orifices of cinema, forcing
the adaptation of technological organs to the senses: new dimensions of
speed, sound, color, alternative plastics and electromagnetic and digital
signals evolved from a body that no longer seemed capable of resisting
its own proliferation. These elements effected permanent metamor-
phoses to cinema in the form of sound then color film, celluloid stock,
24-frame projection, TV, 3D, IMAX and so forth. Cinema had, in the
interim of history, become a fertile womb, reproducing itself and ex-
tending its lineage like a virtual genus.
3D cinema was among the bodies reproduced by cinema. Although
stereoscopic photography, animation and projection already existed,
cinema provided a body for its formal manifestation. At work in the
attempts to secure a stereoscopic cinema was the desire to reproduce
the full dimensions of reality, a phantasy that had been inherited from
the era of photography. One line of thought, sometimes referred to as
'total cinema', saw cinema as a project driven by the need to engage and
master the full sensorium. The appearance of 3D cinema offered an
opportunity to bring film closer to that destiny, to touch the site of the
real, as Kracauer imagines, like an 'umbilical cord'.9 Stereoscopy
unleashed a cinema body inextricably bound to the site of its own
reproduction. 3D cinema surfaced as a supplemental body, essential and
foreign to the matrix that engendered it.10
In 1929, Sergei Eisenstein, who later addressed the question of 3D
cinema, spoke first of 'The Fourth Dimension in Cinema'. The fourth
dimension appears, according to Eisenstein, in 'overtonal montage', the
juxtaposition of 'secondary resonances, the so-called overtones and
undertones' of individual shots.1 1 By editing small slivers of information,

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216 Paragraph

'all sorts of aberrations, distortions and other defects', overtonal mon-

tage creates a complex texture that illuminates the 'reflex physiological
essence' of a sequence. 1 2 For Eisenstein, overtonal montage incorporates
cinema as a dynamic other, assuming the properties of a living body
through an essentially genetic process. The metaphors of genetics, physi-
ology and nervous activity that flow throughout Eisenstein's
discourse - what he calls 'creative ecstasy' - already depict the uncanny
nature of cinema, its mimetic capacity. Eisenstein understands cinema as
an essentially biotechnological organism, an electric animal.
The discourse of animality in Eisenstein's language reflects a larger
trend of writings on film during the 1920s. Attempts to dislodge cin-
ema from the grasp of science, industry and art and project it toward life
as such, established, in the idiom of film theory, a preference for the
organic metaphor. (Germaine Dulac, Antonin Artaud and Man Ray,
among others of this period, often deployed an idiom of vitality when
describing the properties of film.) At the same time, a resurgence in 3D
film - from the Teleview devices that appeared in 1921 to the single
strip anaglyphic duo-color formats that advanced throughout the
decade - edged the industry closer to realizing the dream of a fully
embodied cinema.13 From the organic or benign animality of film,
however, developed a more complex organism, one that was capable
of desire, affect, thought and, as with all organisms, the possibility of
extinction. All histories and desires are marked by this finitude.
The history of 3D cinema is remarkable for its ahistoricity. That is to
say, against the progressive idiom that drives historical discourse,
experiments in 3D cinema invariably erupt as amnesic stutters and
lapses. In 1933, for example, Rudolf Arnheim anticipated the advent
of 3D film almost forty years after it had already arrived with the
Lumières' train. Since moving stereoscopic images preceded the
appearance of the cinématographe - -Jules Duboscq's stéréofantascope
(1852), Coleman Sellers's 'kinematoscope' (1863) and William
Friese-Greene's stereoscopic film (1889), among others - the location
of 3D cinema interrupts the teleological narrative of technological,
aesthetic and commercial convergence.14 An invocation of the future
and past, at once anticipatory and nostalgic, 3D cinema dissolves the
materiality of a film history, replacing the chronic linearity of history
with the anachronic force of phantasy. 3D cinema can be seen as a
perpetual phantasy, never fulfilling the scope of its projection. It is
a phenomenon that is compulsively forgotten, neglected and yet
remains always on the verge of returning. 3D cinema can be seen in
this light, as a kind of disaster, to borrow Maurice Blanchot s figure: at

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 Three Phantasies of Cinema - Reproduction , Mimesis , Annihilation 217

once past and still to come. 'Every new development added to the cin-
ema must', André Bazin wrote in 1946, 'paradoxically, take it nearer
and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented.'15

2. Mimesis

The animated and projected stereoscopic image moves cinema closer

to reality, but in so doing participates in the simultaneous foundation
and destruction of the medium. It has never been entirely clear whether
the purpose of cinema - if one exists - is to simulate reality or
virtualize experience. 3D and other expanded cinemas turned the
focus on reproduction in photography and film toward mimesis, from
the reproduction of reality to the duplication of the subject. In 1953, a
boom year for 3D cinema, Morton Heilig, who invented the
'Sensorama Simulator' in 1962, imagined the transformation of film
from a visual medium to a synaesthetic forum. In 'The Cinema of the
Future', Heilig predicts:

Odors will be reduced to basic qualities the way color is into primary colors. The
intensity of these will be recorded on magnetic tape, which in turn will control
the release from vials into the theater s airconditioning system. In time all of the
above elements [sight, sound, smell, touch and taste] will be recorded, mixed, and
projected electronically - a reel of the cinema of the future being a roll of
magnetic tape with a separate track for each sense material.16

'Open yours eyes, listen, smell, and feel', Heilig concludes, 'sense the
world in all its magnificent colors, depth, sounds, odors, and textures -
this is the cinema of the future.' The euphoric tone that characterizes
Heilig's phantasy prefigures the discourse of virtuality, but also that of
annihilation. A cinema that reproduces the entire field of perception
ceases to function as a form of representation. It becomes, instead, a
kind of prosthetic extension, like an eyeglass or skin graft. A mimetic,
total cinema transforms the screen from a perceptual filter to a porous
membrane.
The shift from reproduction to mimesis further reconfigures the
cinema body. No longer static, the mimetic body consumes, revealing a
body, like the one imagined by Artaud, with many orifices. In the
phantasy of stereoscopic cinema, the film screen is transformed from a
site of blockage, an opaque surface against which light is reflected, into a
kind of tissue that .absorbs the spectator into the body of the spectacle.
But never entirely: the subject travels in the spectacle like a foreign
object. By eliminating the delineating function of the screen, stereo-

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218 Paragraph

scopic cinema shifts the terms of representation from a metaphorical to a

métonymie plane. Signs become objects - according to the stereoscopic
phantasy - and cinema collapses into the world. The surrealists imag-
ined this possibility in photography. The superreal photograph renders,
according to Bazin, 'an hallucination that is also a fact'.17 The phantasy is
already contained in photography. Bazin notes the semiotic disruption
that is intrinsic to the photographic image:

The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions
of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored,
no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by vir-
tue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the
reproduction; it is the model.18

While the indelibility of the photographic referent has since come into
question, Bazin s insistence that the reproduction is the model exposes a
mild psychosis peculiar to the discourse of photography: photographic
images erase the lines between sign and referent, subject and object.19 In
essence, to write with light is to replace the opacity of language with
the tactility of things themselves. In the virtual space of photography,
signs and referents are undifferentiated, identical and, to use Gilles
Deleuze s term, 'transversal'.20
The transversali ty of signs and referents has a profound impact on the
ontology of the spectator. Slavoj Zižek speculates on the collapse of
signification and its effect on the constitution of subjectivity:

[I]f the original is its own model, if the thing is its own sign then there is no
positive, actual difference between them, though there must be some blank space
which distinguishes the thing from itself as its own sign, some nonentity, which
produces from the thing its sign - that 'nonentity', that 'pure' difference, is the
subject.21

Where there is no difference, what Zižek calls a 'pure' difference, the

subject appears. The subject is the 'nonentity' that is effected by a sys-
tem of representation and signification that no longer differentiates
between signs and referents. Following the trajectory of Bazin s pho-
tography, which 'derives an advantage from [man's] absence', the
stereoscopic cinema reduces the subject to a trace or a 'fingerprint'.22 In
the (imagined) field of total photographic mimesis, the subject returns
as an absence, as a phantasmatic nonentity that stands at the end of dif-
ference. If the film screen differentiates the space of representation from
the world that surrounds it, then in the elimination of the screen, the
subject assumes this function. The subject of 3D cinema replaces the

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 Three Phantasies of Cinema - Reproduction, Mimesis, Annihilation 219

screen, serving as a cipher between an actuality and virtuality that are

no longer distinguishable.

3. Annihilation

The resistance to 3D cinema is often expressed as a desire to protect the

sanctity of cinema as an art form and, as the locus of that artistry, the film
screen. It may also betray an anxiety toward the aggressive mimetic
drive of embodied, three-dimensional spectacles. Rudolf Arnheim, a
great proponent of the art of cinema and a fierce opponent of 3D cin-
ema, asserts: ťif the film image becomes stereoscopic there is no longer a
plane surface within the confines of the screen, and therefore there can
be no composition of that surface; what remains will be effects that are
also possible on the stage'.23 Screens serve to delineate the world of liv-
ing things from their representation, spectator from spectacle, the
perception of reality from psychosis and the experience of the public
from that of the private. Theater, in the eyes of Arnheim, represents the
end of cinema because it returns cinema to its beginnings and reinte-
grates the differences made possible by the screen into a kind of living
presence.24 Unlike theatrical presence, which is still demarcated in the
traditional theater by the proscenium, stereoscopy achieves its intended
effect when it invades the space of the spectator and engulfs the specta-
tor into the spectacle. The depths of stereoscopy are deeper and more
distant than those of the theater.
By providing the experience of depth, stereoscopic cinema moves
the apparatus closer toward the elimination of screens. As Jonathan
Crary has noted, however, the stereoscopic image is 'planar'.25 What is
destroyed in the stereoscopic image, then, is not the plane as such, only
its singularity. 3D cinema replaces the single plane or screen with a
series of screens that forms a deep space. A vertiginous multiplicity of
planes invades the stereoscopic experience, effecting not only a
perceptual swirl but also a sense of what Crary, following the inventor
of the stereoscope in the 1830s, Charles Wheatstone, calls 'tangibil-
ity'.26 The desire to reproduce reality, mechanically or photochemically,
carries with it the possibility of reconfiguring the spectator into a sen-
sor. In the case of stereoscopy, the addition of depth activates other areas
of perception, including the tactile sense (of space). The negotiation
between opticality and tactility, in turn, dissembles the illusory
organization of the subject. 'Stereoscopic relief or depth', insists Crary,
'has no unifying logic or order.'27 He continues:

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220 Paragraph

The reading or scanning of a stereo image is an accumulation of differences in the

degree of optical convergence, thereby producing a perceptual patchwork of
different intensities of relief within a single image. Our eyes follow a choppy and
erratic path into its depth: it is an assemblage of local zones of three-
dimensionality, zones imbued with a hallucinatory clarity but when taken
together never coalesce into a homogeneous field. Part of the fascination of these
images is due to this immanent disorder, to the fissures that disrupt its
i 28
coherence. i

If the stereoscopic im
ing the disorientation
of transversal reality
ordering the world,
volume of stimulatio
the subject from itself
into a state of overwh
ema can be understoo
kind of sublime nause
of reality.
The anxiety that Arnheim names, the imminent collapse of cinema
in 3D, threatens more than the destruction of an art form. The imag-
ined annihilation of cinematic flatness, the transgression of the screen,
would not simply restore film to theater: it would force the mutation
of cinema into something closer to Artaud's hybrid cine-theater.
Artaud's cinema - driven by involuntary convulsions, exemplified by
laughter - elicits a provocation from the extremities of the real. Artaud
described it in 1927:

A cinema which is studded with dreams, and which gives you the physical sensa-
tion of pure life, finds its triumph in the most excessive sort of humor. A certain
excitement of objects, forms, and expressions can only be translated into the con-
vulsions and surprises of a reality that seems to destroy itself with an irony in
which you can hear a scream from the extremities of the mind.30

For Artaud, the convulsive effects of humor determine the potential of

a cinema that provides the 'sensation of pure life'. In the cinema of pure
life, reality erupts in convulsions, like an irrepressible nausea, madness,
laughter or scream. The reality that explodes in Artaud s cinema is
marked by an irony that ultimately 'destroys itself'. A cinema that
unleashes the convulsive force of pure life must destroy itself (as art) but
also, conversely, destroy reality. On the ends of irony, Paul de Man
asserts:

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 Three Phantasies of Cinema - Reproduction, Mimesis, Annihilation 221

Far from being a return to the world, the irony to the second power or 'irony of
irony' that all true irony at once has to engender asserts and maintains its fictional
character by stating the continued impossibility of reconciling the world of
fiction with the actual world.31

Irony leads to madness, which erupts in laughter.32 For de Man, irony is

a response to the realization that two irreducible selves, one empirical,
the other fictional, can never be merged. The subject is always doubled,
separated from itself. Irony functions in a transversal mode, connecting
those selves without ever unifying them. In Artaud s vision of cinema
irony, the impossible unity takes place between things and their photo-
graphs. It also leads to a type of madness, an extremity of the mind,
manifested by laughter. Like Baudelaire's laughter, which originates in
and returns to the grotesque, Artaud s ironic cinema lacerates the
smooth equilibrium of the surface and exposes its teeth.33
The rhetoric of laughter and the grotesque converges on 3D cinema.
The sensational features that define the history of stereoscopic cinema,
the promise of a lurid catharsis, can be seen, to borrow Baudelaire's
phrase, as a form of the 'absolute comic' , that is, the grotesque.34 3D cin-
ema is, in the idiom of its detractors, grotesque, a mutilation of the placid
Apollonion surfaces of film art. The fantastic and pornographic allure of
3D cinema activates the erotic registers that are repressed by conven-
tional 2D cinema, reintroducing the full regime of the body. Kerry
B rougher, curator of the 1996 exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles, 'Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors', locates a
comic moment in Weegee s image of 3D film spectators kissing, Lovers at
the Movies, Times Square , N.Y. (circa 1940). 'In one photograph of the
audience at a 3D movie', he writes, 'Weegee captures the comical
embrace between two lovers who, ironically, try to use the dark of the
theater and the spectacle on the screen as a shield from the gaze of prying
eyes.'35 The comedy and irony that Brougher cites arise from the
assumption that movie theaters provide a cover to shield spectators from
the visible world, an opportunity to blend into the shadows that pervade
the theater. Irony is a rhetorical mode of dissimulation, one that allows
the subject to vanish, to hide from an other but also from itself. 3D cin-
ema does not offer the same cover that flat films provide. One can argue
the opposite: 3D films effect a kind of enhanced visibility, not of the
spectacle but of the spectator. Or rather, by eliminating the screen frame,
the entire world is rendered filmic and the spectator is inscribed in the
spectacle as a dimension of it, perhaps, even, as its most visible feature.
What is comical in Weegee's photograph is the manner in which the

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222 Paragraph

kissing spectators have been projected into the spectacle, thrown back
and up into the scene of the real: vomited, as it were. The kissing specta-
tors have projected themselves into the spectacle, he is wearing his 3D
glasses; their kiss, like laughter and nausea, is transmitted at the mouth.
The mouth is also the organ that regulates taste. In the hierarchy of
human senses that Heilig offers, taste is apportioned only 1% (sight
70%, hearing 20%, smell 5%, touch 4%) . Taste, and in the case of 3D cin-
ema bad taste, figures as the most distant dimension of the senses. The
mouth, an exemplary grotto, not only performs the expressive tasks of
kissing (Weegee), laughing (Baudelaire), screaming (Artaud) and gag-
ging (nausea), but also serves, according to Nicolas Abraham and Maria
Torok, as the principal orifice for certain rituals of mourning, especially
incorporation.36 4 Incorporation , Abraham and Torok explain, ' entails the
fantasmatic destruction of the act by means of which metaphors become possible:
the act of putting the original oral void into words'.37 In the melancholic
mouth, words (figures) are made things, 'antimetaphors' that participate
in the 'active destruction of representation'. 38 In this view, the mouth is
the origin of language, the place where language is produced by the
body (as voice) but also a place before language, the site of a profound
and originary absence of language.39 The mouth returns, in the
phantasmatic scenario described by Abraham and Torok, to a time
before language, when things and not words traversed the mouth. The
mouth facilitates a direct, transversal passage between the body and the
world. In the mouth, the cinema phantasy of exceeding language by
making signs tangible is itself exceeded in the ritual of mourning,
which makes tangible things edible.
As a condition of its technological and aesthetic progress, cinema has
always anticipated its own disappearance. As Arnheim understood, a
perfected cinema would be deeply anti-cinematic. Three phantasies
that sustain cinema - reproduction, mimesis, annihilation - drive it
toward extinction, turning it before the fact into an exemplary lost
object. The desire for a 3D cinema that seeks to eliminate the last mate-
rial vestige of the apparatus, the screen, can be seen as a symptom of
such unacknowledged mourning. 3D cinema makes visible the end
of cinema as such - an end marked by the disappearance of cinema as
well as its completion. Like the process of demetaphorization that
Abraham and Torok describe as a condition of incorporation, 3D
cinema disfigures the economies of representation that make cinema
possible. Flat images become tangible, voluptuous. The spectators
senses shift from the registers of basic audiovisuali ty to more complex
perceptions of depth, but also to nausea and a kind of primal orali ty. The

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 Three Phantasies of Cinema - Reproduction, Mimesis, Annihilation 223

spectator is incorporated, literally swallowed by the spectacle that is no

longer bound to the surface of the screen. Embedded in the dream of a
total cinema, of total reproduction, is the wish to experience what
Artaud calls the 'physical sensation of pure life'. To taste the end of cin-
ema. In this sense the phantasy of 3D cinema is crucial to the survival of
cinema and, regardless of any technological advances, 3D cinema will
always remain an unfulfilled promise of a future cinema.

AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT

San Francisco State University

NOTES

This article is based on an earlier text that appeared in French tran

trois dimensions du cinéma - reproduction, mimétisme, annihilat
French version was published in a special issue of Î895 (October 199
to 3D cinema. The present version, published for the first time in E
been modified substantially, and is marked by a slight change in th
author wishes to thank Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Philippe- Alain M
Christopher Johnson for their contributions to the text.
1 Jacques Lacan connects the geometry of perspective - its ev
depth - with the construction of subjectivity. He writes: 'the g
dimension enables us to glimpse how the subject who concerns us is
manipulated, captured, in the field of vision' (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fu
Concepts of Psycho- Analysis, edited by Jacques- Alain Miller, translat
Sheridan (New York, Norton, 1977), p. 92). In Lacan s reading, the su
made apparent, that is engendered, only when it is ensnared by
space. For a more sustained discussion of the relationship betwee
tive and subjectivity, see Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective,
by John Goodman (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1994), pp. 114-40.
2 A notable exception is Jean-Claude Lebensztejn s 'Rétroject
(October 1997), 29-46), which weaves an analysis of 3D genre fil
theory of phantasmatic subjectivity. Lebensztejn describes the
poster for Rudolph Maté s Second Chance , a 3D film from 1953. Th
presents two images of an embrace between the principal characters
film. In each image, one figure is erased, alternately, opening a
the spectator's identification. The caption reads: 'THIS IS YOL/I'
3 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in
teenth Century (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1990). 'The stereoscope
Crary, 'is also inseparable from early nineteenth-century debates ab
perception of space, which were to continue unresolved indefinitely
Concerning the effect of the stereoscope on nineteenth-centur
tions of reality, Crary concludes: 'No other form of representat

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224 Paragraph

nineteenth century had so conflated the real with the optical' (p. 124). For a
rigorous analysis of E tienne-Jules Marey s experiments with stereoscopy and
movement-images, see Michel Frizot, 'Le temps de l'espace. Les
préoccupations stéréognosiques de Marey' in 1895 (October 1997), 59-81.
Linking Marey's interest in the analysis of movement, his
'chronophotography', to the need to creation of photographic space, Frizot
asserts: 'Les chronophotographies (bien visibles) sont les produits projectifs
de l'action de la fonction-temps sur un espace virtuel' (81) ('Chronophoto-
graphs are the projective products of the action of the time function on a
virtual space'). In Frizot s analysis, movement, depth and synthetic space are
already at work in Marey's chronophotography.
4 Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis define a phantasy as an 'imaginary scene in
which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfilment of a wish (in the
last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted to a greater or
lesser extent by defensive [perceptual] processes' ( The Language of Psychoanal-
ysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, Norton, 1973),
p. 314). The psychoanalytic language of phantasy is already infused with the
idiom of theater and film. 'Even where they can be summed up in a single
sentence', write Laplanche and Pontalis, 'phantasies are still scripts [scénarios]
of organised scenes which are capable of dramatization - usually in a visual
form.' (p. 318). Or: 'It is not an object that the subject imagines and aims at, so
to speak, but rather a sequence in which the subject has his own part to play and
in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible.' (ibid.).
5 Bertram Lewin developed the idea of a 'dream screen', a blank surface on
which the dreamer projects her/his dream in the 1940s. The dream screen
makes dreaming possible and is, as such, a part of the dream's apparatus, always
present, although not always seen. It is derived from the film screen. See
Bertram Lewin 's 'Sleep, and the Mouth and the Dream Screen', Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 15 (1946), 41 9-43 and 'Inferences from the Dream Screen' , Interna-
tional Journal of Psychoanalysis 29 (1948), 224-431. Derrida develops a similar
logic with regard to the frame that makes works of art visible, possible, with
what he calls the 'parergon' (Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting , translated
by GeoffBennington and Ian Mcleod (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
1987)).
6 Slavoj Zižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London, Verso, 1997), p. 3.
7 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New
York, Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 27.
8 Antonin Artaud, 'Cinema and Reality', in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings ,
edited by Susan Sontag, translated by Helen Weaver (New York, Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1976), p. 152.
9 Kracauer uses this expression in Theory of Film (p. 71), suggesting that
photographic images are bound to the world by an umbilical cord.
10 This use of the term supplement follows Derrida s conceptualization of it,
most thoroughly in Of Grammatology ; translated by Gayatri Chakravorty

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 Three Phantasies of Cinema - Reproduction , Mimesis , Annihilation 225

Spivak (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). In the lan-
guage of the parergon and the work of art, Derrida writes: 'A parergon comes
against, beside, and in addition to the ergon , the work done [fait] , the fact [le
fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within
the operation, from a certain outside. Neither simply outside nor simply in-
side. Like an accessory that one is obliged to welcome on the border.' ( The
Truth in Painting , p. 54). In this light, 3D cinema can be seen as a parergon or
supplement.
11 Sergei Eisenstein, The Fourth Dimension in Cinema , in ò. M. Eisenstein:
Selected Works, Volume I, Writings, 1922-34 , edited and translated by Richard
Taylor (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 182.
12 Ibid., p. 183.
1 3 The Teleview was an early attempt to bring commercial stereoscopic films to
a public audience. They consisted of an electrical device which spectators
held before their eyes while viewing a specially constructed stereoscopic film.
Most historical accounts suggest that the Teleview, while conceptually sound,
achieved only limited success in creating viable stereoscopic effects. The sin-
gle strip anaglyphic duo-color format was the most common form for 3D
films before the arrival of digital 3D rendering. Anaglyphic 3D films are
recognizable by their blue and red tints and viewing glasses.
14 See Georges Sadoul, L'Invention du Cinéma: 1832-1897 (Paris, Denoël,
1948), pp. 24-33,82-100.
15 André Bazin, 'The Myth of Total Cinema', in What is Cinema ?, translated by
Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1 967) , vol. 1 , p. 2 1 .
1 6 Morton Heilig, 'El Cine del Futuro : The Cinema of the Future , translated by
Uri Feldman, in Presence 1.3 (Summer 1992), 283.
17 André Bazin, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image', in What is Cinema?,
p. 16.
1 8 Bazin s modernist sentiment has persisted throughout numerous discourses
on photography, perhaps most prominently in Roland Barthes's treatise,
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New
York, Hill and Wang, 1981). On the confusion of signs and referents in
photography, Barthes writes: 'A specific photograph, in effect, is never distin-
guished from its referent. It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent
with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the
very heart of the moving world.' (pp. 5-6).
19 Barthes writes: 'I am neither subject nor object, but a subject who feels he is
becoming an object.' (Camera Lucida, p. 14).
20 Deleuze develops the notion of 'transversals', heterogeneous elements that
are bound by an order other than that oflogocentric contiguity or filiation, in
Proust and Signs. According to Deleuze, transversals are the effect of an
'antilogos': they allow one to leap from 'one world to another, one word to
another, without ever reducing the many to the One, without ever gathering
up the multiple into a whole, but affirming the original unity of precisely that

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226 Paragraph

multiplicity, affirming without uniting all these irreducible fragments' (Gilles

Deleuze, Proust and Signs , translated by Richard Howard (New York, George
Braziller, 1972), p. 1 12). Of transversals in Proust, Deleuze writes: 'Jealousy is
the transversal of love s multiplicity; travel, the transversal of the multiplicity
of places; sleep, the transversal of the multiplicity of moments' (ibid.).
Deleuze s concept of transversality is especially useful when considering the
complex relations between signs and referents in the photographic arts.
21 Slavoj Žižek, 'From Virtual Reality to the Virtualization of Reality', in Elec-
tronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation , edited by Timothy
Druckrey (New York, Aperture, 1996), p. 294.
22 Bazin, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image', p. 13. Bazin suggests the
figure of the fingerprint as a means of distinguishing painting from photogra-
phy (p. 15). For Bazin, while painting always involves the subjectivity of
human agents, photographs are inseparable from the natural world that yields
them. 'Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature', he writes, 'like a
flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable
part of their beauty.' (p. 1 3) . Photography makes tangible reproductions of the
natural world by rendering images tactile.
23 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (London, Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 131.
24 Peter Weibel notes that new virtual media are 'providing the technology for
the extension of dimensions of [the] here and now. A yearning for now no
longer as a limited, localized experience, but rather as a simultaneous,
non-local, universal experience' ('The World as Interface: Toward the Con-
struction of Context-Controlled E vent- Worlds', in Electronic Culture : Tech-
nology and Visual Representation , edited by Timothy Druckrey (New York,
Aperture, 1996), p. 346). Weibel s description of new virtual media is not un-
like the theater imagined by Artaud.
25 Crary, Techniques of the Observer ; p. 125. In the stereoscopic image, Crary
writes, 'we are given an insistent sense of "in front of" and "in back of" that
seems to organize the image as a sequence of receding planes' (ibid.).
26 Regarding Wheatstone s desire for a tangible stereoscopy, Crary observes: 'In
devising the stereoscope, Wheatstone aimed to simulate the actual presence
of a physical object or scene, not another way to exhibit a print or drawing.
What he seeks then is a complete equivalence of stereoscopic image and
object. Thus the desired effect of the stereoscope was not simply likeness, but
immediate, apparent tangibility : (Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 123- 4).
27 Ibid., p. 125.
28 Ibid., pp. 125-6.
29 The success of pioneer research on virtual systems has frequently been
measured by the capacity to induce motion sickness in test subjects.
30 Artaud, 'Cinema and Reality', p. 152.
31 Paul de Man, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality', in Blindness and Insight: Essays in
the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), p. 2 18. De Man's description of irony is useful here. Irony, and the

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 Three Phantasies of Cinema - Reproduction, Mimesis , Annihilation 227

allegorical mode to which de Man links it, effect the 'démystification of an

organic world postulated in a symbolic mode of analogical correspondences
or in a mimetic mode of representation in which fiction and reality could
coincide' (p. 222).
32 De Man writes: 'absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself the end
of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection
of madness from the inside of madness itself' (ibid., p. 216).
33 See Deleuze's analysis of Artaud and his relation to surfaces in The Logic of
Sense , edited by Constantin V. Boundas, translated by Mark Lester and Charles
Stivale (New York, Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 82-93.
34 Charles Baudelaire, 'On the Essence of Laughter and, In General, On the
Comic in the Plastic Arts', in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays ,
edited and translated by Jonathan Mayne (New York, Da Capo,
1964), pp.147- 65. 'There is but one criterion of the grotesque', insists
Baudelaire, s 'and that is laughter - immediate laughter.' (p. 157).
35 Kerry Brougher, 'Hall of Mirrors', in Art and Film Since 1 945: Hall of Mirrors ,
edited by Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1996), p. 38.
36 Derrida emphasizes the force of eating and orality as a figure for the senses.
He writes: 'For everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of orality,
but also of the ear, the eye - and all the "senses" in general) the metonymy of
"eating well" [bien manger] would always be the rule.' (Jacques Derrida,
' "Eating Well", or the Calculation of the Subject', in Points. Interviews ,
1974-1994 , edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy Kamuf et al.
(Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 282).
37 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, 'Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection
versus Incorporation', in The Shell and the Kernel , edited and translated by
Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 132.
38 Ibid., p. 132. Let us make clear , they continue, that it is not simply a matter
of reverting to the literal meaning of words, but of using them in such a
way - whether in speech or deed - that their very capacity for figurative
representation is destroyed.' (p. 132).
39 Abraham and Torok offer their version of a familiar psychoanalytic narrative:
'the initial stages of introjection emerge in infancy when the mouth s empti-
ness is experienced alongside the mother's simultaneous presence. The
emptiness is first experienced in the form of cries and sobs, delayed fullness,
then as calling, ways of requesting presence, as language. Finally, the early
satisfactions of the mouth, as yet filled with the maternal object, are partially
and gradually replaced by the novel satisfactions of a mouth now empty of
that object but filled with words pertaining to the subject' (ibid., p. 127).

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