Stephen Heath

The Cinematic Apparatus

In the first moments of the history of cinema, it is the technology which provides the immediate interest: what is promoted and sold is the experience of the machine, the apparatus. The Grand Cafe programme is headed with the announcement of ‘Le Cinematographe’ and continues with its description: ‘this apparatus, invented by MM. Auguste and Louis Lumiere, permits the recording, by series of photographs, of all the movements which have succeeded one another over a given period of time in front of the camera and the subsequent reproduction of these movements by the projection of their images, life size, on a screen before an entire audience’; only after that description is there mention of the titles of the films to be shown, the ‘sujets actuels’, relegated to the bottom of the programme sheet.1

The Cinematic Apparatus: Technology as Historical and Cultural Form

In the first moments of the history of cinema, it is the technology which provides the immediate interest: what is promoted and sold is the experience of the machine, the apparatus. The Grand Cafe programme is headed with the announcement of ‘Le Cinematogra-phe’ and continues with its description: ‘this apparatus, invented by MM. Auguste and Louis Lumiere, permits the recording, by series of photographs, of all the movements which have succeeded one another over a given period of time in front of the camera and the subsequent reproduction of these movements by the projection of their images, life size, on a screen before an entire audience’; only after that description is there mention of the titles of the films to be shown, the ‘sujets actuels’, relegated to the bottom of the programme sheet.1 This machine interest and its exploitation can be traced in a variety of effects and repercussions, from, say, Edison’s lack of concern in the development of projecting apparatus (a business strategy based literally on selling the machine, projectors for audience viewing representing less of a market than kinetoscopes for individual, parlour viewing) to the relatively long-lived assumption that the industry was effectively one of cinema rather than films, the latter being elements of the experience of the machine, a uniform product to be sold by the foot and the reel (an assumption which, paradoxically, unwittingly, Edison had in fact seen beyond, fearing also that projection with its large group diffusion would lead to audience saturation and falling attendances for the interchangeable foot/reel productions).

The Question Oshima

The night of 25/26 February 1936. Tokyo under a layer of snow. A reception takes place at the American Embassy in honour of Viscount Saito Makoto, recently Prime Minister and now something like Lord Privy Seal. As a treat, Ambassador Joseph C. Grew has had a copy of Naughty Marietta — the Van Dyke musical starring Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald — brought over from Hollywood. Will Saito like it? He stays, delighted, to the end of his first sound film, leaves later than expected, full of gratitude. In the early morning, he is assassinated by a group of young officers in the course of an abortive putsch, part of the history of the growth of Japanese militarism in the 1930s.

Film, System, Narrative

‘Every film shows us the cinema, and is also its death.’ Here is that singularity of a textual system on which Metz has laid so much stress. Operation, displacement (if merely by virtue of the inevitable shifting of codes into action), a film — any film — goes along with the cinema that it continually and simultaneously recasts. If ‘the study of a singular filmic system is never the study of cinematic specificity’ (and this is the very reason of Langage et cinema, Metz’s attempt rigorously to define and separate the terms of the filmic and the cinematic), it is indeed that the film is on the side of the heterogeneous, that its work cannot be grasped by a simple listing of codes, that it poses for analysis new tasks, a new object: ‘the only principle of pertinence capable now of defining the semiology of film — other than its application to the filmic rather than to the cinematic fact — is the will to treat films as texts, as units of discourse, thus putting oneself under the obligation of looking for the different systems (whether or not they be codes) which inform and are implicated in them.’1

Language, Sight and Sound

‘Cinema and language’ has been in many ways the great theoretical impetus for work on film over the last few years: the attempt to pose with regard to cinema the fact and the analogy of language, to determine similarities, connections, terms of interaction. In many ways again, we seem now to be emerging from the hold of that impetus, from the kinds of questions it produced; emerging from them, it should be stressed, on the basis of the demonstration of their limits, and then, perhaps, against them, with different questions, or with some of the old questions differently. What follows is a brief account of something of the present context of ‘cinema and language’, a consideration of one or two points that are important in its current discussion.