Garrett Stewart,
Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77416-9
US$40.00 (pb)
299 pp
(Review copy supplied by The University of Chicago Press)

In F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (Germany 1922) the vampire Count Orlock meets his end by being exposed to sunlight. We see this death as a lap dissolve where the Count simply fades, writhing, from view. In E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (UK/USA/Luxembourg 2000), Max Schreck, the actor playing Orlock, is supposedly a real vampire whose condition is exploited by the filmmakers. He expires in similar fashion, from too much sun, and this time what we see is Schreck becoming solarized (a photographic effect where the black-and-white tones are reversed from being exposed to a burst of light partway through processing), then burning up in the film stock that contains his image (You can see exactly what I’m referring to if you watch the last parts of these YouTube clips from Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire). On a narrative level what happens in each film is the same – the vampire dies. But attending to these deaths on a textual, stylistic level reveals interesting contrasts. Both films mark the vampires’ deaths with devices that allude specifically to the medium and mechanics of film-based cinema: a medium of images that depend on light but would be destroyed by overexposure, a medium that is in its own way vampiric in its dependence on living form. (And does it render that form lifeless, or give it extended life? Perhaps it turns its subjects into the undead.) But while the gradual dissolve in Nosferatu marks this film as a retelling of a vampire story by an early cinema that already confident about its methods, the violent destruction of the film strip in Shadow of the Vampire enacts an elegy for cinema, a cinema that is becoming more digital than filmic and perhaps soon to discard the filmstrip altogether.

Garrett Stewart, in Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, doesn’t refer specifically to either of these films, but he argues for just this sort of analysis of cinema; what he calls narratography: “the reading of an image and its transitions for their own plot charge” (p. 7), that is, paying attention to the specific elements of style and technique which comprise the images that form the narrative. He is not talking about style for its own sake, but about those moments where the textural and surface features of the medium create meaning in themselves. It is an analysis of what he calls the medial aspects of the text, the elements located somewhere between, or at a median point of, the material base of the film and its projected image (p. 9). Paying attention to what the medium itself does reveals certain tensions, allusions and significances “in the articulations of structure at the plane of the image – camera angles, framing, editing, shifts in film stock, special effects, masking […] to be found there, that is, rather than in an encompassing plot paradigm” (p. 163). In a lot of cases, these elements at the beginning of the film exist as hints of what is to come: “the sponsoring first image graphs its own optic means into the open before being assimilated by the story’s drive toward closure” (p. 17). The opening moments of a film don’t just perform a scene-setting function, they resonate with the plot to create their own narrative significances.

Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (Spain/France/USA/Italy 2001), for example, opens with Nicole Kidman screaming. It’s a startling early shot after an establishing one of the country house she is in. We soon realise, though, that she’s in bed, waking up from a nightmare (“Or is she?” [p. 96]). Her waking seems at first to be held in abeyance then established by the framing of the shot: it starts off with Kidman being framed vertically and only moments later does the camera re-orient itself to indicate that she is in bed. Later on, we learn that the servants in the house are in fact dead; a revelation that is made by Kidman when she discovers funereal photographs of them propped up to look like they are asleep. Propped up, that is, as she was in the first shot of her. That she is herself one of the dead is revealed by the plot, but the visual association of her with the photographed corpses is not merely a stylistic echo of this; by coming at the beginning of the film it invites us to connect this twist backwards even further, to “the ambivalent title itself” (p. 97). It’s an added layer, a clue, that is revealed not by a broad narratological approach, but by attention to the surface, medium-specific qualities of the film text. Not only that, it raises questions of what role photography itself has in the cinema. Since Bazin, of course, we are aware of the possibility of photography as an embalming process. And since this is a film from 2001, the presence of photography and its association with death makes us aware of the mortality of cinema itself, as least as we have known it for most of the twentieth century. Stewart makes this idea a little more specific in his reading of One Hour Photo (Mark Romanek, 2002). When the sinister photo-lab technician Sy Parrish is awaiting his fate at the hands of the police, after having terrorised the family that he has tried to insinuate himself into, he imagines himself actually in one of the family photos that he has printed. This imaginary image, digitally constructed for the viewer, is a fantasy for Sy but also an allusion to the anachronism that he, and cinema itself as we know it, is becoming: “It is as if residual versus emergent media converge in this moment to elide the vanishing dominant, the indexically traced body: the body that photography used to record and that the digital can now so readily transplant or fabricate” (p. 119).

The presence of photographs remains important in many of the films that Stewart analyses. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) makes photographs into artifacts of memory that are so significant that the lovers, who pay the Lacuna Corporation to help them forget each other, are told explicitly to destroy them as part of this process. At the end, the lovers are reunited despite their previous attempts at forgetting. They run together on a wintry beach as the screen slowly fades to white: “this last staggered thrust of desire seems unwilling to surrender the photographic index of suspended time” (p. 148). The final scene of togetherness is perhaps an indication of their resistance to erasure, an assertion of the force of their love. The direction of the plot, with this final reunion, suggests that, this time, they will make it. A narratological analysis “may well be cued to recognize in the open-ended closure an ethics of acceptance” (p. 149). But a closer look at this scene shows that the gambol on the beach is interrupted, at least twice, by jump cuts that take them back microseconds. Stewart points out that this “limited repetition has in itself pried open a sense of possibility” (p. 148). It offers the possibility of reading beyond just a mere narratological analysis of plot to suggest an unease about their future happiness: “[I]n the grain of the final and fading image, it is narratography that sees the rub of the unresolved” (p. 149).

Narratography is not, as one might legitimately suppose, limited to close attention to the photographic or cinematographic qualities of the film text. It is an approach that “tap[s] the medium-specific precisions associated with a given disciplinary object” (p. 26) that can be applied in other disciplines as well. Stewart’s areas of scholarship encompass literature as well as cinema, and he provides an engaging reading of Stanley Cavell’s prose on Dreyer’s Joan of Arc at the Stake. As Joan meets her death, she sees a flock of birds wheeling overhead. Cavell writes that “They, there, are free”. Stewart runs with an avian metaphor to indicate that in “the cadenced swoop of ‘ey/ere/are,’ we audit on the underside of writing a pervasive ‘air,’ the subliminal breath of airiness itself, all but spelled out as the medium of uplift” (p. 265). This analysis adds another dimension to Cavell’s reading of Joan of Arc. The very form and sound of the words imbues his criticism with an implicit sense of transcendence. Stewart writes an appendix that, while not being part of his main argument, provides an instructive demonstration of what narratographic readings of film and literary versions of Oliver Twist might uncover. I wish I’d read this first; Stewart’s prose is thorough, sometimes dense, and often digressive, but he manages to hold his allusions in the air in a fashion that rewards attention – if I’d come with him on his journey through Dickens first I think I would have seen more immediately where some of his analyses were going. There are occasions when he steers a little too elliptically towards what he is examining. I had to re-watch the closing moments of Eternal Sunshine, for example, to fully see his point about the sequence I describe above, what he calls “a twofold loop” that “takes its slipping hold on the image plane” (p. 147).

Framed Time is a continuation of Stewart’s project that worries at the surface features of the medium to see what significances this reveals. In his 1999 book Between Film and Screen, he discusses the photogram (the smallest unit of cinema, the single frame itself) and photography’s appropriation into the technologies of cinema. More recently he has made a contribution to Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, a 2006 collection of essays edited by David Green and Joanna Lowry. In that anthology he makes arguments that he has subsequently elaborated in Framed Time and puts himself right among an emerging discussion about the relationship that photography has with cinema, a discussion that might just, with his assertions about narratography, take a particular approach, or at least a frame of mind. There is recent scholarship in this area from Phillipe Dubois and Laura Mulvey (also a contributor to Green and Lowry’s collection and producing from her piece there a monograph, Death 24x a Second), both of whom Stewart engages with to varying degrees.

Perhaps the theorist that Stewart most depends on to provide a context for his discussion, though, is Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s tracing of the tendencies of cinema from the movement-image, a cinema of strong narrative drive and excitement, to the time-image, that of abstractness and mental spaces, leaves off before the emergence of a more recent digitisation. The treatment of time, both by recent narratives of temportation (Stewart’s term for time-travel or spatio-temporal disjuncture) and by the qualities of digital cinema itself, leave Deleuze’s arguments open: “What, then, about time – and its tempi, no longer its (s)pacing – in post-cinematographic screen practice? That is the question Deleuze leaves readers to voice for themselves” (p. 15). Stewart’s ruminations on the narratographic, textural aspects of cinema arise, in part, from the questions Deleuze raises about time-image cinema, where the concern is not so much with the narrative flow of what happens next but rather with what is happening within the image itself (p. 8). He sees the ending of Adaptation(Spike Jonze, 2002), for instance, with its stop-motion sequence of flowers growing, as a “slapstick variant of the Deleuzian time-image emerging once more [….] style itself leaves all story behind, opening only onto possibility” (p. 112).

It’s not simply a particular approach to cinema that Stewart advocates in Framed Time; he also constructs an argument about the relationships between, and the qualities of, recent surrealistic and fantastical European and Hollywood cinema. In the former, the psychic unease we are presented with remains as something not quite resolved, and in the latter, the disruptions to reality tend to be explained into some larger comprehensible system (it was all a dream, or the computers are controlling us). And these latter films raise an ethical question too, in that “may well solicit acquiescence not only in a culture of fantasy but in a politics of the unreal” (p. 205). It’s an intriguing point, but he doesn’t dwell on it, just as he doesn’t dwell on some quick allusions to the influence of recent Asian cinema on his schemata. This last reservation leads me to wonder also how solidly his categorisation of European and Hollywood cinema can hold, given that The Others and Heaven (Tom Tykwer, 2002) are multinational co-productions. While this move to define some of the outlines of contemporary cinema may not be completely persuasive, Framed Time remains compelling both as a study in a particular way of reading that may yet become influential, and a study of what cinema itself is becoming.

Mike Lim,
Flinders University, Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 11 September 2008