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Wide Angle 21.1 (1999) 115-130



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Phalke, Méliès, and Special Effects Today

Sean Cubitt

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IMAGE LINK= IMAGE LINK= IMAGE LINK= IMAGE LINK= Every age wishes to believe itself exceptional: under advanced capital, every minute wants to be distinguished. No innovation, no matter how trivial, can pass muster unless it can be sold as "revolutionary." The evolution of the animated image, from shadow games on the cave walls to the obsessive dimensionality of The Mummy (dir. Stephen Sommers, 1999) and Wild Wild West (dir. Barry Sonnenfeld, 1999), has scarcely been left five minutes at a stretch for the last hundred years without a new declaration of root-and-branch grubbing out and replanting of the whole history of moving pictures. Digitality is just such a false memory masquerading as historical insurrection: and that specific combination of rememorisation and false radicalism, of ordinary turbulence masquerading as epochal break in a visual domain characterised by hyperbole, ecstasy, and vertigo, brings us face to face with its historical role: digitality has been overwritten with that first enforced repetition of an undigested past which Marx envisaged as tragedy. Lacking an understanding of the origins of pixelisation in the division of light into colors and motion into frames undertaken by the Lumières, we cannot grasp in total the banality of the CGI (computer generated image) effect. Deprived of clarity concerning the achronological and reversed geographical constructions of space and time in the early effects film, we will make unfounded claims for what occurs in the new geometries of millenial filmmaking.

In what follows, I want to show that the sales-pitch of originality and of a new beginning made for the CGI industry is not only overstated and misleading, [End Page 115] but provides an alibi for a sloppy, undialectical, and to that extent ahistorical film criticism. In going back to the early work of Méliès and Phalke and isolating the spatial dialectic at work there, we are observing one facet of a larger dialectic, the confrontation of space and time which, in the early "trick" cinema, instigates a new moment in the longer dialectical history of animated images, indeed of geography and history in the Western culture, that reaches a specific accuracy of expression in the history of the cinema of and as special effect. The colonial dialectic pinpoints the nub of both the trick and the effect film: that they rematerialise the narrative temporalities of consumption as the empty space of the commodity itself. The dialectic of space and time constructions must be understood politically as well as historically, and should be faced as essential components of both film style and the experience of movie going. 1 This paper opens up the process by investigating some aspects of the temporal dialetic in Méliès and Phalke. Specifically, the presumed chronological relation between European master and Indian disciple must be turned upside down so that the colony precedes the metropolis. But clearly this is itself a moment of a longer and more complex historical movement, from colonial dependency, via imperial imitation, to an emergent nationalism whose legacy still haunts the Hindi mythological movies and Dordarshan's mythological spectaculars. In short, the cinema's temporal dialectic of orientalism and myth succeeds only at the expense of a perversion of a globally communicative ideal of cinema which, as myth and orientalism, they have raised as possibility. Crucial to this argument is that orientalism, as a state of the orientalist, not only oppresses its Other, but constructs a repressive and limiting model of the othering Self. That construction is the inheritance of the spectacular subject of special effects cinema today, a subject ripe for the implicit critique of the silent trick film.

1999's blockbuster effects movie The Matrix (dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski) comes impregnated with the rhetoric of the unprecedented. Here the logic of alienation is worked through in a more accelerated form: the everyday material world becomes banal and simulacral, the object of a subject whose subjectivity is lifted as far above it as the imperialist is above the colony. The "colonisation of everyday life," in Lefebvre and the...

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