Body Double: The Author Incarnate in the Cinema

Afterword: Signs and Meaning in the Cinema

214 AFTERWORD Signs and Meaning in the Cinema We propose . . . a morphology . . . that views film not from the outside, as a product to be consumed, but from the inside, as a dynamically evolving organic code directly responsive and responsible, like every other code to the supreme mediator: consciousness. —Hollis Frampton, “On the Camera” Limitless (2011, directed by Neil Burger) is a rather silly movie about a blocked, aimless novelist, Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), who gains sudden powers by taking a secret, unlicensed medicine. In one scene, we notice on his bookshelf a copy of Barthes by Barthes (a text that combines memoir, anecdote, and literary theory). One assumes that the set dresser put it there to signify that Morra is an informed and intelligent writer interested in literary criticism (although nothing else in the film suggests this). But we know, of course, that there are some artists who combine creative and analytical skills allowing them to “inhabit” their own work in the manner of a bona fide critic, and to scrutinize it as carefully as Žižek does the works of others. One of those is American experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton. The Past Is Prologue It seems fitting that the final chapter of this book should focus briefly on two films byFrampton—perhapsitiseven“poeticjustice,”thetitleofaworkofhisthatIhave alreadydiscussed.HereImust“comeout”astheauthorofmyownbookandrelate anincidentfromthebeginningofmyscholarlycareer.Oneofmyfirstseminarsasa doctoralstudentintheDepartmentofCinemaStudiesatNewYorkUniversitywas American Independent Film, taught by Annette Michelson. I knew nothing about the topic and was horrified when, during the first class session, she told us that by the next week we had to decide upon a filmmaker to study and on whose work we would lead a class session. One day soon thereafter, I was wandering through the halls of the department (then located in a tenement above the Bleecker Street Cinema ), when I happened upon a small projection room as someone was screening Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 215 a film. Like a Surrealist, I entered in the middle. I immediately became fascinated withthework—inpartbecauseIgleanedthatsoundandimagewerepurposelyout of step (not out of synch) with one another, and I hung around until I understood the system or logic of its composition. That film was (nostalgia) (1971), by Frampton , and I came into class the next weekenthusiastically proclaiming my term project . As it happens, I was able to contact him at the University of Buffalo, where he was teaching, and he made all his work available to me at no cost and proved to be incredibly generous with his time and remarks (and nonjudgmental about my tentative insights). I went on to complete my class presentation, then write about his later work, The Magellan Cycle (1971–1984), after interviewing him.1 Frampton was oneofthemostbrilliant,witty,andmunificentpeopleIhaveeverknown. I return to him now because (as Poetic Justice has already shown) he is a filmmaker who has dealt with questions of authorship, writing, and the relation between word and image—creating what we might deem “theory films” (to borrow a name attached to an early category of feminist cinema).2 Poetic Justice, of course, implicated the historic tensions between scriptwriter and director, allowing the former’s (oft invisible) contribution to dominate as subject matter of the film. Likewise, the spectator of Poetic Justice found herself simultaneously a film viewer and a word reader—with the never-realized “movie” playing only in her mind. Frampton’s use of intermittent first-person address in the handwritten written text —especially with reference to the protagonist being a photographer3—forced the spectator to consider the author behind the film (since Frampton worked in that medium early in his professional life). One of the primary theoretical issues Frampton tackled was the relation between verbal and pictorial discourses (also a major theme of this book and one highlightedinchapter6),sowebeginbydiscussinghisZornsLemma(1970),which Scott MacDonald has deemed “a phantasmagoria of . . . language.”4 The title refers to a proposition in set theory, that being the branch of mathematics that concerns sets, or collections of objects. (For example, in this book, my “set” is filmic texts aboutauthorshipandwriting.)InZornsLemmatheprimary“objects”collected(in the major segment of the film) are (1) letters of the Roman alphabet (having only twenty-four characters),5 (2) images containing words beginning with those letters , and (3) images that successively replace those depicted in group 2. The film starts with sequential shots of alphabet letters. Then the screen goes blank and we hear a woman’s voice reading from The Bay State Primer, an early American schoolbook that provides religious-themed rhymes to introduce children to the alphabet —clearly, the...