Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema

7. Changing Places: Predation, Transformation, and Identity in Demme’s: The Silence of the Lambs

165 In light of the concept of transformation, we may reflect on the nature of the twenty-four frames per second that pass through motion picture projectors. The hundred-thousand-plus photographs making up a movie comprise more than so many pictures whose rapid succession dupes our overwhelmed optical pathways into seeing motion. If we recall the much-reproduced stop-action photographs that Eadweard Muybridge made in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, we may come to another, perhaps more fertile, understanding of what motion pictures do. They register metamorphosis . Each frame shows its instant moving toward the instant of the next. The blurring within frames that contain rapid motion makes their documentation of metamorphosis especially vivid. Like Canetti’s “figures,” the series of photos that constitute a movie signify “both the process of transformation and its result” (374). Siegfried Kracauer regarded the power of cinema to represent “the flow of life” as “a basic affinity of film. In a manner of speaking it is an emanation of the medium itself.”1 Although different from most still photography in its capacity to record transformation, cinematography shares with its elder relative the power to fix an instant as an imperishable trace that is neither present nor past but outside of time (and therefore outside of place as well). To that capability, manifest but generally uncomprehended in its individual frames, cinematography adds the power of a multiplicity that returns its pictures to the universe of time and place, the universe of transformations. Its rapid succession of images turns a perishable moment into an imperishable 7 Changing Places: Predation, Transformation, and Identity in Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs CHAPTER 7 166 past with respect to the frame that follows and a permanent future for the frame that precedes it. Amy Taubin writes of Jonas Mekas’s filmmaking, “Like a still photographer, Mr. Mekas wants to capture the essence of the moment, but for him, that essence is the instantaneous transformation of present into past.”2 With cinematography , however, one can also look in the other direction, and see present and past as future. Garrett Stewart has turned his attention to what he calls “the undervalued problem of the single frame” and to the relationship promised in the title of his book Between Film and Screen. It would be impossible to briefly summarize Professor Stewart’s complex arguments or the points at which his interests intersect those of this study (some of which are noted elsewhere); but I should articulate a fundamental disagreement that is pertinent to the current discussion . Where I understand cinematography as recording and representing transformation, change in time, he sees it as embodying “a dying away in process.”3 His view of cinematography derives from a conception of still photography as intricately, perhaps “naturally ,” involved with death—a conception widely held among theorists and advanced with particular conviction by Roland Barthes and, following him, Susan Sontag. This conception seems to me to be disputable; but, in any case, still photography and cinematography do not differ absolutely, and there are photographic and cinematographic practices that partake of both. In addition to series of stop-action photographs, we may count photos with long exposures that allow time to visibly paint its passing on light-sensitive materials, some sequences of still photographs , and double exposures (and uses of flash that amount to double exposures) as approaching cinema’s tendency to render the world as a flow of transformations. Nonetheless, cinema’s connection to metamorphosis is intrinsic to it and remains distinctive. In moving pictures, as Bazin remarked, “for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified.”4 Bazin’s countryman, Jean Epstein, also took note of the power of motion pictures to render change: “The cinema is a particular form of knowing, in that it represents the world in its continuous mobility .”5 Similarly, Stanley Cavell writes of “the natural evanescence of film, the fact that its events exist only in motion, in passing.”6 The ability of the cinema to register both the process of change and its outcomes is evident in its concentration on the subtlest alterations of actors’ expressions. “Man’s perpetual readiness Predation, Transformation, and Identity in Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs 167 for transformation is clearly expressed in the mobility of his face.” Canetti labels these fleeting changes of expression “seminal transformations ” that...