# **TACIT**

 **CONFIGURATIONS**

**OF FILM**

# **CINEMATIC**

# **KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE**

# **REBECCA BOGUSKA**

 **GUILHERME MACHADO**

 **REBECCA PUCHTA**

 **MARIN RELJIĆ**

**Tacit Cinematic Knowledge**

# **Tacit Cinematic Knowledge: Approaches and Practices**

**edited by Rebecca Boguska, Guilherme Machado, Rebecca Puchta, and Marin Reljić**

**FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM HISTORISCHE GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN** FRANKFURT HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE

#### **Bibliographical Information of the German National Library**

The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie (German National Bibliography); detailed bibliographic information is available online at dnb.dnb.de

Published in 2024 by meson press, Lüneburg, Germany www.meson.press

Design concept: Torsten Köchlin, Silke Krieg Cover design: Mathias Bär Cover image: Sequential Sequencing by Reto Togni, Demonstration: Barbara Postolka, ETH Zurich (© CC BY-NC-ND 2.0: Reto Togni). See page 9ff. in this volume for a detailed description Copy editing: Dan J. Ruppel

The print edition of this book is printed by Lightning Source, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom.

ISBN (Print): 978-3-95796-023-8 ISBN (PDF): 978-3-95796-024-5 DOI: 10.14619/0238

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### **Contents**

Series Foreword 7

Tacit Cinematic Knowledge: An Operative Term 9 Rebecca Boguska, Guilherme Machado, Rebecca Puchta, and Marin Reljić

Authors 265

# **Configurations of Film: Series Foreword**

Scalable across a variety of formats and standardized in view of global circulation, the moving image has always been both an image of movement and an image on the move. Over the last three decades, digital production technologies, communication networks and distribution platforms have taken the scalability and mobility of film to a new level. Beyond the classical dispositif of the cinema, new forms and knowledges of cinema and film have emerged, challenging the established approaches to the study of film. The conceptual framework of index, dispositif and canon, which defined cinema as photochemical image technology with a privileged bond to reality, a site of public projection, and a set of works from auteurs from specific national origins, can no longer account for the current multitude of moving images and the trajectories of their global movements. The term "post-cinema condition," which was first proposed by film theorists more than a decade ago to describe the new cultural and technological order of moving images, retained an almost melancholic attachment to that which the cinema no longer was. Moving beyond such attachments, the concept of "configurations of film" aims to account for moving images in terms of their operations, forms and formats, locations and infrastructures, expanding the field of cinematic knowledges beyond the arts and the aesthetic, while retaining a focus on film as privileged site for the production of cultural meaning, for social action and for political conflict.

The series "Configurations of Film" presents pointed interventions in this field of debate by emerging and established international scholars associated with the DFG-funded Graduate Research Training Program (Graduiertenkolleg) "Konfigurationen des Films" at Goethe University Frankfurt. The contributions to the series aim to explore and expand our understanding of configurations of film in both a contemporary and historical perspective, combining film and media theory with media history to address key problems in the development of new analytical frameworks for the moving image on the move.

# **Tacit Cinematic Knowledge: An Operative Term**

Rebecca Boguska, Guilherme Machado, Rebecca Puchta, and Marin Reljić

Since the development of moving-image technologies, cinematic techniques have been pervasive in many fields of cultural practice. Configurations of film have continuously appeared in unexpected locations, forms, and formats—far beyond what would eventually become the primary cinematic *dispositif* of the movie theatre. Today, airports, data centers, weather stations, laboratories of aerodynamics and fluid mechanics, corporations, military bases, and schools are just a few examples of sites where cinematic techniques routinely support a variety of procedures, processes, and social-material interactions. In all these sites of cinematic practice, the production and distribution of knowledge have been manifestly impacted by moving images.

Despite the ubiquity of cinematic techniques, film researchers interested in exploring non-theatrical cinematic *dispositifs* are still likely to encounter astonishment from the human actors engaged in shaping these various cinematic settings. For example, in our conversation with Barbara Postolka and Reto Togni, who, at the time of our conversation, were working at the Laboratory of Movement Biomechanics at the ETH Zurich and created the image we have chosen for the cover of this edited collection (see fig. 1), their surprise immediately surfaced: why would we, film scholars, be interested in their scientific practices? In turn, what has often surprised us is the deep awareness that such scientists—but also managers, architects, musicians, and others—have of the technical and historical commonalities between their *dispositifs* and more conventional forms of cinema. As our conversation progressed past their initial astonishment, this was clearly the case for Postolka and Togni as well.

[Figure 1] *Sequential Sequencing* (Source: Postolka and Togni 2020)

Entitled *Sequential Sequencing*, the cover image consists of a series of photographs, captured and edited into a single composite image by Togni, which depicts Postolka as she demonstrates the use of a unique moving fluoroscope. The short description that Postolka and Togni wrote to accompany their submission of this picture to the Swiss National Science Foundation's *Scientific Image Competition* in 2020 shows that they are perfectly aware of the historical ties that their *dispositif* has with practices and technologies that are commonly considered to have given birth to cinema:

142 years after Eadweard Muybridge's invention, the principle of chronophotography remains essential … [to] understanding human movement. The image not only builds on a rich cultural heritage of sequence photographs, nowadays best known in extreme sports, but also illustrates cutting-edge scientific processes that reveal internal working principles of the human body. Shown is a gait trial using a unique moving fluoroscope that tracks and follows the movements of a study participant while taking a series of x-ray images to analyse bone kinematics. By merging a series of six photographs taken during the trial, the image not **11** only shows but also follows the maxim of novelty through continuous reinterpretation and repurposing of methods that are more than a century old. (Postolka and Togni 2020)

Togni and Postolka's awareness of the long history of their visualisation technique and its proximity to contemporary sports performance imaging devices did not seem sufficient to explain why film studies researchers were interested in their laboratory. The common origin and the similarity of the apparatuses did not obliterate what now appears to be a divide between cinema and scientific or utilitarian image practices, or between the featurelength theatrical film and various other configurations of film that have emerged over the past century.

While trying to explain our interest in cinematic practices outside of the movie theatre, we have often encountered difficulties posed by the increasingly problematic boundaries between filmic and non-filmic; theatrical and non-theatrical. Debates on marginal practices of cinema, and in particular on the "end (or death) of cinema" (Friedberg 2000; Gaudreault and Marion 2015), "expanded (or extended) cinema" (Dubois, Monvoisin, and Biserna 2010; Youngblood 1970), and "post-cinema" (Casetti 2015; Chateau and Moure 2020; Denson and Leyda 2016; Hagener, Hediger, and Strohmaier 2016; Shaviro 2010), have contributed to the plurality of perspectives within film studies and to the expansion of its fields of inquiry. However, the impact of these debates is still limited outside of the framework of film studies, which might explain the frequent surprise expressed by people involved in non-theatrical, cinematic settings when seeing film researchers like us interested in fields that are supposedly not "ours."

In this volume, we introduce the notion of "tacit cinematic knowledge," in order to account for the increasing ubiquity and the resulting ordinariness of cinematic conditions of knowledge. We also seek to provide an operative term that allows for

**12** engagement with cinema as a fluid *dispositif* of aesthetic and epistemic configurations. The following collection of essays draws on a number of historical and theoretical approaches to cinema that refuse to consider it as a field restricted to a privileged set of practices or *dispositifs* (Acland and Wasson 2011; Albera and Tortajada 2010; Casetti 2015; Eisenstein 2009; 1989; 2016; Elsaesser 2016; Farocki 2003; Hediger and Vonderau 2009; Virilio 1989; 2007). The notion of tacit cinematic knowledge thus aims to combine these approaches into a common perspective on cinema as a performative, transformative, and heterogeneous epistemic agent, which often assumes startling roles in the shaping of seemingly "non-cinematic" knowledge.

Our nomenclature draws critically on Michael Polanyi's (2013) concept of "tacit knowledge," which he identifies as a "personal," unformulated complement to any explicit (i.e., codified, enunciable) knowledge, underpinning practices of the body, perception, and communication. By inserting "cinematic," we attempt to shift the location of the knowledge his term describes, and therefore also to push against its anthropocentric character. The term tacit *cinematic* knowledge thus allows us to address the ways in which tacit epistemic operations based on cinematic forms, formats, and usages have been participating in education, art, science, politics, labor, and other fields of cultural practice and continue to do so in ever-changing ways.

As the contributions to this volume show, tacit cinematic knowledge provides a framework for discussing film-based knowledge formations, while not restricting these inquiries to a single definition. Considering the constant metamorphoses of film throughout history, theorizing its epistemic agency requires a framework of analysis sufficiently extensive and adaptive to the singularity of particular cinematic *dispositifs*. Understood as an *operative term*, tacit cinematic knowledge suggests methods of investigation that elicit various aesthetic and epistemic operations, rather than being constrained by a specific definition limited to particular objects. The term thereby allows us

to explore expanded cinematic configurations while serving as a **13** unifying anchor for debates on the multiple epistemic potentials of cinema.

While the authors featured in this edited collection propose ways of engaging with this operative term that befit the analysis of their objects, this introduction will present some examples that will help the reader to situate tacit cinematic operations. Through these examples and the variety of case studies discussed in the following essays, the notion of tacit cinematic knowledge will come to encompass multiple understandings of how implicit, unspoken cinematic knowledge emerges from analytical gestures. Nevertheless, attending to tacit cinematic knowledge does not dismiss or overlook the analysis of more conventional, explicit forms of cinema. Rather, it opens up possibilities of tracking cinematic objects across practices which—particularly in the context of digitization—are increasingly dispersed (Alloa and Cappelletto 2020; Denson 2020; Hagener, Hediger, and Strohmaier 2016; Rothöhler 2018), and seem to be fading into the background as they become the tacit infrastructure of contemporary knowledge practices.

### **Cinematic Modes of Existence**

The essays of this edited collection demonstrate the possibility of reinstating cinematic features of processes and associations that might not be, at first sight, particularly indebted to cinema. This reinstatement reveals something substantial in our ways of being, thinking, and acting. Insofar as the term tacit cinematic knowledge aims at unearthing the cinematic qualities of practices involving human actors who are potentially unaware of their relevance, this notion designates ways of documenting—and claiming—cinematic *modes of existence*. 1

1 As Henning Schmidgen shows, the term "mode of existence" has undergone a series of re-appropriations, shifting from phenomenological to ontological orientations, including in film theory (2016, 325).  Such research is crucial in the face of contemporary concerns about forms of mediation that shape our societies (Akrich, Latour, and Callon 2006; Galloway and Thacker 2007; Kember and Zylinska 2012). Accordingly, we argue that cinematic mediation is productive of the social, meaning that our societies are inevitably affected by modes of cinematic existence whose complexity remains largely ungrasped. Thus, in order to give a series of *figurations*—to use Bruno Latour's (2005) terminology—to cinema, we need to track the cinematic traces of the social. We need to consider the ways in which cinema operates across practices and environments, imparting its operational modes.

But this raises the question of what allows us to designate certain forms of knowledge as "cinematic"? In other words, how can we recognize cinema outside of cinema? How can we argue for a similarity between these tacit cinematic knowledges outside of the movie theatre and practices and *dispositifs* that have so far been treated as explicitly cinematic?

There is no need to engage in the debate on medium specificity. We will not even restrict the "epistemic domain" of cinema to the generic presence of moving images displayed on screens, and thus associate the cinematic with the "*kinetic*" or the "*screenic*" (Casetti 2015, 112). Rather we would like to take up examples in which artists and theorists have claimed that cinematic modes of existence extend beyond the technological and temporal boundaries of what we intuitively (still) put under the sign of "cinema."

propose here is to take up the term in a sense close to Gilbert Simondon's (2017) and Bruno Latour's (2018) interpretations, i.e., in a sense "not limited to a phenomenological or ontological characterisation of a specific type of object, but rather [open to] a consideration—grounded, ultimately, in sociology and/or history—of how the object is embedded in particular modes of thought and action" (Schmidgen 2016, 325).

Among the authors who have thoroughly examined tacit **15** cinematic forms of knowledge, there is one for whom such forms could hardly be restricted to specific sets of practices and *dispositifs*. For Sergei Eisenstein, cinematic operations of meaning production were already present at the end of the 16th century, in the way that El Greco envisaged the composition of his paintings as blocks of shapes that could be reassembled in different ways—resulting in various compositions—while keeping their inner structures unaltered (similar to filmic shots in montage sequences) (Eisenstein 1980). The way children construct their drawings, ignoring the laws of perspective in favor of a hierarchy of pictorial elements whose dimensions correspond to their narrative importance, mirrors the use of variation of shot sizes in films (Eisenstein 1989, 111). Eisenstein further argues that prose composition may be compared to the process of filmic montage and the gesture of emphasizing objects through close-up shots. He explains how orators compose their speeches in a "cinematic way," seeking to meaningfully connect the stages of a thought, and conferring on each sentence the power to alter the meaning of the preceding one. Finally, he borrows a definition of the art of oratory from Thomas de Quincey to conclude that, like films, orators extract from the truth its most striking aspects in order to bring them to the attention of an audience (Eisenstein 1980, 32).

In short, Eisenstein suggests that what has come to be "cinema" are operations of meaning production present across the arts and in various social practices. Moreover, these operations embody knowledge as well as affects.

According to Eisenstein, El Greco's *View of Toledo* (1596–1600) (see fig. 2), which is not concerned with the realistic spatial relationship between the different elements of the landscape, demonstrates the relationship between that painter's work and the affective potential of cinematic montage. The painting is not simply an interpretative narrative of the city where the painter lived, but also a "fugue on the theme of the Last Judgment"

[Figure 2] El Greco's *View of Toledo* (1596–1600) (Source: Wikimedia Commons 2022).

(Eisenstein 1980, 28)—a landscape under a storm raised to the status of an ecstatic figure. Various elements drawn from real life are set up within the painting in order to render the conflict of passions that the painter was experiencing in the face of his imminent death, expressing his state of existence through a conflicting montage embracing all his suffering and anguish. Thus, for Eisenstein, the cinematic is a broad and long-standing operation of *thinking*, which does not dismiss *feeling*.

Perhaps Eisenstein's richest example of tacit cinematic knowledge is his famous interpretation of the Acropolis of Athens as "the perfect example of one of the most ancient films" (1989, 117). In his text "Montage and Architecture," based on the descriptions of the historian of architecture Auguste Choisy, Eisenstein put forward the idea that the layout of the Acropolis' buildings does not respect geometric symmetry from an overarching perspective because it was designed to compose a sequence of points of view whose perfection can be perceived only through the idea of montage. The monuments that made

up the sanctuary of the Athenians were arranged in such a way **17** that the view of each one is juxtaposed with that of another. By avoiding the simultaneous view of several buildings, the architectural ensemble never takes away the uniqueness of each individual monument, placed for a moment in the center of the visitor's attention and offering an impression of unity of composition. Moreover, the Acropolis' buildings were arranged in a manner that the visitor always comes to contemplate the monuments first in their most privileged angles of view. This prompted Eisenstein to claim that "the Greeks have left us the most perfect examples of shot design, change of shot, and shot length" (1989, 117).

Even the rhythm of this composition is designed by the movement, not of the "film" itself, but of its spectators:

[I]t is hard to imagine a montage sequence for an architectural ensemble more subtly composed, shot by shot, than the one which our legs create by walking among the buildings of the Acropolis. … [The] length of these montage sequences is entirely in step with the rhythm of the building itself: the distance from point to point is long, and the time taken to move from one to the other is of a length in keeping with solemnity. (Eisenstein 1989, 117 and 121)

Eisenstein's extensive genealogical project of writing—as Antonio Somaini puts it—"the history of all the media and all the forms of representation that had explored, *before cinema*, the same 'expressive means' that cinema would later employ" (Somaini 2016, 20)2 is thus a key reference for thinking tacit cinematic knowledge today.<sup>3</sup> In particular, it allows us to grasp cinematic configurations that have never been rigidly fixed in specific

**18** settings or *dispositifs*. On the contrary, referring to objects as "post-cinematic" considers that these long-standing and diffuse cinematic means of expression have now been tamed, cultivated, and developed by the many kinds of film practices and technological configurations throughout the last century. The various configurations of cinematic knowledge today and their effects on social production are inevitably affected by film cultures.

# **Image Operations**

On a different note, contemporary tacit cinematic knowledge may also be considered as an aspect of "invisible visual culture" (Paglen 2016), wherein the majority of image operations take place away from human eyes. Recent media theories account for a cinematic situation unimaginable at the time of Eisenstein's work. The advent of digital images has rendered images machinereadable, and has thus fostered a vast automation of sight (Virilio 2007). Images no longer need to have a human-readable form in order to operate and impact our everyday lives.  But all of this is hard to see" (2016). Cinematic technologies combined with machine learning technologies become tools for managing massive volumes of data used for military, government, and law enforcement practices, as well as for commercial management of large-scale sensorial experiences. As Mark B. N. Hansen argues:

The self-propagating, self-escalating increase in non-perceptual sensible data generated by twenty-first-century media profoundly affects the economy of experience, such that our (human) experience becomes increasingly conditioned and impacted by processes that we have no direct experience of, no direct mode of access to, and no potential awareness of. (Hansen 2015, 8)

Most digital cinematic operations take place in a tacit domain, **19** from which they distribute visibilities and invisibilities, controlling experiences and attentional flows (Citton 2017; Rosa 2018; 2019). Knowledge itself calls for new definitions in the era of big data, when institutional practices of knowledge production are intimately linked to techniques of tracking digital traces and large-scale processing (boyd and Crawford 2013). All these new technological configurations raise aesthetic, epistemological, ethical, political, and ontological problems that are just beginning to be unraveled. Significantly, the hidden nature of digital operations cannot be elucidated with the traditional tools for investigating cinematic images, which primarily address human perception. The automated operations that precede (or preorganize) sensibility are also becoming a topic of film research, as infra-empirical cinematic operations that embed practices and modulate human agency.

The work of video artist and film theorist Harun Farocki captures and reflects upon the implications of digital cinematic processes in a variety of institutional settings. In his video *War at a Distance* (see fig. 3), for example, Farocki (2003) shows how digital technologies and machine vision have simultaneously reshaped industrial modes of production and military strategies of visualization and destruction. He highlights the fact that, today, images are used not only as indexical testimonies of events, but also as indispensable operational units in processes of production and destruction, in which the human gaze itself is replaced by machine vision and relegated to marginal functions.

Perspectives on the diverse operations of images, in the Farockian sense, have multiplied in the last two decades, revealing a variety of relationships between the functions of digital images and processes in the military, pedagogical, economic, and legal spheres (Eder and Klonk 2017; Hoel 2018). Such work has also prompted retrospective examinations of non-digital cinematic techniques, proving that such techniques already had an active part in shaping the operation of these

[Figure 3] Film still from Harun Farocki's video *War at a Distance* (Source: Farocki 2003, 52:47; © Harun Farocki GbR).

spheres (Acland and Wasson 2011; Hediger, Hoof, and Zimmermann 2023; Hediger and Vonderau 2009). Aud Sissel Hoel argues that the growing literature on images as operational agents shows that "we are currently standing on the verge of an emerging, operational paradigm of media theory" (2018, 27), wherein digital technologies produce new types of images, questioning the very concept of the image itself and the assumptions that underlie it. The autonomous, active character of digital images unleashes the power of the tacit epistemological agency of media.

In the midst of such upheaval of contemporary visual culture, in which cinema—no less than the image itself—is hardly selfevident, the compelling new perspective opened by the term tacit cinematic knowledge helps to navigate through disparate domains in search of traces of cinema. As we evolve within digitally controlled spheres of sensibility, it is of great interest that we find the means and tools to track down the implicitly cinematic aspects of our experiences. This applies to both visual and acoustic fields (at least), insofar as sonic configurations have also always been largely relegated to the background of cinematic experiences, although they are powerful evocators

of the universe of cinema outside of its classical *dispositif*. In the **21** age of high-speed file sharing, the modes of semiotic production and of designing affective ambiences are constantly reviving, recombining, and translating visual and sonic configurations drawn from cinematic archives (Steyerl 2008). When these configurations become frameworks of experience, operations, gestures, associations, and moods, they carry the imprint of our cinematic knowledge cultures far beyond the movie theatre and filmic diegeses.

Tacit cinematic knowledge is thus potentially related to all kinds of cultural practices, historical periods, visual and sonic *dispositifs*. It arises from human as well as non-human knowledges (Braidotti 2019; Haraway 1988; 2007) and is directly or indirectly bound to the explicit universe of cinema. Just as Karin Knorr Cetina suggests that knowledge practices in a "knowledge society" take place primarily outside of academia (2002, 333), in times of "post-cinema," cinematic practices take place most often outside of the traditionally privileged sites of cinematic knowledge.

# **Tacit Cinematic Knowledge: Approaches and Practices**

This volume brings together essays from scholars who participated in the international conference *Histories of Tacit Cinematic Knowledge,* organized by the Graduate Research Training Program "Configurations of Film" at the Goethe University Frankfurt (September 24–6, 2020), and from authors who were invited to follow up on the questions raised at the conference. Coming from different backgrounds, the authors propose distinctive approaches to the term tacit cinematic knowledge.

We have chosen to arrange the essays so as to allow the reader to move from technological, social, and environmental approaches

**22** to tacit cinematic knowledge to more object-oriented ones. Theoretical, conceptual, or practice-related points of articulation mark the intervals between the essays. We hope that this structure will help to map out not only the growing diversity of cinematic practices but also the theoretical and conceptual tools that are currently being developed to investigate them. While the essays gathered here are not intended to provide a conclusive account of tacit cinematic knowledge or a single definition thereof, they each attest to the way this notion operates within a multiplicity of cinematic settings, highlighting how each of these sites can benefit from further research into the subtle cinematic operations at work.

Benoît Turquety's "'Implicit Conceptual Structures': The Nonhuman Dimension" opens the discussion of tacit cinematic knowledge by inviting us to contrast Polanyi's anthropocentric understanding of tacit knowledge with the French tradition of technical epistemology, following in the footsteps of Georges Canguilhem and Gilbert Simondon. By reviving the notion of "implicit conceptual structures," Turquety proposes a way to think about cinematic knowledge as knowledge which circulates tacitly "from the device to its user," exemplified by human gestures prompted by cameras and projectors.

Henning Schmidgen's "Minoring Machines: René Laloux, Félix Guattari, and the Cinema of Animation" focuses on animations Laloux made in collaboration with Guattari, and with the help of the patients of the psychiatric clinic of La Borde. He proposes in his essay a revisitation of the concept of "minor cinema," separating it from questions of national origin and criteria of authorship by considering the interplay between the cinematographic machine, the body, and human subjectivity. The "technology of cinema," as Schmidgen suggests, can "itself … be conceived as an environment imbued with tacit knowledge."

Veena Hariharan's "Bio-Logs and Non-Humans" discusses cinematic apparatuses designed to capture animal behavior and turn tacit animal knowledge into cinematic images. She takes **23** up the case study of a Swedish slow-TV show, *The Great Elk Trek*  (Erhag and Edlund 2019–23), that records the migration of the Swedish moose. She demonstrates how visual tracking of animal movement, which has been one of the historical drivers of new cinematic technologies, continues to inform our knowledge of non-human worlds. As she argues, such tracking now enables a global community to share a mode of contemplating distant, vanishing wild realms.

Felipe Soares' "Old Modes, New Moods, or How Soundtracks Can Experiment" opens a perspective on the long history of the association between musical modes and particular moods, dominated by conservative industrial cinematic interests, but also a source for new cinematic experiments. He considers mode-mood associations as "memory move[s]" i.e., collective tacit knowledge stemming from different temporalities and presenting countless possible reconfigurations. Specifically, Soares' case study considers how the composer Sergei Prokofiev—notably in his collaborations with Eisenstein—drew extensively on Russian musical heritage.

In "From the Construction Site via the Highway to the Guided Tour," Rebecca Boguska reports on her research trip to the Large Wave Flume, a coastal research facility located in Hanover, Germany. Building on Eisenstein's conception of cinematic montage, Boguska explores the visualization apparatuses and the material infrastructure of this research facility as multiple sites of hidden cinematic performance, ranging from scientific measurement to didactic activities. Her contribution reveals the degree to which cinematic operations are embedded in everyday research practices.

Guilherme Machado's "Scripting Organizations: How Labor Is Becoming Cinematic" provides an account of the increasingly generalized uses of cinematic apparatuses for recruitment, training, and management of labor-related knowledge. He shows **24** how the scripting of learning environments gives rise to tacit epistemic conditions for self-discipline. As productive efficiency results from the apprentices' sensorial, cognitive, and affective activity within cinematically and algorithmically programmed environments, staging practices that have long been associated with cinema are now extensively shaping the performance of labor.

Claire Salles' "'When Pregnancy Becomes a Moving Picture': Negotiating Tacit Cinematic Knowledge in Fetal Ultrasonography" analyses how ultrasound studios produce images of fetuses that inform the political debates around the fetuses' ontological and legal status. She discusses the various uses of prenatal images and the diversity of meanings given to them, invoking feminist positions on the epistemological stakes of modes of visibility related to pregnancy, showing how the political operations of fetal images are themselves configured by diverse forms of tacit cinematic knowledge—from the settings in which echography takes place to family viewing practices.

Shifting scales, Jelena Rakin's "Phantasms of the Sun and Venus: Tacit Cinematic Knowledge in Astronomy" looks at visual *dispositifs* tracking and visualizing astronomical phenomena. She explores the cinematic configurations—such as time-lapse, chromatic rendering, and other forms of image processing—that give perceptible shape to celestial events and their temporalities. Rakin shows that photographic and filmic technologies and the aesthetic knowledge they embody are consistently involved in the "crafting" of astronomical realities and scientific knowledge, thereby allowing us to speak of "aesthetics as a form of cinematic episteme."

Bettina Paul's and Larissa Fischer's essay entitled "Iconic Materiality, or the Ambivalent Fascination of Cinematic Lie Detection Depictions (in Germany)" considers the numerous filmic representations of lie detection practices and machines particularly in Hollywood—as constituting a widely disseminated knowledge field that supports practices of law, policing, and **25** research in the US and Germany. By incorporating perspectives on tacitness from social science and analyzing interviews with experts, the authors argue that tacit cinematic knowledge gains its epistemic significance through iterative representations and the retelling of popular imaginaries of lie detection.

Moving from the institutional to the private realm, Andrea Mariani's "Crafty Cinephilia: The Scrapbook and Film History as Media Anamorphosis" lets us discover a practice of reconfiguring the cinematic experience into a form of knowledge set out on the pages of a cinephile's scrapbook. By emphasizing the agency of the materialities at play in the process of mediating knowledge between the films and the scrapbook, and through the scrapbook maker's gestures, Mariani addresses tacit cinematic knowledge in terms of a performance of material and technical configurations transcending, as he claims, the symbolic and the discursive realms.

R. Haritha's "New Media(tions): Audience's Engagement in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema" revisits narrative cinema via its digital forms, formats, and reception devices, which facilitate various modes of spectatorial engagement, from the production of freeze-frames to practices of copying and recycling images. Focusing on the ways in which users engage with each other in online discussion about filmic details, she argues that the reconfiguration of audiences fueled by social media eventually transforms spectators into permanent producers of collective knowledge about cinema, i.e., tacit volunteers contributing to the digital economy of cinema.

As a closing reflection on tacit cinematic knowledge, Vinzenz Hediger's and Felix Simon's "Unauthorized Fictions: Political Conflict as Spectacle and Conceptions of Trust in the Age of Trump" provides a view on the part played by film in contemporary US democracy (and potentially beyond). Drawing on Donald Trump's election campaign and tribute videos, the authors show how

**26** these videos rely on a tacit collective knowledge of the movietrailer format to promote a dramatized spectacle of politics and popular sovereignty and show that in an "ocular democracy," popular empowerment is grounded in spectatorial affects.

#### **Literature**

Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. *Posthuman Knowledge.* Cambridge: Polity Press.

———. 1980 (1939). "El Greco y el cine." In *Cinématisme. Peinture et Cinéma,* edited by François Albera, 15–104. Bruxelles: Complexe.

	- Schmidgen, Henning. 2016. "Modes d'existence: Memoirs of a Concept." In *Reset Modernity!*, edited by Bruno Latour, 320–7. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Shaviro, Steven. 2010. *Post-Cinematic Affect.* Winchester: O-Books.

Simondon, Gilbert. 2017 (1958). *On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects*. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.

Somaini, Antonio. 2013. "Généalogie, morphologie, anthropologie des images, archéologie des médias." In *Notes pour une histoire générale du cinéma*, edited by François Albera and Antonio Somaini, 237–91. Paris: AFRHC.

Steyerl, Hito. 2008. "Politics of the Archive: Translations in Film." *Transversal*. Accessed February 16, 2022. http://www.documnt.net/ hito-steyerl-politics-of-the-archive.

Youngblood, Gene. 1970. *Expanded Cinema*. New York: Dutton.

#### **(Audio)Visual Material**

El Greco. 1596-1600. *View of Toledo*. Oli on Canvas. *Wikimedia Commons*. Accessed August 10, 2022. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:El\_Greco\_View\_of\_ Toledo.jpg.

Erhag, Johan, and Stefan Edlund. 2019–23. *Den stora älgvandringen*. Slow TV, Sweden. Farocki, Harun. 2003. *War at a Distance*. Video, color, 58 min., Germany.

Barbara, Postolka, and Reto Togni. 2020. *Sequential Sequencing*. Digital Photograph. *Flickr*. Accessed August 8, 2022. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ snsf\_image\_competition/49725501732.

 **TECHNOLOGY**

 **LUMIÈRE CINÉMATOGRAPHE**

 **GILBERT SIMONDON**

 **GEORGES CANGUILHEM**

 **HISTORICAL EPISTEMOLOGY**

# **[1] "Implicit Conceptual Structures": The Nonhuman Dimension**

**Benoît Turquety**

**In a foundational text, Jacques Guillerme and Jan Sebestik described technical operations as being ruled by what they called an "implicit conceptual structure" (1968): they only work when done in a certain way. "Implicit" strikingly echoes Michael Polanyi's "tacit" dimension of knowledge, but there is a difference: the "conceptual structure" lies in the operations, not in the subject. It is not a personal knowledge. These "implicit conceptual structures" describe precisely the kind of knowledge that, according to Gilbert Simondon, is archived in technical objects through a process he calls "concretization." This process implies a continuous exchange of knowledge between humans and**

# **<sup>32</sup> machines. The study of machines shows how cinematic technical objects and gestures systematically involve a nonhuman dimension in the circulation of knowledge.**

In the first pages of *The Tacit Dimension*, Michael Polanyi defines his ground-breaking notion of "tacit knowing" through a simple but ambitious statement: "I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that *we can know more than we can tell*" (2009, 4). As he comments just after, the apparent simplicity of that sentence can be misleading: "This fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means" (ibid.). To clarify his claim, he goes on to present a number of examples of what it can mean to *know* without being able to tell. The first is recognition: we can recognize one person's face among a thousand, or interpret their moods, without being able to describe with words the distinctive features we base our judgement on. From this point on, Polanyi moves to descriptive sciences that "study physiognomies that cannot be fully described in words," and then to "the art of the expert diagnostician" (2009, 5 and 6). This art involves "both practical and theoretical knowledge," and here Polanyi makes another important theoretical gesture in announcing that he "shall always speak of 'knowing'" (2009, 7) as covering *both* these kinds of knowledge. For the argument that I will develop in this chapter, this is a major intervention.

The example of the diagnostician entails a decisive shift. Their work is grounded in descriptive science, but their observation is active, involving "skillful testing" (Polanyi 2009, 7), not only a distanced gaze. It is technical work. It belongs "in the same class [as] the performance of skills, whether artistic, athletic, or technical" (Polanyi 2009, 6). Technical expertise is thus an aspect of *knowing*, and more particularly, *tacit knowing*.

This move from what first appears to be a problem of language— **33** not all knowledge can be translated in words—to the integration of technical as well as scientific knowledges under the single notion of *knowing* has been central to the status of technology within the philosophy of science and the development of the concept of "technics." "Tacit knowing" may not have been primarily about technics; but it was clearly a major tool to think even the most informal, everyday forms of practical expertise. Know-how becomes knowing—a kind of knowing inscribed within the body and surrounded by secret.

This chapter will outline the implications of Polanyi's model of "tacit knowledge" for the study of technics in general, and for cinematic technics in particular—"technics" including here both technical gestures and technical objects, techniques, and machines. To this end, I will present another technological model, elaborated at about the same time as the publication of *The Tacit Dimension*, but coming from a totally different background: the French tradition of historical epistemology. This may lead us to question what could appear as the most indisputable part of Polanyi's initial definition, namely, that what is at stake is essentially *human* knowledge.

### **Technics and the Implicit**

As several scholars have noted (Sebestik 1992), the position of technics within the history of epistemology in France has been somewhat overlooked. One of the fundamental places for the development of French epistemology, the Institut d'histoire des sciences, created in 1932 and headed successively by Abel Rey (1932–40), Gaston Bachelard (1940–55), Georges Canguilhem (1955–71) and others, was renamed as early as 1933 the "Institut d'histoire des sciences et des techniques."<sup>1</sup> Renowned as a

<sup>1</sup> It is now the "Institut d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques" (IHPST).

**34** philosopher of medicine and biology and as an epistemologist, Canguilhem was in fact, during his time as the director of the Institute, a major proponent of "technology," the term being understood as the discipline that studies technics. This was not separate from his major philosophical preoccupations in his 1943 dissertation, Canguilhem defines medicine as "a technique or art at the intersection of several sciences," and more particularly as "a technique for establishing or restoring normalcy" (2009, 7–8). This directly echoes Polanyi's description of diagnosis as an "art" (Polanyi 2009, 6–7), as much "technical" as it is "scientific."

During two academic years, between 1963 and 1965, Georges Canguilhem led a research seminar at the Institute on the "Beginnings of Technology," "technology" referring here again to an academic discipline. The collective work examined Western literature since the Middle Ages, from engineering manuals to philosophical texts, in order to investigate "the constitution of the discourse on technical operations as a scientific discourse" (Guillerme and Sebestik 1968, 1).2 It was not a history of technics, but rather a history of meta-technics. The results gathered by the seminar were published in a ground-breaking essay in *Thalès,*  the journal of the Institute, written by two of the participants, Jacques Guillerme and Jan Sebestik.

Among the important discoveries of the seminar was the importance of Christian Wolff's 1728 *Philosophia rationalis sive Logica*, whose introductory chapter on the classification of sciences presented the project of a "philosophy of the arts" (Guillerme and Sebestik 1968, 29) ("arts" here in the general sense of *technè*, as still used in Polanyi's quote) that he named *technology.* "*Technology* is thus the science of the arts and of the works made with art, or, if one prefers, the science of the things produced by persons through the work of bodily organs, mainly with the hands" (Wolff 1963, §71, 38). It was to be the first and for a long time the only attempt to express the possibility—and the **35** ambition—of expounding "a philosophical and mathematical knowledge" of technical operations. As summarized by Guillerme and Sebestik, "the aim is to gather within a coherent body of doctrine the *implicit knowledge* that manifests in the operations of an art and to inscribe them on the intellectual map of the academic system" (1968, 28; italics added).

The discipline of technology encompasses the analysis of laws that explain the possibility of operations performed by craftspersons, and the rules that govern the development of these operations. Cutting wood, for instance, is subject to certain specific rules: "there is a reason why one can cut wood, and why it can be done with a wedge, and then also with an axe" (Wolff 1963, §39, as cited in Guillerme and Sebestik 1968, 28). "The forces involved with the wedge and with the attack pushing it can be demonstrated mathematically" (Guillerme and Sebestik 1968, 28), claimed Wolff, which implied that for him technology was to be a mathematical discipline as well as a philosophical one. But the very understanding that "there is a reason why" a given technical operation or gesture can work in certain ways and not in others has major implications. As Guillerme and Sebestik formulate it, "Even a manual art as menial as cutting wood puts into play an implicit conceptual structure that governs the execution of the operations" (1968, 28). The philosophical task involved in technology thus relies on the establishment of these "implicit conceptual structures" by which operations are ruled, and which can be formalised mathematically.

#### **The Tacit and the Personal**

In the context of this edited collection, these "*implicit* conceptual structures," which follow the "*implicit knowledge*" embodied within human operations and which technology should integrate within the scientific system of the time, echo the "*tacit*" dimension of knowledge first described by Polanyi in his 1966 publication.

**36** But I think that the differences are no less striking than the commonalities.

Both these conceptual frameworks describe nonverbal forms of expertise. They both can be used to analyse technical knowhow, and to examine the fact that a technical gesture is done in a certain way, without anyone having explained, formulated, verbalized why and how. But the major difference to me lies in the fact that Polanyi's framework is fundamentally subjectivist. Tacit knowledge is a form of what he had called, in an earlier book, "personal knowledge" (Polanyi 1958). As is well known, Polanyi fought for the recognition that the "declared aim of modern science … to establish a strictly detached, objective knowledge" was absurd. "Tacit knowledge" then became a step within this larger project. As he wrote, "But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge" (Polanyi 2009, 20).

Tacit knowledge is thus at the heart of all personal knowledge. It is, to Polanyi, the most radically and obviously personal of all kinds of knowledge. I may not be able to *describe* how to cut wood, but I know, my body knows, and I can make the right gestures: this is my personal knowledge. In a way, Guillerme and Sebestik's account reverses the perspective. The "implicit conceptual structure" designates an arrangement of concepts, so it *is* knowledge, but it lies within the operations. It belongs to an objectivist epistemology, just as there is an objectivist aesthetics where beauty lies in the objects and not in the observer's gaze. A gesture or a machine do not contain concepts per se, but they materialize knowledge in the form of "implicit conceptual structures." The operation "cutting wood" can be done in various ways, but these ways are not infinite, and each of the possible techniques imposes on the operator its own internal coherence, a certain set of gestures and precisely conceived tools. Should these requirements be neglected, the operation just won't work. Technical laws do exist, which may not be theorized, formulated,

or understood by the operators, nor by science in general, but **37** which apply nevertheless. The specific assemblage of rules governing a particular operation thus does not materialize in theoretical discourse, but in the operator's succession of gestures and choice of tools. The correct execution of the operation manifests the knowledge contained within the technicity of that operation, within the structure of the machines or the precision of the gestures. The technical process realizes the implicit conceptual structures inscribed within the operation. If I know how to cut wood, it is because I have first adapted my actions to the technique's implicit conceptual structure. *It* rules *me*; *I* learn from *it*.

The learning process, I argue, defines technical knowledge as such. In "Techniques of the Body," Marcel Mauss claimed that a technique is "an action which is *effective* and *traditional*" (1973, 75): transmission is an essential, defining feature. Techniques are fundamentally *what can be learned*. However, the Polanyi and the Guillerme/Sebestik models imply different modes of transmission, different models for the circulation of knowledge. The latter allows for the consideration of a nonhuman kind of knowledge, and of its circulation from the device to its user. Unsurprisingly, these "implicit conceptual structures" describe precisely the kind of knowledge which, according to Gilbert Simondon, is archived in machines—unsurprisingly, since the philosopher participated in the "Beginnings of Technology" seminar after completing his 1958 doctoral thesis*, Du mode d'existence des objets techniques*, under the supervision of Canguilhem *(Simondon* 2017). The "concretization" process described by Simondon implies a form of evolution of the technical object wherein the progressive understanding of the machine's inner structural interactions, of its objective internal coherence, generates the production of new, improved forms (Simondon 2017, 25–29). Invention is thus not an act of human imagination imposed on a machine, but an effort toward a deeper understanding of the machine's own "implicit

[Figure 1] Turning the crank of the Debrie camera in *Man with the Movie Camera* (Source: Vertov 1929).

conceptual structure." The human operator's task is to become attentive to the kind of knowledge embodied in the machine.

# **Implicit Cinematic Conceptual Structures**

Mediatic technical objects and gestures systematically involve this nonhuman dimension in the circulation of knowledge. A smartphone will teach you how you should use it: you do not need any user manual; all you have to do is follow the machine's instructions. You can even ask it questions and experience that human-machine learning relation within a reassuringly anthropomorphic model.

In film history, the art of turning the crank in a silent film camera or projector was similarly a form of tacit knowledge (see fig. 1).

Handbooks stated that the speed of rotation should be maintained at the "correct" rate, or—if it was a projector—that some expressive variations were allowed, but to be used with care, according to the situations. Then again, they gave little more

[Figure 2] Charles Moisson turning the crank of the Lumière Cinématographe (Source: Gay 1895, 216).

than basic advice as to how this should be done—singing a song to keep a basic rhythm not being really efficient and not possible in all situations… But what I discovered when I actually got to turn a camera crank myself was that to a large extent, the crank guides you. Its material shape, its radius, and its mechanical resistance participate actively in teaching you the right movement (see fig. 2).

The rate that the mechanism teaches one to turn it is not absolutely precise, of course, but it would be physically difficult to have the crank move much slower or faster than the "correct" speed. If I remain attentive to the machine, it will teach me how I should use it.

These examples, the smartphone and the crank, have this teaching capacity because they were designed that way by human beings. But if the camera's design is effective, it is precisely because the designers understood the implicit conceptual structure of the operation "turning the crank" and adapted the form of the machine to its gestural, dynamic requirements. The operation's internal coherence dictated the structure of the

[Figure 3] The Cinématographe's adjustable shutter (Source: Sée 1896, 6).

machine which, in turn, tacitly informed the user's movements as well as their relation with the apparatus.

In fact, the initial concretization process of the "cinema" machine was already based on such a nonverbal circulation. As I discussed in my book *Inventing Cinema* (2019, 176–80), Louis Lumière's correspondence with the chief engineer Jules Carpentier shows that Lumière originally wanted his invention, the Cinématographe, to provide very short exposure times. Therefore, the shutter's opening had to be very thin (see fig. 3). Lumière thought that the animation effect relied on obtaining sharp, instantaneous photographs. This idea—or this bias—came from the framework of the Cinématographe's conception. As it appears in the original patent (Lumière 1895), Lumière initially considered his new machine to be a version of the Chronophotographe developed by the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. For Marey, the Chronophotographe was a scientific instrument conceived to analyse human and animal bodily motion. As he explained many times in various texts,<sup>3</sup> Marey believed the sharpness of the image to be crucial, because the photographs were produced for

measurement and analysis. Any blurring would invalidate the **41** entire experimental protocol. Therefore, Lumière's knowledge of his own machine included sharpness as an obvious feature.

However, Carpentier found this to be a problem: employing a narrow shutter opening necessitated that it be adjustable.

The reason was that the Cinématographe was a reversible machine: it could be used both to capture images (i.e., as a camera) and to share or distribute them (as a projector or printing apparatus). When used as a camera, only a narrow shutter opening could produce sharp images. On the other hand, when used to project images, a narrow opening would reduce the amount of light passing through and thus interfere with the clarity of the projection.

Adjustability was therefore the only solution, but it engendered technical difficulties. Firstly, the requirements on the material used for the two superimposed, adaptable blades were more demanding, resulting in a more fragile instrument and higher costs. Secondly, adjustability would complicate the operations for the future users by requiring them to correctly set the shutter before each use. Was that really necessary? In fact, it was not. As a letter from February 6, 1896 shows (Lumière 1995, 115), *while testing the apparatus* Lumière suddenly realized that he was wrong: the Cinématographe worked just as well if the exposure time was slightly longer. In fact, it was even better visually if the frames included a bit of motion blur, so it was best to simply leave the shutter as wide open as possible.

This moment is a typical example of Simondon's concretization process: the internal coherence of the machine governs its evolution, beyond the will or resistance of its designers. The seeming simplification of the device in fact corresponds to a better understanding of how the Cinématographe actually works. The theoretical, even epistemological lesson of this is that technically and conceptually, a cinematic frame is *not* an instantaneous photograph. The Cinématographe had tacitly

**42** taught its inventor what its technical structure should be, and that cinematography's "implicit conceptual structure" was deeply different from chronophotography. Having learned from his machine, Lumière abandoned the idea of a variable shutter.

# **The Tacit and the Implicit**

The notion of "tacit knowledge" encompasses more than technics. Still, its importance to technology is undeniable, as it allows for the description of skill and know-how as forms of knowledge on par with scientific, theoretical knowledge. The craftsperson, the user of an instrument or of a tool and the expert in a practical art, can be recognized as *knowing* something, even though we may not be able to *tell* what exactly that "something" is. Guillerme's and Sebestik's "implicit conceptual structures" entail a reversal of perspective, since suddenly the focus turns from the human individual to the operation: to the apparatus and the gestures that surround it. The human has not disappeared from their concept; the human element manifests in the *intentions* that inform the operation as such. Still, the consideration of implicit conceptual structures in a technological analysis, echoing Simondon's "concretization" process, encourages us to move our attention to the demands of the non-human. It also makes us realize that apparatuses, too, contain and materialize knowledge. They are knowing beings. They receive knowledge and communicate it, as humans do. To understand the circulation of knowledge, its transmission, one must take them into account as active participants within networks that they, in part, shape. That circulation is indeed tacit: it is based on examination and gestures, on combining "skillful testing with expert observation," as Polanyi described the "art of knowing" (2009, 7) when discussing the diagnostician.

In the case of cinema and media more generally, I contend that the role of apparatuses within the construction of cinematic knowledge must be recognized in order to understand the full

scope of what this knowledge represents. Cinematic machines, **43** from the Cinématographe to smartphones, are not only the recipients or the archives of human knowledge: they have also participated in constituting the vast aggregate of knowing and cultural practice that is "tacit cinematic knowledge." Thus, "tacit cinematic knowledge" is not exclusively *human* knowledge.

#### **Literature**

	- chronophotographiques." French patent 245'032, February 13.

Marey, Étienne-Jules. 1894. *Le Mouvement*. Paris: Masson.

#### **(Audio)Visual Material**

Gay, M. A. 1895. "Fig. 3—Production des nègatifs" (Charles Moisson turning the crank of the Lumière Cinématographe). In "Le Cinématographe de MM. Auguste et Louis Lumière." *La Nature* 1161 (August 31): 215–18.

**44** Sée, Armand. 1896. "FIG. 1—Obturateur réglable, à deux secteurs." *Reproduction analytique et synthétique des scènes animées par la Photographie: Le Cinématographe de MM. A. et L. Lumière*. 6. Graphics. Lille: Le Bigot Frères. Vertov, Dziga. 1929. *Man with the Movie Camera*. Feature-length film, 68 min., Soviet

Union.

 **MINOR CINEMA**

 **RENÉ LALOUX**

 **FÉLIX GUATTARI**

 **GILLES DELEUZE**

 **ANIMATION**

 **TECHNOLOGY**

# **[2] Minoring Machines: René Laloux, Félix Guattari, and the Cinema of Animation**

**Henning Schmidgen**

**Following Gilles Deleuze, the concept of** *minor cinema* **is often discussed with respect to questions of authorship, nationality, and** *fabulation***. This essay highlights the specificity of Félix Guattari's contributions to defining minor cinema, emphasizing the transversal connections between machine, body, and subjectivity. The essay focuses on animations that the French graphic artist, puppeteer, and filmmaker René Laloux (1929–2004) made at the psychiatric clinic of La Borde in the mid- to late 1950s with the active participation of Guattari and the clinic's patients. Drawing on Laloux's**  *Tic tac* **(1957) and** *Les dents du singe* **(eng.** *The Teeth of the Monkey***, 1960), it argues that the**

# **<sup>48</sup> technique and aesthetic of his animations confront us with cinematography in its minor state in the sense of Guattari, i.e. before becoming overloaded with faces, texts, and meanings.**

René Laloux was a French graphic artist, puppeteer, and filmmaker. Born in 1929 and deceased in 2004, Laloux is best known today for the feature-length animated films he made in the 1970s and 1980s in collaboration with graphic artists such as Roland Topor and Jean Girard (aka "Moebius"). In particular, two science fiction animations, *Fantastic Planet* and *Time Masters,* have received recognition and distribution (Laloux 1973; 1982). *Fantastic Planet* even obtained a special prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, and both films have been shown many times on television. They are also now available in digital form and have become widely acknowledged as authoritative works of their genre. With *The Snails*, which he made with Topor in 1966, Laloux also set a benchmark for artistically sophisticated animated short films that is still recognized today.<sup>1</sup>

Less well known is the role that Laloux played at the beginning of his career at the psychiatric clinic of La Borde. Inspired by the radical movement of "institutional psychotherapy," the La Borde clinic was founded by the psychiatrist Jean Oury in Cour-Cheverny near Blois in 1953. Two years later, Félix Guattari began working at this clinic, with which he remained affiliated throughout his life, both before and after his collaboration with Gilles Deleuze. From 1956 to 1960, Laloux also worked in this clinic, first as a trainee (*stagiaire)*, then as a supervisor (*moniteur*). His task was to stimulate and direct the artistic work of the patients—mostly

1 On Laloux in general see Blin (2004) as well as Keller (2012); see also *Laloux sauvage* (Dauman 2003); on *Fantastic Planet* see, for example, Stiglegger (2018).

drawing and painting, but also working with puppets as well as **49** silhouettes, and, finally, making films.2

During his time at La Borde, Laloux made three films. The first is *Tic tac,* from 1957, a seven-minute 16mm black-and-white film. Using silhouettes, this film tells the surreal story of a woman who lives in a world where things gradually take on a life of their own. In this world, she starts to fly, being carried away by balloons. A living clock, a lamp, and another person accompany her. These beings are eventually eaten by a dragon, but the woman continues to fly, ultimately changing her silhouette from black to white (see fig. 1).

*Tic tac* was created in collaboration with the patients of La Borde. According to the opening credits, "This film was conceived, drawn, and filmed by a group of patients at a psychiatric hospital under the direction of René Laloux" (Laloux 1957, 00:12–20).<sup>3</sup> Laloux was responsible for directing the film along with Jacques Brissot, who at the time headed the "Image Research Group" at the French broadcaster *Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française* (RTF). In turn, the "Image Research Group" was affiliated with the "Research Service" of RTF, which was then headed by Pierre Schaeffer (Robert 1999-2002).

The second film Laloux made during his time at La Borde was *Les Achalunés (1958)*. For this five-minute experimental film, Laloux again collaborated with Brissot, as well as the composer Henk Badings, a pioneer of electronic music. In this case, however, there seems to have been no direct collaboration with the patients of La Borde. The black-and-white film shows a series of visual phenomena—light reflections and refractions—that are reminiscent of organic forms and functions, of individual organs such as eyes, but also of the throbbing and pulsating of entire

[Figure 1] …a world where things gradually take on a life of their own. Still from *Tic tac* (Source: Laloux 1957, 06:25).

organisms. Badings' music adds a strikingly futuristic character to these abstract images.

The third film was *The Teeth of the Monkey*, completed in 1960, an eleven-minute 32mm animated film in color. This film tells another surreal story of a poor man who goes to the dentist to have a tooth pulled, but does not know that this dentist is stealing the teeth of the poor to give to the rich. A "magic monkey" gets wise to the dentist and makes amends: he pulls the dentist's teeth, thus returning them to the man from the beginning.

*The Teeth of the Monkey* makes clear that, and how, the film was made in La Borde through a short opening documentary shot in black and white. Not only is Jean Oury explicitly mentioned as a counsellor; we also get a glimpse of the painting workshop at La Borde. We witness the young Guattari as well as the young Laloux as they work on the film with the patients in the painting studio (see fig. 2).

In an interview, Laloux retrospectively described the work on the screenplay for *The Teeth of the Monkey* as a "collective

[Figure 2] Félix Guattari (front left, sitting at the table) and René Laloux (back right, standing at the table) work together with patients in the La Borde painting studio. A still from *Les dents du singe* (eng. *The Teeth of the Monkey*) (Source: Laloux 1960, 02:35).

improvisation" that was carried out by a group of about 15 patients in a kind of "association test" inspired by C. G. Jung. Words chosen as randomly as possible were expanded spontaneously first into sentences and then into a story (Ciment 1994). Simplifying the concept, the film itself says: "It was like a game, an improvisation, where they all looked for a story and invented heroes. Slowly, a theme emerged from these discussions. They had to meet up frequently to think up a scenario and a setting. Everyone had their own character and they finally chose the ones that they liked" (Laloux 1960*,* 02:34–03:02). Based on the original designs, drawings for the film were made by Julien Pappé, who would later become famous for, among other things, the trailer for Truffaut's *Shoot the Piano Player* (1960).

### **Minor Cinema**

I would like to return to these early films by Laloux in order to discuss the concept of *minor cinema* associated with the work

**52** of Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze, in particular, is famous for his remarks on a *cinema of minorities*, found in his two volumes on cinema from the 1980s (1989; 1997). In the second half of the second volume, when reflecting on the relationship between film and thought, Deleuze refers primarily to what he calls "third world cinema" the cinema of "minorities" and of "oppressed and exploited nations," which he sees as exemplified by the work of the Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka (Deleuze 1989, 220 and 217).

As is well known, Deleuze argues that cinema conceived in this sense participates in a complex expressive task, "not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people" (1989, 217). Similarly, a few years earlier, Guattari states that cinema can be conceived of as a "minor art," an *art mineur*, but only if it is an art "that serves people who constitute a minority" (2009a, 271).

As Deleuze and Guattari note in *A Thousand Plateaus,* the crucial reference for this idea of a minor cinema is Paul Klee, who said in a 1924 Jena lecture regarding his difficult situation at the Weimar Bauhaus, "We still lack the ultimate force... We seek a people" (Klee quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1993, 337–38). Deleuze and Guattari also refer to Franz Kafka, who as they describe in *Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature*, developed the concept of *littérature mineure* in an effort to open up the dominant German-language forms to the expressive forms of the Jewish minority, especially by opposing "the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality" (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 27).

In the years since Deleuze and Guattari's initial development of the concept, *minor cinema* has been discussed primarily in terms of the origins and authorship of films, e.g. by David E. James (2005), Dudley Andrew (2000), and David Rodowick (1997). In this vein, *minor cinema* is understood as the cinema of the "Third World" and of minorities: the cinema that emerged independently from major US film companies and draws on non-Western, and especially post-colonial, discourses.

This does not mean, however, that the concept is entirely clear. **53** As David Rodowick explains, on the one hand, "[a] minority discourse must affirm its becoming in images by struggling to define itself through the forces of domination and exclusion that occlude it. The defining characteristic of a minority is in fact philosophical: to become-other as an affirmative will to power" (Rodowick 1997, 153).

On the other hand, in addition to this philosophical process of becoming-other, Rodowick refers to the "postcolonial cinemas in the 1960s and 1970s, both narrative and documentary" (1997, 158) and cites African filmmakers such as Hale Gerima and Ousmane Sembene. To what degree and in what way these filmmakers actually meet the previously stated philosophical criteria, remains, however, unclear.

With regard to the question of the tacit knowledge of cinema, I would like to recall that this already ambivalent definition is still only *one* possible way of reading *minor cinema*. Instead of referring to the questions of origin, authorship, and the problem of fabulation—as Deleuze, and later Rodowick, do—the questions raised by *minor cinema* can also be directed, via Guattari, to *cinematography as technology,* to cinema not as a medium but as a machine—or more precisely, to the relationship between the cinematographic machine, the body, and subjectivity.

There are at least three arguments in favour of such a reading. First, it has become clear in recent years that Guattari—unlike Deleuze—was involved in media practice to a considerable extent. Notably, he was involved with the "Free Radios" in Italy in the 1970s and set up of his own radio station (*Radio Tomate*) in Paris in the 1980s. Meanwhile, his critical collaborations with artists such as the photographer Keiichi Tahara and the painter George Condo; or the exhibition on Kafka that he set up with Yasha David for the Centre Pompidou in 1984 (Guattari 2016a; Prince and Videcoq 2005) demonstrate his commitment to tying media theory and practice together. Guattari's media activities

**54** also included theatre work (Garcin-Marrou 2011) and a number of film projects, including the draft for a miniseries published as "Project for a *Film by Kafka,"* as well as the impressive screenplays Guattari co-wrote with Robert Kramer in the 1980s for a microbiological science fiction film titled *A Love of UIQ* (Guattari 2016b).

Second, Deleuze's and Guattari's references to Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of technology further encourage a reconsideration of minor cinema. Simondon is an important source for the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly in their two-volume study, *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* (1983; 1993). As early as the mid-1960s, Deleuze paid tribute to Simondon's book on individuation in an extended review (Deleuze 2004). However, the fact that this engagement concerns not only the question of individuation and hylemorphism but also extends to the problem of minor technology has often been overlooked.

In his treatise on the *Mode of Existence of Technical Objects*, Simondon (2017) indeed distinguishes between the "major" and the "minor" modes of interacting with technology. Similar to how Claude Lévi-Strauss contrasts the thinking of the engineer and the tinkerer in *The Savage Mind* (1966, 1–33), Simondon distinguishes a rationalistic way of relating to technical objects from an intuitive one. In this context, the term "major" is used to describe an attitude towards technology based in science and rational reflection. This attitude corresponds to technical knowledge that is based on descriptive analysis and geometric representations of technical objects, including measurement and calculation. Here, Simondon has in mind the *Encyclopedia* of Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert, but also engineers in 19th-century industrial societies (Simondon 2017, 109–111).

In contrast, the minor approach to technology is characteristic of agriculture and mining in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is based on a culture of technology that spreads essentially through the acquisition of locally rooted knowledge, physically grounded gestures, and intuition. According to Simondon, it is based on "a

kind of co-natural relation" (2017, 107), a *connaturalité of* man with **55** his environment. In other words, it implies an "implicit" or "tacit" knowledge of technology (Polanyi 1966). As we will see, however, the technology of cinema in itself can be conceived as an environment imbued with tacit knowledge.

In their appendix to the second edition of *Anti-Oedipus*, "Balance-Sheet for Desiring Machines," Deleuze and Guattari (2009) take up Simondon's categories in order to argue for the minor use of technology as an emancipative re-appropriation thereof, effected under the conditions of individual and collective desire. Key ideas in this regard are "the most extensive utilization of machines by the greatest possible number of people, the proliferation of small machines and the adaptation of large machines to small units, [and] ... the destruction of the specialization of knowledge and of the professional monopoly" (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 107).

If as early as this publication, Deleuze and Guattari are already connecting minor uses of technology and "tinkering" both to Ivan Illich's programmatic attempt at "retooling society" (Illich 1973), and in the same breath, Buster Keaton's machine films, then it is no surprise to find this double reference—to Illich *and* Keaton in Deleuze's cinema books as well, precisely at the point where he mentions the process of "minoration" of machines (Deleuze 1997, 176).

Deleuze describes the principle of *minorer* as "taking the biggest machine in the world and making it work with the tiniest elements, thus converting it for the use of each one of us, making it the property of everyone" (1997, 176). Unfortunately, he fails in this case to refer to cinema as such a machine. Such a reference could have been established comparatively easily via Keaton, if one considers the minoration the protagonist of his films performs not only on machines such as a locomotive (*The General*  (Bruckman and Keaton 1926)) and a ship (*The Navigator* (Crisp and Keaton 1924)), but in *Sherlock, Jr.* (Keaton 1924) on the cinema itself though the hybridization of film and dream, the "getting

**56** into" the projected film, and the resulting change of its action. As we will see, it is precisely this process of minoration, which can be described, following Deleuze, as a direct transition "from the great, real machine to its reproduction as a toy" (1997, 176), which can be observed in the cinematographic practices associated with Laloux's early films.

The third argument for revisiting the concept of *minor cinema* is the increasing interest in the connection between cinematographic machine, body, and subjectivity in film and media studies, as well as in the history of science. I refer here to the work of Benoît Turquety (2019), who has examined the "machines" of cinema within a Simondonian framework, to the observations of Adam Szymanski (2020) on cinema as a psychotherapeutic medium, and finally to the investigations of Elena Vogman (2018), who, starting with her meticulous studies of Eisenstein, has shown increasing interest in the connection between "madness, media, and milieus," in which context she also refers to Guattari.4

# **Laloux and Guattari**

In order to understand Laloux's early films as minor cinema, I propose not to analyse them closely in terms of content, but to look at them in terms of form. Nevertheless, I will not view them as sweeping reflections on the medium of film *per se*, but as rather concrete interventions that disassemble and reassemble the cinematographic apparatus into its individual parts. In other words, I suggest looking at Laloux's films similarly to how Deleuze looks at "experimental film" in his books on cinema (though these include remarkably little work on animation) (Deleuze 1989; 1997).

At the same time, I suggest drawing a parallel to the scientific practices of early 20th-century cinematography. As the example of biological cinematography shows, these practices also disassemble "the black box of the 'basic cinematographic **57** apparatus,' in order to redistribute its elements—the 'movement image' (Deleuze 1997), the projector, the screen, the seat rows, and so on—without making any claim to be complete" (Schmidgen 2011, 60; see also Leyssen and Rathgeber 2013).

Such work with and on the machinery of film is also characteristic of Laloux's early works. The shadow-play of *Tic tac*, for instance, makes reference to the basic fact of projection. The film is reminiscent of the Platonic cave as well as the long tradition of Asian shadow theatre or—to choose an anachronistic but quite appropriate comparison—of the shadow processions in the video installations and theatre pieces of William Kentridge.

*Les Achalunés* alludes to the lenses in both the projector and the camera with its staging of light and glass. The film dramatizes games with light and glass in a manner similar to Man Ray's *L'étoile de Mer* (1928). It is reminiscent, on the one hand, of the depictions of surface textures in the water films of Joris Ivens, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Ralph Steiner, and, on the other hand, recalls the later sequence about "Paris of the future" from *La Jetée* (Marker 1962).

In Laloux's film, these undulating and quivering light structures are staged in such a way that they draw attention to the process of seeing itself. What the film makes clear is that this process is not only human, based on the eye, but also a technical, lensbased process. The pulsating reflexes point to a new kind of life, as it were. The cinematic eye appears not only as an element of a machine that takes in images, but also as part of a yet unknown organism that produces them.

*The Teeth of the Monkey* makes the materiality of the "movement image" (Deleuze 1997) tangible through the technique of cutout drawings and the animation of successive shots. Through this method of making, the film continually reminds us of how movement images are created: by gradually transforming one image into another. This viewing experience is extended and

[Figure 3] People are transformed into teeth. Sequence of stills from *Les dents du singe* (Source: Laloux 1960, 05:03–45).

enhanced by the fact that the film shows an abundance of fantastic metamorphoses. People transform into things or into animals, but people also transform into other people, who are alive or dead, or they are transformed into teeth, as in other sequences (see fig. 3).

In addition, all three films combine their self-reflexive play on their constructed, technical nature with a contemplation about language. In *Tic tac* this is effected through an endless strip of the words "*tic tac tic tac*," which appear in the opening credits in typewriter fashion, accompanied by the sound of a ticking clock. **59** *Les Achalunés* contains a pun in its title that oscillates between the French words *achaler* (*to get on one's nerves*), *lune* (*moon*), and *allumer* (*to set on fire*). In *The Teeth of the Monkey*, whose story—as already mentioned—came about in a kind of random process of collective association, the original French title (fr. *Les dents du singe*) can be read not only as *The Teeth of the Monkey,* but also as a pun: *The Gifts of the Sign* (fr. *Les dons du signe*).

Thus, we can say that Laloux's early films stage implicit knowledge about the production of cinematographic images, in particular their anchoring in a complex machine, which on the one hand encompasses the relationship between image, sound, and language, and on the other contains the camera, the projector, the lenses, the screen, and similar equipment.

The self-reflexivity of Laloux's films is no coincidence. It spells out the fact that cinema appears here as a minor art. On the one hand, this is due to the relative simplicity of the production conditions, which allowed for a far-reaching artistic freedom, an autonomy that Laloux explicitly emphasizes in an interview from 2003 (Dauman 2003, 11:24–14:30). On the other hand, it reflects the conception of the cinematographic machine that Laloux developed as an artist who came to film from drawing and puppetry. The films in question retrace this path through artistic media, leading from silhouettes, reflections of light, and drawings to movement images.

In his 1996 book *Ces dessins qui bougent* (*These Drawings that Move*), Laloux makes the conception of cinema thus outlined explicit. A history of animation which is at once an autobiography and a kind of manual for budding filmmakers, the book refers to shadow theatres, puppets, and the magic lantern as "distant ancestors" of what has become established as a "twin brother" of "normal" cinema under the name of "animation" (Laloux 1996, 24).

In this context, Laloux explicitly sets himself apart from the commercially successful model of industrially produced

**60** animations à la Walt Disney. The technique he prefers is not *dessin en phases*, but rather—and this is what the films discussed in this essay make clear—the cutting out, mounting, combining, and recombining of drawings and other materials. As a result, it is not Walt Disney or Tex Avery, but Lotte Reininger, Berthold Bartotsch, and Jan Svankmajr who are the benchmarks of the tradition to which Laloux has committed himself.

Laloux characterizes this tradition by its emphasis on the importance of a wide variety of materials for the creative practice of cinematographic animation: "[t]he shadow figure, cut-out papers, the puppet, modeling clay, ink, charcoal, the pastel, the gouache, the oil painting, the crayon, powder, sand, and likewise all the objects that man makes, all the products that he consumes or uses, without forgetting humans as lively details, have been vectors of interesting creations" (Laloux 1996, 61).

Laloux thus not only outlines a history of cinema, highlighting the "vectors" of materials, but also formulates the program for a cinematography grounded in the heterogeneity of media, a kind of sculptural animation.

The flip side of this program is a view of "normal" cinema that has striking similarities to that of Guattari. In his statements on cinema as a minor art, Guattari frequently uses cinema's heterogeneous past to illuminate its homogenized present. From his perspective, for example, it is a mistake to think that the silent film of the 1910s and 1920s represents a poorer or more limited assemblage of expressive materials than today's film. On the contrary, according to Guattari, silent film "succeeded in expressing the intensities of desire in relation to the social field in a way that was much more immediate and authentic than that of the talkies" (2009b, 243). This, he continues, was because film was not yet structured like a language to the extent that it is today, i.e. "*because the signifying script had not yet taken possession of the image*" (ibid.).

Laloux expresses similar scepticism about the fixation on **61** language and meaning in today's cinema when, in the aforementioned interview, he comments polemically on the dominant forms of cinema (apparently referring back to his early work in La Borde): "Today's films reveal more and more, it's the film-making of paranoid dictators. But they say less and less. We'd be better off with films made by schizophrenics. But there aren't any films made by schizophrenics. Except for animation, perhaps" (Dauman 2003, 26:18–32).

What both authors ultimately favour is a cinema that—in Guattari's words—turns against the "complete saturation" of the audience, against a "stuffing full of images and meanings," as is "increasingly becoming a fact in major contemporary cinema productions" (1995, 144); a cinema, in other words, that—positively speaking—brings to bear the heterogeneity of cinematic signs and matters. For Guattari, this means helping the "asignifying semiologies"—gestures, rhythms, colours, moods—find expression alongside "semiologies of signification" (2011, 59) like language. Laloux's early films respond to this intention by relying from the outset on a minor, heterogeneous ensemble creation with rather simple materials.

### **The Cinematographic Unconscious**

The convergence between Laloux and Guattari is not a mere coincidence of preferences and tastes. It is due to their shared experience of filmmaking in a psychiatric context—a recourse, so to speak, to the "tacit knowledge" of filmmaking (Polanyi 1966; from the point of view of the history of science, see Olesko 1993).

This implicit dimension of knowledge entails considerable effects, especially in Guattari's work. While Laloux turns to cooperation with artists (Topor, Moebius, etc.), in which knowledge also remains implicit in artistic virtuosity, the presence of a tacit knowledge of cinema can be discerned in Guattari's writings whenever he criticizes, from his radical psychiatric point of view,

**62** a type of psychoanalysis that fits into his perspective on the late capitalist economy of demand and prefabricated response, i.e., one that is part of the saturation-compensation system of the developed consumer society.

Guattari criticizes Freudian psychoanalysis for making the antiquated world of tragedy the frame of reference, basing its interpretative framework in the Oedipus myth. In contrast to the theatre, cinema refers to a mechanized world that, precisely because of its artificiality, represents a more authentic frame of reference for therapeutic interpretation and intervention. Relying on the dynamic visual and auditory experiences of cinema, Guattari thus criticizes the structuralism of Lacanian psychoanalysis for its old-fashioned fixation on language, which can be traced back to basic pairs of signifiers. To this fixation on language, cinema forms a rather complex, quasi-multimedia alternative.

It should be noted that the first drafts of Guattari's semiotics of the unconscious were written around the same time that he was cooperating with Laloux. These drafts reveal that in order to position himself in relation to Lacan's approach, Guattari not only theorizes the relatively passive consumption of cinematic products, but also the active, productive handling of film technology. As shown in his early essay "D'un signe à l'autre" (1966), Guattari had been trying to describe the emergence and development of heterogeneous sign matter since about 1960, and this is precisely the material he had to deal with while working on *The Teeth of the Monkey*. The unconscious described in "D'un signe à l'autre" includes above all images that are superimposed, shifted, and thus set in motion, but then also fragments of language, on the one hand, and gestures as well as movements, on the other (Watson 2009).

The primal scene of this theoretical sketch is based on a fundamental principle of cinematography. The signs of the unconscious no longer operate through pairs of signifiers, as they did

in Lacan's understanding. According to Guattari (1996), they meet **63** in a "black night," in a "fog of meaning," in which "spots" overlap and superimpose in such a way that characteristic lines emerge from their blurred contours—as in the flickering succession of film images in the movie theatre, or more precisely, as in the serial arrangement of drawings in different positions during the production of an animation.

It is only when, after *Anti-Oedipus*, Guattari sets out to further elaborate this sketch into a full-fledged semiotics of the unconscious that the reference to film becomes explicit. One of the lectures he delivered in 1973 is tellingly entitled "Cinémachines désirantes" (2009c), thus reaffirming the importance of cinematography to the dynamic, material-semiotic theory of unconscious desiring machines that Guattari formulates in evernew attempts. At this point, he turns to the film theory of Christian Metz (1974) to bring the polyphony of a veritable machinery of moving signs to bear against the one-dimensional structuralism of the Lacanian linguistic unconscious.

Guattari distinguishes among four layers of meaning in film. The "significant semiology" in his terminology corresponds to the "linguistic tissue" of film as analysed by Metz, i.e. *grosso modo* the spoken word. Meanwhile, Guattari's "a-significant semiotics" is juxtaposed with the "sonic but not linguistic tissue" in Metz's frame, including, for example, instrumental music. This is followed by the "mixed semiotics," which correspond to the painterly, colourful dimensions of film as well as its photographic, black-and-white aspects. The final layer is constituted by the gestures and movements of the human body, which Guattari calls "symbolic semiologies" (2011, 42 and 72).

Similar layer-models of expressive material recur in Guattari's writings, as in the "machinic genealogy" of the components of the unconscious he sketches in *The Machinic Unconscious* (2011, 199), moving from points, icons, and indexes, to codes, as well as in the **64** literal multiplicity of "energetic semiotics" that he captures and outlines in *Schizoanalytic Cartographies* (2013).

Overall, then, it can be said that Deleuze was not the only authentic philosopher of cinema. Perhaps Guattari was even more of one than Deleuze himself. While the latter went to the cinema to encounter an unheard-of range of signs and tried to taxonomize them; the former came out of the projection room, as well as the studio and the editing room, using the tacit knowledge of filmmaking to discover overlapping signs of the most diverse kinds in each of these places.

# **Conclusion**

Guattari never referred to Laloux's films or Laloux's activities at La Borde in his writings, and Laloux does not appear in the double biography by François Dosse (2010) devoted to the "intersecting lives" of Deleuze and Guattari. Apart from a few interviews and some commentaries in DVD and Blu-ray editions of his films, there seems to be little research on this filmmaker to date.

This does not mean, however, that Laloux's films went unnoticed in their time. The contrary is the case. Through the intervention of Frédéric Rossif, *Tic tac* was shown on RTF's television program, as was *Les Achalunés*, presumably, because both were supervised by RTF's "Service de la Recherche." In addition, *The Teeth of the*  Monkey received the "*Filmdukat*" for the best animation at the International Film Festival in Mannheim in 1960 and the Emile Kohl-Award for the best French animation in 1961.

The question of precisely when, how, and why Laloux came to La Borde to make animations with the patients there remains unanswered, however. Given the current state of research, this can only be stated here in general terms. Laloux's activity in La Borde can be understood in the particular context of a psychiatric reform movement that became known in France as institutional psychotherapy. Grounded in the work of the Spanish- or rather

Catalan-French psychiatrist François Tosquelles—a crucial figure **65** for Guattari—institutional psychotherapy has advocated for a more active treatment of psychiatric patients since the its emergence in the 1940s (Guattari 2015).

Drawing on an eclectic mix of Gestalt theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, Tosquelles recommended giving patients access to artistic materials and practices, which in his eyes included the creative use of media. The Saint-Alban clinic, where Jean Oury completed his psychiatric training, included a patient newspaper and a print shop, as well as photography and film. Such media practices were also cultivated at La Borde, and where Guattari was responsible for organizing corresponding activities, from theatrical plays and puppetry to writing workshops, painting, and filmmaking (Dosse 2010, 55–75).

Ever since Tosquelles, the insight that underpins these activities lies in the question of the environment in which psychiatric patients live—more precisely: the environment they continually create for themselves. On this point, Tosquelles, Oury, and Guattari himself followed the work of neurologist Kurt Goldstein, who had already insisted prior to World War II, and certainly with a socio-critical intention, that the actions of physicians must not only apply to the body of a sick person, but to his or her environment as well (Schmidgen 2019). The fact that Goldstein also used film to illustrate this point of view by showing patients in their everyday environment very much belongs to this context (Geroulanos and Meyers 2014).

In institutional psychotherapy, however, environmental action was not limited to physicians, biologists, and psychiatrists. It also included psychiatric patients. According to Tosquelles, Oury, and Guattari, by relying on a wide variety of artistic and media practices, these patients are constantly in the process of constructing and reconstructing themselves and their world. This is ultimately the claim of cinema as *art mineur*. Through Laloux's

**66** films, cinema appears as a machine that creates specific environments and corresponding subjectivities.

The technology of cinema itself becomes a kind of environment. It constitutes an apparatus, an assemblage whose materialities and modes of operation can be appropriated not only in order to express one's own subjectivity, but to produce it in the first place. The crucial movement associated with this assemblage is the transition *from one sign to another*, from one image showing a particular material in a particular state and position to another image showing that material in a changed state and position—or to a different material.

As in Kentridge's cinematographic work, this kind of cinemamachine uses technical and physical means to explore the space between the represented and the representation. In addition, however, the existential territory of this machine is the space between different kinds of representations, or rather materials: the wandering back and forth between drawing, filming, and erasing, or, as in Laloux's case, between drawing, filming, and moving—a virtuoso dance of images, sounds, and gestures, of drawings, puppets, and lights.

By virtue of these movements in and through the interstices among images, cinema becomes minorized. Just as Keaton transforms the locomotive and the ship, Laloux makes the great machine of cinema "work with the tiniest elements," as we can conclude with Deleuze (1997, 176). Laloux thus adapts the cinemamachine to the potential use of each of us, "making it the property of everyone" (ibid.). Alongside authorship, origin and fabulation, this form of *retooling*, this re-appropriation of technology through its subjective as well as collective use, is an essential aspect of the concept of minor cinema.

# **<sup>67</sup> Literature**

Ayme, Jean. 2009. "Essai sur l'histoire de la Psychothérapie Institutionelle." *Institutions* 44: 111–53.

Blin, Fabrice, ed. 2004. *Les mondes fantastiques de René Laloux: Avec des témoignages de Topor, Moebius, Caza.* Chaumont: Le Pythagore.

	- ———. 2011. *The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis*. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

———. 2009a. "Not so mad." In *Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977*, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 268–71. Translated by David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

———. 2009b. "The Poor Man's Couch." In *Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977*, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 257–67. Translated by David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

———. 2009c. "Cinema of Desire." In *Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977*, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 235–46. Translated by by David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

———. 1995. "Le cinéma, la grand-mère et la giraffe." *Chimères* 9 (26): 141–51.

———. 1966. "D'un signe à l'autre." *Recherches* 1 (2): 33-63.

Hofmann, Wolfgang. *Die "psychothérapie institutionelle": Theorie und Praxis einer psychiatrischen Bewegung in Frankreich*. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1985.

Keller, Craig. 2012. "The schizophrenic cinema of René Laloux (2006)." In *La planète sauvage aka Fantastic Planet*. Accompanying Booklet for DVD/Blue-ray Disc, 8–39. The Masters of Cinema Series.

Laloux, René. 1996. *Ces dessins qui bougent: 1892-1992, cent ans de cinéma d'animation*. Paris: Dreamlan.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. *The Savage Mind*. Translated by George Weidenfeld. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Leyssen, Sigrid, and Pirrko Rathgeber, eds. 2013. *Bilder animierter Bewegung/Images of Animate Movement*. Munich: Fink.

Metz, Christian. 1974. *Language and Cinema*. Translated by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok. The Hague: Mouto.

Olesko, Kathryn M. 1993. "Tacit Knowledge and School Formation." *Osiris* 8: 16–29.

Polack, Jean-Claude, and Danielle Sivadon-Sabourin. 1976. *La Borde ou Le droit à la folie*. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.

Polanyi, Michael. 1966. *The Tacit Dimension*. London: Routledge and Paul.

Prince, Bernard, and Emmanuel Videcoq. 2015. "Félix Guattari et les agencements post-média: L'expérience de *radio Tomate* et du *minitel Alter*." *Multitudes* 21 (2): 23–30.

Robcis, Camille. 2021. *Disalienation. Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France*. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Robert, Martial. 1999–2002. *Communication et musique en France entre 1936 et 1986, 3 vols*. Paris: L'Harmattan.

Rodowick, David N. 1997. *Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine*. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

#### **(Audio)Visual Material**

**70** Marker, Chris. 1962. *La Jetée*. Featurette, 28 min., France. Truffaut, François. 1960. *Shoot the Piano Player*. Feature-length film, 81 min., France.

 **ANIMAL**

 **BIO-LOGGING**

 **SLOW TV**

 **TACIT KNOWING**

# **[3] Bio-Logs and Non-Humans**

**Veena Hariharan**

**In this article, I discuss the Slow TV show** *The Great Elk Trek* **(Erhag and Edlund 2019–23), an eclectic combination of popular nature cams and bio-logs. The show offers the pleasures of knowing and experiencing wild nature even as it allows us to reflect on human endeavors via the cinematic—to make explicit, in this case, the tacit animal knowledge embodied in the migratory movements of the Swedish moose. The affordances of Slow TV, its felicity to draw the viewer into its enchanted circle that leads them from pleasure to contemplation, challenges the ways our knowledge of non-human worlds is conditioned by years**

# **<sup>74</sup> of cinematic representation and nature programming.**

As the pandemic forced most of the world into government ordered lockdowns in March 2020, following the pandemic, images of wildlife spotting flooded the internet. From dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice to a Malabar civet spotted at a normally busy intersection in Meyappur, Kozhikode; from strolling wild sika deer in Nara, Japan, to migrant pink flamingos arriving by the thousands in Navi Mumbai's wetlands, social media was abuzz with images of wildlife reclaiming our cities. While many conservationists dismissed this infodemic of WhatsApp forwards as fake news, others saw this rewilding of cities as a renewed opportunity for bio-logging—tracking wildlife behavior, habitat, and movement via prosthetic animal imaging technologies—even as the ambivalent ethics of these imaging practices are being debated.

What the reactions described above reveal are the increasingly segregated habitats of humans and wild fauna that have made these sightings a rare and even ecstatic spectacle; the prevalence of highly evolved animal tagging and tracking technologies to watch animals; and the all too human desire to make explicit the tacit dimension of non-human knowledge.

Scientist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi differentiates between two kinds of knowing—the tacit and articulate—in his deceptively simple formulation: "[w]e can know more than we can tell" (2009, 4). One of his examples is the human capacity to know an individual face, recognizing it among millions of others, yet we cannot explain exactly how we recognize a face we know. Polanyi refers to this inability to articulate the "how" of knowing as the tacit, ineffable dimension of knowledge. In the same vein, we can think of examples from the animal world—how did Siberian cranes know to migrate all the way from the arctic tundra to winter in India's tropical sanctuaries, or the Swedish moose to walk across the melting ice to reach their summer pastures in the

foothills? This is knowledge that is passed on from generation to **75** generation of the species ineffably—tacitly.

Humans constantly endeavor to devise ways of making implicit knowledge explicit, whether simply for knowledge's sake, or with more sinister implications, for data mining and the development of lucrative commercial applications. Take the above examples: millions of dollars have been invested in the development of facial recognition software to aggregate data sets that could enable machines to recognize faces like humans do. These efforts have been extended to the animal world, too: from high-definition images of birds in flight to sophisticated telemetric and bio-logging technologies that have been developed over years for mapping moose migratory patterns.

As wildlife habitats have receded farther and farther from human worlds in the modern industrial era, they are increasingly captured as images or sensory data. John Berger and Akira Mizuta Lippit argue that when animals disappeared from the phenomenological world, they appeared as salvage animals in the world of shadows and light (Berger 1980; Lippit 2000). Indeed, this has been the way in which most of us, save a few wildlife experts and forest dwellers, have access to the ways of the wild. Our knowledge of wildlife is always-already mediated by such images and data.

The history of the moving image is itself intimately entangled with animals, Jonathan Burt (2002) goes so far as to claim that the desire to see and know the intricacies of the moving animal body proved to be both challenge and driving force for early cinema technologies. Starting with Eadweard Muybridge's "Galloping Horse Series" (1878)—in which he used a zoopraxiscope to investigate if and when all four hooves of the horse left the ground during its motion (knowledge that was in turn used to ace horses

**76** for the racing track),<sup>1</sup> individuals have attempted to capture, in moving images, the elusive and enticing animal, thus contributing to the evolution of cinematic technology. Other examples include Étienne-Jules Marey's attempts to capture the motion of pigeons in flight with his chronophotographic rifle (1883-7), experiments in animatronics and animal modelling, CGI and VFX technologies to reconstruct *Jurassic Park*'s Tyrannosaurus Rex (Spielberg 1993), or the numerous experiments seeking to get as close to the animal as possible with thermal cameras in the "blue chip" documentaries on Discovery Channel or Animal Planet.2 Indeed, the "fantasy of looking" through the superior mechanical eye of the camera, what Dziga Vertov called the *kino-eye* (1984), "as if through the eye of an animal, to further reveal those realms of nature invisible to the human eye" (Burt 2002, 53), can be said to constitute an epistemic environment encapsulating what the editors of this current volume have termed "tacit cinematic knowledge."

The cinematic experiments of Muybridge and his successors may seem archaic today, even if the guiding principle remains the desire to know the animal world ever more intimately. However, from 1966, when the first grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park were tagged with high frequency VHF radio collars that pinged approximate locations to receivers, modern devices have been used to map and know animal movement, behavior, and habitats, and now include a range of sophisticated imaging technologies (Gunther, Manen, and White 2017). While nature cams and camera traps are deployed in citizen-science projects, using nothing but simple smart phone technology to log and deliver wildlife information,<sup>3</sup> satellite tracking and remote sensing

devices allow for retrieval of accurate geo-positioned locations **77** and environmental data. Modern biotelemetry tags, also called "bio-logs," fitted around the animal's neck, ear or other body parts, can store or transmit vast packets of vital datasets through electromagnetic waves that are picked up by nearby receivers or communications satellites and decoded using advanced algorithms and AI software.4

### **The Great Elk Trek**

*Den stora älgvandringen* (eng. *The Great Elk Trek*, Erhag and Edlund, 2019–23)5 first featured on Sweden's public service television network, Sveriges Television (SVT) in 2019, and it has been an annual televisual event every spring. Global audiences have been able to tune in to SVT Play to watch this 24/7 livestream of the annual migration of the moose<sup>6</sup> herd of Jamtland, North Sweden, crossing the Ångermanälven river to get to their summer pastures at the foot of the mountains—a total of nearly 520 hours of footage over three weeks (see fig. 1). "Follow the walk live from Kullberg in the north of Sweden," the tagline announced. The show was viewed over 11.5 million times and clocked nearly 4.6 million viewing hours on SVT Play, making it one of Sweden's most-watched TV shows and resulted in a "national moose fever" in the spring of 2020 (Swedish Radio Västerbotten and Prix Europa 2020).

It was also closely followed by more than 200,000 visitors to the DUO-app, who communicated directly with the production via unique handles. Users could find information such as which camera is active at any given moment, and at what angle, a

6 The species *alces alces*—known as a "moose" in America and an "elk" in Britain (not to be confused with the American elk or Wapiti) is known as an "*älg*" in Swedish.

<sup>4</sup> See Hooten (2017) for details of these technologies.

<sup>5</sup> Produced by Stefan Edlund, Johan Erhag for Swedish TV and co-produced by Yleisradio, Finland, on a budget of 238.000 Euros according to the Prix Europa Catalogue, 2020.

**78** counter showed the number of moose who successfully crossed the river onto the mainland, and there were options to watch the day's highlights and even share a link to a timestamp in the episode. Interactive maps, GPS-tracking, and weather-related information provided environmental data to visitors on the app. The show itself proceeded wordlessly and without commentary. Once in a rare while, a text sign flashed across the screen identifying a species, providing brief information about moose migration or location. The show was also available offline on SVT Natur and Twitch. Selected short clips and highlights of the footage of the day and the year with commentary, are available as edited one-hour programs.

### **Slow, Snowy, Spectacular**

The past years have witnessed the cultivation of slowness as a virtue to counter the fast-paced chaos of technological modernity—slow food, slow travel, slow burn, slow movies, and now slow television. When Andy Warhol first made his five-hour long film on the sleeping poet, John Giorno, calling it simply *Sleep* (1964), it was hailed as an avant-garde film par excellence, spawning similar concept experiments across genres and media. The slow movies of auteurs such as Lav Diaz, Apichatpong Weeraseethakul, Béla Tarr, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, to name a few, have received scholarly and cinephilic attention for countering Hollywood's commercial time-space models based on thrills and quick payoffs. Usually characterized by stillness, emptiness, and silence, the minimalist styles of these classic auteurial films include long shots, slow takes and slower edits, immersing the willing viewer in a world where time flows slowly, laboriously, lyrically. Nature—by turns inert, harsh, hostile, supple or fertile and the weary protagonists who journey through it are a staple feed of slow cinema.7

7 See Jaffe (2014) and Tiago de Luca (2015) for detailed studies of slow cinema auteurs.

[Figure 1] Moose begin the crossing in *The Great Elk Trek* (Source: Erhag and Edlund)

Slow Television is of more recent vintage and was popularized, most notably, by Nordic Television's *Sakte-tv* (eng. *Slow-TV*), Norway even voted it as "word of the year" in 2013 (Ulven 2017). Unlike slow cinema's allure among avant-garde and festival audiences, slow TV was a community event and appealed to a broad demographic from the elderly to children. Slow cinema's melancholy-tinged air is replaced in slow TV by an affect-neutral, even breezy everydayness. Plodding, ponderous protagonists are substituted with anonymous commuters, cats, birds or elk, while nature is restored from its tragic timelessness to an unhurried, yet dynamic interactive environment.8 Thus, slow TV alludes to the non-extraordinary and typical processing of quotidian knowledge, reflecting the implicit (tacit) qualities of mediatization.

Nordic slow TV's first sensational hit was *Bergensbanen—minutt for minutt* (eng. *Bergen Line minute by minute*, Hellum and Norsk rikskringkasting 2009) and, as the title suggests, was a minuteby-minute rendering of the 7-hour 4-minute train ride of the train

8 Something similar can be observed regarding the "drift away" qualities of ambient music from the 1960s and 70s and later in what Gernot Böhme calls the "ecological aesthetics" (Böhme 1989), drawing on the aesthetics of nature.

[Figure 2] Still landscapes in *The Great Elk Trek* (Source: Erhag and Edlund)

from Bergen to Oslo.9 It was an attempt to mirror in real time the path of the train's journey that had remained unchanged over its 120-year old history. The record of the train's scenic journey was interspersed with interviews of drivers, passengers, engineers, and archival footage of the journey.10 The show was a sensational hit, with nearly 20% of Norwegians tuning in. Producer Thomas Hellum in his TED talk explains how the live broadcast of long events as they unfold in real time—such as the 7 hours of the Bergen train journey, 10 hours of salmon fishing or 8 hours of knitting made for "the world's most boring… yet hilariously addictive" television (2014). Other Scandinavian countries followed suit and from popular demand, created their own versions of slow TV.

*The Great Elk Trek* was Swedish television's answer to this call. Emma Beddington, writing for *The Guardian*, exclaims, "[f] orget *Line of Duty*, my must-watch show is the riveting spring moose migration, a natural drama full of atavistic pleasures" (2021), echoing the sentiment of millions of viewers who tuned in. If the slow trainspotting of *Bergensbanen* mapped the

**80**

Norwegian landscape, then the moose's slow migration offered a **81** cartography of Sweden's forest and mountain-scapes (see fig. 2). The show fulfilled all the parameters of slow TV spelt out by the producers: real-time unedited footage, live broadcast on prime time tv to maximize community participation, and content rooted in national culture and focused on something that people could identify with.<sup>11</sup>

The moose is the beloved animal of Sweden, and the moose silhouette is highly visible as a national symbol. Besides being the country's top tourist attraction, it is also its premier sport. About 100.000 moose are shot every year in the hunting season in an activity that is both controlled and legitimized by the Swedish Hunting Association and Environmental Protection Agency. It is also a communal activity, rather than a solitary or stealthy game hunt that we see in many other countries (Heberlein 2000). So, when Swedish National Television decided to film the moose migration, it seemed to be a natural choice. The slow TV format was particularly suited to the ruminating ungulate's annual marathon that was epic, spectacular, and yes, slow.

They are in no hurry. This is slow TV, after all, and the moose will not cross until the last ice on the shore has melted. This means the livestream often offers up an hour or two of a single moose chewing meditatively, the steam of its warm breath dissipating gradually in the forest chill, or just standing looking at the river (Beddington 2021).

Nothing happens, but something *might happen*. Thus, if commercial tv shows have their cliffhangers, then this is the hook of slow TV—the fear of missing out when something just might happen keeps viewers glued to their television sets. The show's presenter, Anders Lundin, points to the human traps not far from the cameras, revealing to us that just as hunters wait patiently,

11 See the Facebook fan community for the show at "Vi som följer den stora älgvandringen!" (Nilsson and Olsson 2023).

[Figure 3] *Moment of Drama* (Source: Christensen 2021)

sometimes for days, for the moose to fall along its journey, these camera traps, too, were waiting to capture images of moose. If dead moose were the trophies of the hunter then these moose images, these grainy silhouettes, were the rewards of the show.

Even if the biggest draw of the show is the illusion of watching nature live, without the heavy human hand of classic wildlife programming, the entangled presence of humans and technology alongside the animals casts a shadow every once in a while. Thus, a moose may stumble into a mic or stare at a night vision camera where the fleeting glimpse of a paved road cuts through the forest, which has itself been rewilded or commodified for hunting, tourism, and television. The program also provides the interested spectator with an overview of the intricate infrastructure that went into the making of the show. Twenty-three PTZ cameras (enabled with pan, tilt and zoom functions) concealed with cam-nets, two night-vision cameras, and multiple drones were placed at strategic locations along the trail of the moose walk. Specially designated mics were set up to isolate the

sound of ice thawing and rippling. These devices were operated **83** remotely from the control room in Kullberg, where a team worked round the clock to manipulate the camera every time there was a sighting of a moose or any other wild animal. Sometimes they had to reangle the cameras when the moose strayed from its anticipated path. 17.000 meters of crisscrossed cables (along with embedders for audio) that originated in Kullberg and branched at the mainland were neatly divided into hubs, camouflaged, and placed at several points along the 400-mile path of the moose walk. These fiber-optic cables picked up the video feed and transmitted it back to the control room.

The camera-cable set up tried to follow the well-worn path of the moose as accurately as possible. Usually, the moose would enter through Naset, reach the Passage, then cross the island, before disappearing out of view somewhere beyond the camera. Close ups of the moose are captured as they wade across the waters to cross the island—this is where the main action takes place, and the main hub is placed here. "These moose don't choose Kullberg, but at least we get to see them"12 says the presenter gesturing to the audience.

What we see, then, are not only moose, but also occasional appearances of other wild animals that roam the forests, including wolves, brown bears, lynx, deer, wolverines, reindeer, and black grouse—most of the time, however, there are no animals in sight in this still landscape. Once in a while, the camera drones travel sinuously over beautiful aerial views of miles and miles of limpid silvery snow and majestic green pines as they sway in the wind. Sometimes, the camera disappears behind a stump, or rustles through the spring forest as we listen in to a birdsong, a ripple in the river on the ridge, or hear ice crack and melt. But even these are minor events in the show, since most of the time, we are just staring into an empty expanse of dark blue waters or a white stretch of nothingness. But then suddenly,

**84** something happens: "7-8 moose went through the ice. The moose try to cross here. And when the ice weakens there are still a few who are willing to risk it. When they go through the ice your heart starts to rush" (Erhag and Edlund 2019). Indeed, the drama of the show is a sheer moment of serendipity when a moose falls through the ice, and then heroically rises from it, hesitates before a night vision camera or decides to change its track (see fig. 3).

The gradual revelation of the show, in which every infinitesimal change and each minute detail is apprehended through our slow perception, combines the slow pleasures of watching, knowing, and contemplating moose and other wildlife as they move through snow, forests, and water, or as our gaze is riveted by a still, wild landscape. Linda Williams calls our deliriously voyeuristic pleasures of watching moving subjects on screen the "frenzy of the visible" (1989) while Michael Renov describes our pleasures of documentary viewing as epistephilia—the pleasure of knowing (1993). Rather than transporting us to the wild as classic nature programs do, the wild is brought home through unhurried, unedited real-time footage, sans commentary or music. Indeed, directors Stefan Edlund and Johan Erhag describe the show as "the moving painting in the living room" (Redvall 2020) that enveloped viewers 24 hours a day for three whole weeks in an immersive sensory environment. These enchanted forests, these techno-wilds make us at once remember and forget our culpability in destroying our wildlife and ethical responsibilities toward conserving it.

*I thank Shambhavi Prakash, Tobias Toll, and Dhivya Janarthanan for pointing me to the show and listening enthusiastically to a first draft of this article.*

#### **Literature**

Beddington, Emma. 2021. "Forget Line of Duty: Sweden's Great Elk Trek is giving me hours of joy." *The Guardian*, May 4. Accessed April 4, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/04/ forget-line-of-duty-i-have-found-a-show-that-brings-me-hours-of-primal-joy.

	- White, P.J., Kerry A Gunther, and Frank T. van Manen. 2017. *Yellowstone Grizzly Bears: Ecology and Conservation of an Icon of Wildness*. Yellowstone National Park: Yellowstone Forever.
	- Williams, Linda. 1989. *Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible*." Berkeley: University of California Press.

# **(Audio)Visual Material**

Christensen, Christian. 2021. "High Drama on Swedish Television's 'The Great Moose Migration…'." *Twitter*. April 26. Accessed April 4, 2023. https://mobile.twitter.com/ chrchristensen/status/1386695874890305538?lang=bg.

Erhag, Johan, and Stefan Edlund. 2019–23. *Den stora älgvandringen*. Slow TV, Sweden.

 **SOUNDTRACKS**

# **MUSICAL MODES**

# **EXPERIMENT**

# **SERGEI PROKOFIEV**

# **IVAN THE TERRIBLE**

# **[4] Old Modes, New Moods, or How Soundtracks Can Experiment**

**Felipe Soares**

**When dealing with musical modes, instead of exploring a fascinating, millenary history, with millions of possibilities for experimentation, some soundtrack composers and teachers prefer to obey a sort of utilitarian normativity stemming from the industrial logic of film production. Ancient mode-mood associations tend to become norms, and this ends up inhibiting new ones from developing. Here, I put forward Sergei Prokofiev as a privileged example of the opposite trend: working with old modes, particularly on the music for Sergei Eisenstein's**  *Ivan the Terrible* **(1944), Prokofiev demonstrates that soundtrack scoring is a field of experimentation** *par excellence***.**

**90** *...et un joli Crime piaulant dans la boue de la rue. — Rimbaud*

As a gigantic dinosaur strolls through the park, we hear the orchestra go from a Bb major chord straight to a C major instead of the expected C minor (Spielberg 1993). We can hear the same progression—now from C major to D major (not minor)—in the opening to *The Simpsons (Elfman 1989)*, which starts with voices singing a sharp fourth interval (c-#f). This interval defines the Lydian mode. The list of examples of this mode in the film industry is extensive. It is usually linked to stimulating moods described as heavenly, heroic, hopeful, etc. (Beato 2020). Other musical modes bring out similar lists of moods.

For millennia, in several contexts of musical production (not only in Europe), mode-mood associations have been copious and usually taken for granted.<sup>1</sup> Some authors look for explanations, predictable systems of cause and effect. But, after so many horrors have called into question the validity of human progress—and after so many alerts by minorities, in the context of colonial catastrophe, that the supposed universal

1 This is somewhat surprising, because modes are, ultimately, groups of notes, just elements in a set to be used in a composition—like modern scales. Originally, each mode had a strong association with a kind of musical instrument, which could produce only some determined pitches in a sequence, so that the pitches and intervals were physically determined. Music produced in a mode would sound different from that produced in another one. After some training, it would become easy to recognize modes only by listening to the tunes (analogously, it is easy to tell, nowadays, if a song is in minor or major mode.) As with architectural styles, modes were soon associated to Greek tribal names, like Ionian, Lydian, Phrygian, Dorian etc., and this very association, though perhaps groundless, presupposes a vague quality, character or humour (a mood) for each mode. Thus, a poorly defined notion of cultural identity was, in turn, linked to instruments somehow "typical" of that identity. As I will show below, in Plato's *Republic*, for instance, one can already find these associations in use (1897 iii, 398e).

human subject lies at the root of such horrors—, physiological **91** or cognitive explanations for the production of moods through music seem unconvincing. Speaking from my place, in Southern Brazil, sensitive to the day-by-day effects of colonial arbitrariness, I always prefer to consider attributions of moods as movements of historical references, within more or less defined historic-geographical contexts, based on vague assumptions with no *explanation* at all. Similar to word usage in Linguistics: each proposition is contingent, hypothetical. For any individual, each mood supposedly stimulated by a mode can be seen as a memory move.

Thus, mode-mood associations may well be examples of tacit cinematic knowledge. Michael Polanyi characterizes tacit knowledge as a movement between two vaguely known terms: "we know the first term only by relying on our awareness of it for attending to the second" (2009, 10)—a movement from imprecise signifiers to vague but identifiable sensations. It is plausible to imagine a spectator relying on a vague awareness of the Lydian mode, from which they derive (by memory) a sensation of grandeur when seeing a dinosaur on screen. They have seen dinosaurs before, and they have heard that chord progression many times, so their memories become accustomed to this tacit knowledge.

Thought of in this way, tacit knowledge recalls Proustian involuntary memory: "let a sound, a scent already heard and breathed in the past be heard and breathed anew, simultaneously in the present and in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract" (Proust 2016, 2535). As old sensations awaken, we can see things liberated from the order of time—and ourselves along with them. This possibility becomes clear when we think of Henri Bergson's *la dureé*: all images accumulate in the past (which does not pass) (1911). Each new perception makes us actualize certain memories, concentrated in a certain level of consciousness. "[t]o complete a recollection by more personal details does not at all consist in mechanically juxtaposing other recollections

**92** to this, but in transporting ourselves to a wider plane of consciousness, in going away from action in the direction of dream" (Bergson 1911, 322). The Proustian narrator is Bergsonian, except in his attitude towards the past: for Bergson, the past is kept in itself, and we can only learn how to cope with it, while the Proustian narrator is eager to recover past the way it was (Deleuze 2003, 55).

Links between modes and moods may not recover the past, but they approximate sensations from different times, allowing us escape from chronological order. Curiously, if we take one element away from a film, another may also become part of it: a camera shot, a related sensation, the afternoon you watched a movie or the someone you watched it with, a popcorn flavour. In sum, even if one knows nothing about musical modes, listening to a modal progression while watching a movie may bring up things that are "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract" (Proust 2016, 2535), along with vague but identifiable sensations.

One of the most effective (if regrettable) consequences of this is the extensive reuse of modes in the film industry. This indicates that producers seem satisfied with decisions made by composers, notably when modes *work out fine*, and help sell the films. The problem is that, through industrial logic, the use of musical modes for the work with images has become a *method*, accepted and developed by cinema and music teachers. Rather than pushing for new research and experimentation with this rich millenary history, many teach *how to use* modes, seeking effects (and usually achieving them) by using conventional sound material that supposedly *works out fine* in Hollywood.

In video published by the Berklee College of Music, Instructor Tim Huling, "discusses how modes of the major scale can be used to create different moods and spirits throughout a scene" (Huling 2020). He argues that John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman and Randy Newman, despite all differences, have the use of modes in common. He tries to demonstrate these moods and

spirits, in association with samples of modes. He starts by giving **93** the spectator/student a schematic example of the Aeolian mode, only juxtaposing C minor and F minor chords, but not explaining the difference between this and the usual progression from i to iv in the tonality of C minor, and not adding that the Aeolian mode can be found in the other 11 tonalities. He treats other modes similarly, before concluding by reiterating that modes are "quite useful when scoring a scene" (Huling 2020). If the student achieves the desired effects by playing the correct notes, the class is successful, and the industry may count on new promising workers.2