Unspoken

Journal for contemplative cinema

VITAL RHYTHMS: ONTOLOGY AND BIRÓ’S TURBULENCE AND FLOW

Edwin Mak

‘There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal,’ claimed Gilles Deleuze, since ‘a single voice raises the clamour of being […] we can conceive of several formally distinct senses which none the less refer to being as if to a single designated entity, ontologically one.’ ¹ This univocal ontology of oneness, vitalism, is but one of several ways to think ontology, however, it continues to be favoured by a long tradition of thinkers – Western and Eastern alike. They commonly conceive of all that exists and is yet to exist in complex simultaneity. In that, the oneness itself is virtually inexhaustible as a substance from which all phenomena emanates; structured like crude petroleum oil to the ointments, fuels, shoes, pens, and pacemakers and so on of quotidian life. Its source and oneness, reaffirmed from one derivative essence to the next, is virginal in each variation. And extending from this substance of pure potentiality is the conceptual essence of time itself: time stripped back to its raw nature. It is precisely this amorphous temporal essence that is explored by Yvette Biró in her latest of ten books on cinema narrative, Turbulence and Flow: The Rhythmic Design [Idöformák, literally “Forms of time”].

For the purposes of appreciating Biró’s vitalism, it is useful to situate her amongst its historical continuum. Indeed Biró makes extensive reference to it herself, be they of scientific (natural and psychological), philosophical, quasi-religious, cinematic, or combinations of each in practice. The underlying thesis of them is that each procedure of experiment, critique, faith, or thought assumes its matter as manifestations of a volatile – and strictly – singular being. This tradition’s lineage can be traced, very roughly, from Aristotle – the student and eventual opponent of Plato. Irreconcilable between the two was their ontology. Where Plato defended the existence of immutable truths, Forms, separated from being-in-the-world, his disciple argued for precisely the opposite: being as nothing other than the worldly “essence of all things.” After the Greeks, however, it was Spinoza who made the most rigorous advances in this direction. Passing through him, the claim was that God and nature were coextensive in the ultimate one of Substance; the very pantheistic deity that Einstein endorsed when famously uttering, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.” Thereafter, Spinoza’s vitalist ontotheology flourished through derivations in the works of several influential followers. Most prominent of them were three outstanding Frenchmen: Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Bergson placed vitalism at the centre of his controversial re-reading of Darwinian evolution, in that he claimed the process of natural selection itself enacted his theory of the “vital impetus” [élan vital]. But it was Bergson’s main theory of “duration” [durée] that provided Deleuze, in turn, with the necessary tools for two of his famous formulations: the ontological notion of the “plane of immanence” [plan d'immanence], aided by Guattari; and theories of temporality inspired by the editing techniques of classical and neorealist cinema, the “movement-image” and “time-image” respectively.

Biró also draws from the French trio for artistic consultation, however, they are placed on equal footing with the scientific speculations of Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead. Valued most in Prigogine and Stengers was their conception of temporality and matter, allowing for an empirical basis for creativity and its given materials. Where, ‘“a stone, to an object of art is closely related to our impact on matter. Artistic activity breaks the temporal symmetry of the object. It leaves a mark that translates our temporal dissymmetry into the temporal dissymmetry of the object.”’ ² From this basis three parameters were identified: first, that objects and artists exist in their own unique temporalities; second, these temporalities are non-synchronous (or “dissymmetrical”) to each other; and third, each of these non-synchronous temporalities are collapsible into each other via human or artistic intervention – what Biró calls a ‘forming process.’ ³ Implicitly, then, it follows that each “forming process” is open ended, leading to evermore forming processes disrupting another, ad infinitum. Therefore, where the artist – filmmaker – and time are concerned: creative acts become strategized disruptions, carvings of the infinite potential afforded by matter’s temporal collapsibility. In this strict sense, then, it is small wonder that Andrei Tarkovsky, a master filmmaker of temporality – by subject and technique – was given the epithet: “sculptor of time.” As indicated in the first chapter heading, time is volatile. And it is a theory of cinematic narrative constructed upon this ontology that Biró engages through a kaleidoscope of examples – one hundred and eighty different films in two hundred and thirty nine pages to be precise.

Issued upon this ontology is a rhythmic theory of narrative time. Its operation, thought through the cinematic apparatus, can be likened to Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema – though diametrical in style. This partially explains, why Positif director Michel Ciment considers Turbulence and Flow as much a ‘philosophical’ meditation as it is an ‘aesthetic’ work; time is central to both. ⁴ The operational logic is suitably holistic: since time is volatile by its own nature then all proceeding cinematic expressions in and of this time are necessarily marked by its volatility. This extends regardless of differences in speed, duration or layered complexity. What becomes exposed by this logic is the veneer of speed in cinema: fast or slow. At one end: stillness is but the surface of restlessness, concealing subterranean tensions by which they are supported; and vice versa. Therefore, such tensions do not problematize rhythmic time; rather, they are embraced – or suppressed – as parts of the theoretical whole. They are differences forming structural equipoise.

It is worth mentioning how this vital rhythm resonates with the Deleuzian notion of intensive and extensive. Where, at its most reduced: quantitative differences of objects are overturned in favour of thinking their differences qualitatively. Manuel De Landa’s elegant illustration of this dynamic proceeds as follows. ⁵ Although a litre of water at 90° in temperature is divisible into two half-litres of water (extensive), the temperature of the water (intensive) remains identical, and remains identical however more it is subdivided. While objects can be portioned extensively (unit measures of temperature, volume or even time), they are qualitatively inseparable from their intensive properties. Thus there is a vital immanence to objects in order for this relation to be produced and reaffirmed simultaneously. Rhythms, then, belong to the qualitative category accordingly; they are intensities of time viewable as reflections of the vitalism conceiving it. The usefulness of these dynamics in terms of film theory becomes apparent when reading cognitive – and other parametric – approaches to temporality in film criticism. Should notions of affectivity (ie. emotiveness, poetics, identification etc.) be appreciable through inferences of average shot lengths and ratio data alone? This question remains compellingly open.

Biró, however, resists reductions of the sort. Stressing instead constant rhythmic interdependence of fast and slow. Interdependence is everything, and is duly acknowledged introducing the eponymous signifiers: turbulence and flow. Where,

“turbulence” [örvény] and “flow” [aradas] became the more precise naming of my subject matter, intending to illuminate some of the basic devices, patterns, and modes in which this intertwining takes place […] rhythmic design appeared to be an extraordinarily manifold phenomenon, based on more factors than simply a quick or slow pace. […] the changing pulsations of events and emotions alter meaning, affecting not just the ambiance and physical expressions of a film, but the overall tone and nature of the work as well. ^{6 7}

Appropriately, Biró describes qualities of rhythmic time through lyrical evocation – a constant throughout her writings. One recurring motif in her work including this book is the metaphor of music. She forges a strong association between cinematic rhythm and musical orchestration, and its resulting tonality. For example, the films of Stanley Kubrick, Aki Kaurismäki, and Wong Kar-Wai are said to express ‘delight in the provocative presence of musical interpretation and its paradoxical reversal’ to audiences since: ‘[w]e are dealing with an orchestra where the play and presence of instruments create harmony or [in] its absence, a form of indispensable dissonance.’ ⁸ And in turn, it is the serialization of oppositions in presence and “absence,” or “harmony” and “dissonance” that creates the very fabric of rhythm. Another example shows how the music metaphor draws out the “polyphonic” nature of contingency. Where within the space of music: ‘[t]he evolution of plurality is as polymorphous as the elaboration of a melody’ constructing a loose narrative time. ⁹ Put another way, it is the palpable sense of musical freeness that is possible despite given rigid constraints, say, three-minutes running time, no more no less.

Within this musical restriction, though, Biró discovers further useful associations to film narrative; strategies of repetition and coda thriving on precisely its own repetition: the “ritornello.” It is the immanent musical metaphor par excellence, illustrating how temporal wholeness emerges from fragments of it. As Félix Guattari noted,

[t]he ritornello relies not on the elements of forms, materials, and ordinary meanings, but on emphasizing an existential motif embedded in a multifold and sensitive whole. As Guattari observes, “This ritornello escapes beyond the strictly defined limits of space-time. With it time ceases to be external so that it can become the intensive center of temporalization.” (Original emphasis) ¹⁰

Examples used to illustrate this technique include several famous endings: Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Theo Angelopolous’ The Travelling Players (O Thiassos, 1975). Each return, in ritornello, to motifs introduced in the earlier course of their respective narratives. Its effect, of course, is striking in each; rendering like a sonar’s echo a sense of dimension in its rhythmic return. One additional example could have been Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Where in its closing sequence, a languid zoom towards Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) haunting photograph shatters, from within, the temporal linearity of its self-contained diegetic world – revealing the “hauntological” ambiguity of its inhabitants. ¹¹

Thus, even the rigidity of temporal linearity is liable to collapse under the pressure of rhythmic design, and should be approached with caution. For even the semantics of the past, present and future inter-depend on each another as differences of a substantial whole; each contains perceptible – though not obvious – residues of each other. Yet even the slightest of these residues has the propensity for more substantial effects, through accumulation. This is the topic of Biró’s first example, attended to with characteristic lucidity. The ‘deliberate calm’ that ‘creates a certain tension, without […] any perceptible change in the rhythm or […] pace of events’ in Gus Van Sant’s film on the Columbine High School massacre, Elephant (2003). ¹² How tension builds, threateningly, in anticipation of an event is recalled in itself intensely accumulative prose:

Fragments upon fragments of minute, ordinary actions are performed and shown in an unhurried pace that fills us with increasing suspicion. This feeling is hard to define. What is the source of this increasingly chilly atmosphere that surrounds us? Of course, we know the story. We know what’s coming. This is why we can register certain signs here and there (the spleen, the sadness, or jealousy of the kids), then the more explicit, short little flashes of viewing Nazi documents, of getting weapons through the Internet, and a rather ominous moment when the kid with the most gentle face is writing down notes, sizing up the cafeteria with a view toward a future use. Of course, all this illustrates the mysterious nature of accumulation: how odd that we should hardly perceive the approach of danger (turbulence), yet somehow we do sense it, experience it. We collect the signals that anticipation can feed on. Not one of these is strong enough to serve as a direct explanation of the massacre. These scattered moments mentioned above blend into a faceless time of other time-killing projects. ¹³

Implicit for the reader is, then, the duty to raise susceptibility to change itself, heightening the monitoring of rhythm in narrative time and beyond. Included are precisely those – faceless-ly – registered at the edge of perceptibility: remaining devoid of meaning or justification of why they are indeed perceivable. This duty for the film reader is something Biró is insistent upon. In an instructive ritornello of her own, what begins, as an inferred duty later becomes – in the closing chapter – an explicitly announced praxis. She invokes Victor Shklovsky’s Ostranenie: ‘After all, what else is poetic creation than approaching the familiar with the dissecting urge normally reserved only for the unfamiliar and, by this process of “defamiliarization,” making others discover it?’ ¹⁴

What, then, we might ask, be of use in wielding the scrutinizing gaze of defamiliarization? Or in other words, to what end are acts of identifying instances of “poetic creation” from cinema – particularly in slow, accumulative and unfamiliar examples? The response is to be found in, again, the experience of the holistic: a way of critiquing further, the nature and function of fast, accelerated and familiar instances – thereby understanding processes comprising the whole of instances within time. What should be acknowledged here is the ethical edge of its argument, its relevance over the politics of the everyday: in what is advanced in the form of praise or condemnation. Praised is the ‘joyful slipping’ into the narrative time afforded by stories, while the anaestheticization of human subjects – in the sense of Paul Virilio – to speeds promoted by modern communication are condemned. ¹⁵ Granted this is a book on narrative design not a polemic of contemporary media-audience relations, but its arguments remain relevant to both. In both, we find a passionate defence of enjoying unfamiliarity as such.

With a minimum recourse to sociology, criticisms of modern life are broached via discussions of mainstream cinema. In particular, the scenarios and representations of speed in acceleration that are symptomatic of modern life. These are the familiar scenes from modernity: the forceful production and delivery of immediate familiarity; its Lefebvrian styled erosion of space via ‘unchecked contraction[s] of time,’ and with it, the brutal arrival at the “epoch of the nanosecond.” ^{16 17} Cinematic manifestations of these are never far from view, witnessable in unrelenting assaults of adrenalized set pieces: spectacular car chases, gratuitous explosions, ultra-violent reverie and a-sensual sex. Extracted from here is, however, fast speed’s own seed to self-destruction – embedded within its imperative for acceleration. It is, simply, that speed eventually undermines its own purpose in being faster: ‘speed cannot be appreciated in and of itself.’ ¹⁸ What good is speed if its delivery exceeds the grasp of its recipient?

What Biró champions in defamiliarization is not simply a criticism of acceleration tout court, but a reminder of at least two things. First, it returns speed-in-itself to its correct structural place, as a particular rhythm of turbulences and flows – though, it may be argued that speed-in-itself, especially in a philosophical realist sense, is always indifferent, never intending toward any subject. Cinema still exists as productions by and for human creators and audiences. And the second extends from this: defamiliarization offers a momentary glimpse of how rhythmic operation relies on human subjectivity. Could rhythms be said to exist without the registers of human sensation? The central role for audiences to perceive variations of speed and rhythm becomes untenable when speed accelerates beyond the finite limits of non-abstract human perception. Biró recalls Umberto Eco’s defamiliarizing forest metaphor from Six Walks in the Fictional Woods to drive home its critical intent – celebrating slowness and journeys of delay in the process. It is a passage well worth quoting again:

He reminds the reader of the pleasures of wandering. For we like walking in the woods because of the possibility of making various discoveries along the way, of being presented with unexpected choices. In fact, we may derive satisfaction from being lost in the foggy depth of the forest […] Aimless wandering is also about contented idleness. “There are two ways of walking through a wood,” Eco writes. “The first is to try one or several routes (so as to get out of the wood as fast as possible)…the second is to walk as to discover what the wood is like and find out why some paths are accessible and other are not.” Put differently, the “forest” itself (our relationship to events and the environment) deserves attention, and the experience of lurking “evil” or failure is not without benefits.” ¹⁹

This metaphorical splitting of “ways through the forest” is useful not only in defending potential benefits of seemingly aimless passages of time. It serves also to help classify – in at least sentiment – a long divergent style in cinema, films that are less concerned with “as fast as possible” approaches to narrative. The historical break for this divergence, of course, was the fervent post-Second World War cinema of Europe and Asia, particularly that of the Italian neorealists and other aestheticians of the “transcendental style.” ²⁰ But this metaphor also allows for a still wider and more recent divergence: that of the post-neorealists and post-transcendentalists, that of contemplative cinema. There is no doubt for one of contemplative’s finest exponents, Abbas Kiarostami, that he was influenced by both post-war styles – having vocally acknowledged his debt to the Europeans of the time, and created his own works in homage to the other, Five Dedicated To Ozu (2003). Yet, equally, it is clear that his cinema – alongside of a healthy number of global contemplative peers – exceeds the vocabulary and canonical details of his mentors. Together, they are moving in an unspoken direction. This contemplative trajectory is of great interest for many, as it challenges filmmakers and their reader-audiences alike to discover new ways of articulating this cinema. Returning once more to Eco’s metaphor: what Turbulence and Flow provides, then, is not a “map through the forest,” but a rich and beautifully written array of strategies to explore and discover what continues to surprise us there.

I: TARR↩

---

Notes

Announcements (RSS)

Submissions

About Unspoken

Issue Archive