culture, man found the means to take an impression of time. And simultaneously the possibility of reproducing that time on screen as often as he wanted, to repeat it and go back to it. He acquired a matrix for actual time. Once seen and recorded, time could now be preserved in metal boxes over a long period (theoretically for ever) … Time, printed in its factual forms and manifestations: such is the supreme idea of cinema as an art.
It has often been observed that, with its absence of flicker and greater sense of continuity, the video image seems eternally “present.” What then is one to make of Christian Marclay’s 2010 installation The Clock, a digitally-projected assemblage of photographic motion pictures that, in its perfectly chronological, minute-to-minute temporal references, functions as a twenty-four-hour timekeeper? (The Clock’s thousands of clips include everything from High Noon and Easy Rider to Back to the Future and Pulp Fiction. No list can possibly do it justice.) In London, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, The Clock demonstrated Tarkovsky’s assertion—albeit in a vulgar sense—as it held an audience spellbound and hyper-aware of time passing.5
Although the suspense inherent in many of the original clips undoubtedly contributed to The Clock’s power to fascinate the spectator, one might also observe that the heightened awareness of time, as well as The Clock’s utilitarian capacity to tell time in real time, provided a new sort of indexicality: The experience of watching a movie is forcibly literalized as the experience of watching a movie and this is further emphasized by the presence of so much familiar material. For many, much of The Clock is pre-saturated in personal memory or nostalgia.6
It may be argued that, as fashioned from pre-existing, often well-known movie and television clips and thus employing many beloved stars, The Clock was in fact a traditional motion picture or, at the very least, a celebration of motion pictures and their undying appeal. (It was praised by several New York art critics specifically for its presumed love for movies.) Nevertheless this epic projection was, of course, digital, and—like 24 Hour Psycho or other Gordon installations—only possible as a form of digital image-making. The Clock’s occasional cropping and stretching of the original material is a factor of the high-definition video format which demands a 16:9 aspect ratio. (Marclay employed further digital manipulation in making The Clock, sweetening some footage by removing voiceovers that implied a past tense, eliminating overly emphatic music, and creating new sound effects where necessary.)
In short, whether as a source of visual data or as a delivery system, computer-generated imagery has introduced a radical impurity into the motion picture apparatus that was developed at the turn of the twentieth century and which, save for the introduction of synchronous sound, remained markedly consistent for 100 years. Thus, The Matrix (1999), written and directed by the brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, represents a landmark hybrid in its combination of live action with frame-by-frame digital manipulation. No previous animated film had so naturalistically represented the physical world. “Once you have seen a movie like The Matrix, you can’t unsee it,” a Los Angeles exhibitor told the New York Times in 2002, referring to the ways in which CGI had altered the action film, in part by allowing serious actors to perform impossible stunts. The Matrix, as film critic David Edelstein would note the following year, “changed not only the way we look at movies but movies themselves.” The Matrix “cut us loose from the laws of physics in ways that no live-action film had ever done, exploding our ideas of time and space on screen.”7
In addition to vaulting the gap between photographed humans and computer-generated humanoids known as the “uncanny valley,” The Matrix provided an irresistible ruling metaphor that was heightened in its force by the approaching millennium—humanity lives in simulation, in a computer-generated illusion created to conceal the terrifying Desert of the Real. “There’s something wrong with the world, but you don’t know what it is,” the most informed character told the movie’s computer-nerd protagonist, articulating the loss of photographic certainty in a digital world even while offering the red pill that will allow the protagonist to see things as they actually are.
As with Tron, the hacker was the hero but, to a far more sophisticated degree, cyberspace was the place. Despite its fantastic premise, The Matrix evoked and identified a recognizable world—a new social reality in which freedom and social control had merged, while information, entertainment, fantasy, advertising, and communication seemed indistinguishable. This was reinforced by the movie’s incidental social realism—the narrative was not just dependent on computers but cell phones and instant messages. At the same time, The Matrix’s own matrix of self-referential film sequels and websites, as well as participatory fan sites and video games, suggest an entire virtual environment.8
Media theorist Henry Jenkins considers The Matrix to be the quintessential “entertainment for the age of media convergence … a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium.” The Matrix further benefited from and made use of DVD technology which, introduced in 1996, came into its own as a consumer product in the late 1990s (and soon began to provide the movie industry’s margin of profit), not least because of the extras the new format permitted, including commentary and self-promoting production documentaries. In August 2000, Time Warner announced that a record-setting 3 million Matrix DVDs had been sold. What’s more, in addition to promoting itself, The Matrix also popularized certain ideas associated with French philosopher Jean Baudrillard—namely the notion of the Hyperreal, “a real without origin or reality,” which might be one way to characterize CGI, as well as The Matrix itself.9
In short, The Matrix (now hopelessly dated) was understood in its moment as an historical event. Shortly before millennial New Year, Entertainment Weekly made Jeff Gordinier’s “1999: The Year That Changed the Movies” its cover story. “Films of the new guard dart and weave,” Gordinier wrote, “they reflect the cut-and-paste sensibility of videogames, the Internet, and hip-hop,” as well as the MTV-conditioned sensibility of the audience. “You don’t ‘watch’ a film like Fight Club,” Gordinier explained, “you mainline a deluge of visual and sonic information (including a hefty chunk of the IKEA catalog) straight into your cranium.” Speaking for his audience, David Fincher had reassured the movie’s producers: “Don’t worry, the audience will be able to follow this. This is not unspooling your tale. This is downloading.”
Released at the height of the dot.com bubble, during a period in which computers saturated the home entertainment market in the manner that television did in the 1950s, The Matrix was an idea whose time had clearly come. In January 2000, less than a year after the movie’s release, Time Warner—the world’s largest media conglomerate as well as the studio that produced The Matrix—merged with the world’s largest internet-service provider, America Online (AOL), in a deal which involved the transfer of $182 billion in stocks and debts and was the largest in history.
Evoking “a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch … a prison for your mind,” The Matrix premise invited allegory. For architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, the Matrix suggested “the monoculture of shopping malls, theme parks, edge cities, suburban subdivisions, convention centers and hotels.” It might also be AOL Time Warner or Hollywood or the National Entertainment State. The main thing is this: one cannot stand outside it. Thus, in the universe of The Matrix, Bazin’s dream arrived as a nightmare, in the form of a virtual cyber existence: Total Cinema as a total dissociation from reality.10
CHAPTER THREE
THE NEW REALNESS
“If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis,” Bazin begins his “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” then “the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation.” If the motion pictures of the twenty-first century were placed under psychoanalysis, their symptoms might reveal two types of anxiety—one objective, the other hysterical.
Objective anxiety is manifested both in a recognition that the motion picture medium, as it has more or less existed since 1896, is in an apparently irreversible
