Correction Please, or How we got into Pictures (Noel Burch).
If film history is as straightforward as the textbooks say, a symbolic division separates the paths the cinema took from its inception: Melies, father of fantasy, special effects and film magic, leading it towards fiction and story-telling; the Lumière Brothers pointing their camera towards realism and the documentary.
Correction Please, says Noel Burch, and in his film he offers an alternative way of looking at the origins of the cinema. To him, the distinction between filming what is in front of the camera 'out there' or building it up in the studio with backdrops or paper-mache is of secondary importance. What matters is 'how we' (meaning the spectators, Western culture) 'got into pictures'.
Although the birth of the cinema is a comparatively recent event, and well documented, the difficulties arise from too many claims and counter-claims. What is the crucial fact – is it capturing motion on photography (then Muybridge and Marey ought to be credited); is it discovering persistence of vision and the illusion of motion (then the honours ought to go the inventors of the phenakistiscope and the zoetrope? Is it the invention of the celluloid strip (George Eastman), or of the projector (then the Lumière Brothers in France and the Skladanowsky Brothers from Berlin contend for the title), but then, what about the long history of the laterna magica, or of 'fog pictures'? And where does Edison come in, or Oskar Messter, who developed the Maltese cross and thus made possible flicker-free projection?
Bela Balazs, one of the earliest theorists of film, has argued that the cinema is the only art that owes its existence entirely to capitalism. If he is right, the dynamics behind its history would be maximisation of profits, or the advances of technology in the field of optics and electronics. Maybe the invisible centre is an ever-greater degree of 'realism', a more and more perfect repro- duction of 'life'. Or is it the case that the CI9th developed a sensibility that make the cinema necessary, even before it was invented? A sensibility that became fascinated with motion and locomotion, that relished dioramas and panoramas, that craved for variety, quick change, sudden and discontinuous stimulation of the optical nerve? In short, perhaps the cinema responded to a change of perception forced upon people by their urban environment, for which they sought a correlative and a compensation.
Once one follows this train of thought, an investigation into the origins of the cinema re-centres itself almost inevitably, and will have to focus on the spectator, the consumer – and the commodity that is the film experience. The camera, while pointing at something is always, simultaneously, aimed at the spectator, giving him a role, assigning him a place. Identification, the movement that draws the viewer into the fiction is the real subject of Burch's film-essay, and any development there has been in film history can be traced along the fault-lines of what passed for film-language, and written and unwritten rules and codes that have dominated film production almost without change since 1916. For Burch, it is at best an ambiguous, at worst a false development, mainly because it seems to have excluded alternatives, other ways of seeing films and making them.
Correction Please is a nudge towards re/dis/covering these alternatives, by taking another look at the so-called 'Primitives' – directors and film-makers from the pre-Griffith era. Hence the selection of archive material that constitutes both subject and object of the film: the historical footage, made in France, Great Britain and the U.S. between 1900 and 1906 and consisting of no more than sketches and snippets, gives us what might be called, in Michel Foucault's sense, an archeology of film viewing, or the foundations of what Burch, quoting Christion Metz, calls the Cinema Institution: 'not simply the film industry, (but also) the mental machinery – that other industry – which spectators accustomed to movies have historically interiorized and which enable them to consume films (the institution is outside and inside of us, it is indiscriminately collective and private, sociological and psychoanalytic)'. The rules that became institutionalized seem designed to ensure one overriding objective: to create a linear, mono-causal, single-focussed narrative, which the spectator can 'take in' in one sitting. This suggests an ever closer involvement of the spectator, interiorizing, subjectifying, emotionalizing the action, by giving the illusion of a continuously articulated space and time, emanating from no where in particular and addressed to no-one in particular. So the groundrules of cinematography – the eyeline match, the rules about spatial displacement (no less than 30 degrees and no more than 180 degrees), the invention of the close-up, the prohibition for actors to look into the camera – impose themselves not 'naturally', but for ideological reasons that have to be sought elsewhere than in the allegedly manifest destiny of cinema towards perfect verisimilitude.
The 'Primitives', because they did not care or had not mastered the tricks on which the mental and economic institution of cinema is based, blithely make films that demonstrate the codes by default, by transgression, and they childishly (or wisely) indulged in pleasures that were to become the un- acknowledged obsessions, the 'structuring absences' of fictional narrative, The grotesque dismemberment of the passengers in a sketch like Explosion of a motor car innocently prefigures the fascination that will attach itself to the fetishizing fragmentation of the human body in the close-up or iris shot. The knowing glance the bride casts towards the camera in a self-serving little exploitation film like The Bride Retires will have to be suppressed, if the blatant voyeurism of such a scene is to transform itself into the latent voyeurism of all cinematic identification and participation. The same film highlights another feature that the fiction film had to 'acquire' in order to assume its historical role of complementing the novel as a vehicle for consumable ideologies: the sense of an ending. Bridegroom, canopy and studio flats all collapse on top of the retiring bride. Whether disaster, explosion, marriage or general chaos ensue, such unsubtle but serviceable expedients for narrative closure are not meant to tell us anything about life, but to solve the problem of how to end a film with an appropriately rhetorical flourish.
Not the least enigmatic sketch that Burch incorporates is a tale of adultery at the office, whose real protagonists seem to be a typewriter, a telephone and a camera. Their fascinating and by no means fortuitous encounter is only thinly disguised in the banal goings-on between husband, secretary and jealous wife. Three systems of communication – sound, vision, writing, here all present by their mechanical repro- duction – are rivals for dominance. This too, is an explicitness about the technological apparatus of cinema that has to be repressed for the illusion to found itself securely.
The practice of the 'Primitives' makes linear narrative and the fixed perspective appear no more than an imposition upon a control and containment of a more basic pleasure of letting the camera and spectator participate in an elaborate game of showing and withholding, of tromp l'oeil and impossible points of view, of hidden observers and strange machines. If one cares to look, there is always another pair of eyes, a multiplication of glances, a dispersal of attention across the whole surface of the image – as yet uncoordinated by the eyeline match or the cut on action.
It is a game whose potent logic Fritz Lang was perhaps the first director to grasp fully and exploit. No accident, therefore, that the staged scenes in Correction Please have as their subject a tale of international spying, thriller mayhem, high living and art-deco architecture irresistibly reminiscent of Dr. Mabuse or Spione. A young man, charged with delivering a sealed message to the mysterious Countess is drugged after succumbing to her charmed and mesmerizing gaze. Watching the proceedings through a keyhole is the Countess' senile father, while the maid, starched sadism from head to laced-up boot , hides a most phallic revolver under her apron. The tantalizingly androgynous appearance of both Countess and messenger, the masculine maid and the emasculated old man suggest more than a pastiche on current Freudianisms.
Burch has shot the scenes and edited them in the various styles that marked the stages of the camera learning to tell a story by hiding its presence, through the reverse- field shot, and finally moving parallel with the protagonist to force spectator identification. The stages span roughly the twenty years it took for the codes of narrative to stabilize and establish themselves as norms. They are thus intended to provide the historical intertext, or subtext, against which the archive footage of the pre-Griffith years can be read and theorized.
Yet, on another level, the studio-footage is itself a neat parable on the very process that is at issue: how the spectator is drawn into the action by a play of glances, shadows, concealed messages and invisible observers. Having delegated the hero to take charge of his vision, the spectator finds himself drugged into self-oblivion, paying perhaps with his life for his ignorance and fascination. And to push the point a little further, Burch has given his protagonists names from the prehistory of cinema institution: Skladanowsky, Hepworth, Williamson.
Correction Please, as the title indicates is an interruption, and interjection, a spanner in the smooth works of the institution, Anecdotes, quotes, allusions, mock-didactic diagrammes, chapter-headings in the manner of a Fielding novel, explanations that jab at a problem mainly in order to jam easy answers: Burch's style encourages or irritates the spectator into exploring the subject for himself. As a primer it asks for an attentive audience, though it teaches with humour and a love for its subject. As a theoretical essay on the origins of the cinematic codes of representation and narrative, it carries its scholarship lightly, lightly enough enough to have prompted Burch into pro- viding a set of notes and suggestions for further reading which ouline, under different headings, some of the theoretical, historical and aesthetic issues that the film wants its spectator and user to engage with.