Futures and Fictions Page 21
Figure 1. Tony Conrad (1966), The Flicker, screening at Film Exercise, Arnolfini, December 2010. Photograph: Sam Nightingale.
Flickering Jewels
A flash that breaks into and transports us out of time is what Tony Conrad sees when he first observes the myriad points of flickering light cast by the performer: Mario Montez’s sequinned dress at a party held by the artist-filmmaker Jack Smith at the apartment that the three of them shared. It “created an incredibly luminous effect and froze Mario Montez when it was shone Photograph: Sam Nightingale. onto her” (MacDonald 2006: 65), Conrad recalls, and his words create a vivid picture of an image snatched from movement and multiplied into an array of flickering points of light, each projecting and refracting their own polyphony of effects. Conrad’s first encounter with Montez’s flicker then led to experiments that involved Montez dancing in front of the beam of light emitted from a lensless projector. Again, the image that Conrad paints of this is so evocative that it is easy to imagine being entranced by the magical array of lights emanating from Montez’s sequins amidst other similarly glamorous invitees — particularly knowing the beauty and dream-like qualities of Smith’s films such as Flaming Creatures (1963), which he had dedicated to the film star Maria Montez, Mario’s namesake. Seeing the potential in Montez’s flickering sequins, Conrad goes on to play with the frequency of light that shines upon Montez; “fiddling with the knobs” of the projector is the phrase used in one account, although the origins of Conrad’s subsequent film, The Flicker, have become somewhat mythologised (Shirley 2009). In Smith’s version of the story “Mario and the Flickering Jewel”1, he himself also dangles a piece of green costume jewellery in front of the lens, causing the light to “refract erratically from the green jewel, flickering violently across the room” (Shirley 2009). Yet what is clear is that for Conrad the flicker-image immediately opens the possibility for the expansion of experience through the flickering points of light, which he goes on to liken to journeying into another world or dimension.
Figure 2. Tony Conrad (1966), The Flicker, screening at Film Exercise, Arnolfini, December 2010. Photograph: Sam Nightingale.
Conrad has stated that his intention in making The Flicker was to create an event that the audience would understand as “going on — not just passing by” (Mac-Donald 2006: 70). This sense of event is partly enacted by a rather long seizure warning for epileptics, which is beautifully rendered in cursive-style handwriting and accompanied by a music-hall-style piano number, rather cheerful in mood — and referencing the use of such devices in early film screenings, which were often referred to as the “flicks” and again highlighting the important role of flickering light. Interviewing Conrad, Scott MacDonald enquires whether the long duration of the warning is a deliberate gesture towards creating some kind of suspense at the start of the film. Conrad denies this, speaking of his concern to allow those who might fear having a fit time to leave the room, but later admits that it was intended to create the screening as a space set apart from the everyday; a space to enter into as well as creating a sense of compliance, commitment and surrender in the viewer, as Conrad notes. And he further emphasises this sense of entering into another time-space, stating: “I wanted people to lose themselves and to understand they had lost themselves in that world” (MacDonald 2006: 66). Conrad’s emphasis on the spatial dynamic of an event “taking place” highlights his intention to create a different temporal experience — “not just passing by” but entering into a distinct space and time which is not only produced by setting the space of the film screening apart from the everyday (through the inclusion of the long credits) but also, most importantly, through the operations of the flicker-image itself.
This space that is created by the operations of the flicker image is produced through a double movement of expansion and contraction at once — contraction into the image as a point of light that is cut from movement, on the one hand, and, on the other, the expansion outside of the image into another dimension. Thus we are transported away from the image via its excessive effects into a hallucinogenic experience of multiplying images and after-images, and at the same time the world contracts to the experience of the single points of light, not light, light, not light. Here the “cut” refers to interruptions and breaks that contrast to the continuity of film in which images are propelled through their relationship to each other. Here, the flicker-image can be considered both in the instant of its illumination — that is the little events of the individual flashes — and in relation to the incorporeal optical effects that the flicker-image produces. In this way, it is the freezing of Montez in the light of the projector and the visible breaking of the image into a series of tiny individual points of light of that is of the most interest to the development of the flicker-image.
To articulate the flicker-image as a “point” is to highlight its interruptive and disruptive aspect and to further emphasise the image that arrests or holds out against movement itself. This means that rather than considering the image as always connected and in movement, or as a form of montage in which the dynamics between images produce meaning, as in Deleuze’s movement-image, the flicker-image acts more like a singular point in time. It is a moment of projection that occurs in time but disrupts the ongoing, linear movement of time. Here the flicker-image operates as a kind of insistent point-like now that is inserted between the past and future. It is a now that is defined by its impossible limits rather than duration, and which breaks into the present which is fleeting and almost ungraspable: a point or prick in the movement of time rather than space, a single flicker of light, a single point appearing fleetingly upon a screen and crucially opening up a space that we might enter into. Yet at the same time, this singular image projected in the instant is expansive, producing a series of effects that emanate outwards from the point itself. We can visualise this as the psychedelic flashing of light that results from a strobe, for example, where each point or flicker of light produces a doubling or tripling of the image. It is this multiplication of the effects of the flicker-image that is so fascinating, especially considered in relation to Montez’s sequins and, later, Conrad’s film. This is because there is a possibility of transportation in and away from this single point of light towards what Conrad calls the “experiential excess” of the flickering light, an excess that transports, that produces other worlds. As Conrad has stated: “I’ve always thought of The Flicker as a bizarre science fiction movie, as a space that you can enter […] and go floating off into some weird dimension and then come back” (MacDonald 2006: 66).
The question of perception and its limits is inherent to the composition of The Flicker and connects the film with early twentieth-century experiments in neurology, particularly those concerning the treatment and diagnosis of epilepsy, and most particularly Conrad’s interest in the visions experienced by epileptics during a fit. Therefore while The Flicker draws upon parallels with musical composition and mathematics, the experiment with patterning and repetition — and the disruption of these patterns — that is explored in the film is also a crucial aspect of this neurological research. As W. Grey Walter points out in his book The Living Brain (1953), which was influential to Conrad’s work, there is a “synchronisation between the flicker and the brain rhythms” (Walter 1961: 92). Walter describes how the scientists made a type of flicker-film themselves by projecting light through a turning wheel. The compositional structure of The Flicker speaks directly to the correlations between the mechanics of film and of visual perception by addressing the frequency at which the eye can detect light, which differs according to the structure of the eye, the type of light falling upon the eye (colour, black-and-white, moving or still) and the point of the eye upon which the light falls (frequency differs across the eye). This is seen most obviously in Conrad’s piecing together of single frames within the overall movement of images, and his consideration of the role of rhythm, patterning and repetition in the processes of perception.
After his initial exper
iments with Smith and Montez, Conrad went on to work on what becomes The Flicker on his own, and while the basis of the film seems so simple, so basic to film, and the image, itself — that movement between light and darkness, between white and black and black and white film frames, its planning and execution were complex and diagrammatic. Beginning from questions of composition, harmony and rhythm, Conrad, who was also a musician, ponders upon the “frequencies [of image movement] you would have to use in order to get flicker”, and he pursues this question in a highly systematic way, working through calculations of frame rate, film speed and, finally, through an intensive editing process that involves splicing hundreds of pieces of black-and-white film. The initial problem that Conrad recounts in the making of the film is the question of how to shoot white frames. He recalls that Jonas Mekas brought him a number of rolls of old negative film, and that shooting the black frames was simply a matter of covering the camera lens. However, exposing for the white frames so as only to get “projected light” proved more difficult than simply removing the lens of the camera as hoped. Finally, on a borrowed 16mm Bolex camera, Conrad succeeded in shooting forty-seven variations of black and white frames. Ten copies of this film were subsequently printed, which Conrad then cut and spliced into the final film, which contains five-hundred splices. Working with the constraints of twenty-four frames per second, the projection speed of a 16mm projector dividing the film strip into variations that will produce between three to twelve flickers per second, depending upon the length of blocks of black-and-white frames used. The Flicker therefore develops through a mathematical structure (which, in itself highlights music’s indebtedness to mathematics) in order to determine and to experiment with the limits of vision — that question of how many flickers of light per second the eye can see.
Montez’s flickering sequins enabled Conrad to recognise the expansive effects of the flicker. As Conrad has noted, this is a moment of expansion and contraction at once, as, on the one hand, time is reduced to the instant of flickering light and, on the other, a new experience of time and space opens up. This can be understood as the intensity of experience that Conrad asks the viewer to enter into through the space of the film, but also most importantly it is the breaking and remaking of time that takes the viewer on a journey from the myriad of individual flickering points of light in Montez’s dress or Conrad’s film to a new experience of time and space. Here the points of light act as a form of transportation by contracting time to the instant of illumination and then expanding it into other visuals effects. This is a space that might be called hallucinogenic, that might be attributed to a form of image referred to as a noosign (an image that exists only in our head) or likened to what Deleuze refers to as the Crystal Image of Time — a place in which the actual and virtual are drawn close together and time dominates (Deleuze 2005: 95-121). The domination of time over image-movement highlights another more mechanical aspect of the flicker that is suggested by Conrad’s experimentation with projection speed and the inter-spacing of the film-frames. Here there is a direct link to neurological research in which the pace of the flickering light is observed acting to stimulate brain activity such that the experience of time is altered relative to the speeds of flickering light (or images). It is therefore the rhythm and speed of the points or flashes of light and crucially the distance between these flashes measured by the duration of darkness between them that produces this sense of time passing.
Flicker Time and Crazy Wipes
Excavating the relationship between flickering light, brain activity and the experience of time enables an opening up of the limits of chronological time that results in a time that is dependent upon the speed and frequency of flickering light; what we might term, flicker-time. Early neurological studies, such as those discussed by W. Grey Walter (and read by Conrad), note a connection between the flickering of the eyelids, the stimulation of light and brain activity and the perception of time. And indeed, Walter reports on experiments to alter the rhythm or frequency of this flickering light: “Sometimes the sense of time is lost or disturbed. One subject said he had been ‘pushed sideways in time — yesterday was at one side, instead of behind, and tomorrow was off the port bow’” (Walter 1961: 98). Here the disaggregation of time from its usual linear arrangement hints towards what might be recognised as a form of time-travel. René Thoreau Bruckner addresses this possibility in the essay “Travels in Flicker-Time (Madre!)”, proposing that the flicker enables a form of time-travel by extending upon the neuro-scientific notion of critical flicker frequency to understand the moment in which the mind gives way to the breakdown of chronological time — or gets “pushed sideways in time” (Walter 1961: 98). We also see this concept explored in Hoban’s novel Fremder through the notion of the flicker-drive — the (fictional) means of travelling through vast distances of time and space by manipulating the brain of surgically conditioned people, called flickerheads.
If we recognised that chronological time is, first and foremost, time arranged spatially and dominated by a linear trajectory or progression, the flicker is the breaking up of this ordered forwards movement. In this way, the flicker is then the repeated transmission of light broken up and constantly interrupted by moments of darkness, such that time is experienced not as duration nor as linear movement but as the “palpitation” of points of light (Bruckner) or the “pulses of cognition” that are inherent to the individual’s ability to “self organise time perception” (Vimal and Davia 2008: 108). Thus consciousness is not experienced as continuous but as a series of successive pulses. We might relate this then to critical fusion frequency — the rate of flicker or the “palpitation” of light upon the eye that produces images. For example, in a scientific report on the relationship between phenomenal (or experienced) time and quantum (or measurable) time, Ram Lakhan Pandey Vimal and Christopher James Davia note that yoga practitioners and those that practice meditation develop a higher critical fusion frequency than others, suggesting that they may synthesise images at a faster rate; this further highlights the mutability of the experience of time.
Bruckner postulates that it is the operation of critical flicker frequency that is at work in time-travel insofar as it can control the disruption of linear, spatially well-organised (chronological) time. He gives two examples to support his case for time-travel in this manner. Firstly, he cites the twelfth-century fable of the wolf and the animals, in which a wolf circumvents his two-year ban on hunting by speeding up time through the opening and closing of his eyelids to evoke the darkness of night and the brightness of a new day with each successive blink. “The Wolf’s trick, his invention, is a device for moving things along by blinking, producing for himself a proto-cinematic, flickering picture”, Bruckner notes (Bruckner 2008: 63). Secondly, Bruckner addresses H.G. Wells’ novella The Time Machine, in which the protagonist, simply referred to as the Time Traveller, invents a machine that allows him to travel through time and space. Wells’ novella, published shortly after the Lumière Brothers first revealed their cinematograph and R.W. Paul demonstrated his theatrograph, can be seen to refer directly to the invention of these cinematographic devices that transport the viewer/operator out of the present in a way that is akin to jumping through time and space. In both examples, Bruckner suggests that time-travel is the result of a “merging of glimpses” — the wolf rapidly opening and closing his eyes to speed up time, and the Time Traveller in Wells’ novella travelling through the neurological operation of critical flicker frequency and the mechanical operation of film projection. What is significant in this “merging of glimpses” is the breaking down of a continuity of smooth image-movement to individual glimpses or pulses; these are akin to what I have referred to elsewhere as flashes, points or flickers of light. Similarly, the linear movement of time is disrupted and replaced, not by an extended present, but with a non-linear version of time dominated by a succession of accelerated instants, glimpses, flickers, points, flashes of light that is suggested by the theatrograph, cinema
tograph and film projector. Again, there is a correlation here between the mechanics of visual perception and that of film projection in the connection made between the manipulation of vision in terms of the wolf opening and closing his eyes more quickly than normal to evoke the passing of day and night more quickly, and in the movement of film through the projector gate — it’s mechanical eyelid.
In Hoban’s novel Fremder, transportation through time and space via the image produces a world of flicker space, a world that is produced through the alternative “stilling” and movement of (frozen) images. Fremder, the novel’s protagonist, is known as a flickerhead or a deepspacer — travelling via the flickering image. These journeys, which exceed what is possible in a regular human lifetime, are made possible by the implanting of an oscillator in Fremder’s head. This enables Fremder’s projection through time and space through what is termed, in the novel, “the jump” — the instant of projection into another time-space. This is fast-forward on a massive scale and echoes Bruckner’s notion of time-travel through altering the speed of critical flicker frequency: speeding through time, driven by the flicker, flicker, flicker. However, in a sinister twist, the oscillation of the flicker is co-opted into the smooth space of Corporation control. This is a world that flickers constantly, a world in which the world pulse rate (WPR) governs the appearance of things and freedom itself might lie outside of this flickering appearance. As Fremder’s mother, Helen Gorn, suggests, or hopes, it is perhaps not the flickering of images that provides the real disruption to the smooth co-joined space of the horizontal plane (the Corporation’s absolute control in the novel) but, rather, the obverse space that is opened up by the appearance of the flicker — that is, the space between the appearance of images, between the flickering points of light and through the disentanglement of their relationship to time.2 Helen has been obsessed with the question of escape, and she experiments with the idea of escaping in the gap between the images, that is, escaping between the pulses of the world in its appearing. While she ultimately fails in her endeavour (she is unable to escape the totality of Corporation control), her research is useful for us because it suggests that rather than focussing upon the appearance of images — the moment of illumination or flicker — we could, instead, consider what lies outside of the image: what lies outside of the frame of the visible? Therefore, rather than the point of light and its relative speed of transmission and reception, it is perhaps the surrounding points of not-light, or not-image, that provide a real rupture or disruption to the continuing flow and appearances of the image.