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capricorn sunset [a constellation]

capricorn sunset [une constellation]
Johannes Binotto

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1In their short film “Powers of 10,” made in a first version in 1968 and then in a second 1977, Charles and Ray Eames famously show the fascinating effects of exponential calculus through a simulated camera zoom that moves away from the Earth until the entire universe can be surveyed (and then moves in the other direction until we reach the quarks of a single atom). In the way the film is designed however, with its steady (albeit simulated) movement of the zoom, the film does not really make us aware of the fact that we actually move at different speeds. Therefore, it is rather likely that most of the innumerable pupils who saw “Powers of 10” in school, did still not understand the mathematical argument this film is declaredly making. Instead, the visuals of the film seem to inadvertently foreground something else, and something much more fascinating: as no one will fail to notice the striking resemblances between those images from the outskirts of the universe and those from within an atom, we are tempted to consider this similarity being more than just a coincidence. Although not explicitly addressed by the film’s narrator the sheer visuals of “Powers of 10” thus seem to argue for a universal homology between macro- and microcosmos, even to the extent of one being interchangeable for the other.

2I would argue, it is this mysterious accordance between the enormous and the infinitesimal that makes “Powers of 10” so persuasive as a film. And it is also what makes it so problematic, since the smooth visuals of the endless zoom literally glosses over crucial distinctions, like for example the one that outer space, our everyday world and the atomic range are not governed by the same physical laws. Thus, what the continuous zoom in “Powers of 10” conceals is precisely the discontinuity between those different realms.

3Or to put it differently: what the film’s fluid change of scale from the subatomic to the infinite (and back) withholds, is that, which, in theories of technology are called “scaling problems.” The term refers to the fact that increasing or decreasing the size of elements involved in a process not only changes these elements but the process itself. The behaviour of chemical substances, for example, will differ depending on whether they are mixed in a test tube or in large tanks. Similarly, an insect whose physique allows for ideal movements would be rendered immobile when enlarged to the size of a human body.

4As media theorist Claus Pias has proposed, scaling problems are also to be discussed within the humanities and concern society at large (Pias). An attentiveness to scaling problems would thus make us more cautious about trying to easily apply small scale observations to large scale processes (a method, of course, still very dominant in statistics). Similarly, we would realize that splitting a complex work process into smaller, simpler sub-units may not give the same results.

5Interestingly enough, it is precisely the medium of cinema, which in the case of the Eames’ film seemed so oblivious to these issues, where we can encounter a profound, although often implicit knowledge about the problems of scalability. It is precisely the film image with its ability to change size (an effect that has only increased with the proliferation of different screens of different sizes in our post-cinematic era) which makes us aware how a shift in scale will engender not only quantitative but also qualitative changes.

6As Jean Epstein already points out in his 1921 essay “Grossissement,” which is nothing less than a hymn to the close-up, changing the size of the image of a human face not just simply increases its emotional value but completely transforms it:

If the tenderness expressed by a face ten times as large is doubtlessly not ten times more moving, it is because in this case, ten, a thousand, or a hundred thousand would – erroneously – have a similar meaning. Merely being able to establish twice as much emotion would still have enormous consequences. But whatever its numerical value, this magnification acts on one’s feelings more to transform than to confirm them, and personally, it makes me uneasy. (Epstein 13)

7Picking up on Epstein’s ambivalent attitude towards the close-up as a phenomenon which can suddenly switch from the seductive to the uncanny, Mary Ann Doane has recently explored the affordances and discontents of scalability in cinema and traced them from its earliest expressions to its most recent migrations from the small screen of our smartphones to the super large screen of the IMAX (and vice versa) (Doane). She is thus presenting a theory of scale which allows to address its inherent contradictions and uncanny potentials.

8Eventually, as Martine Beugnet has argued, scaling practices such as the close-up could thus be understood as “techniques through which film ‘thinks’ through the issue of the construction of the subject and object (and the possibility of inter-subjectivities) […] it chronicles the metamorphosis of the body rather than reassert identity as the continuity and coherence of sameness.” (Beugnet 89).

9Following Beugnet’s argument, my video essay “capricorn sunset” sets out to have the viewer at the same time experience and consciously reflect upon scaling problems. The video is doing this by – once again – showing us one continuous zoom. In that, as well as in the visual design with the overlaid enlarged squares and the descriptions placed vertically on the left side, the video obviously is referencing “Powers of 10” while aiming at a completely different outcome. Rather than arguing for a holistic unity of macro- and microcosmos the video essay is set on a journey of "aberrant movements" instead (Lapoujade; Binotto):

10The two words in the title will eventually turn out to point in a very different direction than to the celestial phenomena of the zodiac of the capricorn and the movement of the sun.

11Accordingly, the zoom of the video essay is misleading both in a literal and metaphorical sense: not only the outer space in which we supposedly begin will turn out to be something (and somewhere) completely different, but we are also unsure in what direction we are actually moving.

12While the zoom in “Powers of 10” was only a simulation, an effect of animation techniques and put together out of different material, the zoom of my video essay is real, and done in just one continuous shot. But paradoxically enough, instead of giving the impression of smooth continuity (as the Eames film does) my video essay wants to make the qualitative breaks within the scaling process perceivable: There is a moment in the video essay at which we will realize what the footage we are watching is actually showing. And from that moment on we can no longer “unsee” it. Thus, instead of sliding on a homogenous plane of perception the video essay crosses a tipping point at which the image will irrevocably change its face.

13Similarly, on the audio track what is first heard as the sounds of cosmic chaos (knowing perfectly well of course that there is no sound in outer space) will eventually be recognized and understood as a very different audio signals and pointing to another scaling problem. Like with the video essay’s visuals, so too with the soundtrack there is a tipping point at which we can no longer “unhear” what the sounds convey.

14Finally, in highlighting the epistemic breaks within the visual and auditory scaling processes, the video essay also reflects upon its own technique and ethics: Videographic engagement with media, as I understand and practice it, is not about glossing over the contradictions within the object I analyze nor those within my own reflections. Instead, videographic research could be seen as a practice of différance, which opens up gaps through transformative processes, like that of scaling.

  • 1 As one could easily show, it is a (sadly rather common) misunderstanding of Bellour’s text to read (...)

15To pick up on Raymond Bellour’s famous (and over-used) notion of the film as an “unattainable text” (Bellour), this video essay does not see the aim of videographic criticism in rendering a filmic text more attainable but rather in highlighting that which will remain unattainable. This will then also explain why the footage this video essay uses is from one of those earlier forms of essayistic film criticism, that we might tend to discredit as unsatisfactory because of being “not close” enough to the filmic text.1

16The video essay thus posits itself neither just in strict opposition, nor simply in linear continuation to this earlier form of film criticism. Rather, it offers a dubious, ambivalent, and fragile constellation of different practices, different texts, different images, different films, different times, and different bodies.

17

capricorn sunset [a constellation]
Crédits : Johannes Binotto
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Bibliographie

Works cited

BELLOUR, Raymond. “The Unattainable Text.” The Analysis of Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000: 21-27.

BEUGNET, Martine. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

BINOTTO, Johannes. “Wahrnehmung auf Abwegen. Wie der Film bildet.” Filmbulletin 6.17 (Sept. 2017): 6-17.

DOANE, Mary-Ann. Bigger than Life: The Close Up and Scale in the Cinema. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2021.

EPSTEIN, Jean. “Magnification and Other Writings.” October, 3 (Spring 1977): 9-25

LAPOUJADE, David. Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2017.

PIAS, Claus. “Skalierungsprobleme” (Interview from 16.02.2011 on 3sat). https://youtu.be/snjQ4r4QNTE (page accessed June 22, 2022)

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Notes

1 As one could easily show, it is a (sadly rather common) misunderstanding of Bellour’s text to read it simply as an indictment of written film analysis as being insufficient when compared to the complexity of the filmic text. Rather, I would argue, it is precisely the deficiencies of language that make it so productive for an engagement with the filmic text as an “analysis which never ends” (the Freudian term Bellour will also pick up on in his reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds).

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Référence électronique

Johannes Binotto, « capricorn sunset [a constellation] »Interfaces [En ligne], 50 | 2023, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2023, consulté le 19 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/7501 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/interfaces.7501

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Auteur

Johannes Binotto

Lucerne School of Art and Design, University of Zurich

Johannes Binotto, *1977, is researcher and senior lecturer in cultural and media studies, experimental filmmaker and video essayist. He teaches media theory and history at the Lucerne School of Art and Design and English and American literature and culture at the University of Zurich. His publications include a monograph on the space of the uncanny and edited volumes on architecture and/as cinema, or on sexuality in film. His video essays are published widely in journals and shown at international film festivals and the video essay series “Practices of Viewing” has received the most nominations in the BFI best video essay of both 2021 and 2022. He currently leads a research project on video essays in academic research and teaching (videoessayresearch.org) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). His personal website with most of his research and video work available is: transferences.org

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