ABSTRACT
Duration in printing/projecting in materialist film technically shows aspects of (non)discontinuity. Rather than “continuity” being posited as the given, it is really a matter of non-discontinuity because duration, the piece of time presenting itself filmically as duration (and inculcating in the viewer a position of expectancy, for example, towards that duration, cut at beginning and end by the splice) is not to be linked to a continuum. The theoretical point taken here is that duration and continuum have no necessary links, any more than the previously discussed one to one relation of film to viewer has any necessary linkages. Thus, duration can be theorized in relation to discontinuity, the piece of filmstrip-time which is cut at begin and end by the splice. This occurs if the filming is in such a way as NOT to deny duration. This may also persist as duration when non-discontinuous, i.e. perception of continuous image. It is within such complex relations that a cinematic piece of photochemical reproduction exists. Through that, then, certain representings of “contents,” certain preceding and simultaneous and following editing devices, certain matters of grain, light, movement, focus, determine the functioning as materialist or anti-materialist, illusionist or anti-illusionist, and so on. As Rose Lowder, a French filmmaker/theoretician states it: “in the case of … we have a film that is politically progressive but formally backward. I am willing to concede that the authors had progressive intentions but do not think that a film can be to any purpose progressive and backward at the same time. Formally backward is still backward” (Rose Lowder, “Recent film problems,” Avignon, February 1983, unpublished).
