ABSTRACT

A splice mark is a photographic image, a reproduction, as is every cinematic device, given through projection of film through a projector. This is not an ontological inference but rather a description of a determinate effect of a photochemical process. Similarly, effects of cinema-technological operations have certain meanings, though the technology, effects, meanings (or anything else) are not ontological. If they were they would have to be avoided (voided) the way biologism has to be, no matter what the state of any proof happens to be at any time. This also dispenses with ethics, finally, so that good nature or bad nature ceases to matter. It ceases to be material. It is, precisely, material. Splice, producing itself as splice, makes of a shot of celluloid (acetate?) a material piece of time. To be situated as a viewer in relation to and engaging with, and processed by, and through, such a material piece of time means that the shot is materially enacted as finite. In the narratives of dominant cinema, a shot is always given as infinite. Thus it produces itself and the viewer through it as infinite, a realist/naturalist infinity, whether through metaphor or not. This pertains to both space and time. That is, the space given within the cohering rectangular frame, within that convention of seeing reality, is simultaneously given as if the convention were invisible, were in fact “transparent,” so that the specificity of the rectangular convention, and the various codes necessarily operated to produce a viable narrative scene, or documentary representational sequence, is obliterated. In such a case, truth exists as if unencumbered by its having been produced via a production process. As if it could be communicated from its place to you directly. This invisibility of the conventions of cinema, the rectangle, perspective(s), eye-lines matching, and so on, including codes of sharpness, of peripheral (non)vision, and so on, allows the coherence of the scene. At the same time, its infinitude/eternitude is thereby organized. What this means is that, at the time of a particular scene, no other time, and no other space, from within the film (prior or forthcoming) or from without (from the realisms and the ideological realisms of the non-cinematic world) can engage the viewer. This operation of cinematic repression of time and space can be obliterated by the foregrounded splice, disallowing easy functioning of the cinematic machine, its illusions.