ABSTRACT
The argument continues in respect of the impossibility of history, or rather, its fundamental possibility only within narcissistic psychoanalytic structures, the historicizations thus of an ego-centered spectator in desire of control over object and spectacle. In such a definition the spectator is in endless transcendental self-identification and identification with the camera as fetishized metaphor for (patriarchal) self. Equally “impossible” for a radically materialist practice is an “other” history, as Stephen Heath argues: “If the history of cinema is radically impossible, two courses seem open: either the end of cinema as the straight refusal to make films and so repeat its terms or the end of cinema in films, a work in, on, through film, the ‘truly materialist practice’ as Gidal defines it. Such a practice … is then necessarily the fully reflexive knowledge of the history of cinema that at any moment a film — a materialist film — must hold and present, ‘a dialectically constituted “presentation” of film representation, film image, film moment, film meaning in temporalness, etc.’. The film must be the event of that material presentation — (‘the historical moment is the film moment each moment’) the only way to end the implications of cinema, the place-image, identification, narrative-sign, illusion — of the spectator there” (Stephen Heath, “Afterword,” Screen, Summer 1979).
