Firing at the Clocks: Cinema, Sampling, and the Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Artwork martine Beugnet

In his writing about the medium of the moving image, Walter Benjamin classically emphasized film's role as modern man's perceptual training tool, one that was uniquely apt to mediate, through its form as well as its apparatus, the intensified rhythm and shock of an era of accelerated industrialization and urbanization. [START_REF]Benjamin writes that film brings together "all the forms of perception, the tempos, the rhythms which lie preformed in today's machines[END_REF] Hence for the cultural historian and philosopher, the study of film offered key clues for an understanding of the construction of the modern self, its relation to time, and, broadly speaking, art's contribution to a modern sense of identity and history-all areas of reflection that remain at the forefront of new media theory. As Peter Osborne sums it:

Film is, famously, the technology for representation most closely associated with philosophical insight into the mutual and paradoxical constitution of time and the self. For Benjamin, it was the medium in relation to which "all problems of contemporary art find their definitive formulation." [START_REF] Osborne | Distracted Reception: Time, Art, and Technology[END_REF] Today, Osborne adds, cinema's legacy is in evidence in the practice of contemporary artists who, aided by digital technology, are appropriating and manipulating the moving image archive as well as cinema's techniques and spectatorial apparatus, in what he describes as "a general experimental articulation of technologies of perception and patterns of artistic and social use." 3 Indeed, in the views of a number of contemporary art historians and art practitioners, the widespread vogue for found footage techniques is one of the ways in which the older medium of cinema is being offered a new lease on life in the museum and gallery. [START_REF] Vancheri | Cinémas contemporains[END_REF] Conversely, one may concur with Philippe Dubois and argue that in effect, it is cinema-its techniques, aesthetics, perceptual regime, and historical records-that impregnates the art world, opening new avenues for experimentation and self-reflection in moving-image-based art and art theory. Dubois calls this phenomenon the "effet cinéma." "Diversified and multiform, " the "cinema effect" can be felt in all areas of contemporary art-institutional, artistic, and theoretical-where cinema now "informs, feeds, influences, works through, inspires and irrigates" artists' and curators' practices. [START_REF] Dubois | effet cinéma' dans tous les cas extrêmement diversifié et multiforme. Un 'effet cinéma' qui opère à tous les niveaux: au plan institutionnel, au plan artistique, et au plan théorique (ou critique)[END_REF] Appearing at the uncertain junction between appropriation and creative hybridization, Christian Marclay's 2010 video work, The Clock, the most popular example of the widespread practice of artists' found footage assemblage to date, arguably stands as an exemplary instance of the way contemporary artists sift through the moving image archive in an attempt to offer new insights on the correlation between art, time, and perception.

The work's initial conceit, realized thanks to the storing and editing capacities afforded by digital technology and with the help of a team of assistants, was very simple: thousands of film excerpts, all evoking the passage of time, edited together into a twenty-four-hour video fully synchronized with actual, non-diegetic time. The piece is effectively a clock, and the viewers' first gratification, even before they reach the room where the work is on display, lies with the realization of Marclay's simple and clever premise.

Selected from hundreds of films as well as a number of made-for-TV features, the extracts are mostly very brief and around the time of each hour, the pace quickens as the choice of images builds into a more emphatic sense of suspense. Whereas artists such as Douglas Gordon famously explored duration through the slowing down of cinematic flow almost to the point of stillness, Marclay resorts to quick cutting instead, assembling thousands of fragments that unravel in rapid succession, literally forsaking duration in favour of time-as-movement.

We may be captivated by it or remain immune to its attractions, but there is no denying that The Clock raises troubling questions about the relationship between cinema and the art world-and, more broadly, in the way Marclay's piece harnesses mechanical time and the montage technique to its closed formal system, about art and commodification. Indeed, part of the fascination exercised by The Clock rests with the polarized reactions it generates, whether the piece is envisaged as a kind of "imaginary museum" in celebration of cinema and the "effet cinéma" or, alternatively, as a virtual mausoleum to the medium of the moving image that reduces the montage effect to an easily consumed serial form.

In this article, Marclay's method is first explored in the light of the tradition of moving image compilation in which filmmakers and artists have been taking on the role of curators. Marclay's serial sampling is further considered in relation to the emergence of an "ethics" of appropriation as suggested by the writings of Hal Foster, Emma Cocker, and Jan Verwoert. It is finally discussed in terms of spectatorial experience and the "museification" (or, indeed, the mu(seu) mmification) of cinema.

Crucial to the argument developed here is the recognizance that Marclay's video experiment in time and history cannot be dissociated from its context of production and dissemination. In the way it makes industrial rhythms of production and consumption integral to its form and mode of display, The Clock thus arguably reflects and participates in the continuing interpenetration of art and capitalist culture.

By extension, Marclay's use of found footage and of cinematic techniques conjures up an issue that is often overlooked in relation to the status of the medium of the moving image in the art world: the question of cinema's modernist legacy. In what form and to what extent is film's past as well as its future as a radical form of artistic practice continued in experimental filmmaking, present and acknowledged in contemporary works exhibited in galleries and museums? Moreover, The Clock is staged in the form of a dispositif destined for gallery and museum exhibition, yet simulating conditions of theatrical or home cinema reception as part of its mise en scène. Marclay's work thus conjures up the debate about cinema and television's afterlife in the era of the digital and of media convergence, and their relation both to video art and artists' films and to art institutions. As a fully functional clock, it not only throws into relief issues of the quality of gallery spectatorship, but raises questions about the status and meaning of the moving image-cum-art object, as well as the classic association of cinema's beginnings with the establishment of modern time-or, to be precise, of the (universalized) Western clock.

Borrowing from the Moving Image Archive

In an often-quoted passage of his thesis on history, Walter Benjamin recounts how, on the first day of the 1848 revolution, "the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris." Benjamin mentions this as one example of a collective desire to blow up what he calls "the continuum of history, " to break away from the official, chronological history and seek out an alternative version, one that would account for progress' wreckage and the existence of the exploited and outcast. [START_REF] Benjamin | Theses on the Philosophy of History[END_REF] It follows that for Benjamin the modern historian should take the role of a scavenger-or, as Béatrice Hanssen summarises it, "the rag picker and garbage collector of history . . . who seeks his material and inspiration not in culture's officially sanctioned venues but in the refuse and debris that has been overlooked, repressed or marginalized." This debris is to be assembled into a "new constellation" through "strategic poetic montage." [START_REF] Hanssen | Benjamin and the Arcades project[END_REF] As the centrality of the term montage suggests, and as the work of avantgarde filmmakers as well as film essayists has demonstrated, the medium of film, although dependent on a linear unfolding of images and sounds, is particularly apt to serve such strategies: through editing, moving-image-based media can defeat spatial and temporal divides, bring together heterogeneous material, and create a polyphony of voices and points of view. It can thus serve the aims of the "imaginary museum" 8 -though, in contrast with André Malraux's project, by bringing references to contexts of production into play, cinema can create imaginary museums that do not consign art works to a transcendental realm of pure form. [START_REF]Concerned with cinema itself, or with art more generally, in film and video form, Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma[END_REF] In the introduction to his 1964 book Films Beget Films, Jay Leyda points out that compilation and montage techniques and the reuse of footage in general, diversely practiced by experimental filmmakers as well as essayists and documentarists, are almost as old as cinema itself. [START_REF] Leyda | Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film[END_REF] From the 1970s onwards, however, video artists also started to exploit the film archive, sampling and compiling alternative histories of narrative cinema. In the wake of the digital shift and of film's pronounced obsolescence, the art world's interest in film increased, and the field of video art was seized by an archival and curatorial impulse that led to a new flourishing of found footage techniques. [START_REF] Both | Archive: Film") and Philippe Dubois offer useful sets of categories distinguishing between a diversity of found footage, compilation, and citation techniques[END_REF] In video art as in film, the sifting, selecting and compiling of found footage is akin to a form of curatorial process that reflects on the history, evolution, and future of the moving image. A few examples come to mind in relation to the unusual scope of Marclay's project: Jean-Luc Godard's all-embracing video project Histoire(s) du Cinéma (FR, 1998), Gustav Deutsch's early film typologies (Film ist, AT, 1996-2002), Thom Andersen's comprehensive portrait of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Plays Itself (US, 2003), and Claudio Pazienza's poetic tour of a film archive, the award-winning Archipels Nitrate (BE, 2010).

In contrast with Godard's densely intertextual audiovisual collage, Deutsch's idiosyncratic collections, Pazienza's free associative combinations, and Andersen's opinionated montage of contrasted extracts, however, Marclay champions a specific kind of "serial sampling" method where brief fragments are selected and compiled based on their graphic or thematic similarity. The technique has been used to great analytical effect by a number of film and video makers in the recent past: by American video artist George Barber, for instance, who combines serial compilation with scratch montage to deconstruct mainstream narratives, as well as exponents of the contemporary Austrian school of experimental film and video-Matthias Müller, Claude Girardet, Pierre Tscherkassky-whose work relentlessly probes the violent, compulsive unconscious of classic Hollywood cinema. [START_REF]Girardet's 60 Seconds (AU[END_REF] Similarly, Australian multimedia artist Tracey Moffatt's serial compilations offer chilling explorations of mainstream cinema's legacy of explicit and implicit sexism and racism. [START_REF] Moffatt | [END_REF] These works are typical, however, of the dominant trend in found footage compilation work destined for the gallery, in that the range of the raw material tends to be of a limited kind. Even when artists espouse experimental techniques, the main focus is likely to be on classic cinema, more easily deconstructed, with some more marginal interest in the work of the so-called cinema auteurs. As Philip Monk has remarked, contemporary artists tend to make a type of "experimental film from the resources of popular entertainment." [START_REF] Monk | Paint it black: Curating the Temporal Image[END_REF] Yet the focus on (deconstructing) cinema as entertainment means that in the space of the modern art museum or gallery, the revisiting of cinema as a medium of the past arguably gives rise to a kind of selective history. The great absent tends to be experimental cinema, rendered doubly invisible in that it rarely appears as actual content, but also because in some cases techniques and experiments that are inherent to the practice of experimental filmmaking are seemingly reinvented anew in the context of the gallery.

Advertised as a work of compilation on a scale so far unknown, The Clock is, by extension, presented as a kind of journey through the history of the moving image in twenty-four hours. [START_REF]The trailer is preceded by an announcement outlining Marclay's "fragment technique[END_REF] This a-chronological overview initially appears both inclusive and non-elitist: the compilation calls on the viewer's memory of cinema and television while seemingly creating a platform where classic and unknown works of all genres and forms can meet on an equal footing.

In effect, in the hours I sat through the screening, and through the night, when the piece became more interesting and strange (with excerpts from horror flicks and soft porn movies and episodes where inactivity seemingly becomes the main subject matter), [START_REF]me the import of seeing The Clock "after hours[END_REF] a selective history of the moving image emerged in which classic western narrative cinema and, to a lesser extent, western television fiction were largely dominant. For some observers, The Clock might well stand as the quintessence of the Bergsonian nightmare, but many a reviewer has praised the way it explores cinema's multifaceted relation to time. [START_REF]Peter Bradshaw's review of the piece for the Guardian entitled[END_REF] For Sight and Sound critic Jonathan Romney, the work holds "considerable philosophical density" and encourages us to "examine the way time-or the effect of time-is created in film." [START_REF] Romney | What Time is it Where?[END_REF] Romney offers one of the few reviews that have commented on The Clock's characteristic "western" slant-an observation that his article does not extend, however, to the specific concept of time exemplified by Marclay's piece.

Art, Chronotechnology and (Resistance to) Commodification

In an interview with Romney, Marclay explained that it had proved difficult to find, for instance, Bollywood films featuring clocks. 19 In effect, The Clock's specific take on the moving image archive extends to the way it implicitly evokes the pre-eminence of a global western time. As such, The Clock forms an interesting contrast to the recent work of South African artist William Kentridge. In The Refusal of Time (ZA, 2012), Kentridge combines film and displays of historical machinery for measuring time to look at the universalization of the western clock that underpinned the colonial project. The Refusal of Time takes the form of a complex assemblage of heterogeneous artifacts and moving images where the carnivalesque nature of the films works to disturb the would-be scientific discourses embodied in the machinery.

Marclay's project can also be compared with a film that belongs to a very different moving image world yet is equally concerned with issues of art and time: Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (FR, 2000). Close to Benjamin's description of the historian as a rag picker, in this film Varda posits herself as a gleaner who records and salvages unwanted shreds of pro-filmic reality. Varda's film offers a persuasive and imaginative critique of commodity culture, combined with a reflection on time and on the tyranny of accelerated industrial rhythms of production and consumption that determine the ever-briefer lifespan of objects and practices, as well as people as valuable assets in a late capitalist culture. In a sequence at a street market, Varda salvages a clock without hands that she then proudly displays on her mantelpiece.

In "The Western Hour, " Sylviane Agacinski emphasizes the import of artistic strategies aimed at undermining the hidden and pervasive effect of globalized time. She reminds us that Globalization is the unification of the world's rhythms, all adjusted to the Western clock, that is, to contemporary chronotechnology . . . The technical hegemony of the West expresses itself all over the world through the extension of production methods and the establishment of its temporal architecture. But it is not only the measure of time that has been unified; it is also its value, reduced to market value of work time. [START_REF] Agacinski | Western Time[END_REF] Mary Ann Doane's The Emergence of Cinematic Time looks more specifically at the advent of cinema in relation to the contemporary and systematic rationalization of time that was characteristic of industrialization and, more generally, capitalism. [START_REF] Doane | how early cinema was seen as a "sensitive indicator" of modern life, but ~one that "refuses the depth of experiential meaning[END_REF] Cinema, she argues, held an ambivalent part in this process: whilst in cinematic forms of storytelling the arbitrariness of modern life was contained and tamed in the shape of linear causality, alternative film aesthetics, such as those explored by art and avant-garde filmmakers, would point to the possibility of a resistance to rationalization.

From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, Marclay's piece arguably recalls cinema's ambivalent legacy. Whilst it evidently plays on the classic association of cinema's beginnings with the establishment of modern, industrial time, the sampling method seems to both playfully celebrate cinema as one expression of the homogenizing force of modern, global time while also demonstrating, through the apparent heterogeneity of its sources, the impossibility of containing contingency. By the same token, however, what it also points to is how once radical techniques, such as non-narrative montage, become absorbed in commodity culture.

The Clock is intriguing and seductive in the way it recreates film as one entirely porous spatial and temporal ensemble through which objects, actors and characters can seemingly travel, appear, and reappear, and, in the case of certain actors, age and regain their youth in the space of a few minutes or hours. The editing has been repeatedly described as virtuoso work, and the result reminds us of Marclay's musical background and long-lasting engagement with the rhythmical qualities of the medium of the moving image. Sound bleeds over one fragment to the next; gestures, camera movements, and compositions echo one another across cuts; and the shots are seamlessly linked into an illusory continuity that plays fully on the Kuleshov effect: we see clocks, then characters from different movies apparently watching them; we see people running on a train platform and catching a train in a station figuring in another feature, in a different place and a different period, and so on.

At the same time, however, by virtue of its precise formal principle, The Clock appears curiously old fashioned. With its relentless fragmentation, its precise taxonomy, the connection it creates between film and the mechanical, it seems to hark back to film's beginnings, the early cinema of attraction, when the medium of the moving image was considered emblematic in its evocation of modern perception, modern life, industrial rhythms, and the assembly line. The press releases and the trailer emphasize Marclay's reliance on the latest (digital) technology, the employment of a team of half a dozen researchers for this project as well as the sheer number of extracts and the lengthy, labor-intensive task of editing the fragments: in other words, the piece is advertised very much as an attraction, a "novelty, " which value can be appreciated and measured in relation to its mode of production and spectacular technical achievements. [START_REF]See the useful distinction established by Jonathan Walley between (low budget and largely self-made) experimental films and (higher budget, technically assisted, and editioned) artists' films. "Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde[END_REF] The success of Marclay's The Clock rests with its astute combination of form and content, the transformation of the artwork, by way of the medium associated with modern time, into the very artifact that has come to represent the measure of time. By the same token, The Clock both reflects on and partakes of the kind of commodification process that underpins the unification of the concept of time and the collapsing together of work and leisure time described by Agacinski. Indeed, in The Clock montage itself is arguably transformed into a simple, infinitely reproducible meta-system, a serial form that neatly replicates common operations of commodification and rationalization and, by virtue of its strict taxonomy, contains the possibility of contingency offered by the multiplicity of its sources.

In The Clock, each sample is replaceable (by another extract showing a similar time), de-contextualised, emptied of its meaning, and made exchangeable for another: the compilation combines the effect of serialization with the reduction of a great variety of data into a homogeneous whole, its taxonomy itself dependent on the kind of inanimate object that is a natural material extension of the modern commodification of time and space. As such, Marclay's serial sampling has affinities with familiar manipulations of moving image data, including certain advertising practices. 23 (We may recall that in 2007 Apple seized on the idea for Marclay's 1995 video, Telephones (US/UK), a compilation of extracts from classic film scenes with telephones, and turned it into an advertisement for the iPhone). [START_REF] Zalewski | The Hours: How Christian Marclay created the ultimate digital mosaic[END_REF] The Clock's access to "genuine cross-over status, becoming popular beyond the art world, " 25 and its success in attracting the attention and capital of well-known international art institutions, may be related to its compelling bridging of once radical montage forms with everyday practices of serial compilation characteristic of today's capitalist visual economy. [START_REF] Victor Burgin Has Noted | of narrative forms, techniques once received as avantgarde rejections of classical realist cinema are now part of routine computer practices[END_REF]

Time, the Moving Image, and the Museum

The prominent place readily granted to Marclay's oeuvre by the world's most established museums, combined with the piece's emphasis on fragmentation and speed, brings to mind the opening sequence of Varda's The Gleaners. The film starts with a journey to the museum of Orsay, a sequence that opens with a shot of the building's frontage with its large clock, a reminder that before it became a museum Orsay was a train station-a building that stood as the very emblem of industrial modernity. Yet it is in Orsay that Varda finds Millet's Glaneuses (1857), arguably the most famous depiction of a practice, gleaning, that mechanization and the rationalization of modes of production destined to obsolescence. The combination of post-industrial museum space and classic realist painting is Varda's cue to a brief, humorous comment on contemporary modes of artistic consumption. Following from the prominent shot of the Orsay clock, Varda resorts to a speeded up effect to emphasize the superficial engagement of viewers with the painting. Most visitors barely take the time to have their photo taken in front of the masterpiece before moving on to the next display. The sequence thus offers itself as a witty stab at the kind of cultural consumerism described by Steven Jacobs, where present day museums become "machines designed for the quick and efficient circulation of large numbers of visitors." [START_REF]Amongst other films, Jacobs talks about Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à part (FR, 1964), with its famous sequence of the full Louvre visit in less than 10 minutes. Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts[END_REF] With The Clock, Marclay brings clock time inside the contemporary museum (whose sparred down facades rarely bear such functional displays as clocks), using the cinema dispositif as his Trojan horse at it were. Indeed, the work negotiates the vexed issue of the viewing conditions of time-based works in the gallery and museum in a fascinating manner.

In the now classic debate on absorption-versus-distracted reception, the modes of display characteristic to the gallery or museum space were initially presented as a productive alternative to cinema's traditional dispositif. Where conventional cinema had seemingly betrayed the consciousness-raising potential that the early theorists had associated with the medium of the moving image, video art appeared as an antidote, its reception in galleries and museums comparing positively to the absorbed-read: passive-experience offered to spectators through the theatrical release of classic feature films. As Catherine Fowler summed it up, having escaped from the cinema auditorium, the moving image could now invite "responses from its spectators that are far from the passive, distanced stance of the auditorium." [START_REF] Fowler | Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and Vertical Time from Maya Deren to Eija Liisa Ahtila[END_REF] Catherine Elwes similarly emphasized the newly acquired freedom of the spectator "no longer constrained by cinema schedules" and "free to determine the length of exposure to the images." [START_REF] Elwes | Artists' Film, Video and Installation[END_REF] Conversely, however, nuanced descriptions of the experience of cinema viewing have been offered, [START_REF] Rushton | Deleuzian Spectatorship[END_REF] and questions have been raised about the material conditions of cinema's entry into the museum. Here, arguments often focus on the quality of audience reception in gallery spaces, equating it less with an active, critical engagement than with a form of highbrow window shopping, channel surfing, or browsing. Writing about his experience of moving image works in the gallery, filmmaker and writer Mike Hoolboom describes the spectatorial involvement with moving image works in characteristically unconvinced terms:

The biggest difference between the movie theatre and gallery is the shared look. In the gallery people come and go, sampling the buffet, watching parts of some things, ignoring others completely, looking at moments again and again. But mostly browsing. There is no browsing in the movie theatre, in the gallery the shopping (do I like this? Is it me?) never has to end. [START_REF] Hoolboom | interview[END_REF] The Clock gives an interesting spin to the debate on spectatorial engagement both in its manipulation of suspense effects and in the way it duplicates and adapts the traditional cinema viewing conditions.

The Clock is normally displayed in a large, darkened room, with comfortable seating so as to encourage the viewer to settle: a series of small sofas are arranged in neat rows so as to constitute a kind of cross between film theater and homeviewing. Because the film itself is effectively a clock, however, the spectators are, at all times, aware of the time they pass in front of the screen, and indeed remain connected to and conscious of the non-diegetic present thanks to the synchronization between diegetic and extra-diegetic time. Hence, many a visitor tends to leave the room on the hour or on the half hour.

The accumulation of brief extracts, on the other hand, can keep the spectator spellbound by appealing to her memory in a quiz-like mode-not only "What happens next?" but also "What film did this extract come from and what might the next extract be?" [START_REF]According to the Paula Cooper Gallery Press handout, it has been described as a "magnificent work" (The Guardian) and "relentless and compelling[END_REF] Most effectively, the work plays fully on the effect of suspense emphasized by the ubiquitous presence of the clock, so that "the plot gears itself into that of the film clips he uses, in which characters anticipate a catastrophe that will be unleashed at a certain moment: a bomb's explosion, a missile's strike." [START_REF] Krauss | Clock Time[END_REF] Rosalind Krauss further compares the addictive quality of Marclay's editing to the Althusserian power of interpellation:

The Clock's synch-time joins audience and screen in the manner of what film scholars call interpellation, after Althusser's "Ideological State Apparatuses, " as the subject "recognizes" himself as the addressee of a command, thus identifying with the commander, himself. [START_REF] Krauss | Clock Time[END_REF] Ultimately, Krauss concludes, The Clock is a masterly play on suspense, the illusion of self-presence and the dilatation of the "now effect." Mention of Althusser calls for an alternative interpretation, however, based on the classic association of Althusserian interpellation with advertising tactics. As in the earlier discussion of the serial sampling method, it is indeed tempting to associate the addictive power of The Clock's endlessly shifting fragments with Marclay's ability to make the gallery "browsing" or "shopping" described by Hoolboom an integral, built-in ingredient of the experience of watching The Clock.

Conclusion

As Rosalind Krauss reminds us in her classic description of the museum as a latecapitalist institution, Adorno expressed doubts about Benjamin's description of the rag-picker as a radical figure, pointing out Benjamin's failure to acknowledge the capitalist function of the rag-picker who reintroduces that which he scavenges back into the commercial system of exchange value. [START_REF] Krauss | The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum[END_REF] Though in more recent writing Krauss herself sees in Marclay's work the signs of the emergence of a new vanguard, [START_REF] Krauss | Clock Time." See also: Rosalind Krauss[END_REF] The Clock certainly raises issues in relation to the ways in which cinema's legacy, in the form of archive as well as techniques and aesthetics, is recycled by the art world. Experimental films destined for theatrical release and artists' films produced for galleries and museums are, as Jonathan Walley demonstrated, 37 created according to contrasted modes of production and distribution (in the case of the artists' films, the practice of editioning the work to raise its value) that make it difficult for the latter to avoid the logic of capitalist recuperation signalled by Adorno. Further than the context of production however, or as an extension of it, divergent approaches to appropriation and montage also emerge here.

Taking her cue from Hal Foster's discussion of techniques associated with appropriation, 38 Emma Cocker emphasizes how borrowing from the archive can be interpreted . . . as a specific tactic for resisting and responding to the pressures and accelerated temporalities of late capitalism, and the dislocation (from both present and past) experienced by the individual in relation to the global and increasingly virtual context in which they are expected to perform. [START_REF] Cocker | Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives[END_REF] In a similar vein, Jan Verwoert argues that given the "undiminished if not increased power of capitalist commodity culture to determine the shape of our daily reality, appropriation is a way of cutting 'a slice out of the substance of this commodity culture to expose the structures that shape it, ' freeing that slice of material culture from the grip of its dominant logic and put[ting] it at the disposal of a different use." [START_REF] Verwoert | Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation[END_REF] These comments on the topical critical import of practices that engage with the appropriation and compilation of existing material seem particularly apposite in the context of the growing popularity of found footage techniques in recent video art. As Marclay's practice demonstrates, however, the critical and subversive potential emphasized by Cocker and Verwoert needs to be considered in relation to the specificity-in aesthetic, historical, and economic terms-of the space provided by art institutions.

There is no denying the pleasures to be derived from The Clock's formal achievements. Yet there is also, arguably, something deadly about Marclay's work-about its monolithic approach to montage, its systematic cataloguing and reduction of the "effet cinéma" to one singular mode of organization. Some of the films, video essays, and installations mentioned in the course of this discussion (Varda's Les Glaneurs, Godard's Histoire(s), Claudio Pazienza's Archipels Nitrate, and Kentridge's The Refusal of Time) are exemplary in the way they use montage and collage to undermine established epistemologies and create formally and thematically disruptive connections. Marclay's serial sampling, on the other hand, creates a closed system that runs itself. Where one approach points to the endless possibilities, formal as well as critical, of appropriation and montage, Marclay's method focuses on compilation as taxonomy and, with dazzling virtuosity, points to its own limits.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Christian marclay, installation view of The Clock (2010). Single-channel video with sound; 24 hours. white Cube mason's Yard, london (october 15-november 13, 2010) © Christian marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, new York and white Cube, london. Photo: Todd-white Photography.

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Christian marclay, installation view of The Clock (2010). Single-channel video with sound; 24 hours. white Cube mason's Yard, london (october 15-november 13, 2010) © Christian marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, new York and white Cube, london. Photo: Todd-white Photography.

Martine

  Beugnet is professor in visual studies at the university of Paris 7 diderot. She has written articles and essays on a wide range of film and media topics, and has published four books: Sexualité, marginalité, contrôle: cinéma français contemporain (l'harmattan, 2000), Claire Denis (m.u.P, 2004), Proust at the Movies (ashgate, 2005) together with marion Schmid, and Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (edinburgh university Press, 2007 and 2012). She also co-directs, together with kriss ravetto, a book series in film studies at e.u.P. martine Beugnet, martine.beugnet@univ-parisdiderot.fr NOTES


Introduction

In the beginning, technology has no rules. Then we teach it how to speak. 1 Jean-Luc Godard Étienne-Jules Marey's first chronophotographic film, shot in 1891, was entitled La Vague ('The Wave'). It shows the sea crashing against a pontoon, the raised water disappearing in a whirlpool of foam. Marey planned to use the film as a basis for creating a precise graph of the movement of a wave. He could see little point in showing the original images in public, such as they were. The Lumière brothers, on the other hand, realised the moving image's spectacular quality and its power to fascinate; they valued it and set out to exploit it, to great success. Writing in 1896 about the first public projection of the Lumière brothers' films, journalist Henri de Parville attempted to put into words his experience of cinema's extraordinary rendering of detailed movement. In response to the 1895 films L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat ('The Arrival of a Train'), La Baignade en mer ('Bathing in the sea'), and Le Repas de bébé ('Baby's Meal'), De Parville marvels at having been able 'to distinguish all the details, the rising swirls of smoke, the waves that come crashing on the beach, the leaves quivering in the wind'. [START_REF] De | Le cinématographe[END_REF] Many a historian of the cinema has pondered on De Parville's observations and choice of terms; how, in the same sentence, he exclaims that cinema can 'distinguish all the details', before he proceeds to emphasise those elements that most resist stability and definition: quivering leaves, swirling smoke, crashing waves. [START_REF] Vedrès | Les feuilles bougent[END_REF] These early films were not depicting anything that could not be seen by the spectators without the aid of cinema. What De Parville found remarkable was the specifically cinematic quality of the rendering -that is, film's ability to capture everything in movement, and therefore to bring to our attention the presence of all the detail that we do not normally consciously acknowledge.

It does not follow, however, that cinema's mediation makes perception more accurate or definite. Appearing as a shifting combination of separate yet indistinct elements, a spectacle of multifaceted, gaseous, or liquid matter in perpetual movement, the leaves, the smoke, the waves remain too dispersed and confused to be grasped fully and definitely. Rather, then, as the journalist immediately intuits, for all its photographic objectivity, cinematographic vision allows for the indefinite to surface: it is a unique means of recording as well as expressing the world's natural state of confusion. [START_REF] Siegfried | s discussion of the Lumière films in the introduction to his Theory of Film, and his description of 'camera-life', the 'flow of Life' and the 'indeterminate' as intrinsic qualities of film[END_REF] Vague, indefinite, yet full of detail: De Parville's description echoes Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's classic concept of the 'clear but confused'. According to Leibniz's well-known critique of the Cartesian concept of knowledge, although only scientific, fully rationalised knowledge is both clear and distinct, it does not follow that it is the only legitimate form of consciousness of the world. Whether knowledge gained from our senses is obscure (when you can simply not identify that which you are perceiving), or clear and confused, it is valuable nonetheless. One of Leibniz's favoured examples of clear and confused perception is that of the sea, which we identify although we cannot distinctively perceive it: we hear the roar of the sea, made of all the crashing waves, writes Leibniz, and we identify it as the sound of the sea even though we cannot distinguish the sound of each individual wave. As expressed in De Parville's paradoxical observation, what goes for sound is equally true of vision.

The French terminology gives additional force to the manifestation of the clear and confused as captured by the spectacle of the crashing waves, for in French, the word vague has a double meaning: as an adjective it means vague (synonymous, as in English, with 'indefinite' and 'uncertain'), and as a noun -la vague -it translates as 'the wave'. Though their etymologies are different, the meaning of the two words overlaps from the start: the adjective comes from the Latin vagus, meaning something random, in perpetual motion, something indefinite or indecisive. The noun has an Indo-European etymology that refers it to the random, ceaseless movement of liquid matter. Writing about it in the context of literary creation, Georges Didi-Huberman observes that la vague, the wave, hovers between form and formlessness, and, because it is the very manifestation of incessant motion and constant transformation, it can only ever be grasped fleetingly. La vague is, therefore, the favoured stuff of poetic creation. [START_REF] Didi-Huberman | Aesthetic Immanence[END_REF] Didi-Huberman's bringing together of poetry, the wave, and the vague echoes the connection between sensory perception and artistic creation observed by Leibniz and his disciple and founder of the study of aesthetics, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten: art explores and cultivates the indefinite part of perception or experience, the 'je ne sais quoi'; [START_REF] Gottlieb | On modern aesthetics and the je ne sais quoi, see Richard Scholar's The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something[END_REF] it is only in the realm of the clear and confused that it can thrive. Artistic intuition and vision thus stem from the incompleteness and constant variation of the perceived, the impossibility of a full and perfect knowledge of the world. [START_REF]For an analytical survey of the contrasted philosophical discourses that established or critiqued the 'theoretical framework that defined sharpness as an epistemological ideal associated with value judgements', see Bernd Huppauf[END_REF] As a medium and as a dispositif, cinema appears uniquely predisposed to the capture and the expression of the 'clear and confused': on the one hand, incessant motion and the confusion of parts necessary to create the whole, characterises the way projected images fuse into movement. In the projection of analogue film, we see the image change in front of us, without separately perceiving each of the photograms which, in the unravelling of their subtle differences, constitute its variations. Though the shift from analogue to digital has radically altered the basis of the projected image, the blending of separate images still arguably takes place in the movie theatre, where digital projection still relies on 'frames' and frame rates. On the other hand, as we just saw, film's mechanical eye has the ability to capture everything, the multitude and dispersion of movements recorded in its simultaneity and in duration, as it unfolds in time. But crucially, cinema as a medium also has the means to explore, alter and intensify our experience of the world's constant transformation, its constitutive indeterminacy.

In the silent era, a broad range of techniques were elaborated by filmmakers who, striving to establish cinema as an art form, sought to emphasise this particular quality of the medium, be it at the recording or at the developing stage. The confusion of details was creatively exploited with techniques such as superimposition, where several layered photograms appeared simultaneously, their content separate yet fused; it was accentuated through acceleration and slow motion (the dissolving forms of speeding objects or the vacillating outlines and ghostly doubling of moving figures captured in slow motion). Alternatively, definition could be deliberately attenuated: through intentional defocusing or by selecting particular film formats or film stocks; similarly, the use of filters and specific developing techniques altered the quality of the image, bringing out the whole at the expense of the parts, drawing film towards painterly forms.

Although experiments with the capture and expression of the 'clear and confused' have remained, as method and as object, a key concern of experimental film and art cinema, the advent of sound -or, rather, the advent of synchronised sound and image -has worked to marginalise such practices: sharp contours and the constancy of figures became the norm, necessary to make dialogue and other sounds immediately intelligible as well as readily assignable to identified sources. [START_REF]See Dominique Païni's introduction to Silenzio!, an exhibition catalogue of François Fontaine's photographs[END_REF] Favouring clear and 'effective' storytelling and communication, the grammar of mainstream cinema established a range of camera movements and framing choices, and devised a strict management of focus and depth of field, with the corresponding careful guidance of the spectator's gaze arguably applying not only to 2-D film but also, with renewed techniques and efficiency, to 3-D. High definition (HD), Paula Cardoso Pereira and Joaquín Zerené Harcha conclude, is the epitome of 'visual capitalism': 'Fetishized not only by advertising, graphic design, HD television, 3-D cinema and 4K resolution, but also by military and scientific devices, high definition is attractive, seductive, impressive and accurate'. [START_REF] Cardoso | Revolutions of Resolution: About the Fluxes of Poor Images in Visual Capitalism[END_REF] Even if one still recognises cinema's unmatched capacity for expressing the disorderly exuberance of the real, the historical roots of the drive to control this particular predisposition are much older than the medium and far more pervasive than the effect of the advent of sound film. The conception of knowledge that founds the ideal of utmost precision, and which prompted Leibniz's initial defence of the 'clear and confused', remains the classic Cartesian model of thought, its central tenet already expressed in the form of an analogy with sound or vision: knowledge and progress belong to the realm of the 'clear and distinct'. Though the critique of the Cartesian model was continued throughout the nineteenth century, and was pursued to the point of becoming a truism of the recent history and theory of visuality, the advent of the digital and the need to offer alternatives to the drive towards an ever greater definition and legibility of the film image gives it a new impetus.

There is, nowadays, talk of 'fuzzy logic' to describe modes of reasoning that develop without strictly established categories of judgement. [START_REF] Martin | s 'Genres of Blur[END_REF] In art and media studies, the corresponding 'phenomenological turn', with its emphasis on haptic visuality and synaesthesia, has led to the reappraisal of the indefinite as key to perceptual and artistic experience. [START_REF] Vivian | Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture[END_REF] Yet obscurity, lack of definition and blurring remain associated, in common understanding, with the irrational and the faulty, or, at the very least, with the absence of an essential quality. [START_REF] Huppauf | Between Imitation and Simulation: Towards an Aesthetics of Fuzzy Images[END_REF] Given technological thinking's grounding in ideals of precision, this collaps-ing together of the indefinite with lack is particularly in evidence in conventional discourses connected with technology.

The history of audiovisual technical developments, including the increase in the scope and precision of lenses and the increasing sensitivity of film stocks, as well as the range of precisely calibrated post-production tools, all ostensibly reflect, and participate in, the narrative that fuses together the notion of progress and that of a better legibility of the audio-visual field. Born out of a machine, the child of an industrial and technological modernity -the advent of which, for Jean-Louis Comolli, inaugurated an era of the 'frenzy of the visible' -cinema's evolution is aligned, from the beginning, [START_REF]On the parallel development of military and cinema technology, see Paul Virilio 'A Travelling Shot over Eighty Years[END_REF] with the logic that today extends to mainstream discourses on and practices of highdefinition digital media.

At first glance, with the advent of the electronic, then digital, moving image media, the drive towards the eradication of confusion appears to have intensified. After all, digitally captured and stored moving images are ultimately reducible to the variations of a continuous binary coding (of zeros and ones) that one struggles to conceive of as confusion. [START_REF]Attacks and subversions of digital coding represent a growing dimension of artistic practice[END_REF] The size of the screens and the resulting changes to the perceived quality of the image challenges even more tangibly our appreciation of the cinema image as a 'clear but confused' depiction of the world. Whereas the image projected in large scale, even the most carefully constructed image, allowed the gaze of the spectator to wander and even lose herself in the composite space of a shot, the display of the image in reduced formats (from television to computer to mobile phone screens) not only heightens the resolution (in relative terms, at least) but encourages us to seize the image at once, as a cohesive whole. [START_REF] Martine | Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone[END_REF] Smaller screens thus foster a regime of the glance that does not seem well predisposed to an imaginative investment in images' inherent incompleteness. The displacement of the mechanical by computing processes is equally significant in the way it subsumes the subjective to automatic systems: at its worst, when it was first integrated into recording devices coupled with small sensors, the automatic focus and light function were responsible for a generation of dull, flat images where, for the sake of maximum readability, the whole of the field of vision, from foreground to background, was subjected to the same, indiscriminate focus. Finally, there is the lingering issue of the unequalled quality of celluloid film, of the unique effect of its fine and irregular layer of silver salts. If digital film can theoretically emulate the fine unevenness of celluloid film (including in post-production, through the addition of 'noise' to the initial recording), common discourses on media technology align with the retailers' in the way they uphold the argument for an ever greater definition and constancy, the insufficiently questioned ideal and future goal for the moving image remaining one of utmost clarity and precision -clear and distinct.

Though we have arguably never known a broader range of possibilities in moving image capture and treatment, [START_REF]Director of photography Jean-Pierre Beauviala describes this transitional period as offering a 'colossal' range of options. Benjamin Bergery, Diane Baratier and Caroline Champetier[END_REF] today's mainstream aesthetic of the moving image privileges that which is controlled, stable and instantly 'readable': high definition, with its attendant well-contoured image, immediately identifiable face and perfectly synchronised sound. In commercial exploitations of the moving image, the creative exploration of cinema's ability to convey reality's inherent instability and confusion tends to be safely grounded in narrative or generic rationales (which include the incorporation of obscured, shaky, blurred images as a token of authenticity) or attached to clearly signposted sensational effects.

And yet, Gaston Bachelard reminds us: 'The value of an image can be measured by the extent of its imaginary aura [. . .]. Hence a stable and fully completed image effectively clips imagination's wings'. [START_REF] Bachelard | L'Air et les songes[END_REF] It is well known that the indefinite and the incomplete are an essential part of the spectator's experience. As Leonardo da Vinci famously proposed, a few stains on a decrepit wall might be the best stimulation for the imagination. Similarly, Ernst Gombrich argued that the extent of the spectator's 'share', of her active engagement in perceiving and interpreting the image, depends on its partial legibility or incompleteness. [START_REF] Da | Traité de la peinture[END_REF] While new technologies offer a wealth of alternative modes of recording, however, as well as producing images that often disregard the 'clear and distinct' imperative, the still prevalent search for the ideal of the perfectly defined image pulls contemporary cinema back to its uncertain beginnings as an art form. Experiments with high definition contour algorithms and high frame rate (HFR) seem destined to reawaken the spectre of the soulless copy and rekindle the Baudelairian debate on the impossibility of a photographically based artistic medium. Moreover, where the latest trends in digital imaging overlap with the fuzzy or the unreadable, advertising and scientific imagery are quick to exploit or occupy the field: whether it aims to channel the viewer's gaze into a consumerist logic by isolating and putting emphasis on a product, or to subject access to the interpretation of the visible to exclusive (and therefore seemingly authoritative) scientific knowledge, these strategies do not seek to challenge perception nor to address the viewer's imagination. Remarking that the imagination is also 'absent from current discourse on images and imagery', Bernd Huppauf and Christof Wulf ask, 'will it be possible to reclaim the imagination under the adverse conditions created by digital technologies and an overpowering market?'. [START_REF] Huppauf | Dynamics and Performativity[END_REF] As far as film is concerned, and as the contributions to this volume eloquently testify, the answer is yes: confusion and indefinition, as the stimulants to imagination, are not easily eliminated. If the dominant discourse places the immediately legible and perfectly defined image at the top of the visual hierarchy, the recognition that film is in fact, and in essential ways, ill-suited to the expression of the fixed, complete and clear-cut, continues nonetheless to inflect the medium's evolution, practices and theorisations. Accordingly, the essays included in this volume offer themselves as alternative narratives on the nature and vocation of film. They consider moving images and sounds in their more indefinite, ungraspable manifestations, where film hovers on the threshold of representation and legibility and challenges the way we look and listen. Three of the chapters included in the volume address the formal as well as conceptual question of definition applied to the visual (Erika Balsom, Martin Jay) and to sound (Giusy Pisano) respectively, and outline the historical, philosophical and aesthetic theorisation that founds the understanding and embracing of film as a medium of the indefinite. A number of the contributions further explore key aspects of the cinematic that determine its relationship to the uncertainty of vision, and encourage an active and imaginative spectatorial engagement: pitched at the border of art and technique, Jacques Aumont, Richard Misek and Tom Gunning's reflections take light, darkness and the flicker, and the experience and significance of the blinding and the obscure, as their subjects. Michel Chion and Julian Hanich, in their examination of framing and montage, focus on the play on scale and mirror reflections respectively, emphasising the complexity of the relationship between on-and off-screen (champ and hors champ) and cinema's articulation of the visible through ellipsis.

If mainstream cinema can be considered the 'flagship store' in a 'class society of images' 20 that values sharpness, high resolution and stability above all, the great diversity of the corpus addressed in the volume shows that the obscure and the 'clear and confused' nonetheless permeates all cinematic forms, demanding a renewed engagement from viewers of experimental cinema and video art, but also blockbuster film. 'Cinematic indeterminacy', precisely analysed in Christa Blümlinger's piece on Peter Tscherkassky, and advocated as the essence of filmmaking and theorising practices by David N. Rodowick, remains a staple of experimental cinema's innovative and critical (anti-illusionist and anti-consumerist) strategies. Kim Knowles draws attention to an array of experimental practices that foreground process and the partly uncontrolled alteration of celluloid, and reinstates the ethical import of the 'performative power of materiality' 21 in the era of digital dematerialisation. Turning to video art, Catherine Fowler and Kriss Ravetto concentrate on the ways in which contemporary artists adopt the long take and slow motion as a means to challenge perceptual habits and current viewing regimes. At the other end of the spectrum, the high production values of contemporary Hollywood are the focus of Carol Vernallis' chapter, where she evokes an excess of visual information that defeat attempts at fully grasping the content of a shot.

Even in the digital era of optical and sound precision, the medium's aptitude for the vague, the confused and the obscure endures, producing new forms of indefinite visions. Enhancing the possibilities offered by the overabundance of detail and precision, or, on the contrary, encouraging the products of low definition, error-prone media, new technology breeds new types of indefinite sounds and images (interestingly, the etymology of the word error is strikingly close to that of the word vague: a wandering, a straying or meandering; the roots of the term also connect it to doubt or uncertainty). The explosion of software and hardware that produce, disseminate and display moving images coincided with the dawn of a new era for glitch and noise. Increased accessibility, intensified reproduction and manipulation, compression and circulation, as well as the ubiquity of fully automatic recording devices, also ushered in the age of the 'poor image'. The 'poor' variants of moving images, their reduced definition often further marred by low resolution, glitches and noise, have an ambiguous status: on the one hand, they are a product of the advanced commodification of image production and circulation. In some of their low definition forms, stripped of details, they suit an economy of attention that encourages the regime of the quick glance; in others, as with CCTV images, they are associated with surveillance and control. On the other hand, in a culture of 'neoliberal media production' that fetishises 'pristine visuality', [START_REF] Steyerl | In Defense of the Poor Image[END_REF] poor image platforms such as YouTube offer an outlet to marginalised non-commercial imagery, including experimental films. More generally, as Cardoso Pereira and Zerené Harcha emphasise, 'the growing presence of these "precarious images" in daily life has changed the ways of appreciating images and their dynamics'. [START_REF] For | taking their cue from Arlindo Machado, the proliferation of 'precarious' images, and the emergence of forms of 'precarious aesthetics' is an upshot of the unreliable technical conditions in which the images are produced, circulated and archived (or not), and their 'allegedly inferior representational quality' should not obscure 'their great potential[END_REF] Just as glitches and noise disturb mimetic transparency, the poor image -re-filmed, ripped, squeezed, zipped and unzipped -calls attention to the processes that led to its degraded look. Not only do such phenomena, whether they emerge as accidental or deliberate interruption, create points of resistance to the regime of the hypervisible, but they make us aware of communication as mediation, and conscious again of the labour that goes into the production and display of images and sounds. Artists and filmmakers that appropriate and develop these dimensions of the electronic and digital technologies in their work thus extend the tradition of avant-garde and experimental cinema that embraces the possibilities of chance -of intentional and non-intentional effects -turning errors into productive formal and critical strategies. In both cases, unstable, obscured images foreground the process that goes into their appearance, lending material presence and gravitas to immaterial media. These questions are addressed in the contributions of Sean Cubitt, Steven Shaviro and Allan Cameron, who look at the aesthetics and politics of glitch and noise in fiction cinema and art video. They show how, as interruptions and alterations of the image and sound flow, glitch and noise make manifest and disturb a logic of enmeshed representation-as-communication specific to the era of the electronic and digital image, while pointing to the uncanny sense of increasing self-sufficiency associated with twenty-first-century technology.

What kind of cinema emerges out of such technological mutations, where radical changes in the techniques and protocols of production and dissemination generate new forms of uncertainty regarding the authorship, point of view and modes of circulation and reception of film images? Emmanuelle André envisages cinema's recent transformations as an annexation of the visual by the manual (the thumbing through images required by tactile devices) and of flatness by 3-D, that has antecedents, however, in earlier modes of display and superimposition. Raymond Bellour's intervention tracks the emergence of animal presence as the unexpected result of film technology's growing autonomy from human agency. In both cases, the authors look at the work of filmmakers who appropriate emerging modes of imaging to probe and extend the territories of cinematic representation.

A historian and theorist of the development of modern techniques and practices, Vilém Flusser argued that creativity was dependent on the practitioner's ability to become more than an operator (even an excellent operator, able to activate and apply to the full the machine's functions) and to seek instead to counter the effect of automatism (the camera's in-built functions). The history of film, and of ensuing audio-visual forms of expression, is made up of such alternative practices: the drive to align the image with a readily legible regime of representation and efficient medium for communication is woven together with the conscious (as advocated by Flusser) and continuing exploration but also the unplanned appearance, of imprecise, obscure audiovisual forms that run counter to or alongside the dominant practices. [START_REF] Flusser | Pour une philosophie de la photographie[END_REF] Accordingly, in the contributions that make up this book, indefinite visions born out of blur, glitches, de-framing, darkness or blinding light, the erasure or excess of detail, that surface on our screens or invade the films' soundtrack as the results of artistic strategies or of technology's 'defects' are not, or not primarily, explored in comparative fashion -as transitory states of the image, a step towards greater definition and clarity -but in and of themselves. As such, the general outlook of the volume might be envisaged in terms of potentiality. In his reworking of Aristotle's concept of potential and actual, Giorgio Agamben circumvents the issue of actualisation: potentiality, he proposes, is not reducible to this process. Indeed, the value of potentiality in itself is derived from the resistance to actualisation; it resides instead in states of non-being or non-perceiving (as opposed to defined, complete, fully identified objects). [START_REF] Agamben | Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy[END_REF] In implicit contrast with the Cartesian model, Agamben illustrates his reflection with a discussion of darkness, pointing out that we do not experience darkness merely as a lack of, or as the opposite of light, but in and of itself. Accordingly, in Indefinite Visions the moving image is valued as a manifestation of the vague, the obscure, the fragmentary and confused -as a site of potentiality or endless becoming.

The advent of the digital has not reduced film's capacity for capturing and expressing the world's incompleteness. In his description of new media as 'not something fixed once and for all', but as 'mutable' and 'liquid', Lev Manovich echoes theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein and his advocacy of film as the medium of flux. [START_REF] Manovich | The Language of New Media[END_REF] Writing from the 1920s onwards, Epstein ceaselessly stressed the need to cultivate what he called cinema's photogénie, that is, the medium's inclination towards the indeterminate and permanently changing. In his conception of cinema as indefinite vision, it is not just the instability of the figure that is at stake, but all references and spatio-temporal anchors that are cut adrift. It comes as no surprise that Epstein was particularly drawn to seascapes and shot some of his most striking works about the sea. For him, cinema was thought in motion, and as such, it contradicted all knowledge systems based on the establishment of stable rules:

Cinema is, par excellence, a machine for the detection and representation of movement, that is, of the variation of all spatial and temporal relations, the relativity of all measurement, the instability of all points of reference, the fluidity of the universe. Cinematographic culture is thus profoundly opposed to all systems that suppose fixed standards and set values; opposed to currently received conceptions of a stable and solid world that are alien to cinematographic experience; [. . .] opposed to classical rationalisms that have the pretension to reduce to an invariable set of rules the ceaseless fluctuation of feeling. [START_REF]donc ennemie de tous les systèmes qui supposent des étalons absolus, des valeurs fixes; ennemie de toutes les conceptions encore actuellement en vigueur, qui se fondent sur l'expérience extra-cinématographique, cent fois millénaire, d'un monde stable et solide; (…) ennemie encore des rationalismes classiques, qui prétendent saisir dans une invariable règle la perpétuelle mobilité du sentiment[END_REF] While images have become 'predominant vehicles in the circulation of knowledge and key to the shaping of power relations', [START_REF] Pereira | Revolutions of Resolution[END_REF] so have simplistic messages proliferated, threatening to reduce our view of the world to a set of preconceived, immediately graspable affirmations and one-dimensional oppositions. Film's indefinite visions form potential points of resistance, 29 more precious than ever in their capacity to make us doubt and reconsider the world and its representations not as givens, but as complex, vague and unfixed: if film images excel in capturing the world in its fluidity and open-endedness, it is because each frame contains an ocean of variables. 30 Notes 1. Jean-Luc Godard, 'La technique, au tout début, elle n'a pas de règles. Après, on lui apprend à parler.' Interview (2014), http://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/ Jean-Luc_Godard.do (accessed 12 November 2016).

Figure I. 1

 1 Figure I.1 Bathing in the Sea (Baignade en Mer), Auguste and Louis Lumière (1895).


Martine Beugnet

Gaston Bachelard

La Poétique

Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone

Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world

attentive viewing only briefly, before I focus on the effect of miniaturisation on the film image. Indeed, I choose to focus on the more diminutive screens, those that can be held in one's hand, for only the very small-size moving image elicits the sense of magic and fascination that I wish to evoke here. Rather than pertaining to cinema per se, the phenomenon partakes in a diffuse sense of 'cinematicity' and, as such, it calls for its own set of terms and references. Drawing on haptic theories of visuality, as well as on the aesthetics of miniature art forms and the curio, I will explore the effects of reduction on the moving image, from the intensification of the colour fields and of movement, to the miniaturization of moving figures, and more specifically, of the human figure. I will suggest that, through the experience of miniaturized, intimate viewing that it offers even in the midst of the bustle of public spaces, as a screening device the smartphone arguably creates, to paraphrase Laura Mulvey, its own type of possessive spectator.2 Pocket Size Cinema?

Where small screen viewing is concerned, Apple was at the leading edge.3 Indeed from the start, the iPhone's distinctive qualities as a viewing device, suitable to watch even images intended for the cinema, was a key aspect of its success.4 These specific qualities were duly highlighted when the device was launched in 2007.5 At the Apple grand messe where he first presented his revolutionary touch-based device, Steve Jobs emphasized the iPhone's unique design: compared to other mobile phones, Apple's iPhone was immediately recognizable through its lack of a hard keyboard. As a result, whereas other mobile phones only afforded square, stamp-size screens, with its retractable, touch keyboard, the iPhone not only offered a comparatively expansive screen space framed by a case whose 'clean' non-intrusive design would become its trademark, but, in addition, a screen that could be held length-wise. At the same time, the iPhone could still be held in the palm of one's hand, and easily fit in one's pocket.

In his 2007 presentation of the new device, Jobs thus pointed out that, for the first time, it would become enjoyable to not only watch mobile images on one's phone, but to watch images originally created for the cinema. Indeed, Jobs's choice of film as the prop for his demonstration is telling: the sequence of images selected to illustrate the iPhone's superior qualities as a screening device were extracted from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006, dir. Gore Verbinski)-a high production value costume drama, boasting not only a star-studded cast but elaborate sets, costumes, large numbers of extras, expansive seascapes and spectacular battle scenes. From the start, the expectation was that in spite of the small screen, viewers would not shy away from watching images that rely on a wealth of detail and that might require sustained attentionif not at the narrative level, at least where the visual composition was concerned.6 Indeed, Jobs further pointed to two specifications that suggested that cinephiles, as well as occasional, distracted viewers, would use the device to watch films: the 'pinching' application, allowing the user to zoom into the image by applying tactile pressure, and a cinemascope option ensuring that the images would not be automatically 'boxed' and have their content cropped.

Pelle Snickars' and Patrick Vonderau's introduction to Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media, begins with an account of Jobs walking the red carpet at the 2010 Oscar ceremony, a strong indicator, the authors remark, of Apple's growing interest in the cinema business.7 As several of the essays contained in Moving Data emphasize, however, in practice access to filmsin their integral, unaltered form, that isremains an issue. The online streaming and downloading of movies is tightly regulated; storage space and battery power are a concern when downloading and watching a feature film; and it remains to be seen whether so-called cloud-based providers of moving-image based art and entertainment such as Ultraviolet will at some point in the future allow viewers to select and access the films they want to watch anywhere, at any time, and at an acceptable cost.8 The by-product of this situation is that the major modes of access to films on small portable screening devices like smartphones are television channels and video hosting websites such as YouTube. The impact on the quality of the viewing experience is unquestionable, whether in terms of the integrity of a film work (that is, the possibility of watching a film devoid of gaps, glitches and re-edits involving the removing and reordering of sequences as well as the insertion of advertisement breaks) or of the resolution of its images and soundtrack.

As far as the quality of the image is concerned, however, the compactness of the smallest screening devices, where the imperfections due to low resolution are less tangible, is a definite advantage. Moreover, the technical improvements sought and implemented since 2007, and in particular the willingness to provide the best possible image rendition, indicate a belief in the continuing, growing use of such devices for watching moving images, including films (that is, features or shorts, shot in analogue or digital format, but initially intended for theatrical release). For instance, Apple rapidly developed the so-called Retina display for the iPhone-an LCD screen that boasts a high pixel density enhanced by the small size of the screen, its high pixel resolution being squeezed into a 3.5 inch screen.9 Thus even in the face of restricted access to a limited number of titles, film viewing was, from the start, one of the iPhone's selling assets (and other smartphone manufacturers soon followed suit and copied the iPhone design); with the iPhone came the promise that users would carry with them their own 'pocket size cinema' and watch films wherever and whenever they wished.

'Existential Bubbles'

To most cinephiles, such an assertion is, of course, an anathema. The arguments against the kind of media convergence epitomized in the streaming and watching of films on portable digital platforms and the effect it has on the cinematic experience are sufficiently well known to have become topics of tongue in cheek debate amongst YouTube viewers. A spoof of an iPhone commercial, posted in 2008 and based on the clever remix of audiovisual footage from extras of a special edition of an Inland Empire DVD release, has in effect become a classic in relation to the debate over the cinematic apparatus.10 It features a furious rant by filmmaker David Lynch warning viewers against the abomination of watching films on iPhones.11 Interestingly, the hundreds of bloggers who commented were not particularly interested in determining whether or not this was a fake, and if so who the author was, nor did they discuss its achievements as an iPhone advertisement. Reviewers were primarily interested in talking about the maverick director himself (and the irony of Lynch, the master creator of warped fictional worlds, asking us to 'get real' was not lost on the commentators). There were also heated exchanges about the message of the fake advertisement: on the acceptability of watching actual feature films on such a tiny screen, with reduced audio span. Out of the remarks emerge familiar concerns: as viewers, as well as missing the rituals associated with communal viewing and shared experience, we lose out on the large screen projection experience with all it entails in terms of audiovisual quality. Only within the film theatre's enfolding darkness, secluded from the outside world, can we surrender to the sense of suspended time while we sitspellbound and immobileamong a crowd of strangers, immersing ourselves in the vast expanse of the image projected on the cinema screen. Here, and in spite of the usual observations on the alleged added 'freedom' ('anywhere, anytime') brought to the user by mobile technology, the bloggers' ambivalent comments often mirrored those of academic observers. For many a film theorist, the possibility of experiencing a film projected in a theatre at least once is precisely what continues to define cinema; it remains cinema's unique prerogative in an era of remediation and media convergence, where films are turned into (mere) data so as to be redistributed in a multitude of formats and shifted between a growing number of platforms and screens of all sizes. Probably because of its long tradition of art-house cinema and cine-club-bound cinephilia, francophone film theory offers particularly polarized points of view. Serge Daney's classic advice in favour of watching films on television, and Roger Odin's advocacy for the development of a 'communication space' where the frontiers between watching and making films becomes blurred, however, remain the exception.12 From Jacques Aumont to Raymond Bellour and Eric de Kuyper,13 Jean-Luc Godard's classic aphorism, echoed by Chris Marker, still holds: Cinema is larger than us; you should have to raise your eyes to the cinema screen. When you start lowering your eyes on a smaller display, cinema loses its essence […] On television, you see the shadow of a film, the nostalgic memory of a film, its echo -never a film.14

In the introduction to his recently published La Querelle des dispositifs: cinéma, installations, expositions, Raymond Bellour summarizes the argument eloquently:

To experience the projection of a film in a cinema, in the dark, as part of an audiencelarge or reducedhas become, and remains, the condition of a unique experience of perception and memory that will be transformed, to a lesser or greater extent, in any other viewing situation. This and only this deserves to be called 'cinema'. [START_REF] Bellour | La projection vécue d'un film en salle, dans le noir, le temps prescrit d'une séance plus ou moins collective, est devenue et reste la condition d'une expérience unique de perception et de mémoire, définissant son spectateur et que toute situation autre de vision altère plus ou moins. Et cela seul vaut d'être appelé « cinéma[END_REF] Media historians interested in the longer view however, tend to take a more relativist stance.

Hence in the aptly called In Broad Daylight, Gabriele Pedulla echoes many 'new media' theorists when he states:

In the brief history of moving image systems, the movie theatre's absolutism was only a brief parenthesis [...] a brief encounter that today we are all the more inclined to remember nostalgically for its transience. [START_REF] Pedulla | Broad Daylight[END_REF] In the past few decades, the emergence in the field of media studies of a media archaeology approach that looks at the evolution of cinema as part of a broader, non-linear, and on-going history of technology17 has contributed to this tendency to revaluate the importance of the actual cinemagoing experience epitomized by Pedulla's quote. Here, the question of the multiple origins and genealogies of the medium of the moving image comes into play, calling for a re-contextualization of cinema in relation to a broad range of modes of experiencing films, including the individual viewing of small-scale film images. As part of an archaeological approach to media, connections can be drawn, for instance, between today's small mobile screens and early forms of exhibition that did not involve public projection, such as peephole viewing (the kinetoscope) or the zoetrope that depended on the viewing of small scale images by one or a few spectators at a time. Similarly the flip book, or kineograph, involved the kind of manipulation that could be compared to the gesture-based activity of using palm size mobile media such as iPhones.

Given the mongrel origins of the medium of the moving image and of its apparatus therefore, and acknowledging that cinema has, so far, survived the digital onslaught that was meant to annihilate the very notion of cinema as we know it, a number of film and visual studies historians see no reason to equate media convergence, and the possibility of viewing film on a variety of platforms, with its imminent death. Writing as part of the aforementioned Moving Data collection, Francesco Casetti and Sara Sampietro thus argue, in contrast with Bellour's quote cited earlier, that 'if it is true that media are no longer tied to an exclusive platform or technology, it is also true that they continue to possess their own identities'. [START_REF] Bellour | Whereas Bellour's argument posits a precise definition of what the term cinema designates (cinema's identity having become, in the course of time, inseparable from specific conditions of viewing which involve public projection), Casetti and Sampietro's analysis rests on the overlapping use of a set of loosely defined terms (media, cinema, film). See Francesco Casetti and Sara Sampietro[END_REF] For Casetti and Sampietro, cinema possesses a distinctive way of involving us as well as a distinctive way of reflecting on our relation to the world, which they summarize, in a Bazin-inspired fashion, as 'the ability to simultaneously restore the world to us while creating a new one, thus reconnecting the real to the possible'. Crucially, the technology that grants us this characteristic media experience, they argue, is significant, but not decisive.19 To the terms 'remediation' and 'media convergence' they therefore prefer the term 'relocation', because 'media are "worlds" that can be shifted elsewhere'.20

Casetti and Sampietro emphasize, however, that there are specific conditions to the successful relocation of the film viewing experience via a technology such as the small portable screen. The first condition, they argue, is a successful pre-existing relocation (Casetti and Sampietro call this the 'two-step condition').21 In the case of film, this was done thanks to television and, later, the computer through which we have grown used to watching movies in small frames such as Quicktime, Vimeo or YouTube. [START_REF]On this topic, see Vivian Sobchack's 'Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of Quicktime[END_REF] The second, key condition is dependent on the ability to create what Casetti and Sampietro call an effective 'existential bubble', that is, the capacity for a subject to isolate herself within collective environments (though as mentioned before, you may well elect to watch your iPhone in the privacy of a domestic space). Though the authors do not address this particular aspect of the creation of 'existential bubbles', one can expect sound to take on --to a certain extent at least --the function traditionally assumed by darkness in a cinemagoing experience: the sound received through earphones allows the individual sitting amongst a crowd to seclude him-or herself and engage in what Casetti and Sampietro describe as an intimate and 'exclusive relationship with the text'.23 The 'intimate experience' rendered possible by the creation of an 'existential bubble' is to be distinguished from the 'multifocalized' and 'epidermal' modes of viewing, where the viewer exercises not an attentive but dispersive gaze, switching between several objects, or privileges interaction with the technology itself, leading to a superficial, inattentive, and highly discontinuous gaze. In these latter cases, as with web platforms such as YouTube where films appear in fragmented, manipulated forms, and abridged to 'pill-size doses', cinema does indeed, Casetti and Sampietro remark, 'un-cinematize itself'.24 It is not the attempt at asserting cinema's uncertain 'relocation' via the iPhone that is of interest here, but, rather, the way in which Casetti and Sampietro's analysis points to the possibility of a different encounter with the moving image --one that goes beyond what Bellour calls a 'degraded vision' of film25 and calls forth the small screen's own, intriguing, mode of spectatorial engagement.

It is the so-called 'intimate experience' that I will therefore implicitly assume as the basis of my further exploration of the specific pleasures associated with small screen film viewing. The viewer I am now picturing is an attentive one. It is probably a viewer whose cinema-going habits are not altered by the possession of a portable screen; one who is likely to prefer to watch a given film at least once on a large screen, without fragmenting it, before seeing it via miniaturized media; at the same time however, she/he will also routinely elect to watch, and re-watch, a particular moment or scene on her or his smartphone. By extension, size of screen notwithstanding, it is a viewer who is susceptible to becoming immersed in the world of the film, whether it is a narrative feature or non-narrative work. In effect, the issue of continuity (as in narrative continuity or simply in viewing a work in its entirety) versus fragmentation is not necessarily crucial here: the viewer sensitive to the attractions of the miniaturized image may well be one who appreciates miniaturization in temporal terms as well as in scale; who finds pleasure in watching brief, self-contained extracts, non-narrative and short films. However, what interests me most here is the involvement with the material, tactile aspects of the experience of watching moving images on a very small screen rather than questions of narrative formats. I want to suggest that the attraction of viewing high quality film images on a small screen has less to do with the much advertised freedom to watch the latest mainstream feature anywhere at any time, than with the effect of image reduction itself.

Hence to consider the specific enjoyment afforded by small screen viewing is not, by any means, to suggest the possibility of one mode of viewing emulating, let alone replacing, the experience of the film projected in a cinema, but rather to explore the ways diverse or complementary modes of experiencing film might coexist and offer different pleasures.

Clearly, even if it is possible to effectively create an existential 'bubble' for an intimate relation to the film one is watching on one's iPhone, this has little in common with the experience of cinema-going. Even if, as Casetti and Sampietro suggest, the cinema experience could be successfully 'relocated', iPhone viewing would still imply a highly distinctive relation to the medium of the moving imageone that is undeniably bound to the change of scale and the experience of the miniature.

Scale and Magic

Scale has always been a key component of the magic of cinema: where analogue, nitrate or celluloid film is concerned in particular, the magic comes not only from the immersion of the viewer within the world represented on a gigantic screen, but also from the projection, that is, the capacity to transform, through the power of light, an image that is tiny --the miniature picture contained in each of the film strip's individual framesso as to render it on a massive scale.

When watching on a mobile phone screen the effect is reversed, but the magic remains (and Jobs is well aware of this, using the term 'magic' repeatedly in his presentation). In a sense, iPhone viewing can remind us of the wonder of looking at the miniature photographic world that is enclosed and repeated within sequences of single analogue film frames.

Daniel Szöllösi plays on this association in his 2012 'untitled', a short film which was awarded first prize in the Amsterdam EYE Museum 'celluloid remix' competition, and for which he used a series of mobile phones laid out next to each other so that they evoke photograms on a film strip.26 Following the rules of the competition, Szöllösi used found footage from the museum's early film collection from which he selected shots of camera operators of the silent period at work, as well as amateur footage of a man, woman and child awkwardly acting up and laughing in front of the camera.

Part of the footage showed at the end of the film is badly decayedto the point where the photographic content becomes entirely obscured. Szöllösi inserted split-screens and freeze frames, and remixed and looped various sequences before playing them on three iPhones placed side by side. He then reshot this pocket-size installation work from abovethe three screens contained within one frame.

At first, his hands (and the hand is, in Susan Stewart words, 'the measure of the miniature')27 appear in the frame to switch the three devices on, and as the images start to unravel on each of the small screens in turn, the soundtrack fills with the noise of an old fashioned projector, soon mixed with the sound of a woman laughing. At one point, Szöllösi's hand reappears, lays a fourth phone on top of one of the iPhones already on display, wherein this new device seems to pick up a sequence of images as if by contagion. Little by little, both the sound of the projector and the display of images become more erratic. Parasite noise --static, buzzing and whistlinginvades the sound track and the images start to flick by at an irregular speed, only then to decompose and vanish, as when analogue footage jams and combusts during a projection: it is as if the small electronic devices had become inhabited with the malevolent spirit of an old, dysfunctional projector. This uncanny cohabitation of the obsolete with the new is further emphasized by the author's 'signature shot' at the end, when Szöllösi switches the central device into video mode, so that his own image appears, framed by footage of a silent film cameraman briefly displayed on either side. The repeated involvement of the filmmaker (first coming into sight as a pair of giant hands, then as a small silhouette enclosed within one of the frames) as both a Deus ex Machina and a kind of Alice in Wonderland emphasizes the small size as well as the touch-based, intimate interface offered by the iPhone. It also brings out the sense of enchantment that the meeting, across time and scale, of diverse moving image technologies can elicit. Indeed the miniature, as Gaston Bachelard reminds us in La Poétique de l'espace, belongs first and foremost to the land of fairy tales, and is never far from the world of children and their toys.28 If, to paraphrase Casetti and Sampietro, films are 'worlds' that can be shifted elsewhere, then in this case, to enter them through an iPhone screen is to engage with an experience of viewing that arguably has something in common with the fairytale and with childhood. The iPhone is, after all, a kind of toy, albeit a very expensive toy that relies on the latest technology.

In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart stresses the ambiguous relation between miniaturization and technology: while the development of new technologies has allowed for the miniaturization of data of all kinds, including audio-visual data, the miniature also harks back to traditional forms of craftsmanship celebrated for their capacity to create images and replicate the world in as tiny a scale and as completely as possible, while maintaining proportion.29 'Unlike the gigantic, which celebrates quantity over quality',30 the art of the miniature insists on proportional perfection and detail.31 If one of the main attractions and wonder of miniature representation is borne out of the kind of association of tininess with exactness, it calls for a distinctive form of gaze. For the reduction in scale induces a commensurate concentration of detailsin the case of complex film images, with compositions saturated with visual information and transformations, one might even talk, as Stewart notes, of a 'hallucination of details'.32 As such, the iPhone as a screening device arguably encourages us not only to interface in a tactile way through our fingers, but also to exercise our tactile gaze.

In her seminal books Touch and The Skin of Film, Laura Marks has emphasized how, in a culture that has privileged the distanced, optical gaze over the haptic one, we need to be reminded that vision is also a form of contact. Amongst the types of haptic images that encourage us to exercise our haptic or tactile gaze, she mentions diverse 'traditions that involve intimate, detailed images that invite a small, caressing gaze'. [START_REF] Marks | The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses[END_REF] It is to film and video that Marks devotes her study of tactile vision, but in so doing, she relates the medium of the moving image to other traditions such as weaving, embroidery, and to older media such as medieval illuminated manuscripts, that require us to direct our attention to the surface of the image, its textures, contrasts and colours, minutiae and details.34 In the case of the iPhone, the high resolution and soft glow of the retina LCD screen and the condensation of contrasts and colours as well as figures arguably yields the same visual attraction that the miniature enlumineurs sought to create, with their insistence on the luminosity and vivid hues and contrasts of their tiny paintings.

As suggested earlier, however, the gaze of today's user of tiny mobile media platforms is sustained by a distinctive relation to the soundtrack that accompanies or provides a counterpoint to the film images. In his chapter on the miniature in La Poétique de l'espace, Bachelard mentions a 'miniature du son'. [START_REF] Bachelard | La Poétique de l'espace[END_REF] At that point Bachelard is talking about Tom Thumb climbing inside a horse's ear, and his remarks, oddly evocative of a discussion on the functions of the earbud type of audio device, may help to give a poetic spin to the often banal depiction of the role of this kind of auditory prosthetic. In effect, as my slightly off kilter rapprochement suggests, in Bachelard's literary account, as with the technology concerned here, a synaesthetic or tactile quality is associated with the kind of sound delivered in the close, intimate mode that characterizes the 'auditory miniature':

Tom Thumb is at home inside the ear, at the entrance of the natural sound cavity. He is an ear within an ear. […] He has settled there in order to speak softly, that is, to command loudly, with a voice that no-one could hear except the one who should 'listen '.36 The wording of this passage evokes the kind of excluding perception that immersion in the microcosm presented on an iPhone's small screen can induce -a highly individualized mode of viewing and hearing that yields a specific relation to its object in terms of intimacy but also in terms of control and possessiveness. If the device effectively draws the viewer into the world that unravels on its screen and via its earbuds or head-phones, the sense of possession ultimately lies, however, with the viewer as 'user'. Indeed, if the minuscule invites us to surrender our sense of height to penetrate its microcosms, and while the haptic gaze is, for Laura Marks, a mode of vision that encourages us to 'yield into the image', smallness and tactility also play into forms of ownership and mastery. In Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey suggests that technologies such as the VCR and the DVD with their ability to still the moving image, contribute to the creation of new kinds of spectator, among which she posits the 'possessive' spectator. In using a small, individual media platform such as an iPhone to watch films, the viewer arguably develops an even greater sense of control -for here, the spectator is also the sole 'user' and owner of a device that he carries himself. Intimacy thus yields into possessiveness: she/he carries their screen in their pocket and holds it in the palm of their hand. He/she can select a frame ratio, rewind and fastforward, still the image, but also 'pinch' or zoom into the image to try and discover its mysteries. In the case of the iPhone, it is not when the image is stilled, however, that the greater sense of mastery comes into play, but when the image moves. Suddenly, actors and actresses, stars as well as less known figures, are reduced to the size of Tom Thumb moving through miniaturized sets and landscapes. As they run around this reduced space, seemingly imprisoned in the tight confines of the diminutive frame, and their movements rendered more hysterical by their miniaturization, the distant observer might well compare the owner of the iPhone to a kind of entomologist, or a distant heir of the gigantic blue humanoids of René Laloux and Roland Topor's La Planête Sauvage (1973) who entertain themselves with the spectacle of the insect-sized humans they capture or purchase. [START_REF](…) To have experienced miniature sincerely detaches me from the surrounding world, and helps me to resist dissolution of the surrounding[END_REF] And thus, by extension, we are also reminded that the art of the miniature has always been an art form favoured by the collector. As Stewart reminds us, to carry a miniature picture of a loved one was always a way of keeping them close, their portrait secured in a locket and often kept against one's skin; by extension however, miniature representations are related to specific patterns of possession and collection that would later feed into the forms of commodification of the body that the advertisement came to epitomize. 38

Conclusion

Rather than a radical loss of the cinema effect, there arguably is a strange metamorphosis as well as a doubling of it in the experience of watching moving images on the diminutive, portable screen of a smartphone: the viewer's immersion in the world of the film is, simultaneously, an immersion in a miniature universe whose gate opens in the palm of one's hand. However, the mix of intimacy and possession that such viewing entails effortlessly yields to patterns of possession and consumption where the smallness of the image, the reduction of the human figure as well as its environment, becomes part and parcel of the device's functioning as a commodity form. To a certain extent therefore, to emphasize the connections that exist between such a mode of viewing and a diverse range of historical, literary, poetic and artistic precedents is to attempt to re-appropriate it, away from the technological fetishism and commodifying discourses that often dominate the advertising as well as critical studies of new technologies. For there is, undoubtedly, a distinctive beauty and fascination in the spectacle of extremely complex moving images rendered in such diminutive, yet perfect, fashion; the captivation exercised by the shifting glow that the small images cast against their surroundings testifies to this, as does the irrepressible need, in the bustle of public transport, to peer over the shoulder of the absorbed fellow traveller who holds the miniature screen in her hand.

Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l'espace[1958] (Paris : PUF,

2011), p. 148; see also The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas (Boston : Beacon Press, 1994), p. 155. 2 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 161. 3 Coincidently, in his chapter on the miniature in La Poétique se l'espace, Bachelard quotes from Cyrano de Bergerac a passage where Cyrano describes the apple as 'un petit univers à soi même, dont le pépin plus chaud que les autres parties, répand autour se soi la chaleur conservatrice de son globe […] ». « a little universe in itself, the seed of which, being hotter than the other parts, gives out the conservative heat of its globe […]' Edmond Rostan, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), quoted in La Poétique de l'espace, p. 142; see also The Poetics of Space, p.151. 4 Hence if in spite of the fierce competition we still tend to associate touch phone technology with Apple's iPhone, it is not the communication aspect per se that has turned the iPhone into such an emblematic artefact of the digital era -an 'ideal-type commodity form' as media theorists would have it. As a telephone proper, Apple's iPhone was never rated amongst the best. It is other functions, including that of a screening device, that take precedence. 5 See Steve Jobs's introductory presentation of the iPhone, at: <www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uW-E496FXg and www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vququ7x8gnw>. 6 A strange effect of shifting scales is created, however, by the fact that Jobs's presentation, taking place in a vast cinema-like auditorium, is supported by giant images of the iPhone displayed on a large screen. 7 Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, eds, Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 1. 8 Alisa Perren and Karen Petruska, 'Big Hollywood, Small Screens', in Snickars and Vonderau, 104-124; Chuck Tryon, 'Pushing the (Red) Envelope: Portable Video, Platform Mobility and Pay-Per-View Culture', in Snickars