Things Your Mother Never Though She Taught You

I'm getting sleepy... Very sleepy... ow, the movie is about to start.

I am ensconced in the darkness of my neighborhood cinema… this time it is at what once was the Famous Players Paramount but is now a Cinéma Banque Scotia Montréal.

The CGI animation announcing the Feature Presentation starts up, but it is designed to play as if the projector is started cold and needs to get to speed as the film runs through it. The footage flickers slowly at first and then faster until the strobing of the flicker effect is no longer visible once the “projector has attained full speed.”

It gets me thinking of the butterfly shutter blades running before the stream of light; it reminds me of the flickering light show of a moth drawn to an open light bulb. Is the moth drawn by the heat of the light or the interplay of light on the faceting of the multi-lenticular structure of its eyes? Could the moth be experiencing pleasure from the lightshow in its visual cortex?

Doesn't this resonate with peek-a-boo? Now you see it and now you don’t. The image is there and then it’s not. Fort-Da. Fort-Da. Fort-Da. 48 times a second. The alternation between a pleasureable (agreeable state) and an unpleasant (disagreeable state) that Lacan makes out as a “matter of an intersection between a play of occultation and an alternative scansion of two phonemes.” But contrary to the usual conception of Freudian pleasure, where pleasure happens in seeing the mother and displeasure in her absence, perhaps the pleasure exists elsewhere. Freud goes on at length at the erotogenic pleasurable aspects of sucking (for its own sake, i.e. a pacifier without milk) —perhaps a parallel sensorial mechanism (pleasurable machinism) can be extended to sight for its own sake without involving a subject?

According to Guattari’s reading of Lacan, there seems to exist a desire mechanism in the Fort-Da game where “the wait for the return of the object is constituted as an “anticipating provocation,” which takes form “in the symbolic dyad of two elementary exclamations.” In playing the Fort-Da refrain, the projector becomes a producer of desire (negative affect) during the black out and a generator of affect during the instances of light. This creates a genderless masturbatory “compulsion to repeat” that is checked or contained by the plane of content. Although most readers would dismiss the shutter effect as too rapid an effect to be sensed (even subliminally) as a Fort-Da process, Oliver Sacks has shown through clinical study of his own practice that certain patients with Parkinsonism generate and react to vibratory stimuli many times faster than the shutter of the cinematic apparatus.

I thus foreground the flickering of the shutter as a possible localized sensorial excitation capable of autonomic arousal: could the Fort-Da of the shutter flicker be the generator of affect that generates the dynamic autonomic response that makes the film so eminently watchable and differentiates this medium from all others?

The strobing of the shutter could very well be a Fort-Da refrain that runs as a bass line foundation to the parallel polyphony of narrative content, of the dialogue, music and effect tracks and visual stylistics of the film: the (usually underplayed) affective event of the field of expression that runs parallel to the just as important enunciative assembly of the plane of content.

I wrote this as part of a paper for Film Theory this term. In writing the paper, I felt like a non-swimmer in deep water with partially inflated floaters on my arms. Too many new words, too many new ideas—it's like writing in a foreign language one is just learning.

The paper actually has references:

Massumi, Brian. “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible.” Hypersurface Architecture. Ed. Stephen Perella, Architectural Design (Profiles no. 133), vol. 68, no. 5/6, May-June 1998.
Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. “General Introduction to Psycho-analysis.” In The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Freud. Vol. 54 of the Great Books of the Western World. Robert Maynard, ed. in chief. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1952.
Sacks, Oliver. Awakenings. New York: Vintage. 1973.
Massumi, Brian. ”The Autonomy of Affect” in Movement, Affect, Sensation: Parables for the Virtual. Durham. Duke University Press: 2002.