Anagram, Gestalt, Game in Maya Deren: Reconfiguring the Image in Post-war Cinema

 

 

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Fig. 1.

Choreography for Camera (1945)

Anagram of Film Form (1946)

Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

 

 
“Man is distinguished [from machines] for consciousness, time perspective, and original energy. So is anything that lasts.” When the New York avant-garde film maker Maya Deren writes these words in her diary in 1947 in response to a lecture at the New School by Gregory Bateson, in which Bateson discusses the application of game theory to the study of culture and psychology, she expresses an idea, often repeated since, that time is of central concern to the cinematic art (“Notebook” 45). At first, her quote seems an unlikely response to the mathematical logic of games. Game theory, nested as it is within the rubric of war-time operations research and computing, appears distant from any 18^th century romantic ideals of the human Deren may harbor. The filmmaker does, however, intuitively identify a major historical point: that any such technical revision of time and representation would indelibly mark the subject and transform perception.
 
Deren poses two questions in her notebook that reveal her logic. Game theory is a technique to model, simulate, and predict the behavior of systems when there is incomplete information (for example, when one encounters an unknown enemy force). It is, and continues to be, a technology for control of the unknown. Her first concern, therefore, is about how to engage with an indeterminate Other through logic. In her notebook, Deren questions the universal applicability of such game theoretical models. Implicitly, she interrogates the universalist assumptions of these models about the behavior of both individuals and societies. I argue that intuitively she identifies a homogenizing force within the technical logic of the game.
 
Second, Deren expresses a concern about the relationship between prediction and control. She asks whether “linear analysis” is an appropriate model for thinking cultural systems and predicting or controlling their future actions (“Notebook” 25). Linear systems, in Bateson’s mathematical logic, are predictable, non-chaotic systems. That is, linearity is a mathematical term used to define systems that do not advance teleologically in time. Linear models assume that the past and the future are the same, and that reactions can be reversed. Control in Bateson’s discourse, and in game theory, however, is not supposed to be linear but probabilistic. Games are theoretically supposed to generate a number of possible futures. Control is understood by the anthropologist, therefore, as the ability to take action and to plan under probabilistic, not deterministic conditions. Deren sub-consciously notices a tension here; arguing that while spoken in terms of change and feedback, Bateson’s models may have imbedded within them an older historical concept of control as deterministic, understood as the perfect prediction of future action from past data. Arguably, then, Deren and Bateson share a concern about the relationship between the image, or the model, and the world to come (“Notebook” 43-46).
 
As a filmmaker whose writings and cinematic practices are pervaded by discourses of a predictive and probabilistic temporality, Deren identifies in her work a particular concern with time, one that integrates chance, control, and memory. For example, in her classic 1946 methodological treatise, “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film,” she argues that art must become an experiment, like science, and embrace its true potential–a break from realism in order to produce an even greater reality:
 

should the artist, like the scientist, exercize [sic] his imaginative intelligence–the command and control of memory–to consciously try, test, modify, destroy, estimate probabilities, and try again . . . always in terms of the instrument by which the fusion will be realized.
 

(“Anagram” 13. Emphasis added.)

Her language is revelatory. Framed in terms of “estimate probabilities” and the “command and control” of memory, her words already suggest that time has something to do with odds and manipulation. This kind of language is the uncanny doppelganger of the game theories that Bateson discusses, which are also framed in terms of probability, statistics, control, and chance. Time here is not something to be shown, but rather an operation, a process, the “control of memory” whose outcome is the production and destruction of probabilities. In retrospect, therefore, Bateson and Deren share in a discourse that is predictive rather than invested in presence or the present.

 
Deren is, in fact, at the lecture because she wants to bridge art and science, and to rethink the work of representation and the image. She seeks to appropriate Bateson’s thought and ethnographic work for her cinematic practice. Deren’s training in gestalt and behavioral psychology spurred her initial interest in Bateson’s psychological and ethnographic investigations of trance, dance, and ritual in highland Bali in the late 1930s.
 

 

 

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Fig. 2.

Communication as Gesture: The body recorded as a medium, in Bateson’s work, for the production of culture. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Trance and Dance in Bali (1952). Footage shot 1937-39.¹

 

 
Throughout the late 1930s, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead worked in highland Bali studying culture and schizophrenia. In the interest of developing new methods for ethnography and capturing the intricacies of daily life in the villages where they worked, they created a vast archive of photographic stills and cinematic footage (see Fig. 2 above). To this day, their archive is considered foundational in visual anthropology. (Curiously enough, it also inspired the concept of the plateau for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.) Deren was given full access to this footage for use in developing her own cinematic practices, and the exposure to this massive visual archive brings her to encounter another form of abstraction–models of communication and game theories.²
 
This is already, therefore, a convoluted and rhizomatic history of Deren’s interest in subjectivity and perception, but it has much to say about our contemporary conceptions of the image and the screen in media and film history and theory. That Deren focuses on the locus between game theories, psychology, cinema, and the ethnographic encounter is hardly a side note. I want to use this highly specific discourse of “time” in Deren’s work to ask a series of questions that open onto both a history of representation and an ethics of the image: what notions of time are being specified? How might we understand the debates between an artist and an ethnographer? And between mathematical theories of computing and an ideal of art framed in temporal terms? Most importantly, what is at stake in the relationship between time and the image at this moment in Western intellectual history? Bateson and Deren do not merely intersect chronologically, but rather share a conceptual rubric within which the question of temporality as an ethical and representational problem is posed. Deren’s engagement with Bateson, therefore, brings together a personal encounter and a moment in the history of western representation as theoretical machines that help situate, explore, and expand our understanding of time and the image.
 
This interaction between art and science shows how the same conditions of possibility, and similar genealogies of discipline and training, can produce radically different forms of practice. Deren’s concept of temporality and representation is both similar to and radically different from those emerging in psychology, anthropology, communication science and game theory after the war. This cinema, I argue, excavates the probabilistic and reflexive nature of time, as understood in both art and science during this period, to create new associations between subjects, screens, and life. However, Deren’s work produces associations and potentials that the game theories and technologies with which she is concerned do not. Her work uses the discourse of temporality and representation taken from the sciences but refuses to repeat without difference, thus blocking a return to older discourses of objectivity, authority, and knowledge.
 

Chance, Control, and Memory

 
In 1946, a few months before she attends Bateson’s lectures, Maya Deren introduces a new structure for the image:
 

 

 

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Fig. 3.

Contents of “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film” in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde; Ed. Bill Nichols; Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.

 

 
It is an opening diagram in one of the most famous treatises on the theory and practice of cinema–“An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film.” The “Anagram,” for Deren, is both a theory of cinema and an instructional blueprint for cinematic production. Deren is a very structural filmmaker who diagrams and carefully choreographs every scene and shot beforehand. The “Anagram” is a visualization of this process.
 
This figure is both a game of letters and a structure for visual recombination. She recommends this form “to anyone who has faced the problem of compressing into a linear organization an idea which was stimulating precisely because it extended into two or three different, but not contradictory directions at once” (“Anagram” 6). Already in her opening notes, Deren expresses a complex relationship to teleological narrative and historical time. Negotiating between structure and novelty, this is a system of self-referring elements, each producing a totality irreducible to its parts. No part of it may be changed without “affecting the whole;” every element is able to produce different possibilities through recombination. Because the anagram can be read to produce a myriad of effects in any direction, as one might read “horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or even in reverse,” Deren proposes a world no longer described by linear cause-effect relations but, rather, by feedback loops.
 
For Deren, time, understood as progress, or causality, may be broken, since elements may be recombined in any order, but it is still directional. These recombinatory readings operate in different directions, but their results remain an emergent “whole.” Deren also argues that “nothing is new… except, perhaps, the anagram itself” (“Anagram” 6). This is a curious statement, and it denotes a subtle ontological shift. Nothing is new in that the forms and images come from the past; what is new, for Deren, is the process by which an already known and recorded world is reformulated. The anagram is this process, and its novelty lies in producing a whole that exceeds its parts and emerges as art. The anagram, therefore, is an auto-poietic form bridging past and future, producing possibilities for cinematic practice out of the remains of the past (“Anagram” 7). This form makes manifest her notion of the “control of memory” (“Anagram” 13). In the world she envisions, innovation comes through recombination. The work of the movie-maker is thus to produce forms that will generate future possibilities irreducible to their singular parts.
 
Deren is clear about her disinterest in indexical or documentary practices of image making. This is not a discourse of temporality invested in inscription and representation; by extension, it is also not a discourse invested in the present or presence. Deren speaks to an emergent obsession in both science and art–not in documenting the real or discovering nature, but in producing imagination and transcending historical experience by way of the “instrument.” Science, she argues, is already an endeavor of the artificial: “If the achievements of [contemporary] science are the result of a violation of natural integrity, in order to emancipate its elements and re-relate them, how can an artist be content to do no more than to perceive, analyze and, at most, recreate these ostensibly inviolable whole of nature?” (“Anagram” 23). Art should not, therefore, attempt to return to nature. Instead, art has to embark on a new truth:
 

To renounce the natural frame of reference–the natural logic and integrity of an existent reality–is not, as is popularly assumed, an escape from the labor of truth. . . . To create a form of life is, in the final analysis, much more demanding than to render one which is ready-made.
 

(“Anagram” 23)

To break with the documentary tradition, she writes, is not to “escape the labor of truth,” but rather to affirm it, to create a greater truth: “a form of life.” Her words both gesture to a history of the automation of representation and perception, that of the “ready-made,” as well as to a nascent aspiration to break terminally with nature to produce reality. Deren, therefore, mutates or replaces concern with “the natural frame of reference” as a prescriptive idea of perception for another set of concerns about prediction and performance.

 
Deren calls upon the genealogy of science to make this argument. She writes of a process by which human perception was remade:
 

Through mathematical computations, he [man] was able to extend his knowledge even beyond the reach of his instruments. From a careful analysis of causation and incidence, he developed the powers of prediction. And finally, not content to merely analyze an existent reality, he undertook to activate the principles which he had discovered, to manipulate reality, and to bring together into new relationships the elements which he was able to isolate. He was able to create forms according to his own intelligence.
 

(“Anagram” 8)

Deren cites as historical reference and inspiration the emergence of probability, the erosion of determinism, and the manipulation of reality by new techniques and optical instruments. She diagrams a new relationship between probabilistic thought and subjective vision, a form of visuality that accedes to the self-production and technical nature brought about through “computations” and techniques.

 
Aside from Bateson’s influence, the source of Deren’s familiarity with computers or game theory is uncertain. What is clear is that in training and discourse she shares much with the anthropologist. In her own life, as is by now well documented, Deren draws influence from the physical and psychological sciences, as well as from figures such as Henri Bergson. She was the daughter of a practicing psychiatrist in Syracuse, New York, who was part of the new Russian school for objective psychology in St. Petersburg before coming to the United States in 1922 to escape the civil war. At this school, Dziga Vertov studied and experimented with his cinematic practices in 1917 (Holl 157). Deren was close to her father, and in her undergraduate and graduate education she pursued the study of psychology, particularly gestalt psychology with Kurt Koffka at Smith College in the late 1930s.³ The relationship between science and art continues to play out through her work. Deren’s work is permeated with her interest in psychology, and also with discussions of physics, the Bomb, and games. Her archive contains folders titled “communication.” Her interest in ethnography puts her in direct conversation with structuralist anthropologists concerned with communication and linguistic theories. In fact, her training in psychology, and gestalt in particular, is intimately correlated to the sciences of communication, computing, and cognition. At a moment when minds, machines, and media are all being transformed, many different practices share in the reformulation of representation (“Climate”).⁴
 
Deren shares much with the technologies and sciences of her time. While critical of the bomb and conscious of the dangers of technology, she is also faintly hopeful that art’s relationship with science can invigorate both. For her, tools coming from the sciences offer the possibility of control over memory and the potential to reinvent cinema and reinvigorate art after the war. The “Anagram” essay maps Deren’s points of reference and her hope for the image, an image no longer invested in older forms of knowledge, but rather in the creation of “forms,” an image that recombines past histories of probability and technology to produce, she hopes, new effects.
 
I do not wish to imply here that Deren is directly related to the development of digital or electronic media. Rather, I wish to show that post-war cinema, post-war anthropology and communication sciences demonstrate similar attitudes towards representation. This engagement between art and the social, communication, and psychological sciences after the war allows me to ask where these endeavors intersect and where they differentiate themselves. I want, therefore, to focus our attention on the aspect of Deren’s theories that highlights a historical transformation in both ontology and epistemology. But I also want to mark her curious insistence, almost a demand, that art be separate from science. In this intimate effort to both engage and separate from the physical and psychological sciences, we can begin to understand relationships between time, difference, technology, and representation in the post-war image.
 

Inscription, Representation, and Cinema

 
To link the anagram to histories of epistemology and temporality, I want to situate Deren’s anagrammatic “image” within the history of representation and knowledge. The opening tropes in the “Anagram” essay develop key themes critical to understanding the relationship between memory, temporality, and control that structures Deren’s conception of cinematic time. First, Deren folds a 19^th and early 20^th century concern with chance and control into a new cinematic practice. Her discourse of time is, arguably, probabilistic and associated with a history of anti-determinist thinking in the sciences and in philosophy.
 
Second, Deren demonstrates a historical change in the ontology of the image. Throughout her writing, Deren explicitly attacks both disorganization (she is a highly structured filmmaker, pre-diagramming and storyboarding all her movies) and immediacy. She explicitly and repeatedly condemns what she labels “presentism” (“Anagram”). How can we understand this denial of the present in the name of structure and prediction? And how does it relate to modern concepts of probability and the representability of time?
 
Many historians have noted that the 19th century saw the emergence of two phenomena-the rise of mechanical objectivity and what Ian Hacking calls “the taming of chance.” In physics through thermodynamics, in evolutionary biology, in the social sciences, and in psychology and physiology, there emerged a recognition of the limits of representation, a consciousness that the world was variable and contingent. This worldview opposes the paradigm of Newtonian physics. In Newton’s universe, there can be perfect information; equations predict the future action of the system and reactions can always be reversed. In Newtonian physics, time’s arrow flows both forward and backward and nature is amenable to representation through mathematics and images. In a world that is non-deterministic, however, time cannot be reversed and the future can never be perfectly predicted. The recognition of an inability to legibly represent the present and thus know and control the future (a recognition of chance), combined with the teleological arrow of thermodynamic time directed towards chaos, disorder, and degradation, created anxieties about the representability of time itself.
 
This representational crisis in the late 19^th century was embedded in and abetted by early cinema. Cinema, like science, desperately sought to fulfill an impossible task: both to be able to record “everything,” to access the absolute zenith of the knowable and the seeable–the index, the present, the event–and to render this deluge of data coherent, representable, and legible to the human observer. Cinema and science both produced consciousness of the limits of human perception and representation, rendering visible the difficulty of making choices under conditions of imperfect information, while inducing a desire to surmount this limit to knowledge through new forms of documentation and analysis (Doane 4).
 
Objectivity thus seemed unattainable when the era increasingly recognized the impossibility of controlling the visual data field and predicting the future, while simultaneously desiring to do both. Science contends with this inability to gain complete knowledge of the world–chance–with a desire to document, organize, and archive everything. Chance and the index are thus bound together through the epistemologies of archiving and new visualization technologies that characterize positivistic 19^th and early 20^th century sciences. Arguably, this era’s concern with representing time correlates with a desire to document the present (ontology and the index) and the concomitant demand for a mechanical objectivity to control a field of vision lent autonomy through the machine of cinema and anti-deterministic epistemologies (Doane 4; Daston and Galison).
 
For Deren, however, the problem of knowledge and epistemological control is replaced with the question of creating life-forms. She signifies a slow erosion of the dream of accessing the present in the name of a new and obsessive concern with imagination or the virtual framed in the future perfect tense, a desire not for the document and the index but for the production of effects in anticipation of the future. Deren’s lack of interest in the index and the present is therefore a marked shift. While adhering to a probabilistic and teleological (although not necessarily progressive) time, Deren is only interested in two loci–the past and the future.
 
The third salient structure for Deren’s architecture of time involves memory and the archive. The displacement of concern for the index is accompanied with emergent interest in memory and the archive as infinite repositories of possibility for recombination. Deren is obsessively concerned with the future and with forms or structures that are auto-poietic. Surprisingly, however, this predictive or anticipatory attitude develops by displacing the problem of recording. Deren assumes that the past is available for recombination and no longer worries about its capture; as we shall see, indexicality is not so much destroyed as simply deferred and repressed. There is a curious structure of time in this cinema (but also in communication sciences) where feedback loops generate future actions.
 
These three elements–probability, prediction, and manipulation–work together to fundamentally reframe the dream of what cinema might become and speak to broader transformations in the idea of temporality and its ethical and moral stakes. It is Deren herself who points out the incumbent risks now attached to time: “For the serious artist the esthetic problem of form is, essentially, and simultaneously, a moral problem” (“Anagram” 37). She hints that what is at stake in this effort to rethink temporality, memory, and the image is the future both of media and of thought.
 

The New Image

 
These attitudes towards recording, recombination, and structure are embodied within the anagrammatic logic and structure of Deren’s films. Her first movie, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), made with her husband, the Czech émigré Alexander Hammid, animates this recombinatorial aesthetics, illuminating, in her words, “the malevolent vitality of inanimate objects” (Meshes).⁵ Her definition of the film–joining vitality with the inanimate–already suggests a revision of ontology and perception. The movie is, indeed, a psychotic dream world, perhaps reflecting and advancing the on-going war condition. More importantly, it is a world where the interiority and exteriority of the subject are confused. The film is, in Deren’s estimation, “a dream that takes such force it becomes reality” (Legend 78). It is a film where the abstract processes of perception take material form through editing and repetition.
 
Since Meshes of the Afternoon is the most narrative of her films, many critics argue that the movie wavers between this emergent aesthetic and older classical forms of cinema. However, the dominant device in the film is a rhythmic mirroring, or feedback, between the possibly exterior and interior states, that anticipates the anagrammatic method. Every scene is filled with parallels: a falling flower transforms into a knife, the telephone off the hook is doubled by a knife falling onto a table, and a potentially loving caress between a man and knife redoubles upon itself as a potential murder scene (“Pre-production Notes”). These scenes repeat themselves in the course of the film, each time slightly mutating to produce different comprehensions. Deren also regularly doubles or multiplies the same image in the scene, for example in a moment when she encounters herself in multiple:
 

 

 

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Fig. 4.

Mirroring in Meshes of the Afternoon. 1943.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002. DVD.

 

The logic of the film is thus one of repetition and multiplication. Like the anagram, “nothing is new” in that everything has been recorded. The movie keeps repeating its own operations and images, and also regularly recombining montage and symbolic elements from cinema’s history-particularly from Surrealism and Constructivism, both movements producing movies that Deren claims to have seen.

 
However, while Deren may repeat convention and tactic, she does not recuperate these images in the name of unearthing the unconscious or revealing the reality behind ideology. Deren violently opposes any comparison between her work and the psychoanalytic films of surrealists (Legend 280).⁶ She steadfastly maintains that between the screen and the spectator a new reality is emerging, as well as a new psychology. Novelty here is relocated from the scene of capture to the production of this “whole” that encompasses the act of seeing and involves the spectator and the apparatus in producing an experience.
 
In subsequent production notes Deren writes: “Everything which happens in the dream has its basis in a suggestion in the first sequence–the knife, the key, the repetition of stairs, the figure disappearing around the curve of the road. Part of the achievement of this film consists in the manner in which cinematic techniques are employed to give a malevolent vitality to inanimate objects” (Legend 78). This lively malevolence emerges from the recombination of set patterns that produces more than the sum of the stills. Careful mapping of repeated images is critical to this form. The archive generates the movie and also produces a new form of liveliness that is beyond the sum of its parts, an accident that emerges from this structured practice.
 

 

 

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Fig. 5.

Stills from Meshes of the Afternoon. 1943.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
Deren’s film generates a form of attention through rhythmic patterns, not through the conventional integration of sound and image in causal relations. As Wendy Haslem writes, “The rhythm of the sound, movement and editing conspire to produce the effect of a trance film. Meshes of the Afternoon’s dream-like mise-en-scène, illogical narrative trajectory, fluid movement and ambient soundtrack invite a type of contemplative, perhaps even transcendental, involvement for the spectator.”⁷ The diegesis emerges through the repetition and cadencing of elements, the regular interruption of action, and the discontinuity between movements and spaces. The repetition of form and the direct relationship between images produce movement.
 
Deren is explicitly recombinatorial in her logic. She correlates this cinematic practice directly with memory, archiving, and storage. Recalling a history of photography as indexical, she assumes the availability of the image to memory for recombination. She writes:
 

But the celluloid memory of the camera can function, as our memory, not merely to reconstruct or to measure an original chronology. It can place together, in immediate temporal sequence, events actually distant, and achieve, through such relationship a peculiarly filmic reality.
 

(“Anagram” 42)

Cinema here takes the place of memory, but this is a particular memory. In this formulation, the work of cinema is to provide a structure that may produce new forms of time, not merely reflect a time that comes from outside of it. The camera works like our memory, “not merely to reconstruct or to measure an original chronology,” but rather through a “relationship” between images that comes from different situations to produce a new time, “a peculiar filmic reality.” Memory is thus a process of recombination that is not attached to the recollection of the past so much as the production of future imaginaries. The filmic medium, then, is the structure that creates the conditions for this recombination to occur. Deren’s practice integrates both temporal conceptions of chance (the accident of encounter between different images) and statistical control (the production of equations, diagrams, graphs, and other mechanisms) through the structured “game” that is the anagram.

The Image that Acts

 
Deren’s work is obsessed with process, manipulation, and recombination and is not interested in ontology, indexicality, or capture. Time, here, is thus not so much related to the past or the present as to the future. The anagram is a structure that can produce new forms in the future out of the traces of the past. This cinematic practice embodies a shift in tense from the descriptive to the predictive, from documentation to action. Deren is explicit about this transformation from the documentary impulse to another one:
 

When an image induces a generalization and gives rise to an emotion or idea, it bears towards that emotion or idea the same relationship which an exemplary demonstration bears to some chemical principle; and that is entirely different from the relationship between that principle and the written chemical formula by which it is symbolized. In the first case the principle functions actively; in the second case its action is symbolically described, in lieu of the action itself.
 

(“Anagram” 27)

Symbols no longer act as documentary of or referential to an external index, but instead perform operations. It is not what can be seen but what can be done that concerns her.

 
Deren’s “generalizations” are patterns, defining relationships, and not spatially situated objects. Her concept of form is clearly probabilistic in that it generates a potential future action, but it is also communicative in the sense that in communication theory, information is judged by the potential for action. In Deren’s theory, symbols are the condition of possibility for an action. Whereas the chemical formula (a representation) cannot produce the reaction, her notion of symbol or generalization can. Her deferral or repression of presence, ontology, and description facilitates a focus on relations instead of objects. The materialization of the symbol is thus closely correlated with an ideal of a predictive and probabilistic time, and the deferral of a concern with capture and ontology.
 
Deren attempts to enact this idea of symbol literally in her work, for example in her subsequent film A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945). She describes this film as an effort to remove dance from the theater stage and create a new relationship between the camera and the human body. This film is as dynamic as the body, “mobile and volatile as himself. It was, actually a duet–between Talley Beatty, who danced, and space, which was made to dance by means of the camera and cutting” (“Ritual” 225). To this end she drives herself and her performers to new physical and mechanical relations. Talley Beatty recalls the difficulty of filming Choreography (“Interview,” Legend 280):
 

 

 

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Fig. 6.

Stills from A Study in Choreography for the Camera. 1945.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002

 

Deren forces Beatty to lean in and out of windows, ledges, and precipices and to hold for long moments poses that are both physically taxing and potentially dangerous (“Interview” 286).

 
In her critics’ estimation, Deren’s work diverges from previous avant-garde traditions, most particularly Surrealism, because her image participates in, rather than records or represents (as abstraction), the movements of the body.⁸ As Deren explains, “Most dance films are records of dances which were originally designed for theatrical stage space and for the fixed stage-front point of view of the audience…In this film I have attempted to place a dancer in limitless, cinematographic space…he shares, with the camera, a collaborative responsibility for the movements themselves. This is, in other words, a dance which can exist only in film” (Legend 262). Both dance and cinema change, incorporating and reflexively responding to each other. John Martin, the New York Times dance critic, announces that Deren’s work reveals that the machine could now extend the body, labeling this “chorecinema.” Another dance critic, Richard Lippold, argues her work “liberates” dance from a “transitory experience,” offering it “the eternity of other arts, and the liberation of cinema, through the dancer, from its confines in documenting merely the real” (391).
 
The film spans approximately three minutes, deploying a number of devices to facilitate the production of temporality and movement: a machinic vision, if you will. Cadencing is integral to the structure of the movie. Dance movements and rhythms set the tempo for attention in the film, which moves through a number of discontinuous and idiosyncratic spaces in both geography and history. For example, the dancer starts in a forest and extends his leg. The extension is slow and continuous. This action is on-going while synchronously there is a jump cut between spaces, landing the dancer in a West Village apartment. Movement is shown continuously over spatial disjuncture. In another scene that takes place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the dancer traverses the antiquities hall. The speed of shooting is variable, ranging from 64 frames per second to 8 frames per second, as is the angle of the camera. The dancer’s turns maintain a set cadence, but they unfold for the viewer through disjointed perspectives–extreme close-ups and shallow depths of field interspersed with extended depth of field, wider angles, and distance–and at varying speeds. What the spectator is conscious of is the time in which the action unfolds since the spaces modulate. Deren also plays segments of the film in reverse to transform action and create jumps “contradicting gravity,” breaking with causal logics of action and reaction (“Choreography” 265).
 
Mechanical, perhaps statistical, in nature, the film induces a series of potential affects through tight structures and controlled scenarios. Nature and art–the urban museum, the domestic apartment, and the forest cliffs–are brought into contact as remnants of, and possibilities for, different forms of life, different possibilities for being that emerge from unlikely interactions structured by the film. Temporality is (at least in ambition) produced through the disjuncture between movement and space, directly from the cuts, edits and the variances in filming speed. Deren seeks not to represent time or presence, but rather to produce sensation through her editorial and structural practice. Deren sums up her ambitions for the film poetically: “I mean that movement, or energy, is more important, or more powerful, than space or matter-that, in fact, it creates matter” (qtd. in Butler 11).
 
In its dedication to enacting a deconstruction of the separation between materiality and abstraction, to an irreversible but heterogeneous temporality, and to memory as a process of “relation” building, this cinema appears to correlate with Gilles Deleuze’s later formulation of the time image as a post-war phenomenon. This correlation highlights a historical transformation in representational tactics. In a move that anticipates contemporary media theory, Deren inverts modern concerns with the present and the index, as exemplified in Henri Bergson’s attitudes and critiques of physics, modern science, and cinema. While Bergson continued to insist on the cinematograph’s attack on reality, Deren (and incidentally Bateson, but not Mead) represses this interest in the investment in a “filmic reality,” substituting the instrument for the position of memory. Unlike Bergson, for whom time is always outside of representation and inscription, and for whom the present is both inaccessible to legible inscription and the site of an absolute reality, for Deren time emerges from within the apparatus. In the post-war reformulation of cinema there is no debate between phenomenal, scientific, or mechanical experiences of time.⁹ The debate, instead, shifts to how this experience will be organized and manipulated.
 

Genealogies

 
Deren’s cinema thus allows us to identify three features of the post-war image: 1) The emergence of a notion of multiple temporality comprised of both probability and recombination. 2) The subsequent displacement of interest in the present, taxonomy, and static ontology in the interest of process, method, and relations. 3) The transformation in relations between materiality and abstraction facilitating a new treatment of perception, representation, and symbols. These three features are part of a broader cultural logic of representation endemic to the period. Deren’s relationship to temporality, traversing as it does discourses of physics, anthropology, memory, probability, and control, reflects and refract broader epistemological changes in the arts and sciences of her day and her particular biography. Deren, as I have noted, studied with Koffka at Smith College in the late 1930s while completing an MA. in English literature.
 
I draw attention to this link because gestalt psychology has a particular place in the postwar milieu. In fields as widespread as computing, art theory and history, psychology, and the social sciences, the language of gestalt and the ideas coming from this form of psychology become a dominant lingua franca for rethinking perception and human cognition. Deren’s thinking emerges directly from this influence, which reflects itself in her language of recombining “wholes,” in her idea that the anagram can be a process for creating perception, and her situating the structure of temporality in the image. By tracing Deren’s relationship to gestalt, I seek to situate the filmmaker within a broader history of epistemology and representation.
 
Gestalt psychology is a paradigmatic example of an epistemological bridge between two orders of objectivity and truth before and after the war. Gestalt anticipates, before the war, a transformation in scientific ideals and the dispersion of psychological technologies into fields like design and art through the Bauhaus. But gestalt enjoys global popularity as a practice and discourse only after the war. ¹⁰ In gestalt, the principle is to model the interactions and relationships between objects. Max Wertheimer, founder of the gestalt school, demonstrates this epistemology in his discussion of “time forms” in music. He writes: “what is given me by the melody does not arise . . . as a secondary process from the sum of the pieces as such. Instead, what takes place in each single part already depends upon what the whole is” (qtd. in Green).¹¹ The form, like the anagram, anticipates or precedes its discrete elements. If we are to think of this visually, then the static and indexical image of the photograph that comprises the cinema is only secondary to the form or structure that conditions the possible relations between stills and spectators. Gestalt psychology is interested in these generative forms, not in describing discrete entities.
 
Gestalt psychology makes visible an epistemic shift, bridging the compartmentalizing and rationalizing experimental traditions emerging from psycho-physics with new concerns with consciousness, memory, and cognitive functioning. Beginning at the turn of the century, gestalt psychologists studied perception, or the organization of sensations, rather than direct stimulus response situations (Ash 1). Experimentally, gestalt psychologists focused on examining those places where subjects identify patterns or shapes that are not reducible to the elements of the stimulus. Their focus became the mediated relationship between subjects and the world, and not the direct relationship between external input and action. For example, the kind of visual phenomena gestalt psychologists were interested in is exemplified by the famous gestalt triangle Kanizsa used in 1955:
 

 

 

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Fig. 7.

The gestalt triangle.

 

Kurt Koffka, Deren’s mentor at Smith, was intrigued by the fact that experimental subjects “see” objects like the triangle even though there is no triangle “actually” there. Cinema, of course, is the classic exemplar of gestalt phenomena. In 1912 Wertheimer, with Koffka’s assistance, researched the way people see movement from stills. This phenomenon demonstrated to them the possibility of a gestalt that inherently structures the nature of vision. As in a film that shows no movement, here there is no direct stimulus impinging upon the eye. That the triangle appears to be there demonstrates for Koffka and other gestalt psychologists that perception and stimulus do not correspond one-to-one. The production of the image of a triangle, for gesalt psychologists, gestures to the existence of a process of cognition coordinating relations between stimuli. Cognition and perception become part of the same process, and the boundary between reception and processing is degraded. Perception is a process, not reducible to singular reflex arcs, but determined by complex and changing relations between the organism and the environment. This gestalt investment in “wholes” and in experience that exceeds stimuli is refracted in Deren’s figure of the Anagram, where the
cinema and the spectator together produce new perceptual possibilities.

 
Gestalt psychology, in being concerned with interaction and not merely with causal action, therefore relies on a probabilistic temporality–on the production of an ordered psyche out of a chaotic environment. Köhler argues, for example, that in complex systems there is “no reason why things should develop in the direction of order rather than chaos.” However, he adds, “chaos can be prevented, and order enforced, if proper controls are imposed upon acting factors.” He gives the example of factory machines that, while they conform to principles of physics, impose a form and order that “man, not nature, has provided.” His interest as psychologist is in unearthing orderly patterns of human perception that allow cognition and produce order. He does not view this is an objective process, an inalienable law as in the natural sciences, but rather as a subjective process that constrains chance and chaos by systematically reproducing the same effects in all human beings. So while Köhler concedes that science cannot know what “red” might denote to every individual, science can know the process of relations and of producing order in the mind. “Thus,” he writes, “we must try to find a kind of function which is orderly and yet not entirely constrained by either inherited or acquired arrangements” (62-3, 69).
 
Wertheimer coins a term for this process in 1914–Prägnanz–expressing the idea that all experienced structures always spontaneously assume the simplest arrangement possible under given conditions. This theory clearly invokes the second law of thermodynamics. As a science, gestalt emerges out of a concern for order–in nature and in society. Gestalt psychologists sought to define and explore the process by which perceptions are systematically organized and reach homeostatic equilibrium. Gestalt psychology sought not to unearth an absolute singular form or structure, but rather to isolate processes and relations that operate on similar principles while allowing for change, transformation, and the multiplicity and diversity–the subjectivity–of human experience.¹² I argue this makes gestalt part of a broader shift in epistemology visible in many sciences throughout the 20^th century–away from ontology and documentation and toward performativity, process, and prediction. The shift entails a redefinition of the scientific objective and, perhaps, of objectivity. Köhler argues in 1947 that there can be no separation between thought and the body, and all observations are fundamentally mediated by human perception: “About the organism, just as about other physical things, we know merely by a process of inference or construction. To the influence of other physical objects my organism responds with processes which establish the sensory world around me.” Rather than discover a non-sensory or extra-sensory world, gestalt psychology is interested in how we produce experience and in fact the “sensory world.” For gestaltists there is only an internal and self-referential world (Köhler 9).
 
In entering the “subjective” space of sensory and perceptual mediation, gestalt psychologists also rethink the older categories of materiality and abstraction, mind and body, and representation and action. Gestalt psychology asks about generalizable processes: how is it that all humans appear to view cinema as moving? What process synthesizes this experience? The question therefore is not about the disjuncture between what is seen and presumably what is “really” there, but about how reality, now understood as experience, comes into being at all. This search for a reflexive or subjective method for ordering sense also threatens to degrade older categorical separations between materiality and abstraction, mind and body, cognition, perception, and sensation, or action/behavior and thought (Köhler 9). Breakdowns potently visible in Deren’s gestalt inspired choreographies for the camera, for example.
 
Bateson also demonstrates this refocusing of scientific concern on “relations.” He writes that “[w]hen . . . it is realized that the recognition of Gestalten depends upon the formal relations among external events, then it is evident that thinking in terms of ‘things’ is secondary . . . all knowledge of external events is derived from the relationships between them” (Bateson and Ruesch 173). After the war, Bateson’s experimental and ethnographic work shifts to focus on the relationships between people and cultures, over and against defining any particular subjectivity or culture (Steps). It is, in fact, Bateson’s interest in anagrammatic structures that drives his investigations into both gestalt and game theory; and it is to his game theory and comparative ethnography that Deren responds in her letters to Bateson. For Bateson, games and gestalten share an epistemology. Both systems possess formal or methodological structures that generate a great variety of potential experiences. In his professional fields, such as communication science, cognitive science, and cybernetics, gestalt concepts are often used interchangeably with other logical and game-theoretical ideas. However, Bateson has reservations about games as well-particularly about the logic of prediction in games and the inability of rules to evolve–that he does not have about psychology. His reservations implicitly underpin Deren’s response to his lectures.
 
While a serious background of game theory is impossible here, it should be noted that games, like gestalt psychology, become increasingly important in post-war American culture. Perhaps the most notable incarnation of this importance is John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s 1944 classic, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Influencing everything from computing to cold war politics, the game became both a critical metaphor and a mode of operating in many fields. Deren refers to this new cultural condition directly through reference to foreign policy, atomic weapons, and technically induced genocide of her time. While it is unclear if she distinguishes between different scientific or technical endeavors since psychology, physics, play, and probability are all recombined at will in her work, she is very astute in making visible these fields’ parallel epistemic patterns. Replacing an understanding of the market as a space where actors respond to external prices (dead variables), game theory by, among others, Morgenstern and von Neumann, understands actors as responding to each other. Markets, as well as political situations, emerge from the relationships between the agents involved through feedback interactions. There is no exteriority to the game except perhaps its “rules,” the templates by which the future gets extrapolated. The situation emerging out of these protocols can generate great complexity.¹³ Like the concept of gestalt that is often used to describe them, games in game theory are generative forms produced out of a set of processes or rules that create future possibility. Because games generate their own self-referential worlds, these are not representations. Games, like the post-war images of cinema, are said to be performative abstractions that materialize particular effects.
 
But at the juncture between probabilistic time and predictive time, Bateson diagnoses a problem–games cannot evolve or change once begun. This repetition without change is the topic of the conversation between himself and Deren. He understands that the problem with “static” games is that they produce conditions for action, but not for different possible actions, only repetitive cycles culminating in potentially genocidal violence (nuclear war in this case)–he labels this a “paranoidal direction.” I would label it the logical and rational basis of irrationality and psychosis. These games, models, and approximations both assume the collapse of the perceptual field, a state of total psychosis and internal self-reference, and still desire the ability to gain control, to reassert objectivity–an impossible combination. Bateson also labels this situation “schizoid,” and goes on to redefine the pathology of schizophrenia as an impossible scenario where two incompatible logics compete. This tension at the heart of theories of games is, in fact, at the center of Bateson’s critique (Letter 2).
 
Temporality also structures Deren’s response to the series of lectures Bateson gives linking game theory, nascent cybernetic concepts, and new models for ethnography and psychology.¹⁴ She documents a “heated” discussion with Gregory about “that old business of his linear analysis of nonlinear systems” (“Notebook” 25). She argues that his “dominance-submission, succor-dependence structure is wrong. That is, he builds up a whole structure of feedbacks, etc., because he starts off with such a linear, simplified process . . . It is better to complicate the premise by one dimension–time–and have a simple analytical structure flow from it than to keep the premise simple at any price only to have a very complex superstructure” (“Notebook” 25-26). Her concern with feedbacks and processes demonstrates her exposure to the language of computation, electrical engineering, and the cognitive sciences that are Bateson’s points of reference. And while her understanding of Bateson’s project may be limited, her personal notes identify a problem with the rigidity and linearity of his basic rules or premises and their incapacity to generate more complex systems and unknown futures. Deren maintains that the whole should be more than its parts. Systems are never reducible to their identifiable parts. Systems are never fully legible (“Notebook” 25-26).
 

The Organization of Time

 
If I have insisted on situating Deren within this broader history of epistemology and representation it is, of course, to facilitate a reflexive encounter with the present. Situating our own practices takes particular valence within this context where probability, temporal variability, and emergence become the very technical substrate not only for art and philosophy, but also for communication and game theory, cybernetics, gestalt and cognitive sciences. History, here, becomes theory, quite literally. In systems where the past is always being used to predict the future, as in games, the possibility of emergence is always in question. Games can make automatic repetition into technology.
 
Repetition and automation preoccupy Deren in her writing to and about Bateson. What Deren discovers in his lecture, and in her review of Mead and Bateson’s film footage, is a productive tension between form and content. While Bateson critiques game theory in his lectures and persistently attacks the authorial voice of anthropology, his form–a language of distanciation, linear and repetitive interaction, generic and de-contextualized models–is nostalgic and archival. It is a language of objectivity arriving from an earlier moment in anthropology, a language associated with the archival and objective epistemologies of another age. A language of statistics and mechanism. This language, Deren argues, undermines his ethical effort to rethink game theory. Deren notes that Bateson is trapped in a feedback loop; one that he, himself, fails to recognize. She argues that he is dedicated to maintaining a reductive premise, “a linear, simplified process,” even when describing a complex system (“Notebook” 25). His need to isolate a generic and global process of cultural conflict forces reductivism in thought. Implicitly, she senses that Bateson, despite his own interest in complexity, falls prey to the same problems of game theory in his dedication to unearthing, and authoritatively describing, generic processes governing human cultures. She feels he is creating models no more dynamic or changeable than those of games (“Notebook” 25-26).
 
Deren seizes upon an internal temporal disjuncture that structures both game theories and gestalt psychologies–between the production of probabilities and the desire to contain chance and reassert older ideals of authority. For example, this temporal disjuncture historically plays out in gestalt psychology through an inbuilt tension between universal and cultural explanations of cognition and perception. While gestaltists (and game theorists) reconfigure objectivity as emanating from within experience rather than outside of it, as a science they still sought to disciplinarize and to impose a singular logic and rigorous method for psychological investigation. Gestalt, as the historian Mitchell Ash notes, “was not only, or not simply, a revolt against positivism” (3). Gestalt is haunted by the ghost of previous histories of evidence, rationality, positivism, and objectivity. We all, apparently, see cinematic movement and triangles even if we know that cinema is made of stills. The emerging moral and ethical question is: What do we make of this generalization applicable to “all” humans? Perception organized into homeostatic equilibrium as a rule. While gestalt demonstrates that perception and cognition can be trained, influenced, and reproduced, there is also the possibility that this is a perception defined as naturalized, a-historical, culturally non-specific and, perhaps, as later debates demonstrate, biologically ordained. Gestalt psychologists create new boundaries between nature and culture, objectivity and subjectivity, and perception, sensation, and cognition, but struggle with the normative terms set by modern psychological and biological projects for truth. Even if they debate the place of nature and nurture, learning or innateness, in developing gestalt forms, the terms of the debate are fundamentally normative and disciplinary. Gestalt psychology hybridizes two forms of discourse.¹⁵
 
This disjuncture, in the post-war period, between chance and determinism debates the significance of authority or “control,” a term that binds Deren to Bateson, both pragmatically in that she wants to get a Guggenheim and be authorized by scientists and anthropologists, and conceptually because it is a site in which to negotiate a new separation between art and science. Deren herself regularly deploys this term in labeling her cinema a “controlled accident” (“Cinematography”). Control is indeed an internally inconsistent term at this moment (and perhaps even in our moment) of history. In game theory, and in the post-war discourse of gestalt, control is a double figure–both the condition of possibility for emergence, and the ideal of an authoritative account of future action. Game theory, especially, hopes that the models, templates, and approximations that produce the system can simultaneously analyze it. In game theory perception, cognition, and analysis are all the same. The game is both representative and predictive. Control is the function that temporally organizes the process of game play. But control can also mean perfect prediction, the production of a future that replicates past data. The problem, as Bateson says–and as Deren is quick to affirm in her comment that “time perspective” defines “man,” allowing him to “build machines” and act “idiosyncratically”–is that in game theory the rules are static. Rules cannot change within the game, and the players cannot learn.¹⁶ Time, for Deren, is destroyed when the model and the world become one. Game theories use past data to predict the future, but the new political and ethical concern is that the technology obscures the fact that while we are always predicting different futures, we do so according to the same form or operation. Deren is worried that Bateson, in his reformulation of psychology and culture through game and communication theory, enacts the very problem he is describing.
 
Whether I do or do not agree with Deren’s appraisal of this particular lecture (Bateson is hardly an ethnographer dedicated to authority or objectivity), she highlights an important point. Ethical concerns in gaming and art, I argue through Deren, now do not merely concern the manipulation of time, but also the specific organization of time. In Deren’s discourse, art is classified not by telling topical or technical concerns apart–artists use new technologies and mediums, they speak to science–but by organizing them according to their different temporal organizations. More importantly, for Deren only particular forms of practice, now labeled art, allow us to recognize and experience time’s movements and passage consciously. The emerging question Deren’s work poses is: how will time be organized, now that its teleological operations are unmoored and history is available for recombination? Her work also asks: what does it mean for time to enter the realm of experience and consciousness? For while she adheres to the possibility of a subject capable of change, she wavers between the desire for a psychotic perception and the need to differentiate between entities within the field of perception.
 
Deren is very explicit about consciousness. She violently resists the shock and unconscious automatism of Surrealism, for example. She always denies the possibility that her work expresses the unconscious. She considers her films the result of a “controlled accident,” of an intentional experiment that produces chance, and not of a time and fate outside of subjective control. Time, for Deren, unlike for Bergson, emerges from within a system. It is subject to control. Time is produced by the artist through the cinematic practice. Time is not bought into representation; it emerges from purposefully produced aesthetic structures. It appears that Deren harbors her own personal archive of a never-realized dream of sovereignty and agency that she explicitly seeks to see, finally realized, through the cinematic medium (“Cinema” 29-31). In Deren’s discourse memory becomes central to the project of making time experienced. It is, however, a memory infected, like Bateson’s “linear analysis” by problems of storage and archiving. The fate of this archive, the archive of older forms of storage and knowledge, the archive of images and their taxonomies, the archive as itself an historically specific form of storage inherent in the cinema and to 19^th century anthropology and psychology, is now unclear. Deren wants to break from a history of objectivity and ontology, those orders affiliated with the 19^th century archive, but at the same time she desires to preserve memory and the trace of indexicality, maybe history and context. She wants time to feedback into the image, but she does not want us to identify this time as known and controllable, but rather as alien and outside of legibility.¹⁷
 
Memory takes a complex place in this discourse as the site that both produces time and refuses identification. Deren defines memory very particularly as reconfiguring the index in time. She offers two axes for memory–horizontal and vertical. Deren writes:
 

By “horizontal” I mean that the memory of man is not committed to the natural chronology of his experience . . . On the contrary, he has access to all his experience simultaneously . . . he can compare similar portions of events widely disparate in time and place . . . and he is able to perceive that a natural, chronological whole is not immutable, but that it is a dynamic relationship of functioning parts.
 

(“Cinema” 11)

What art must utilize and preserve, she argues, is not the direct index, but rather this “horizontal” memory, which can produce new relations between times rather than organize time in one direction. This is not a linear memory, even as it can facilitate change. This is also not a memory based on an archive of static, spatial representations. Rather, this memory bank is relational. Deren wishes to evoke the relationships between subjects, and between subjectivity, perception, and cinema.

 
Two temporal vectors operate in this discourse. On the one hand, Deren assumes the availability of an infinite and recombinant storage space for manipulation, and on the other, she seeks not to return to any single element within this storage system, but always to focus on totalities (gestalten) that exceed individual elements. She dreams of a memory-storage system operating in internally referential feedback loops, one that produces new relations between historical events and “functioning parts.” In this, Deren reflects much of what I have already argued in this article about an historical shift in favor of the record and of process. Two times operate simultaneously in her work–repetitive feedback and an irreversible teleology.
 
Deren’s most complex film, Ritual in Transfigured Time, interrogates this relationship between cinema and time. The filmmaker, however, counter to her interlocutors in psychology and anthropology, strenuously insists on reattaching these two temporal vectors of feedback and probability to history and subjectivity. Deren insists on reminding us both of the memorializing and indexical functions of the photograph embedded within the cinema, and of the historically changing, situated, and contested structure of visuality. The film adamantly maintains a memory of the index, but only in order to rethink the nature of subjectivity and visuality in the future. The film, not incidentally, is completed in 1946, when Deren begins to engage with Bateson and Mead. While most film criticism has highlighted the movie’s focus on ritual and ethnography,¹⁸ I argue that this film highlights Deren’s alternative idea of games and images. It is also, in many ways, a synthesis of an on-going process. Deren is not a filmmaker whose project can be comprehended in any one film, or text, or lecture, but rather is about the on-going relations between all these sites. In many senses, her films, themselves, are merely traces of another process, one that can never be fully defined, or seen. In this final moment in this essay, I want to use this film to feed-back into all that I have already discussed in her work.
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 8.

Stills from Ritual. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
Deren’s early script of Ritual in Transfigured Time describes a transformation in time, a metamorphosis (Legend 453). “Slow motion is the microscope of time,” Deren writes. And under this microscope, at its end, the “Fourth dimension is you.” The ritual will end and the protagonist (played by a young Afro-Caribbean dancer, Rita Christiani) will finally become Other, changing places with a character played by Deren. She will move away from death to life, changing from a “widow” to a “bride.” History will reverse itself to embrace, in Deren’s terms, “life.” This is a film about “change of identity…and sudden change in stature of relationship” (“Pre-production Notes” 466). Her opening description of the film anticipates that time will be involved in the production of a new form of inter-subjectivity or “relationship” between the fixity of identity and the “metamorphosis” of becoming a subject.
 
In keeping with her anagrammatic practice, Deren’s production notes dissect the movie into seven segments, laying out every shot and movement. This is a movie pre-planned in every detail, but one she still hopes will induce the “controlled accident.” Each scene feeds back into previous one through the repetition of gesture and figure. The movie opens with a series of shots in a room, where our two protaganists–Deren and the dancer Rita Christiani–first encounter each other. They are watched by a third figure–Anäis Nin–a figure who reappears as a third eye throughout the film. By watching, she duplicates the viewer in the film, but we are never allowed access to her perspective. She is thus a site of the limit of visibility in the structure of the film. Nin occupies the place of a witness, perhaps to historical change and to the limits of describing or knowing this process. Already from the first scene, therefore, Deren emphasizes the problem of seeing and recording the past.
 
In this room, Deren is playing with yarn, creating a cat’s cradle, as reference to children’s games and to myth and ritual action. These are practices that are untimely, arriving from elsewhere, but also practices that mediate the interaction between subjects. As the scene progresses, the tempo becomes ever slower and Deren’s movement’s more dramatized, until the yarn flies off, and with a cinema cut we are thrust into another room full of people. No sooner are we offered a series of figures with which to potentially identify, than this alignment between our vision and the camera is disrupted through the cut and the manipulation of the time of events in the film. A series of shots tracks Christiani’s outstretched hand as she approaches the figure who is weaving. The two women never touch, so that our phenomenal expectations of an encounter are never answered. In this failure of events, however, to culminate in rational action, we are also left to wonder at the potential future of these figures. We are, thus, not allowed to establish who these women are, nor what their specific relationship to each other might be. Deren refuses us as spectators access to the present, so we cannot render these subjects into static objects. Nor are we offered solace in cinematic convention, since the abruptness of the edit between one room and another is jarring and unexpected.
 
The cut into the “second” scene comes through the tracking of this figure–Christiani–and maintains a relationship to interior space, but the room is now different. In this scene, the protagonist (Christiani) enters the room as a bride (perhaps of Christ) in black (see Fig. 9 below). The camera cuts to a partial view of a room seemingly full of men in suits and women in dark dresses and dark lipstick. It appears to be a party. We are never offered an establishing shot, and we are never sure if our viewpoint coincides with that of the protagonist. We are thus refused any commanding sense of where or when this event is happening. There is a cut back to the “bride.” She removes a veil from her head and enters the room. With this gesture she is transformed into another member of the partying group. Bereft of veil and cross, she is another woman in a dark dress.
 

 

 

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Fig. 9.

The “bride” in Ritual. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
But the camera tracks her differently, offering her the intimacy of the close up, focusing on her facial expression. As viewers, we register on the protagonist’s face the search for the other woman she initially encountered in a game. Christiani is among the only individuals (the other in this scene is Nin) whom we actually recognize. She is the only figure to look at the camera directly. She is also, of course, racially marked, as the black woman in the party. Her skin color is not what identifies her. The movie is black and white, there is no sound, her skin is not truly visible. Rather, we identify her though differences in her hairstyle, gesture, and lack of make-up. She is the only individual in a mass of mechanically moving and similarly dressed and made up people.
 
Deren’s noteworthy move here is to make difference appears equivalent to gesture. Both the normative social actions and the movements that separate and differentiate subjects are no longer representative, but performative. Not only does gesture comprise the terrain of visuality, but it is also rendered equivalent to the technology of cinematic manufacture. It is the choreography of gesture that edits this movie, producing perception. Difference, the very gestural interactions between the figures, is the technology that makes this cinema–just as in gestalt it is the relations between objects–the very process of perception, that produces cognition. The logic of the performative sign also governs Deren’s anagrammatic figure and A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945). Representation thus only enters in delay, as the spectator retroactively recognizes, and assigns meaning to, the performative and historical nature of vision. Only through this feedback loop where gestural conventions are returned to us after temporal delay do we become conscious of how and who we see. From the beginning of this movie, therefore, we are made mindful of the historical nature of vision. We recognize both the ability to perceive difference and the conventions that make us look. The party is a dramatization of social norms fed-back to us through the cinema.
 
The next series of shots, however, reveals that the movie will not allow us to fully identify and classify either historical norms or difference. The camera zooms out, and we start to see movement. The party is a dance, a pas de deux between people meeting and greeting each other. We are offered mid-length shots capturing the upper-bodies and hands of these “dancers” greeting each other. The moments of greeting are continually repeated. These repetitions, however, are interspersed with two forms of cutting. On the one hand there are sudden moments of stillness–photographs. People caught in indefinite poses, in almost, but never completed, greetings. On the other hand, we are regularly offered shots of Christiani and Nin encountering each other. The camera focuses on their faces, affording us the ability to witness their moment of almost-recognition. I say “almost” because the facial expression assumes some familiarity on our part, but without a defined emotion or identification. Neither looks at the camera; they are caught to the side. The look they give each other is more a glance than a gaze.
 
As the two women encounter each other, their gestures are so slow as to allow us to see their eyes momentarily meet, and to note the gesture of their bodies. Each time they meet, their interaction subtly changes, becoming slightly elongated. Theirs is the only relationship that appears to progress. The protagonist’s movement across the room is a linear counterpoint to the empty and repeated performances of sociality that do not engage in recognition even as they are identifiable.
 
Here both time and cinematic convention are made visible. The photographic still elongates time and serves as a referent to photography, a reminder that the cinema carries within it the memory of the ontology and indexicality of photography. The images are also among the most historically situated in the film, depicting the social dress and manners of a party in the mid-1940s in a New York apartment. But not exactly. These images are not really indexes; they are referents to indexicality itself. The photograph refuses to serve as an index because its function is merely to make us conscious of perception itself. By stopping movements from commencing and cutting into the sensory-motor chain, the photograph forces us to recognize the very conventions of visuality, just as the repetition of social codes forces historical recognition of normativity. Two temporal vectors develop–the circular repetition of individuals greeting each other and the linear and diegetic search for the Other–which mirror the historical memory of the index against the tightly choreographed movement of the film.
 
At the final moment of this scene there is another cut. Through a pose, the space of the party is transformed into another: we enter a third space or “scene,” although neither term is appropriate. At the final moment of the party Christiani enters a close-up with a man (Frank Westerbrook). They appear about to engage in a kiss, or perhaps an assault (see Fig. 10 below). The situation is rendered ambiguously in that the woman’s face is turned away. The camera holds still. It is almost a photographic still, although not quite–the freeze frame does not last long enough, and the animation of the dancers is not entirely stopped. Through the wavering of this moment of potentiality in interaction between desire and violence, there is an immediate cut to almost the same pose, now in a garden filled with Greco-Roman statues, a space where monument and memory collapse. Deren thus makes explicit the relationship between ideal forms and historical change.
 

 

 

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Fig. 10.

Stills from the third “scene” of Ritual. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
We are never permitted, however, to dwell on the monumental and ideal facet of this environment. The forms of sexual perfection and idealized body encoded within the Greco-Roman aesthetic do not enact themselves in the sexual act. For immediately upon entry into this space, the potentially sexual act of encounter in a kiss (or assault) generates a different form of action (see the figures above). The scene immediately cuts to three women from the party, dancing in a circle. A cut doubly referencing the lingering trace of social convention that enters this dream-like space from the previous scene, and an ode to ritual enactment and game. This is the pattern that repeats in all the scenes. Both myth and history are continually reintroduced through repetitive forms of games.
 
From a brief series of shots showing the women, we are thrust back to the couple. Their kiss does not end. Rather, the dancer lurches into the air. We track her arms in a circle, the camera shot is beneath her, then the camera shifts idiosyncratically to another viewpoint, perhaps that of the male dancer. But not quite, because we see the back of his shoulder and his extended arm, framing her movements, perhaps threatening her body as she twists on the ground. The camera is angled and the movements deployed in slower motion so that the actual reverberations of the fall and the quivering of her muscles are visible, offering a very embodied sense to the image. There is a cut back to three women in the background dancing in a circle, as though around a maypole, or playing “ring around the rosy.” The segment vacillates between these two sites of action–the couple and the triad of women. The maypole circle repeats until the dancers fly off as the couple continues in their athletic, or perhaps, violent movements. We are offered scenes in this dance that are almost mimetic of Leni Riefensthal’s Triumph of the Will (1935), as the male dancer’s naked body is filmed against Grecian columns:
 

 

 

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Fig. 11.

Frank Westerbrook in Ritual. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
Ideals of body and history play against the incoherence of a film where there is no clear identification of who these individuals are, or what their ambitions might be.
 
All the figures finally fling apart and recombine. The male dancer joins the circle game, as the protagonist continues her search. Repeatedly one action after another gets strung into another set of motions. The male and female dancers appear caught in a repetitive game of chasing one another. The women in the circle repeat another history. The repetition of a circular dance is associated with death, ritual, the plague, a longue durée in history against the speedy and constantly changing flight and fight of this couple dancing and chasing each other. Deren interjects photographic stills in the garden scene at precisely those moments of choreographic velocity when bodies fling apart, and we assume certain linear laws of Newtonian physics to take hold. Our expectations are thwarted. For example, at one moment a woman is flung out of the circle. Her body has no structured pose and shows no intent. At another moment (see Fig. 12 below) the male dancer suddenly leaps out of a statuesque pose to pursue the protagonist. This leap, however, occurs at almost the wrong moment for such still capture. Unlike the statuesque pose preceding it, this is not a defined or clear action. It is neither monumental nor memorial. It is undefined. It is a moment of preservation that does not show historical intentionality or identificatory power as an action.
 

 

 

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Fig. 12.

Garden Chase Sequence, Ritual in Transfigured Time. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.

 

 
These photographic images are images of potentiality and illegibility. They offer a memorial counterpoint to the moving images unfolding in the present. These moments of stasis interrupt action, depicting actions that fail to finalize and are therefore indecipherable in intent or purpose. These images convey supplemental and excessive gestures. These are images that carry within them not the index as an authority over the past, but an index of the very practice of media and the process by which history is narrativized. They make the nature of the medium visible, thus disrupting cinema’s own omniscience as a time-based and animated medium, and reminding the very machine of its own history and internal resistances.
 
Deren makes us aware that mythic cinematic and social forms are unattainable ideals. The greetings photographed in the film are too theatrical and dramatized, too sudden or disrupted to be truly identifiable as normal behavior or as part of a causal story line. The choreographed movement, intercut with stills, is marginally familiar. We become conscious that it is familiar, but also see it as uncanny. Deren forces us to look in a new manner at the mundane and everyday practices of sociality. We are forced to see acts of expression and excess. We are forced to recognize the forms that constrain and produce our actions. Finally, we are made conscious of the mediums–of technical media, of society–that structure our very movements. These images are reminders of the technical forms through which cinema provides purpose and linearity where none exist. In this moment of cinematic re-memory, all the times are rearranged, and the viewer and the camera both “fail” to achieve a command over the time or space of the film. These are images, therefore, that operate like Deren’s memory–not to stop time and organize it but to make visible relationships between subjects. These images make the production of time, itself, available to perception.
 
There are two temporal movements, therefore, in the film: the repetitive actions of these social, encoded, and gendered games replayed in the visceral actions of the dancers, and the linear diegetic narrative of search and transformation. These two vectors are embedded in two cinematic actions–the recombination of film’s own history and the production of new relations between images. These two directions cut into each other, both repeating themselves but never culminating. These vectors emerge from a cinema structured on gestalt forms. If visuality is on display, it is already embedded in the film notes and in Deren’s anagrammatic schemas. Deren wants to make perception, itself, a techne. Yet out of this structure she seeks to create accidents. A whole beyond the sum of its parts. For this reason, perhaps, the movie insists on repetition–of choreographed movements, of cinematic convention, of mediums. Deren continues this mode as the movie moves through new geographies, culminating in a moment of inter-subjective transformation where Deren and Christiani become each other.
 
This ending culminates in multiple possibilities as an action of inter-subjective substitution whose effects and signification have multiple interpretations. As Ute Holl argues, “Emotions are artificially, almost mathematically, produced by technical devices” in a film that is “constructing and transforming subjects,” but never depicting them, a film that Holl suggests produces subjectivity from without through this mathematical logic (157). This is a film that produces psychology as an external medium, thus denigrating the sutured subject, while continuing to affirm the possibility of differentiation and subject production. This film operates like the anagrammatic and gestalt logic that underpins its making.
 
But, Deren refuses gestalt’s effort to recuperate the authority of science. Rather, she produces an image that pushes the past towards the future, but does not ontologically describe or define the subject in the present. In this film the action never stops, and there is no finality or culmination to the movie. We might believe that the loop by which the women switch places would be replicated, just as the movie endlessly replays the same cinematic devices, recovering an endless archive of forms, from parties to dances, to move us through spaces familiar, yet transformed, through their associations.
 

Failure to Feedback

 
Structure and emergence must recombine. Deren in a series of untitled notes to the movie writes that, “Cubism of event–we do not recognize what is occurring–over and over we fail” (“Pre-production Notes” 468). How do we understand this idea of a “failure” to depict or identify the subject in relation to time? I argue that Deren deploys a series of cinematic conventions in order to create a fissure between the index of the past and the future.
 
This failure to identify emerges from the relationship between the technical substrate of the medium and its own archive of conventions, mirrored by the subjective time of performance and sociality. At the level of convention, the film is about the archive of cinema itself: making visible, through re-performance, conventions of editing, photography, cinematography, camera work, and recording speeds. The repetitions are also choreographic, embedded in the structure of “games” such as greeting rituals at parties and children’s dances. The games and the repetitive cinematic conventions literally mime a repetition without difference. It is the technological repetition of media, and the subjective repetition of sociality rendered equivalent. This repetition is dissected, however, by the very forward flow of another choreography that is about chance and change.
 
The multiple times emerging from the film make the spectator recognize both media and history. On one hand this focus on cadence, editing, and non-linear operations reveals the specific nature of the filmic medium. Film’s own timeliness and sense of time. On the other hand the viewer begins to become conscious of history–specific rituals, specific times and places, specific forms of cinema, but also specific and codified ideals of social norms, gendered interaction, and bodies. If there is a technology made visible in this film it is that of the process of social codification and formalization. The very process of ritual is rendered technical and representable here. It is not, however, one particular ritual that is depicted in this movie, but the entire process of rituals, particularly those of Cold War American sociality.
 
But these recognitions of the processes by which we come into being are not identifications. We are offered traces of a history of normativity. The image is of a memory of the process of subjectivization. We are never offered the direct index–the image of the subject as an object. Nor is this historical specificity ever defined. Rather it is merely produced as a possibility. The viewers must project their individual understanding of time and place upon the film. It is the viewer who must bring the scenes, in delay, into representation through a process of projection. The result might be an “accident”; Deren hopes it will generate a new form of future that does not repeat the past. This inability to return is pronounced if we think about this film within Deren’s oeuvre. The filmmaker continually moves between mediums, replaying these cinematic conventions in her cinema theory, recycling her own aesthetic conventions in all her films. No one piece of her work, therefore, stands alone as an object. No one element of her work is ever finished.
 
Neither the awareness of the medium nor of history is therefore permitted to complete. We cannot return; the feedback loop fails to finish or finalize. Unlike the theories of Bateson, or the return of the objective voice, Deren “fails” to go back to any set ideal or to fully allow us to identify those other histories–either of the cinema, or of the society–that she documents. This failure allows temporal multiplicity to enter, but defers any ability to gain authority over the past, or the individuals within it. The multiplicity of times forces an opening that does not allow a return to static and nostalgic ideals of subjectivity.
 
This filmmaking, I argue, ethically activates all that I have discussed in this essay about the post-war displacement of ontology for process, the availability of the index for manipulation, and the communicative obsession with prediction and emergence. Deren must deal with feedback and with change simultaneously. By making these two times available synchronously, Deren, I argue, opens up the possibility of other modes of being. Consciousness, perhaps subjectivity, in her cinema lies within this gap between prediction and return.
 
Deren holds a mirror to the theories of communication and control, and recognizes that it is precisely a multiplicity of communicative situations, always a question of history, situation, and time, that allows subjective agency. She writes in her notebooks that she might have misunderstood Bateson’s talk. But what she does understand is that Bateson is enacting a scientific discourse, performing a discussion that wrenches the specificity of Bali out of its context, and makes it amenable to comparison with Von Neumann’s games, and with the behaviors of other tribes–policy makers, communication scientists, curators at museums. Intuitively, she understands that this emergent model of image and communication is productive and that it is a site both of danger and of possibility. For this process, now unmoored, is amenable to any manipulation.
 
When Mead and Bateson were in Bali they sought to find the expression of the interior mind of the native in the gesture of the body. Unable to speak any language of the region, skeptical of their translators, they turned away from translation and representation in written language. Instead, they created a recording machine. They wanted to capture everything. They filmed miles of stills. In the course of this study, the search for difference metamorphosed into an archive of performative inscriptions and gestures from which a new practice of cinema, and anthropology, then emerged. Both anthropologists used this research to develop cybernetic theories of mind and human development after the war (Bateson and Mead, “Introduction,” Balinese). The result was the elimination of situation, context, and history, a pure process extracted from any phenomenal time. Difference turned into a technology of communication and performance. On one hand this is an opening…an abandonment of the normative strictures of a previous eras’ Oedipal situations and essential biologies. A release from discipline. There are no objects here for study. There are no clear boundaries to demarcate human difference. But there are new technocratic orders. For the emergent computational and psychological orders often destroyed multiplicity and time in the name of multiplicity and time, simultaneously calling for the possibility of difference in communicative situations and creating processes so perfectly interchangeable and convergent that such multiplicity ceases to exist. The artist, in turn, seeks to return these processes to lived time, to memory, to the specificity of different forms of being and living. She still aspires to produce meaning, not merely messages. She hopes that the memory trace of consciousness, and humanism, might yet inform this condition.
 
Perhaps this engagement between art and science allows us to transform our own thinking. We experience a shock of recognition, since so much emanating from these new cinemas and technologies that emerge after the war animates our contemporary theorization and discourse of the image. The question about time and the image is not, however, whether the time image is the digital image, or whether the desire for cinema is now a form of nostalgia. Rather, it opens to a series of questions about how we want time to be organized in our systems. In a world of infinite archives, feedback loops, performative epistemologies, and predictive times, we might ask, instead, what work it does to return to a memory of a medium or a subject? Which memory traces do we wish to activate? And to what effects?
 
We may also ask what is at stake in the relationship between art, science, and technology. Do we want these three to collapse, or do we desire differentiation in practices and goals? Ultimately, the concerns about game theories and histories of objectivity and subjectivity are also competing imaginaries about the relationship between technology, repetition, and imagination. It is not whether Deren’s vision is better than that of gestalt psychology or anthropology, but rather what is lost if we fail to maintain any separation between these three forms of knowing and being in the world… if anything. In the interaction between film, science, and the technology of games after the war something is made visible–the production of radically different forms of visuality and perception, and perhaps even life, from the same material substrate. Despite sharing the same episteme with her interlocutors, Deren crafts films that produce very different effects in the world than psychological theories or game theories. I argue she produces a form of desire that has not yet been formalized as technology.
 
I am returned to Bateson. He is, after all, prominently remembered for formulating a new definition of difference in terms of information, thereby revising modern anthropological formulations of both otherness and time. He argues that information is “any difference that makes a difference to a conscious, human mind.” In his summation, data can come from anywhere (either within or outside the mind) and information does not need to be meaningful it must merely be effective. Communication is, therefore, about effects and behavior. Consciousness is also revised, perhaps separated forever from a relationship to “spirit;” in Bateson’s formulation, to be conscious is merely to be able to take different paths of action, it is not to be separated from the external world. Most importantly, for Bateson difference is non-ontological, but rather processional and the result of interactions. Difference is always relative and relational. If difference is defined by information, and information is a measure of potential states or actions a system can take, then difference is also always already defined as emergent, a state and not a static object (Steps 459).
 
Deren responds indirectly by asking whether this might not be an automation of emergence or difference itself. She marks a moment in which the site that allows us to think differentiation moves away from ontological categorization to the very structure of communication channels. Change is made static no longer through a mechanical process of rationalizing time, but through a discourse that insists on emergence. It is to this possibility that our contemporary thought must answer. In her cinema, the filmmaker suggests, perhaps not all differences can be rendered equivalent through this model of information. Perhaps, Deren suggests, one can produce images that can contain forms of non-equivalent encounter, differences that are neither static nor immediately amenable to transmission and circulation into any other medium. What is an image of difference that can still produce meaning or signification–dare I still say representation? A difference that is no longer only a difference, but can organize affect and gesture into signification. This difference comes through a very particular organization of temporal multiplicity. It is immanent. Perhaps this is what Deren would call art.
 
There is much at stake, therefore, in this renegotiation of bodies and images, time and otherness, all on the screen. For this dream of an image that can still confront the Other with love, that can open to a world that is not yet known… has not yet been realized.
 

 

 

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Fig. 13.

Becoming Other. Rita Christiani and Maya Deren in transformation in Ritual in Transfigured Time. 1946.

© Mystic Fire Video, 2002.