{"id":7058,"title":"Towards A Primary Differentiation Between Film and Video","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/towards-primary-differentiation-between-film-and-video","version":"77c9b65e9a3138936ab41ebcc17a2d1db50ce3fb8dd6e2235a8ef20e94e008d5","modified":"2026-09-13T21:51:53.8875028+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Alan Sondheim"}],"authorKeys":["Sondheim, Alan"],"subjects":["Tool Texts"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Art Papers","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"September 10, 1989","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0837","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Towards A Primary Differentiation Between Film and Video.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/towards-primary-differentiation-between-film-and-video.","publication":"Alan Sondheim. Towards A Primary Differentiation Between Film and Video. Art Papers. September 10, 1989.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/7058.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0837","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":22199},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":331},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":705},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0837","generated":false,"characters":332}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Historically, both film and video are 19th-century manifestations. The concept of an electrical scanning or linearization of the real (i.e. the reproduction of the two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional space by means of a one-dimensional line repeatedly folded back upon itself within a single field) developed first. For television to become commercially feasible, however, fairly sophisticated electronic technology is necessary. Film disseminated several decades before video by virtue of its grounding in mechanism. All that was necessary was the perfection of the pulldown claw in relation to the manufacturing of a flexible film base of reasonable tolerance. Today, film and video have interpenetrated throughout the production of commodities ultimately destined for one or the other venue. This merging combines two very different sites or phenomenologies of representation, which are described below. Although super 8mm still retains an edge over 3/4\u0022 U-Matic video in terms of resolution, film and video may be considered ultimately equivalent in the degree of quantitative information presented per frame. This is based on the development of high-definition television (HDTV) which will reproduce about half the information present in a 35mm slide. Industrial or military scanning systems can present as many as 10,000 lines to the frame - compared to the 500\u002B in commercial television or the 450\u002B in high-end popular tape formats. Therefore we do not look for a primary differentiation between the two media in terms of quantitative information (sharpness or contrast ratio). The primary differentiation is not located in histories or practices, although these vary widely. We acknowledge a materialism at work here, and ignore the class-dialectical aspects, including research programs, demographics, etc. Although intertwined with the technology, we consider them surface phenomena. The viewing milieus (normative venues) of film and video are different: theater versus home, external versus internal illumination. The viewer perceives the television set as one object among many (a piece of furniture to be watched), and the film screen as that absence of object within a spectacular and darkened space (a field to be seen). Television occurs in light, an everyday space of idle conversation, while film is presented in a darkness impregnated with meaning. But the primary differentiation lies elsewhere. (Of course we are constructing a myth of the cave and the stoa. This is traced in the form of the essay itself, in its narrative, which occupies the narrative of film or video. Every spectatorial experience occupies time, develops by virtue of the rupture at both ends.) Film, from an ontological viewpoint, is a translation of one material stratum, the potential visibility of the real, into another. This translation occurs from the position of a third, the sources of illumination of the former. This position is that of a mediation which embeds itself by virtue of the latter. From this viewpoint, the mapping that occurs (by virtue of perspectival optics) appears to be an allegiance, an internalization of the perceived by the film stratum. (The film, defined by an anti-halation layer, is considered to be a two-dimensional surface. Of course this is never true; film is a volume, and this complicates matters.) The allegiance is in the form of similitude or alignment. One is concerned with a projective geometry of an ideal sort itself translated into an applied mathematics jostling between two materialities. Video, however, is a translation which involves an ontological break (ontology at work, even in the application of the Marxist theory of reflection, designed to return information theory once again to the Practical - inert); it occurs between a material stratum and a potential well of discrete (digital) or indiscrete (analog) reversible states fully translatable and equivalent. This well is a momentary stasis, an impediment or data bank, a node, within an idealized flow of communications. The well is characterized by electronic links; reversibility guarantees ideal constructibility (and also an insipid and exhausted temporality - desire, produce, reproduce, desire, use as much time/tape as you like!). Video has no allegiance to the material stratum which is only one source, a source among many. Its allegiance in fact is to a secondary narcissism: from external manipulation vis-a-vis a human operator/subject to a total internalization as the image is enfolded into the body. This internalization is in the form of a circulation operating on the level of, and by the laws of, the dreamwork: condensation, displacement, inversion, substitution, and the recuperation of the dream-time are the primary processes here. Video is therefore the cinema of thought: cinema is mediated by thought. Video turns the viewer back to him/herself; cinema returns the viewer to the world. This is reflected in the technology involved. The film apparatus is ultimately mechanical; even the nicad batteries translate into motor operations. But video translates into parameterization, the isolatable and isolated constituents of information, and the image is manipulated in an idealized (imaginary/Imaginary) space devoid of representation. Film may approach this space, and this is the influence of video, but the approach is mechanical, clumsy - the use of numerous camera passes, matte and optical effects, slit-scan technology, motion control, etc. Music video, television, and the hysteria of spectacular consumption have influenced cinematic representation to the point that it attempts to appropriate this idealized space for itself. The frame becomes a construction: as in set theory, the universe of images becomes equivalent to their constructibility. Economics and audience demographics are at stake. Media proliferate beneath the guise of capital. The primary state of video (down to the alignment of magnetic domains on the tape itself) is switched, reversible, impermanent; the state of film is fragile (subject to wear, to the \u0022ravages of time\u0022), irreversible. A developed film is in a sense identical to its embedded images. The images carried by tape represent a temporary stasis. Manipulation in video occurs within a discrete state-space: the alteration of the image occurs within the identical closure of its production. Manipulation in film is a posteriori to source (often occurring in other generations); while the frame is discrete in film, thus enveloping the real as occupant, the pixel is discrete in digital video, producing empty polarity as the potential for minimal content. (Nowhere does the real appear in either, except as disorder, disorderly.) Deconstruction in film (i.e. the self-reflexivity/criticality of post-May \uFF9168 political cinema) is the deconstruction of the mediation of the real; this mediation is a primary object of film theory. Deconstruction-closure (a contradiction in terms) in video transforms into a surrealism guaranteeing the subject, subjectivity, narcissistic processes and slippage, as well as an ultimate decontextualization in which the objects of the world are recognized as colonized subjects which themselves reproduce (both within video and without it) the manipulated contents of the screen. The object as represented in the film frame is a category of linkages forming a Jordan (closed) curve with an interior and exterior defined by noisy (grain) boundaries. The object represented in the video frame is a system of accumulations exhausted in time and presenting the analog of a Jordan curve viewed from a suitable distance; these accumulations are characterized by their presentation across scan lines \u0022contradicting\u0022 the topology of the object. In video, the contingent or contiguous object. In film, the representation permeated by noise. (In video, noise too!) For the viewer, the video image is ideal, \u0022psychoanalytical.\u0022 The film image is archeological, embedded within an object psychology. The video image is a top-down presentation of discrete translations of sets of elements; these translations are dependent upon mathematical transformations and the primary source material (internally or externally generated). In film, the translations (\u0022special effects\u0022) are an interplay of constructions of all sorts, ultimately based on a mechanical-optical technology which has changed little from the time of the Encyclopedia. The filmmaker organizes herself/himself around part-objects: splicer, editing table, bins, synchronizers, footage counters, magnetic and optical readers, gloves, glue, tape. These generate mechanical-optical activities in the form of juggling between signifiers and semiotic systems. Such activities transform the configuration of the workprint itself, an object. The videomaker recognizes the presence of drives and pathways which are electronically constrained. The semiotics is built into the editorial apparatus which generates signs. If film operates under difference, video operates under division. If film is additive, video multiplies into noise and overload. In video, the representation of external reality (as if reality were external!) is immediately placed within an exchange system. Using a home camcorder, for example, both internal and external titling (involving key effects) create inserts into any image. Those portions of the image which are masked are exchanged for other content (titles, etc.), which form a second and equivalent level of representation. Since in simple inserts, luminosity determines the areas to be occupied by the second level, luminosity is defined as a parameter against \u0022content.\u0022 Video synthesizers with external inputs, digital editors, etc., are all capable of the same. In film, the filter often falls between the camera and the scene to be filmed; the filter becomes an editorializing apparatus within the \u0022theater of the real.\u0022 This is also true for simple keyhole matting and special effects. (The mattebox and the filter are objects.) Video operates within a heuristics of discrete logics, that, through the presence of an increasingly fine mesh, reproduce the presence of the body. The body is simultaneously here, there, elsewhere. The body of video is self-contained, logical, surrealistic, dream-logical. The discrete frame of film may be contradicted by gestural logics that play across it, the indefinite spectrum of light and dark, shadows, luminosities, paralleling the transgressive play of gestural logics across the spectator\uFF92s body. But the film is internalized by the spectator, while video internalizes the spectator. Film is abject, shadow and material, abstract and representation. It is dirty, and always dirty; noise adheres to it in the form of object-particles - dust, hair, spores, earth. The dirtiness of film is the presence of the flesh, the imminency of flesh. It is the flesh of the actor or actress which presents itself. Cinematic pornography is more powerful and empowered than its video equivalent; the theater is the consummation of _illicit_ masturbation, fetishization, and the realm of skin descending to spectatorial transgression. Video pornography is simply the presence of other people. Video noise is a displacement of the image; film dirt is a condensation, an adhesion of parasitic material to the supposedly clean and proper body. Deep down, we know the body is never clean. Cinema is pornographic by its very nature (is that the primary differentiation?). Cinema procures us in the negation of etiquette and its replacement by the longing of touch. One touches the dirt of the film. Video is always polite. And video is the cinema of thought - a complete equivalence of objects in which a horse and man, for example, may be placed upside-down in the sky; in which a woman, for example, may be exchanged for the man. This is paradoxically the totalization of the real, a totalitarianism in which every object is subject and subject to manipulation. To the exte","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":22199,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}