how things looked, how things worked, how to do things...and, of course (by
example), how to feel and think.”With radar–and subsequently, with a pro-
liferating host of media innovations (culminating in today’s computers) that in-
volve a similar end run around human sense perception–this correlation, and
this mimetic-pedagogic function of cinema, finds itself suspended. That, I sug-
gest, is what Frampton means when he claims that cinema is the last art that
will reach the mind through the senses.
Another closely related and equally intriguing claim involves Frampton’s
questioning of the temporal technicity of cinema. Noting that cinema is a
“Greek word that means‘movie,’”Frampton divorces cinema from the artifac-
tuality of its institutional apparatus, which is to say, the fixed projection of mov-
ing images at a rate offps:“The illusion of movement is certainly an accus-
tomed adjunct of the film image, but that illusion rests upon the assumption
that the rate of change between successive frames may vary only within rather
narrow limits. There is nothing in the structural logic of the filmstrip that can
justify such an assumption.”Given its close association with Frampton’s meta-
historical concept of the“infinite film”(a film that would appear to comprise all
the images potentially generated by the world throughout its entire history), we
might perhaps best understand this claim as an attempt to liberate movement or
variation–the interval between any two states, which is precisely how I pro-
pose we understand cinematic movement–not simply from its historical sub-
ordination to still images (which informs our received notion of cinema as a
sensory illusion created by the animation of photograms) but from the overcod-
ing such movement-variation undergoes via its historical elective affinity with
the cinema, understood narrowly as a technically-specified, institutionally sta-
bilized regime of representation. In other words, what I believe to be at stake in
Frampton’s seemingly outrageous claim for the radical temporal flexibility of
cinema is nothing less than a shift in focus concerning the operation of move-
ment and its relation to time: a fundamental shift from movement as an artifact
of cinema narrowly considered to movement-variation as the basic component
of all worldly relationality. By calling his art“simply”“film”–film that would
encompass all potential passages between frames or“images”ranging from
those most alike to those most different–Frampton aims to expose the mini-
mal logic of connection and distance that informs variation as such. If we read
his account of the infinite film in relation to Bergson’s conception of a“universe
of images”–a conception according to which images comprise the materiality
of the world–we can appreciate the fundamental and multi-scalar imbrication
of movement and time it involves: what there is is continual“virtual”variation
between images that can and must be actualized in concrete movements operat-
ing across a host of timescales.
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 47