We can now understand just how limiting and indeed how misguided were
the terms on which an earlier generation of critics (one to which both Lunenfeld
and Manovich belong) sought to couple Frampton and the digital. For it is not
just insufficient but it is downright mistaken to claim, as does Lunenfeld, that
Frampton’sMagellanproject anticipated the cultural form of database and
loop that, following Manovich’s analysis, comprise the defining tropes for con-
temporary digital media. Lunenfeld writes:
In the earlys, Frampton posited“the infinite film”: a forever unfinished cinemat-
ic system incorporating all modes of filmmaking, all examples of those modes, and
one that could grow and change as its medium matured. Frampton’s“infinite film”is
a Platonic database for our spectacular culture. It is the Alexandrine dream...dis-
tilled from the librarians who were promised by the Ptolemiac kings of Egypt that
they would have the opportunity to catalogue every book of their era.What is wrong or misguided about this claim is not the general correlation it
posits between Frampton’s work and the defining aesthetic properties of new
media objects and networks; no, what is wrong here is Lunenfeld’s complete
neglect of the temporal dynamics of selection, his purely spatial treatment of
the infinite film.Magellanoperates on the cusp of what can be considered to
be cinema: it challenges the temporal artifactuality of institutionalized cinema
(by, for example, forgoing the cinematic synchronization of consciousness, as it
does in spreading out the one minute films comprising the“Straits of Magellan”
section across the span of a year) at the same time as it instantiates alternate,
non-(pre- or post-) cinematic temporalities (by way, for example, of its sheer
magnitude and imposed conditions of viewing, which function [or would have
functioned] to make viewingMagellanas a film, that is in its entirety in a sin-
gle session, simply impossible). As such, it exemplifies how Frampton antici-
pates the condition of new media: how his cinematic aesthetic was in fact rooted
in a media temporal modulation of movement.
Movement and the Impression of Reality
In a talk at theSociety for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Los
Angeles, Tom Gunning made a plea for cinema scholars to question one of the
longest-standing–and least-interrogated–assumptions of our discipline: the
notion that cinema (understood in its institutionalized form as still images pro-
jected at a constant frame rate offps or close to it) is the product of a funda-
mental sensory illusion, that cinema results from technology tricking our
senses.To give a sense of just how widespread this assumption is, Gunning
48 Mark B.N. Hansen