As we shall see, Richter’s envisioning of rhythm as the essence of emotional
expression seems perfectly attuned to the temporal sensibility by which Cun-
ningham conducts his images to the music. This should not entirely surprise us.
If we see our present audio-visual culture as one in which mutable temporalities
have some prominence, and note the growing preoccupation with thinking
about time and cinema as well as the realm between still and moving images,
these characteristics also define the era of the early film experiments of Richter
and other avant-garde filmmakers of thes. Tom Gunning has commented
on how acinema of attractionis present both in early film and in contemporary
production–how“the two ends of the Twentieth Century hail each other like
long lost twins.”The historical ramifications of the avant-garde artists’work
with a cinema of mutable temporality is beyond the scope of this article. But the
following comment from Richter, which harks back to Valery’s concern in the
opening quote, and speaks to how we should conceive of the relation between
technological and aesthetic invention, may help us to understand not only the
interest in mutable temporality in early cinema, but also its demise. When de-
scribing his making of the short fine art filmRhythm, in the earlys,
Richter explains,“I did my shooting partly on an animation table, partly in the
printing machine by stop motion and forward and backward printing. The
printing machines at that time were not fully automatic....”This absence of a
fully automated reproduction process–which also applied to the hand-cranked
cameras used in early film production–provided a technological grounding for
an audiovisual culture of mutable temporalities. There are indications that the
culture of mutable temporality in early film ran dry with the automatization of
speed required by the lip-synch based sound cinema emerging in thes.
Temporal irregularities were deeply problematic for the sound, which, contrary
to the image, becomes variable not only in terms of speed but also in terms of
pitch. Of course, shifting temporalities still had an important afterlife in main-
stream cinema though slow motion–in sequences that do not involve synchro-
nized sound and lip-synch–and in experimental cinema through a series of
more disruptive practices.
“Time Warp”Software
In current practices involving an aesthetic of mutable temporality, the pitch of
the sound no longer needs to be affected. Digital technologies may compensate
by keeping the pitch at the same level in spite of variations in the speed. In fact,
a brief look at the contemporary technical support for an aesthetic of mutable
temporality quickly displays a host of technologies for producing what is often
162 Arild Fetveit