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The work of the cinematograph is, it would seem,
fundamentally a business of
form and tone. Form is the regime of self-consistency and
self-deviation; organic while also being like industrial scaffolding. Form is
the incoherent coherence of a single world reduced down from the perceptually
overloaded world in which we operate on a daily basis and with which we only
interact at a level of minimal immersion by virtue of our occupying but a tiny
micro-topography of the whole field of lived experience. Form is less the world
of the film then it is the film as
a
world. The work of art becomes a little world all the parts of which are
available for us to scrutinize, ultimately demonstrating its own limits
by virtue of what it includes and excludes. Though it is totally reduced, there
is no world more complete (not
my world, for example, or
your world) than that
of the work of art. The shape of this world, its interior physics and
intra-relational parameters, the constitutive rules it has set for how it conveys
itself, the basic energy with which it situates its limits and boundaries, its
tendency towards organizational self-reproduction and self-similarity, are all
key to the work of art (especially the film, as film appropriates all of its
sensory and psychic affects from poetry, literature, the theater, music, and
painting – its is the great hybrid art
par
excellence). The preeminent filmmakers of form are Bresson and
Hitchcock. Both tether the parts of their film-worlds together as a rigorous
fixing of interstitially united fragments like pieces of a jigsaw that
gradually come together in ways that produce sense (and awe). Tone, on the
other hand, is the internal self-consistency of the work of art as it operates
in time over a certain duration and a
plurality of micro-durations (those of the frame, the shot, the scene, the
sequence). Tone is rhythm and counter-rhythm. It is how affect is deployed
while the film is unraveling. Tone in the cinema is most related to tone in
music, though I also think it is related to the tone of a painting insofar as
the painting’s tone is explicitly inherent in the traces of the brushstrokes,
the leftover evidence of the painter’s gestures
in
time. Tone is a part of everything. Tone is not just tone of voice (unless we consider that all things have their voices). Poetry is also extremely tonal in the way it moves, breaks,
and flows (it is especially tonal, of course, when read aloud). The tendency is for us to think of filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky
and Terrence Malick as the preeminent figures of tone (hence the use of the
term “tone poem” to designate works by such filmmakers). This would be like
saying that drone can be the only type of real tone is music. Think of the
explosive, propulsive, and manic tone of films like those of Stan Brakhage or
even the Soviet montage school (especially Dziga Vertov), which are closer to
the tone of free jazz than they are to that of drone. There is tone at either
extreme; the minimal and ascetic on the one hand and the maximalist and
ecstatic on the other (the Dionysian). Discontinuity, contrapuntal affect, and
rhythmic intransigence are not indicative of an absence of tone but are rather
a different way of
doing
tonality. Tone works best not simply by being sustained and undifferentiated,
but rather by demonstrating a musical logic of affect which is self-similar and
subsumed by a kind of consistent, rhythmic logic. Films of poor tone tend to be
like the paintings of an artist who dollops paint thoughtlessly on a canvas,
hither and thither, without
feeling
it. Tone is ultimately a sensory-motor matter: something we
feel in time. Form
and tone work when we not only bear witness to them but rather
feel and
experience them at
the sensory-motor level. A film ought to, first and foremost, work over the
nervous system (and within the neural apparatus).
