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Events/Exhibits

Film/Video

edited by Vivian Sobchack.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, U.S.A.
ISBN 0-8166-3318-5 (hardcover) 0-8166-3319-3 (paperback)
Reviewed by Sean Cubitt, U.K. E-mail: sean@nagle.demon.co.uk


Sometimes you have to ask why you let yourself in for reviewing anthologies. Giving a coherent account of the work of a single author is demanding enough: dealing with the twelve accomplished essayists in Sobchack's anthology is too much. That said, let's cut to the chase. This is an excellent anthology. It is one of the first to deal with special effects in the cinema and related media, and it has adopted the daring and striking strategy of concentrating on a single type of effect, the morph.

You might be tempted to say that what flares were to the seventies and shoulder pads to the eighties, the morph was to the nineties of the last century. Among the essays here is the accumulated evidence that the morph's genealogy stretches back through the cinema of Mickey Mouse and Eddie Cantor via the magicians of the music halls of the late nineteenth century, into the metamorphoses celebrated in the art and poetry of ancient civilizations. Though the commonest references, not surprisingly, are to James Cameron's Terminator 2 and Michael Jackson's Black and White music video, the morph threatens to expand beyond the point of definition. Yet Sobchack keeps her authors in line, and guides the reader through the simple expedient of organising the collection into three sections, 'Metamorphosis, Magic and Mythology', 'Transformation, Technology and Narrative' and 'Morphing, Identity and Spectatorship'. A technique I recommend to other reviewers (and to potential purchasers of academic books) is to check the index. Here, apart from the words appearing in the section titles, the biggest number of entries are for race, gender, masculinity and identity, animation, action heroes and performance. Film scholars will recognise a very up-to-the-minute agenda. Theorists getting a major by-line include Jameson, Eisenstein, Mulvey -- and Riemann, the first of the great non-Euclidean geometers. Among scientific categories, the fourth dimension flies home in the lead.

In fact a first word of praise for Kevin Fisher's excellent essay on the pre-cinematic evolution of the morph in the work of late nineteenth century geometricians, centrally in Riemann's slogan FORCE=GEOMETRY. Though I have had occasion to rue going to humanities conferences bearing papers on math, at the beginning of the 21st century, the humanities can no longer afford to remain inumerate, let alone to boast about it. Fisher reads the morph as a phenomenological novum deriving from the temporalities produced when a four dimensional object reveals itself in motion through the third. The links to visual culture, in the person of Marcel Duchamp, are convincingly drawn, and the essay's eclectic misture of references drawn into a coherent and impressive argument. Equally valuable in a quite different manner is Mark J Wolff's historical account of the evolution of morphing technologies, from DÄrer's physiognomic transformation, via D'arcy Wentworth Thompson biological morphology to the mechanical transformations in cinema and thence to a detailed account of digital morphing technologies and software. Wolff has a gift for this kind of work (he presented a good paper on the history of computer games at the SCS conference of March 2000), and it is surprising how valuable it is. Without it, scholars would have to go back to American Cinematographer, or worse still press agencies, every time we wanted to check what equipment was used on a particular film. Matthew Solomon contributes another top-notch historical essay centring on the figure of Felicien Trewey, who appeared in some of the Lumi¶res' earliest films, presnted the first cinematograph showing in London in 1896, and who I had encountered in Eric Barnouw's wonderful little book on The Magician and the Cinema as an expert in hand shadow puppetry. Not content with bringing a lost art to vivid life, Solomon argues strongly for a 'plasmatic' ontology of cinema as the art of movement and change.

Which brings us to the book's major theme, the morph as a negotiation of identity in an age in which selfhood can no longer be taken for granted. Joseba Gabilondo's essay on Forrest Gump is for example is a model of the essay form as it has developed in the North American cultural academy, twisting and and reorienting arguments and spinning them round on the fulcrum of a neatly observed bit of visual evidence. . Contrasting the spectacle of 'high morphing' films like T2 with the realism of 'low morphing' films like Gump, he argues that the latter implies a specifically male subject of the morph, sacrificing identity in return for a gaze that controls hyperreality as the scopophilic gaze of bourgeois realism sought ideological control over reality. In her own contribution, Sobchack extemporaises on a them from T.S. Eliot to the effect that the proliferation of morphs produces a sense that there are no differences that make a difference (Bateson's definition, you will recall, of information). Drawing on a sophisticated phenomenological account of the cinema developed in her The Address of the Eye she distinguishes between the morph and the lived body: 'unlike the morph itself', she writes, 'I exist as a being transformed not only in time but by time'. Though it presents itself as a temporal phenomenon, the time of the morph is timeless time, a time outside of history.

This would seem to be the kind of thing you would expect a mythological account to celebrate. Louise Krasniewicz resists the temptation, arguing that mythological metamorphosis acquires, in the late twentieth century, a specific content concenring our relations with our technologies. In effect, the morph is a trope, like narrative, which is pretty general if not universal, but which is deployed in different ways at different times and in different cultures as a way of negotiating difference. A similar but more positive thesis underpins Marcha Kinder's useful economic and business analysis of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: the ability to morph is emblematic of the social and psychological need for resilience and adaptation.

Angela Ndalianis adds a reading of the morph as the spectacle of technology itself in a detailed account of the Terminator: 3D ride at Universal Studios, Florida. Roger Warren Beebe writes on the posthuman. Victoria Duckett writes on Orlan, the French artist who undergoes plastic surgery as a form of performance. Personally, I think Orlan is more an example of wealth frittered away for its own sake than anything to do with feminism or identity, but the essay is usefully critical if, like Orlan's performances, a trifle stomach-churning. Norman Klein contributes an evocative and completely un-summarisable tour of morphs in animation. And Scott Bukatman, whose recent essays go from strength to strength, has another cracking one here, culminating in a reading of The Mask as Jim Carey in blackface. So no shortage of variety.

The anthology succeeds despite that breadth of reference: because its editor has worked judicously with her authors to ensure that the chapters fit; that they address a common object; that they share a certain range of methods; and that their arguments form a harmonious counterpoint. But it also benefits from the wide range of sources and resources that only a group of authors can bring to bear. The time has come when we have to stop talking about 'the digital' as if there were only a single culture and a a single technology. Like Ken Goldberg's anthology The Robot in the Garden which deals exclusively with telerobotic art, Sobchack's anthology has the courage to focus on one significant form of the digital, and to wring from it its cultural significance. Four of the authors were still completing PhDs when the book went to press. There's a whole new generation of scholars coming up, and if this is any indiactor, there are some sharp minds among them.