# Thoughts on *Photogénie Plastique*

Érik Bullot

It is said that in 1637, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher asked to be taken into the crater of Mount Vesuvius in order to take a closer look at the volcano about to erupt. In his book of 1665, *Mundus subterraneus*, Kircher presents a comprehensive inventory of the geological knowledge of his age, interweaving considerations of underground water networks, petrifaction, and insect formations, even dedicating a chapter to fireworks. A phantasmagoria enthusiast who was among the first to codify the principle of the magic lantern, Kircher saw a relationship between the sight of the erupting volcano and these proto-cinematic projections of light.

With the rise of the digital film, whether shot on cell phones, distributed on YouTube, or exhibited in art museums or galleries, cinema is currently undergoing a similarly eruptive metamorphosis. The medium seems to exceed its own boundaries; but is this medium still cinema? Has the art of cinema stayed the same through this digital transformation, or has it changed? For me, this question raises the issue of plasticity. Plasticity: the ability to bestow form on a substance, but also contradictorily, the resistance of the substance to this very transformation. Plasticity differs from elasticity, which holds the possibility of reverting to an original form without retaining the imprint of its transformation. Rather, plasticity designates the propensity of a material to undergo permanent deformation, the capacity to change in response to environmental demands as neurons and synapses change their internal parameters in response to their experiences, their memories. Is cinema plastic? Can it transform itself and/or resist deformation?

Contemporary visual art would seem to represent the limits of cinema's transformation and plasticity. As a filmmaker, my own work explores these limits. My films are situated midway between documentary and the installation film. I can shoot a film for a screening or a museum. Do these possibilities mean cinema has become a plastic art?

I will put two questions face to face. Is cinema a plastic art? And if so, what constitutes the plasticity of cinema? It was in the mid-twenties, during the prolific period of silent cinema, that the plasticity of cinema – the form bestowed upon its material basis but also the medium's resistance to its deformation – was most
often called into question. This line of inquiry is found in two famous remarks: one from 1922 by the art historian Élie Faure in the aptly-named article “De la cinéplastique,”¹ and the other from 1926 by Jean Epstein in his book *Le Cinémato-graphe vu de l’Etna*.²

Faure endeavors to situate cinema within the spectrum of the other arts and, like a prophet, he defines plasticity as cinema’s distinctive vocation. Not only is cinema the plastic art *par excellence*, it also comes closest to its “truth” when emphasizing its plasticity. Plasticity, then, is the very essence of cinema. Faure’s text ends with a description of Mount Vesuvius. Recounting the spectacle of the erupting volcano, he writes: “I thought I saw in it a formal symbol of this grandiose art whose seed we perceive, and which the future doubtless has in store for us: a great moving construction constantly bringing itself back to life under our eyes from sheer internal force, and which the great variety of human, animal, vegetable and inert forms help build.”³

Striving to define *photogénie* as cinema’s peculiar virtue, Epstein’s essay opens onto a superb description of his ascent of the erupting Mount Etna, which offers a metaphor for the animistic power of cinema: “As we climbed on our mules’ backs toward the active crater parallel to the lava flow, I thought of you, Canudo, who threw so much of your soul into things. You were the first, I think, to have sensed how the cinema unites all the kingdoms of nature into a single order, one possessing the most majestic vitality.”⁴

For these two authors, the attraction of the volcanic eruption represents the ultimate metaphor of cinema’s plasticity. Just as lava fuses different states of matter, the cinematic image produces dissimilarity without rupturing its resemblance to its referent. *Photogénie* hinges upon the existence of a gap between resemblance and difference. Epstein says that cinema would be useful for justice because it works like a proof, revealing not truth or falsity but rather producing both truth and skepticism of truth. Epstein was likewise fascinated by the relationship between nature and the cinematic image. Cinema’s plasticity is at work within these tensions. Like *photogénie*, plasticity designates the capacity of the cinematic image to achieve a quantum leap, both mimetic and dissimilar. Cinema has the power to constitute an autonomous language of visual signs, akin to gestures and ideographs. This is undoubtedly why the debate about plasticity is so closely tied to the silent cinema, which invented a real alphabet of signs and gestures through the art of editing.

But exactly what is this plastic attribute of cinema? Faure first notes a particular tonal or pictorial quality of cinema that revealed itself to him “in a flash”: “The revelation of what cinema can be in the future came to me one day: I kept the memory intact, of the commotion I felt at noticing, in a flash, the magnificence evidenced in the affinity between a piece of black clothing and the gray wall of an inn.”⁵ The harmony of muted colors is detached from the things themselves.
Plasticity is a quality of abstraction. According to Faure, plastic cinema rid itself of the subject in order to favor the affinities of light amidst masses and volumes. “The sentimental framework must be but the skeleton of the autonomous organism represented by the film. It has to wind its way through time under the plastic drama, as an arabesque circulates through space to arrange a painting.”⁶ These visual games, subject to continuous variations, define the plasticity of cinema by transforming the film through “a system of values ranging from white to black and constantly combined, moving, changing on the surface and the depth of the screen.”⁷ This description already reveals what precipitates the comparison between cinema and the volcanic eruption: a tremendous power of modulation. Faure describes the plume of smoke emanating from Vesuvius as a vast, plastic medium: “Inside this cloud, massive volumes of ash were constantly forming and deforming, all contributing to the formation of the great sphere and producing on the surface a forever moving and variable undulation, all the while maintained, as though by means of a central attraction within the mass, which neither shape nor dimensions seem to alter.”⁸ The expression “forever moving and variable undulation, all the while maintained” conveys precisely the plastic virtue of cinema, its capacity to receive a form while resisting deformation – that is to say, the interplay between abstraction and representation, between plastic mobility and a pattern’s rigidity. It is probably the perception of this regulatory principle in cinema – the tension between constant, undulating movement and the stabilization of a structure through which the plastic line winds its way – that prompted Faure to evoke the image of the volcano.

The attraction of an erupting volcano never ceases to fascinate; it offers the image of an interregnum. Let’s keep in mind that the different interactions of the various states of volcanic matter (liquid, solid, gaseous) distinguish the eruption’s dynamic types: the effusive, in which flows of liquid lava predominate; the extrusive, in which solid elements abound within a generally dense, highly viscous lava; the explosive, which give birth to brutal explosions of pressurized gas and spew ashen clouds into the sky; and finally, the mixed type, with intermediate characteristics. It is this unstable equilibrium of elements, upon which the lava’s high or low level of viscosity depends, that models the flow’s morphology. Lava comes close to complying with the definition of plasticity; it is given a form according to the different types of eruptive dynamism, all the while resisting deformation thanks to the explosive mode, which releases the over-pressurized matter. It is not surprising that this scene – the constant modulation of matter between the form’s continuous effusion and threat of explosion – should have fascinated both Faure and Epstein.

Cinema’s plasticity designates its capacity to abstract “in a flash” a distinct motif within the continuum of forms. For Faure, the harmony of black and gray exerts a tension – never resolved – between its autonomous visual power and its role within the diegesis. This tension belongs to plasticity.
Doesn't Faure's description of the gap between the continuous modulation of form and the discontinuous (momentary) flash of the motif precisely match the definition of *photogénie* Epstein provides in *Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna? Photogénie* presupposes an amplification of the cinematic sign. "I will describe as photogenic any aspect of things, beings and souls that increases its moral quality through cinematic reproduction."⁹ The photogenic leap characterizes both a gain and a gap between the object and its reproduction. This gap is comparable to Faure's plastic perception of film, which consists of isolating a figure within a continuous framework. But where does this photogenic quality lie? Epstein continually hesitates to ascribe *photogénie* exclusively to objects, techniques, or spectators. Is it intrinsic to movement, a gift within one's gaze, or a process? It at once characterizes a quality of the object (a face can be described as photogenic); the animist power of the medium, capable of revealing this quality; and a virtue of film technique. Thus, *photogénie* belongs to none of these terms in particular, yet conveys the specificity of each – and their respective gaps. It serves as a regulating principle.

Based upon photographic resemblance and upon the difference made possible by the expressive leap, *photogénie* tries to settle on a mobile and contradictory point hinging on both surprise and anticipation. This is undoubtedly why *photo-génie* allows for reflection upon the plasticity of cinema: it connects in an improbable configuration the modulation of forms arising from the continuum of photographic reproduction with their deformation, which arises from the medium's expressive power. Epstein writes that "[s]light teeters upon similarities." This game involving modulation and rupture gets to the very heart of the structural principle of cinema caught between the continuous impression of movement and the discontinuous reality of film's photographic nature.

Defined as the gap between the power of metamorphosis and the threat of rupture that regulates its excess, *photogénie* attempts to juxtapose two opposing propositions, yet without offering a solution. How does one anticipate the photogenic revelation? How does one reconcile calculation and surprise? How does one establish a method from shimmering, intermittent, discontinuous qualities? Such is the logical and poetic challenge of *photogénie*. In terms of semantic mobility – action, quality, state – *photogénie* performs magically. It internalizes non-contradiction in the meeting of opposites, ruins the principle of identity, reveals the plurality of time and its reversibility, and evinces cinema's animistic and metamorphic powers. In this respect, one can notice the links between *photogénie* and the magical force that Marcel Mauss describes:

> We are therefore entitled to conclude that the notion enclosing that of magic power has existed everywhere. It is that of pure efficiency, which is nonetheless a material substance that can be located, as well as a spiritual one, which acts at a distance and yet through direct connection, if not by contact; mobile
and shifting without any movement, it is impersonal while assuming personal forms, both divisible and continuous.¹⁰

Photogénie, situated between terms that evoke it but do not contain it, acts like a magic power; it is a variable of time. “Like the philosopher’s stone,” Epstein writes as a reader well acquainted with the Kabbalah and alchemy, “the cinematograph holds the power of universal transmutations. But this secret is extraordinarily simple: all this magic can be reduced to the capacity to bring about variations in the dimension and orientation of time.”¹¹

If plasticity designates the power to model time, does cinema have the power to model its own history? Indeed, the perception of cinema's plasticity is linked in Faure's text to the future of the medium. Not only is this perception sudden and dazzling, but it is also accompanied by a feeling of foreboding for the future of the seventh art. Plasticity produces a strange confusion, one which suggests that cinema operates in the future perfect tense. Its plasticity is thought to be in the making. It remains unstable, uncertain. It is the vocation of cinema to be a plastic art, but this vocation has yet to come: it must be established and verified. However, doubts concerning the limits of cinema's plasticity can be found in Faure's text. Specifically, Faure is skeptical of cinema's capacity to become a collective art. Without predicting the introduction of talkies (he writes in 1922), he conceives plastic cinema as a power yet to come that faces growing threats from industry and commerce. Hence the figure of the volcano, with its unpredictable and untimely returns to activity, in which plastic cinema lays dormant; it is a figure that plays on the contrast between the continuous modulation of forms and their explosive fate, the promise of art and the threat of its ossification.

For Epstein, the fate of cinema must obey the imperative injunction expressed by *photogénie*: “Cinema must strive to gradually and eventually become strictly cinematic, i.e. to use only photogenic elements. *Photogénie* is the purest expression of cinema.”¹² Still, it is a difficult injunction to grant, for it is whimsical and unpredictable. “Until today, I have not yet seen pure *photogénie* lasting a full minute,” Epstein writes.¹³ *Photogénie* possesses the same fleetingly as does the plastic power of cinema revealed to Faure “in a flash.” “One must admit,” Epstein continues,

that it [*photogénie*] is a spark and an exception by fits and starts. I like the mouth about to talk yet still silent, the movement swinging from right to left, the backward step before taking a leap, and the leap before the stumbling block, the fate, the hesitation, the compressed spring, the prelude, and, even better, the piano being tuned before the opening. *Photogénie* operates in the future and imperative modes. It does not recognize the present state of being.¹⁴
Epstein likewise perceives a lethal power in the spectacle of the erupting volcano. Evoking Mt. Etna, he writes: "The place where I reflected upon the most beloved living machine [cinema] was this quasi absolute death zone that circled the first craters within a one or two kilometer radius."¹⁵

By locating a tension between effusion and explosion at the heart of cinema, between the splendor of a revelation and its unstable fate, Faure and Epstein define a discontinuous temporality polarized by this tension: on the one hand, effusive metamorphosis – expressed by the animism of the close-up, the kingdoms of nature elapsing in slow motion, the modulation of forms – and on the other hand, the explosive rupture produced by photogenic splendor. It is a temporality for which the volcano offers a metaphor, both for Faure’s notion of plasticity and for Epstein’s *photogénie*. This plasticity implies a temporality torn between the creation of modulated forms and their possible disappearance: “[I]f volcanism is the fastest geological phenomenon to guarantee new terrestrial landforms, it is also the only one able to annihilate them almost instantaneously.”¹⁶ Unstable and reactive, cinema’s plasticity is a promise and a threat, a virtuality that may not be actualized. To this extent, we may consider that cinema is a plastic art without being plastic in itself. Such is its paradox. Its effusive-explosive history is that of a continuous-discontinuous invention, with the unpredictability of a volcano.

What about the history of cinema as a plastic art? For Epstein, the cinematic image evokes preverbal language, akin to the ideogram, by offering visual simultaneity instead of the consecutiveness of articulated language and by developing contradictory and reversible logics devoid of causality: “All the details simultaneously pronounced beyond the words trigger the words at their root, and before the words themselves, toward the feelings that precede them.”¹⁷ For Faure, plastics is based on a genealogy inspired by dance and pantomime. I will not discuss at this time the theoretical relevance of cinema as an ideograph, but I will point out that it is precisely because cinema does not speak that it is said to be of a plastic quality. Even if Epstein later tried to theorize sound as another plastic element of cinema, *photogénie* remains primarily tied to the visual nature of the cinematic sign. However, this denial of speech is only ostensible, since Epstein supposes that cinema constitutes in itself a universal language: “In this darkness said to be favorable to phenomena of telepathy, that is to say the most distant comprehensions, to the most secretive connections between minds, the surprising language was born, of an unexpected nature, which can be processed by sight but not by sound.”¹⁸

*Photogénie* is the name given to the plasticity of cinema and, as we have seen, is itself reactive and amorphous, belonging to each of the terms defining it. Doesn’t *photogénie* thus specify the tension between the plastic nature of the visual sign, which predates spoken language, and the very possibility of constituting a non-spoken language? Is *photogénie* the name for the impossible coexistence of a lan-
guage formed without speech and yet miming the power of the spoken word? It is
not surprising that Epstein asks these questions in the years immediately preced-
ing the coming of the talkies. Although they triggered a temporary setback for the
theory of cineplastics, talkies would only more concretely materialize the tension
between speech and the visual sign, a tension that silent films (and their critics)
already invoked in the specter of a lost, original, and universal language of which
they would be the ghost. The history of cinema as a plastic art will therefore be
marked by the struggle to overcome speech, as a stutterer stumbles over lan-
guage, tripping over the explosive and continuous series of consonants. Charles
Van Riper, the famous speech pathologist, defines stuttering as "a disorder in the
synchrony of articulatory movements, prompting an impediment in their tempor-
al adjustment during the pronunciation of phonemes."¹⁹ Shouldn't cinema as a
plastic art be defined, paradoxically, as a "disorder of synchrony" that not only
affects the film itself - subjected to the disparities between its narrative content
and formal construct, between sound and image (the technical definition of asyn-
chronous cinema) - but also describes the history of the medium as an instru-
ment of discontinuous temporality, mediating the dissimilarity between stillness
and movement? Photogénie names this disorder.

The history of cinema confirms this disorder. Cinema as a plastic art falters. Its
history is discontinuous, broken, alternating between ruptures and repetitions; it
proceeds by leaps and bounds. I will not dwell on this transgressive history,
which remains to be written. Instead, I will look more closely at the model of
temporality cinema devises, and the ways in which time can invest cinema with a
future. As an invention with no future, as Louis Lumière famously put it, what is
the fate of cinema today? Can cinema's unstable powers of effusion and deflagra-
tion even allow for a future? At a time when the digital evolution of the image
shatters the photographic continuum, can we still find a future for the plasticity
of cinema? Or have we moved from a plastic art to a "plasmatic" art? I will take up
a notion put forth by Sergei Eisenstein about Walt Disney's animated films and
his characters' continuous transformations. Struck by the parallel between ani-
mism and animation, Eisenstein ponders the variability of forms. How can a
form vary continuously? Eisenstein calls this power of metamorphosis "plasmati-
city," which he also recognizes in the variations of fire and clouds:

> A faculty I will name ‘plasmaticity’ since, here, the being reproduced in the
drawing, the being of the given form, the being having achieved a certain ap-
pearance behaves like the original protoplasm that did not yet have a ‘stabi-
lized’ form but was capable of adopting one, any one, and, one level at a time,
of evolving until it attached itself to any – to all –forms of animal existence.²⁰

If plasmaticity does indeed describe a power of metamorphosis close to plasticity,
it nevertheless presupposes polymorphism without a point of rupture. The ani-
mated characters' bodies, even fragmented, abstracted, animalized, and trans-
muted, can still return to their initial forms; they are elastic, but not plastic. Then
again, placing the fate of plastic cinema in the animated film was one of the
prophecies that concludes Faure's "De la cinéplastique." A parallel can probably
be drawn today with the digital image. By cutting the umbilical cord between the
image and its referent, the animated film and the digital image move somewhat
away from the explosive pole of plasticity, thereby giving way to a power endowed
with elasticity, much like *morphing*. If *photogénie* is defined by a fluid triad of motif,
medium, and process and is not based solely on photographic ontology, can it
make allowances for its own evolution? Can the plastic model express the plas-
matic leap?

We are currently witnessing an unprecedented dissemination of cinema in social
space, thanks to computers, digital cameras, and a wide range of distribution and
exhibition technologies. These media relentlessly mingle image and inscription.
My mobile phone is all at once a camera, a dictation machine, a typewriter, a
calculator, a video monitor, and, sometimes, a telephone. The computer com-
bines and confuses all these functions. This interchangeability between the lin-
guistic and the visual influences my own practice. I have made a video with a cell
phone, *Visible Speech*, which intertwines two texts: Diderot's "Lettre sur les aveug-
gles" and a definition of "visible speech" with Alexander Melville Bell's system of
phonetic notation which illustrates the physical movements that produce the
sounds of language. These texts are read by synthetic voices that serve as "blind
voices." My documentary, *Speaking in Tongues*, encourages linguistic speculation by
showing artificial languages from Esperanto to imaginary tongues. It also renders
homage to the Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov who invented the phonetic lan-
guage Zaum, and to the Canadian artist Michael Snow who performs in a comple-
tely improvised language in the film. In a way, *Speaking in Tongues* is a "silent
movie," because language is a plastic material that can be transformed. An old
problem now renewed, my films explore the plastic dimension of cinema between
word and image. The digital complicates not only the interaction of word and
image but also the relationships between abstraction and representation, trans-
formation and stabilization; these are some of the challenges now facing the plas-
ticity of cinema. If, as Jean Epstein reminds us, "death makes its promises to us
by way of the cinematograph," should we today mourn plasticity?

Translated by Mireille Dobrzynski. This essay is a revised version of an earlier
essay: "Photogénie plastique," in *Plasticité*, ed. Catherine Malabou (Paris: Ed. Léo
Scheer, 2000), pp. 194-207.
Notes

1. Elie Faure, "De la cinéplastique," in L'arbre d'Éden (Paris: Crès, 1922); reprinted in Faure, Fonction du cinéma: de la cinéplastique à son destin social (Paris: Gonthier, 1964), pp. 16-36.

2. Jean Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna (Paris: Les Écrivains réunis, 1926); ESC1, pp. 131-152; infra, 287-310.

3. Faure, "De la cinéplastique," in Faure, Fonction du cinéma, p. 34; Abel1, p. 266.

4. Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna, ESC1, p. 133; infra, 288.

5. Faure, "De la cinéplastique," in Faure, Fonction du cinéma p. 25; Abel1, p. 260.

6. Ibid., p. 32; Abel1, p. 264.

7. Ibid., p. 25; Abel1, p. 260.

8. Ibid., p. 34; Abel1, p. 266.

9. Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna, ESC1, p. 137; infra, 293.

10. Marcel Mauss, "Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie" [1902-1903]; reprinted in Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1997), pp. 110-111.

11. Jean Epstein, L'Intelligence d'une machine [1946], ESC1, p. 323.

12. Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna, ESC1, p. 138; infra, 293.

13. Jean Epstein, "Grossissement" [1921], ESC1, p. 94.

14. Ibid., p. 94.

15. Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna, ESC1, p. 134; infra, 290.

16. Géologie 1, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, dir. J. Goguel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 555.

17. Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna, ESC1, p. 143; infra, 298.

18. Ibid., p. 142; infra, 297.

19. Cited in Anne van Hout and Françoise Estienne-Dejong, Les Bégaiements: histoire, psycho-logie, évaluation, variétés, traitements (Paris: Masson, 1996), p. 112.

20. S. M. Eisenstein, Walt Disney (Strasbourg: Circé, 1991), p. 28.
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1: Jean and Marie Epstein, 1905 (Zopott, Poland). Courtesy Cinémathèque française
Iconothèque</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2: Jean Epstein, date unknown</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3: Jean Epstein during the filming of Le Tempestaire on Belle Isle sur Mer, 1947.
Courtesy Mado Le Gall, Private Collection</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4: A bar fight develops in Coeur Fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923) © la Cinémathèque française</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5: Ivan Mosjoukine as Prince Roundghito-Sing in Le Lion des Mogols (Jean Epstein, 1924) © la Cinémathèque française</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6: Monumental set in Le Lion des Mogols (Jean Epstein, 1924) © la Cinémathèque française</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

Fig. 7: Behind the scene in Le Double amour (Jean Epstein, 1925) © la Cinémathèque française

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

Fig. 8: Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (Jean Epstein, 1925) © la Cinémathèque française
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 9: La Glace à trois faces (Jean Epstein, 1927) © la Cinémathèque française</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 10: La Chute de la maison Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928) © la Cinémathèque française</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 11: Finis Terrae (Jean Epstein, 1929) Courtesy of Agnès Berthola and the Musée Gau-mont</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 12: Life at sea, Mor'Vran (Jean Epstein, 1930) © la Cinémathèque française</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 13: In quicksand in L'Or des mers (Jean Epstein, 1932) © la Cinémathèque française</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 14: A symphony of superimpositions in L'Or des mers (Jean Epstein, 1932) © la Cinémathèque française</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 15: Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947) © la Cinémathèque française</figcaption></figure>