Frames Cinema Journal

Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the

Film Object and Skipping ROPE (Through
http://framescinemajournal.com

Hitchcock’s Joins)
By Catherine Grant

Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins)

AUDIO COMMENTARY ON/OFF

Skipping ROPE from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

AUDIO COMMENTARY ON/OFF

Skipping ROPE with AUDIO COMMENTARY from Catherine Grant on

Vimeo.

Bonus Track: Transcription of Commentary

Touching the Film Object

AUDIO COMMENTARY ON/OFF

TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

AUDIO COMMENTARY ON/OFF

Touching The Film Object with AUDIO COMMENTARY from Catherine

Grant on Vimeo.

Bonus Track: Transcription of Commentary

Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital?,

2012-07-02. This article (including the videos embedded above) is
licensed by Catherine Grant under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

1/9
Frames
BonusCinema Journal
Tracks: Transcriptions of Commentary
http://framescinemajournal.com
Transcript 1 (Expanded Version)

Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins) is a videographic

assemblage, made by Catherine Grant, of all the edits in Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1948 Rope, together with adjacent dialogue.

[Serious minded criticism of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope] may be

considered almost definitively shaped by a ritual of recounting
and assessing the director’s desire to do the film, as he put it, ‘in a
single shot,’ or at any rate, as nearly without the benefit of
montage as the state-of-the-art allowed in 1948, when a camera
held only ten minutes worth of film. [Yet this technicist bias] has
hardly managed to generate a single accurate account of the
technique in question. […] [For Rope‘s] irregularities and
inconsistencies [its film critics] substitute a programmatic
perfection that better supports the dream of a continuous film […]
than Hitchcock’s actual shooting practice. (D.A. Miller 119)]

Hello there. Welcome to the audio commentary for the videographical

assemblage Skipping Rope (Through Hitchcock’s Joins).

Ever since I began to experiment with audiovisual film studies exactly

three years ago, I wanted to make the video you are watching right now.
In fact, if I could only have conceived of scholarly work in anything other
than a written format, I would have dreamt of making it a lot longer ago,
probably back in 1991 when I first read D.A. Miller’s essay on Hitchcock’s
film Rope from which you can read excerpts in this preface [and above].

In his essay Miller set out the difficulties with the procedure of ‘telling’
rather than ‘showing’ in film analysis, indeed what Adrian Martin calls,
in his contribution to this inaugural issue of Frames, ‘the necessary
labour of description’, once the ‘ekphrastic’ domain of words alone’
[referring to Clayton and Klevan 2011, passim].

Miller had indicated that not only had numerous film critics
misrecognised or misdescribed what they had seen of the editing in
Hitchcock’s film, perhaps befuddled by the director’s own statement of
his aim of doing the film ‘in a single shot’, but that these critics remained,
possibly phobically indifferent to the film’s ‘narrative homosexuality’
[Miller 148]. Of his argument that editing becomes an alibi and a wilful
distraction for these critics, he writes

I have of course been implying that if technique is considered a

2/9
Framesmore
Cinema Journal question than the critical results even begin to
engrossing
warrant, and homosexuality a less interesting one [than] can
http://framescinemajournal.com
plausibly be the case, the reason is that both questions have been
unconsciously but definitively crossed with one another, so that
technique acquires all the transgressive fascination of
homosexuality, while homosexuality is consigned to the status of a
dry technical detail. [Ibid.]

My video study of Hitchcock’s joins in Rope may be considered almost

definitively, and certainly perversely, shaped by its own technicist dream:
that of generating an accurate account in motion pictures of the
minimalistic editing technique and related shooting practices of the 1948
film. This assemblage, created through postproduction rituals of excision
and transition, entertains a phenomenological as well as critical
possibility. It offers viewers the ability to experience linear moving image
and sound juxtapositions in real, or near real, time. We can feel, as well
as know about, the comparisons this video makes.

In other words, unlike written texts, this study doesn’t have to remove
itself from film-specific forms of meaning production to have its
knowledge effects on us. And yet, like Miller’s earlier critics, in
assembling this audiovisual experience, I am once again crossing editing
techniques with homosexuality, the latter ever more beguilingly and yet
intensively exposed when its envisioning is distilled down to the moments
around the cutting in Hitchcock’s remarkable film.

Transcript 2 (Expanded Version)

Touching the Film Object?, a video collage by Catherine Grant, offers a

brief audiovisual exploration of issues of sensuous proximity, contiguity
or contact in experiencing or studying films – what theorist Laura U.
Marks called ‘hapticity’. The music in the video is excerpted from Robert
Lippok and Beatrice Martini’s 2009 collaboration ‘Branches’ (available at
the Free Music Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License).

Haptic criticism keeps its surface rich and textured, so it can

interact with things in unexpected ways. It has to be humble,
willing to alter itself according to what it is in contact with. It has
to give up ideas when they stop touching the other’s surface.
[Laura U. Marks, ‘Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes’,
Framework” the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004, pp. 79-82, 80]

Welome to the audio commentary for the video collage Touching the Film
3/9
Frames Cinema Journal
Object.

http://framescinemajournal.com
As a longtime devotee of observing from a scholarly distance, I had never
been grabbed before — or, indeed, ‘clasped’ or ‘fastened’ (the original
meanings of the Ancient Greek verb haptein) — by Laura Marks’ notion of
‘haptic visuality’. But after I had made some video essays about films, the
desire to explore hapticity and its workings took hold. This is how this
collage and this commentary came into being.

While I still believe that Marks’ concept could benefit from a more
thorough thinking through in relation to audiovisuality, hapticity — a
grasp of what can be sensed of an object in close contact with it — seems
to me now to be very helpful in conceiving what can take place in the
process of creating videographic film studies. It can also help us more
fully to understand videographic studies as objects to be experienced
themselves.

In the old days, the only people who really got to touch films were those
who worked on them, particularly film editors. As Annette Michelson
(1990) and others have argued, the democratization of the ‘heady
delights’ of editing (Michelson, 1990: 22) was brought about by the
introduction of video technology in the 1970s and 80s. Now, with the
relatively wide availability of digital technology, we can even more easily
share ‘the euphoria one feels at the editing table […] a sharpening
cognitive focus and […] a ludic sovereignty, grounded in that deep
gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence ” [Michelson, 1990: 23].

But, are there other ways in which ‘touching film’ is just a fantasy? In
videographic film studies, do videographers actually touch or handle the
real matter of the film? Or are we only ever able to touch upon the film
experience? Do video essays only make objects of, or objectify, our film
experiences, our insuperable memories of them, our own cinematic
projections?

These questions may not flag up significantly new limitations. Film

critical video essays do seem to work, it seems to me, in the same
‘intersubjective’ zone as that of written film criticism. [As Andrew Klevan
and Alex Clayton argue of this zone, ‘we are immersed in the film as the
critic sees it, hence brought to share a deeply involved perspective’
(2011: 9)].

Yet, in videographical criticism, is there not a different intersubjective

relation, a more transitional one, to the physicality or materiality of the
objective elements of films that the video essays reproduce? Like written
essays, video essays may well ‘”stir our recall”‘ (Klevan and Clayton,
2011: 9) of a film moment or sequence, but they usually do this by
4/9
Frames Cinema
confronting Journal
us with a replay of the actual sequence, too. How might this
difference count?
http://framescinemajournal.com

If nothing else, this confrontation with, or, to put it more gently, this
inevitable re-immersion in the film experience, ought to make
videographic critics pursue humility in their analytical observations with
an even greater focus, make them especially ‘willing to alter [their
analyses] according to what [they come into] contact with […] give up
ideas when they stop touching the other’s surface’ (Marks, 2004: 80).

A further, built-in, random element in non-linear digital video editing —

the fact that this process frequently confronts the editor with graphic
matter from the film [e.g. thumbnails] that he or she may not specifically
have chosen to dwell on — may also encourage a particularly humble,
usefully (at times) non-instrumental form of looking that Swalwell (2002)
detects in Marks’ notion of hapticity.

[As Marks writes, ‘Whether criticism is haptic, in touch with its object, is
a matter of the point at which the words lift off’ (2004: 80). Haptic
criticism must be what happens, then, when the words don’t lift off the
surface of the film object, if they (or any of the other film-analytical
elements conveyed through montage or other non-linear editing
techniques and tools) remain on on the surface of the film object, as they
often do in videographic film studies. In addition to this, video essays on
films may often be an especially ‘superficial‘ form of criticism, frequently
using slow motion or zoom-in effects to allow those experiencing them to
close in on the grain or detail of the film image.

With so many words, or other filmanalytical strategies, simultaneously

available to be sensed on the surface of the image and, in terms of sound
strategies (such as voiceovers or other added elements), seeming to
emanate from it, videographical film studies may be curiously haptic
objects, then. It is useful to remember that the art historical concept of
haptic visuality emerged from the scholarly and artistic traditions
of formalism, which made procedures such as defamiliarization central to
their practice. Defamiliarization — the uncanny distancing effect of an
altered perspective on (such as a hyper-proximity to) an otherwise
familiar object — may be one of the greatest benefits of the particular
hapticity of videographical film criticism.]

Finally, does TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? practice what it preaches?

Or, does it only practice one of the things it preaches? It isn’t, primarily, a
piece of haptic film criticism produced in close contact with the film.
Instead, it’s a film-theory object which ‘grabs’ from it, transforms what it
grabs, and lifts off, or not, from there.

5/9
Frames
PersonaCinema
doesn’t Journal
exactly disappear, though, either from the literal or
metaphorical frames of the collage. Like many of Ingmar Bergman’s
http://framescinemajournal.com
works, this 1966 film treats (and inhabits) the perilous zone of
borderlines between one person and another, its characters act out
extreme forms of projective identification and introjection.
Indeed, Persona explores some of the real psychological dangers of
‘hapticity’, of not being able to separate, or to see others detachedly –
‘optically’. Some of those perils still find themselves evoked in the
elements I selected for inclusion.

[But, by selecting one sequence from others, by slowing it, and by

replacing the film’s soundtrack, the video collage does mitigate those
dangers. It suspends them in order to close in on a visual track which
simultaneously presents a ‘haptic image’ (the blurry, interchanging faces
– made more haptic, possibly, by the slowed motion and zoom in) and an
‘optical’, or more clearly defined one (the Rückenfigur-esque image of the
boy, who is himself pictured having a haptic experience). The
combination of these images may well hint at Laura Marks’ (and my) ideal
critical frame. Marks writes,

‘I take advantage of this moment to beseech those who are newly

encountering haptic thinking to keep alive the dialectic with the
optical! […]The goal of haptic and sensuous criticism is to
enhance our human capacities, rather than entirely replacing
critical distance with haptic intimacy. I suggest we embrace and
cultivate all our perceptual and cognitive and feeling capacities,
keeping in mind the meanings that motivate them’ (Marks, 2004:
82).]

Touching the Film Object? And Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s

Joins) were made according to principles of Fair Use or Fair Dealing, with
non-commercial scholarly and critical aims, and were published under
a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License in
August 2011 and May 2012.

References and Selected Bibliography:

Barlow, Melinda, ‘[Review of] Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory

Media’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2003

Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, ‘Desire Roped In: Notes on the Fetishism of the

Long Take in Rope,’ Rouge, 4, 2004 (online at:
http://www.rouge.com.au/4/rope.html)

Damasio, Antonio R., ‘How Hitchcock’s Rope Stretches Time’ in

6/9
Frames CinemaWhen’,
‘Remembering Journal
Scientific American, 287.3, September 2002

http://framescinemajournal.com
Deutelbaum, Marshall, ‘Hitchcock in Hollywood’, in Deutelbaum (ed.), A
Hitchcock Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1989)

Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock; or The Plain

Man’s Hitchcock (Boston: MIT Classics, 1974)

Grant, Catherine, ‘Auteur machines? Auteurism and the DVD’, in James

Bennett and Tom Brown (eds), Film and Television After DVD (London
and New York: Routledge, 2008)

Grant, Catherine, ‘Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in

Intertextual Film Studies’, MEDIASCAPE, forthcoming 2012

Grant, Catherine, ‘Audiovisual Alfred Hitchcock Studies’, Film Studies

For Free, May 14, 2012Grant, Catherine, ‘Deleuzian Film Studies in
Memory of David Vilaseca’, Film Studies For Free, March 13, 2010

Grant, Catherine, ‘Sensing cinema: phenomenological film and media

studies’, Film Studies For Free, October 26, 2009

Keathley, Christian, ‘La Camera-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and

Cinephilia’, in Clayton, Alex and Klevan, Andrew (eds.), The Language
and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011

Klevan, Andrew and Clayton, Alex, ‘Introduction’, in Clayton and Klevan

(eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge,
2011

Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment,

and the Senses. London: Duke University Press, 2000

Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media.

London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Marks, Laura U., ‘Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes’, Framework:
the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004 (large pdf – scroll down to p. 79)

Martin, Adrian, ‘In So Many Words’, Frames #1, July 2012

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. trans. by Colin

Smith. New York: Humanities Press, 1962

Michelson, Annette, ‘The Kinetic Icon in the work of Mourning:

Prolegomena for the Analysis of a Textual System,’ October 52 (spring
7/9
Frames Cinema Journal
1990)

http://framescinemajournal.com
Miller, D.A., ‘Anal Rope,’ in Diana Fuss [ed.] Inside/Out: Lesbian
Theories, Gay Theories (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)

Perkins, Claire, ‘This Time It’s Personal: Touch: Sensuous Theory and
Multisensory Media by Laura U. Marks’, Senses of Cinema, Issue 33,
2004

Perkins, V.F., ‘Rope,’ Movie 7 (February-March 1963)

Sobchack, Vivian. ‘Phenomenology and the Film Experience’, in Viewing

Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams, 36-58. New
Brunswick: New Jersey, 1997

Sobchack, Vivian. ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and

Electronic “Presence”’, in Materialities of Communication, edited by Hans
Ulrich Gumbrechts and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, 83-106. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1994

Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image

Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004

Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film

Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992

Swalwell, Melanie ‘The Senses and Memory in Intercultural Cinema’,

Film Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 32, October 2002

Totaro, Donato ‘Deleuzian Film Analysis: The Skin of the Film‘, Off Screen
, June 2002

Truffaut, François, Hitchcock/Truffaut (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1967)

Wallace, Lee, ‘Continuous sex: the editing of homosexuality

in Bound and Rope‘, Screen, 41.4 (2000)

Widdis, Emma, ‘Muratova’s Clothes, Muratova’s Textures, Muratova’s

Skin’, Kinocultura, Issue 8, April 2005

Winnicott, D.W, ‘The Location of Cultural Experience’, Playing and

Reality. London: Routledge, 2005

Winnicott, D.W., ‘The Location of Cultural Experience’, Playing and

Reality (London: Routledge, 2005)
8/9
 Frames Cinema Journal
Copyright

http://framescinemajournal.com
Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital?,
2012-07-02. This article (including the videos embedded above) is
licensed by Catherine Grant under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

9/9

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)