Volume 14, 2008

Guest Editors: Tessa Dwyer & Mehmet Mehmet

Contents

1. Double Trouble: Editorial - Tessa Dwyer & Mehmet Mehmet

2. The Mosaic-Screen: Exploration and Definition – Sergio Dias Branco

3. Sound and Space in the Split-Screen Movie – Ian Garwood

4. The Embedded Screen and the State of Exception: Counterterrorist Narratives and the “War on Terror” – Cormac Deane

5. “What Am I… Beloved or Bewitched?” Split Screens, Gender Confusion, and Psychiatric Solutions in The Dark Mirror – Tim Snelson

6. Medusa in the Mirror: The Split World of Brian De Palma’s Carrie – David Greven

7. The Double Side of Delay: Sutapa Biswas’ film installation Birdsong and Gilles Deleuze’s Actual/Virtual Couplet – Maria Walsh

8. Missed Encounters: Film Theory and Expanded Cinema – Bruno Lessard

9. Four Cameras are Better than One: Division as Excess in Mike Figgis’ Timecode – Nadia Bozak

10. The Aesthetics of Displays: How the Split Screen Remediates Other Media – Malte Hagener

11. Double Take: Rotoscoping and the Processing of Performance – Kim Louise Walden

Split screens spell double trouble. This special issue of Refractory is devoted to the dangers of division, the difficulties of duality and the duplicity of the double, not to mention acts of severing, splintering and splicing.

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Abstract: The split screen is a well-known multi-frame technique used in film, television, and video. This essay focuses on cases in which this denomination seems incorrect, but that are currently classified under the same heading. In these instances, images of usually distinct characteristics are arranged on screen. The aim is to explore and define this specific technique, here termed mosaic-screen. Continue Reading »

Abstract: This article focuses on the operation of sound in the split-screen movie. It concentrates, in particular, on instances where the storytelling function of sound is accompanied by the aural exploration of the split screen as a specific spatial form. Different relationships between the soundtrack and multiple frames are demonstrated through examples from The Thomas Crown Affair, The Boston Strangler and Timecode. Continue Reading »

Abstract: The embedded screen is a key feature of contemporary film and television texts featuring ‘terrorism’. Recurring chronotopes in these narratives, such as the control room and television news programmes, present us with frames within frames that have two complementary functions. First, embedded frames enact circular modes of logic, such as tautology and autology, which are crucial in the creation of a coherent notion of ‘terrorism’. Second, embedded frames are the screen-manifestation of the legal concept of the state of exception, which must be invoked so that the forces of law and order can take extraordinary measures in the face of a ‘terrorist’ threat. The rhetoric of interiority/exteriority that is enunciated by the frame within a frame reflects and constitutes sovereignty’s reliance on the notion of the state of exception in order to establish and consolidate itself. Just as, following Giorgio Agamben and others, the state of exception is at the heart of the power of the state, so is the embedded frame at the heart of the depiction of power in contemporary narratives. This analysis is based primarily on the television series 24 and on films based on novels by Tom Clancy. Continue Reading »

Abstract: This article suggests that the representational themes and strategies of The Dark Mirror find resonance on many discursive and disciplinary levels. It argues that the film responds to popular post-war debates regarding cinema, gender, psychology, and their intersection, through the “unravelling” of its unusual split-screen technique. Continue Reading »

Abstract: Brian De Palma’s Carrie obsessively thematizes splitting in myriad forms, both formally and thematically. On a meta-textual level, the film’s thematic of splitting represents the director’s highly productive agon with the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock. In this film, De Palma intertextually engages with Hitchcock’s career-long concerns with femininity and identification. Carrie’s most potent theme, however, is the violent splitting of the mother-daughter relationship in patriarchy. Carrie unsettles the Oedipal narrative into which Freud inserted female psychosexual development. The film demands – by manifesting – a different mythic narrative of feminine identity and power from the Freudian Oedipal one, one that nods towards an alternative archetypal narrative: the myth of Persephone, her abduction by Hades to the underworld and her mother Demeter’s world-destroying grief. Continue Reading »

Abstract: In this essay I position the Deleuzian circuit of the actual and the virtual in relation to a film installation, Sutapa Biswas’ Birdsong (2004), in order to open up a reading of the film in terms of affect. Biswas’ film, in which a boy confronts a horse in a period living room, can be read in terms of maternal anxiety and against a background of colonial and psychoanalytic discourse. There is nothing wrong with these readings per se except that they all but ignore the affective dimension of the film, which largely derives from the slight time delay between the doubled shots. This gap exposes the other side of the image, its virtual side, which opens the spectator up to differences that exceed objectification. Following a Deleuzian trajectory, I argue that this gap exposes the double nature of objects of fantasy. Biswas’ film stages repetition and passive reception, generating an occasion for a poetics of becoming other. Continue Reading »

Abstract: This article examines the intriguing treatment of expanded cinema in two seminal texts in film theory: Stephen Heath’s Questions of Cinema and Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image. I argue that expanded forms of cinema such as the split screen and its related forms of spectatorship represent a technological double of classical Hollywood cinema that functioned as a ghostly presence until the late 1960s. Thereafter, the prospect of a “future cinema” opened the door to notions of expanded space and indeterminate forms of spectatorship that dovetailed uneasily with the 1970s theorization of the cinematic apparatus. Heath’s invocation of “other cinemas” and Deleuze’s recourse to “electronic images” indicate a concern for expanded cinema that would ultimately point to unresolved tensions pertaining to the future of moving image productions in terms of ideological determinations, narrative continuity, spectatorial agency, and social relevance. Continue Reading »

Abstract: This paper argues that the democratisation of digital cinema has inaugurated a prevalence of the long take and the split screen and a resultant excess of images. Mike Figgis’ use of both the split screen and long take in his Timecode exemplifies the intimate connections between surveillance culture, digitisation and ideologies of material wealth. The idea, then, is that the split screen and the long take function in tandem as codified expressions of industrial culture’s ostensible abundance and patterns of consumption. The connection between aesthetics and economics is registered not only in terms of the raw materials necessary to record the image, but, when the image is multiplied by the split screen and then protracted within a long take, of vision itself. Continue Reading »