This paper seeks to contextualize the frame by focusing on the formal properties of its specific medium (film). It looks outside of the frame’s function to think about it as a condition of its material. What defines the frame is that it is a product of its photographic condition: it is a direct result of the photochemical material and process (and is therefore contingent on processes of time and timing). Significantly, even in this ‘post-cinema’ climate, we are still conscious of the frame’s link to the medium of film. With this in mind, this paper proceeds to examine how digital formats (e.g. Red Digital Cinema Cameras, Apple Pro Res 422 HQ (Final Cut), and DNxHD (Avid)) appropriate the language that was once unique to the cinematic apparatus (e.g., frame, film gauge, frame rate, exposure) and argues that these terms do not adequately describe the processes by which digital cinema is produced and experienced. Fundamentally, this paper asks: what is so important about the frame? Is the very concept of the frame a defining feature of cinema?
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
The Photochemical Conditions of the Frame
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
16
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2016-10-01
2021-09-22
2016-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Rachel Schaff
2016/10/01
University of Minnesota
2036-461X
26-27
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The Photochemical Conditions of the Frame
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16446/16768
16
The Photochemical Conditions of the Frame
Rachel Schaff, University of Minnesota




Abstract

    This paper seeks to contextualize the frame by focusing on the formal properties
    of its specific medium (film). It looks outside of the frame’s function to think
    about it as a condition of its material. What defines the frame is that it is a
    product of its photographic condition: it is a direct result of the photochemical
    material and process (and is therefore contingent on processes of time and ti-
    ming). Significantly, even in this ‘post-cinema’ climate, we are still conscious of
    the frame’s link to the medium of film. With this in mind, this paper proceeds
    to examine how digital formats (e.g. Red Digital Cinema Cameras, Apple Pro
    Res 422 HQ (Final Cut), and DNxHD (Avid)) appropriate the language that
    was once unique to the cinematic apparatus (e.g., frame, film gauge, frame rate,
    exposure) and argues that these terms do not adequately describe the processes
    by which digital cinema is produced and experienced. Fundamentally, this paper
    asks: what is so important about the frame? Is the very concept of the frame a
    defining feature of cinema?


   We are now in a moment during which any attempt to clarify cinema that
engages film’s specificity is seen as a dismissal of other forms of media. The
arguments that surround these post-cinema or fate-of-cinema questions tend
to reject any discussion of medium specificity as nostalgic or fetishistic. In this
respect, my argument is triggered by the crisis presented by our current post-
media climate of convergence, which threatens to swallow cinema into the lar-
ger stream of audiovisual media, giving content and communication priority
over the material of the medium. But this is not a nostalgic gesture — or even
a lament over cinema’s death — since cinema is not dead yet (though recent
scholarship has suggested otherwise); rather I seek to clarify the photochemical
conditions of the film frame.1


1
 This is necessarily complicated because, as Rosalind Krauss argues, the ‘post-media condition’
has forged a different type of specificity that is more focused on ‘the essence’ of cinema. Here I

                                        Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                                            Rachel Schaff


   While the frame has often been described as an ever-present condition of ci-
nema, its function has been understood in a variety of ways: from the indexical
proof of cinematic realism, to an aspect made visible by the technology of the
cinematic apparatus. It has typically been understood as an opaque ‘window
of vision’ that positions perspective (field of vision), and is taken for granted
as merely a ‘display window’ that makes the world visible.2 The frame touches
the very edge of the image; indeed, it both borders and separates an image from
its environment, displacing depicted space from actual space (and vice-versa).
In film and media studies, there is an emphasis on the aesthetic experience of
cinema’s moving-frame as an interior vision, projected as an exterior visuality
that is enworlded and embodied to exist as film time. What is contained within
the frame then is this distinctive spatio-temporal grammar, as well as the physi-
cal composition and framing of the image, light, camera movement and editing
(mise-en-scène).
   Certainly phenomenological, grammatical and structural analogies have been
useful for explaining these systems established within cinema, but these appro-
aches avoid defining the frame as a material object in lieu of examining its aes-
thetic potential. Nevertheless, what defines the film frame is that it is a product
of its photographic condition: it is a direct result of the photochemical material
and process (and is therefore contingent on material and technical processes of
time and timing). Theories of cinema may divorce film from its photochemistry,
but the medium is firmly rooted in the applied science that produces a specific
chemical reaction between light and photosensitive material. Why haven’t we
looked outside of the frame’s function to focus on the formal properties of its
specific material — the filmstrip? What is the place of the frame in the context
of digital cinema? Thinking about the frame as a condition of its material will
ultimately allow us to consider the ways in which we still rely on the traditional
characteristics of film to describe an idea of cinema. And, more importantly, it
will lead us towards a more comprehensive understanding of the frame as an
intrinsic condition of the medium.


Framing

   With the exception of scholarship about avant-garde, structuralist or ma-
terialist works, the frame is and has been surprisingly under-theorised by film
and media scholars.3 One scholar to take on the subject is art historian Rosalind


follow Krauss’s lead and focus on medium specific practices that attempt to produce the effect of
cinema. Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’. Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition
(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999).
2
  Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), p. 89.
3
  While several scholars write about the frame, their studies tend to overlook its relationship to film
material. The exceptions are works on the still frame or the freeze frame. For example, Laura Mul-

56
                          The Photochemical Conditions of the Frame


Krauss, who describes the frame as the ‘very boundary of the image’ that crops
or cuts what is being represented out of ‘reality-at-large’. Krauss writes: ‘the fra-
me announces that between the part of reality that was cut away and this part
there is a difference; and that this segment which the frame frames is an example
of nature-as-representation, nature-as-sign’.4 She goes on to explain that the ca-
mera produces — the camera frames and makes visible through point-of-view or
focal length — ‘the automatic writing of the world: the constant, uninterrupted
production of signs’. Further, Krauss cites Surrealist photography and photo-
montage as her examples par excellence to show how the frame works ‘silently’
similar to Derridian spacing to indicate a ‘break in the simultaneous experience
of the real, a rupture that issues into sequence’ — but it can also function as
‘ceaseless automatism’ that represents and highlights the frame itself.5 In this
way, she suggests to us that the photographic frame is a formal precondition that
can defer and distend reality, even as it mediates and shapes it through focusing
and selecting vision (what László Moholy-Nagy called the ‘new vision’ of camera
seeing) to supplement our aesthetic experience (hence rendering these images
surreal).
   Clearly Krauss’s understanding of the frame is rooted in the same semiotic
tradition that distinguishes the essence of the photographic image by pointing to
the camera’s frame as both a sign that ruptures and a signifier that shapes reality
as we see it. But more importantly, it speaks to the material quality of the photo-
graphic frame. For many scholars, including Krauss, photography’s material che-
mical base gives it a privileged relationship to reality.6 When the photographic
machine registers an image as an inscription of light, a chemical reaction remains
on photosensitive film as a trace of whatever was in front of the lens. Because of
the nature of its light sensitive photochemical material, a photograph is an im-
print, a trace, a reference, or a transfer of the real world onto the image. It simul-
taneously mediates reality and corroborates its existence. From this perspective,
the primary function of the photochemical material and process is to reproduce
an indexical sign: a guarantee of representability.7


vey explains that unlike the still photograph, the freeze frame is in perpetual motion. The freeze
frame is a reference back to the photographic frame — it an optical effect constituted by printing
one identical frame across the consecutive time of the filmstrip. This process of holding arrests film
action, creating an illusion of stillness that replaces cinema’s illusion of movement. However, in the
end, the freeze frame remains ‘a continuous flow of the filmstrip and its individual frames, closing
the gap between the film in the projector and the image on the screen’. Here, we should put our
emphasis on duration as both a narrative and material condition of film, because, as Mulvey notes,
‘unlike the photograph, cinema cannot but come to an end’. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second:
Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 83.
4
  Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1985), p. 115.
5
  Ibidem.
6
  Ibidem.
7
  Mary Anne Doane writes about relationship between the frame and the index: ‘What is being
indicated, indexed, brought to our attention is the frame itself, as the border between everything

                                                                                                   57
                                           Rachel Schaff


   For scholars engaged in death of cinema debates, the index is the principle
quality that digital cinema lacks. These scholars return to André Bazin’s onto-
logical framework to highlight the index as a sign that always exists before the
photographic camera’s lens (even in its casual relation) to create a reality effect.8
Nonetheless, they are missing the point. While Bazin did write about the pho-
tographic image as a distinct trace of reality, he did not actually take on reality
outside of film’s frame. What truly interested Bazin was how the still frame boun-
ds the image and arrests it as ‘embalmed time’ that can be reanimated as lived
duration. Furthermore, his ontological framework was motivated by questions
about the existential potential of the film frame that held the moving image —
questions about how the frame organized space and time through ‘perfect neu-
trality and transparency of style’, to connect the film to the ‘viewer’s experience
of the world’.9
   What we take away from these ontological discussions is that our modes of
experience will shift with the loss of the index. This is, of course, a more com-
plex argument than the one I am outlining here — and implies that the digital
lacks an index (it does not) — but the point is that these scholars appear am-
bivalent about the material part of the media process. In this context, material
(or materiality) is used interchangeably with indexicality in order to mourn the
digital’s perceived absence of a reference to — or an object believably rooted
in — the real world. Not only does this reduce analogue and digital technologies
to a simplistic binary opposition, it also overlooks the very question of medium
specificity it attempts to protect. We need only look to what is being indexed to
understand what is truly lost: the underlying material aspects of a medium that is
fully bound with its materiality.
   The frame is precisely a material object: it has a physical form and matter, but
at the same time its content is more broadly perceived as immaterial. To be sure,
the term ‘material’ is a loaded one, and often conflated with materiality. What
materiality denotes, however, is the material process of a physical matter as it is
blurred into an abstraction. Put another way, a single frame on a filmstrip is not
immediately legible as cinema, so it must be attached to material support that can
manipulate it ‘from touch to sign, to materiality, to abstraction’.10 It is true that


and nothing, as the cinematic equivalent of this […]. The persistence of the photographic and
cinematographic frame, in contrast to the frame of a painting, is that it coordinates and necessitates
the dialectic of Peirce’s two, seemingly incompatible, definition of the index, as trace and deixis.
The frame directs the spectator to look here, now, while the trace reconfirms that something exists
to be looked at’. Mary Anne Doane, ‘Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, differ-
ences, 18 (2007) 128–52 (p. 140).
8
  For examples of this see: Philip Rosen, Changed Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minne-
apolis: Minnesota University Press, 2001); Tom Gunning, ‘Moving away from the Index: Cinema
and the Impression of Reality’, differences, 18 (Spring 2007), 29–52.
9
  André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What Is Cinema?, ed. and transl. by
Hugh Gray, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), i, pp. 9–16 (p. 10).
10
   Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

58
                          The Photochemical Conditions of the Frame


to some degree the cinematic apparatus ensures the specificity of the medium.
Take for example the technical conditions of operations of the opto-mechanical
film projector and the screen. Both work as enabling mechanisms that intercept
light and transform separate, distinct frames into a continuous stream of moving
images. Just think: a latent frame on a film strip must undergo various chemical,
mechanical and physical operations to expose, develop and project its material
— and only then can it become realized as cinema.
   In fact, the frame is not intrinsic to raw film material (which appears solidly
black with perforations). Cameras produce frames: when the analogue camera’s
pull-down claw engages the film perforation, it moves the material down one
frame, and as it disengages to pull down the next, a pressure plate holds it at the
camera’s gate to be exposed to light (photons). This exposure period triggers the
oxidation of the silver salts in the film material and releases electrons. What the
camera captures then registers into a latent image on the photochemical negative
until chemical amplification brings forth a visible image (and with it, a frame).11
The frame only emerges as a consequence of the capturing mechanism irrever-
sibly altering the chemical make-up of film material. The act of developing thus
distinguishes film from its digital counterpart, because it simultaneously tran-
sforms and destroys its previous material state.12
   As I am suggesting, it is crucial to recognize the material processes that con-
stitute film time. Whatever its form, there is a temporality attached to all labour
that goes into the filmmaking process: from loading, shooting, and developing
raw stock, to projecting a completed print. The photochemical process of pro-
cessing raw material is itself contingent on time and timing. We often forget that
in order to yield any image, film must first be exposed to light, chemical baths,
physical agitation, and water rinses — and each step runs on a clock. Thus, we
need to think about what it means that the digital does not go through any of
these processes. The differences between film time and digital time may appear
negligible to viewers, but the fact is that these absences must profoundly change
how we experience cinema time.13 Writing about what they call the ‘double birth
of media’, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion tell us that ‘the digital system
of films and algorithms is too different from the celluloid system for us to remain


11
   As Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz note, ‘the frame carries the evidence of its
making, and indeed the “archival life” […] that it has led since the shutter closed’. Sean Cubitt,
Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz, ‘Introduction: Materiality and Invisibility’, in Digital Light,
ed. by Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015),
pp. 7–20 (p. 21).
12
   Terry Flaxton, ‘HD Aesthetics and Digital Cinematography’, in Digital Light, ed. By Cubitt,
Palmer and Tkacz (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), pp. 61–82 (p. 65).
13
   Paolo Cherchi Usai explains why this is technically the case: ‘In film projection, because a blade
shutter of another device equivalent to is, the screen is dark, for at least half of the time, meaning
that that almost half of the time, meaning that almost half of the movie we are watching is actually
made of darkness […]. The difference is just too big to be meaningless for our sense, let alone our
aesthetic judgment’. Paolo Cherchi Usai, ‘Seeing/ Not Seeing’, The Velvet Light Trap, 70 (Fall
2012), p. 60.

                                                                                                   59
                                         Rachel Schaff


in the same universe’.14 This emphasis on the ‘digital effect’ from a technological
perspective is useful because it considers the ways in which the digital actually
captures and reproduces images. One thing is certain: we need only look to the
shifting role of the frame to see these changes up close.
   Let’s not forget about the time-based character of film material. As we know,
there is a sense of sheer materiality that pervades film time and duration.15 Not
only do mechanical devices measure film time, but time itself is also measured
in feet of material. On a film reel a frame is an integer, or a basic unit of time.
This leads us towards thinking about the significance of the basic mechanics of
frame rate, which is calculated in frames-per-second (FPS). On one level, frame
rate refers to the speed that the projector flashes still frames in rapid succession
in front of a lighted aperture, which gives the illusion of motion. But frame rate
also refers to the rate of a camera’s capture — how many frames of film register
an image-per-second. We only experience the illusion of cinema when these two
machines operate at the same variable speed. The industry standard for both
35mm and 16mm synchronous sound film is 24 FPS. Similarly, digital cinema
uses the progressive scanning format 24p (specifically 23,976) to look like film.16
But more specific to the digital process is refresh rate, which is measured in hertz
(Hz), and refers to the number of times digital images flicker-per-second during
playback. The faster the digital flicker, the more lifelike and realistic the motion
will appear. For example, a digital film shot at 24p can have a refresh rate of 72
Hz if each still image is flashed three times, or 48 Hz if flashed twice. This resem-
bles a film projection practice used to minimize the inter-frame judder found in
24 FPS, which involved flashing the same frame two-or-three times before the
next frame. While digital technology attempts to imitate film time, the pressure
of time is fundamentally different. What we take away from this is, that without
the frame, duration is no longer a distinctly material effect. If the frame is intrin-
sic to analogue film, then what is its place in the digital context?


Digital Cinema (Un)framed

   In this contemporary moment that archivists call the ‘digital transition’ and
others call the ‘digital revolution’, cinema is going through an identity crisis. This
crisis is a reaction to the hybridisation of media and platforms that threaten to
wipe out traditional notions of cinema-as-a-medium. This has prompted several
scholars to claim that we live in a ‘post-medium era’, in which we should adopt


14
   André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, trans. by Timothy Barnard, The End of Cinema? A
Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 38.
15
   D. N. Rodowick argues that it is impossible for the ‘digital effect’ to achieve duration. D. N.
Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 100.
16
   The industry chose 24 FPS at the standard because it used as little film as possible while not
manipulating sound (in other words, it was the cheapest option that worked).

60
                      The Photochemical Conditions of the Frame


new concepts, metaphors and operations to talk about cinematic experiences.
Perhaps the most vocal advocate for these so-called ‘post-media aesthetics’ is
Lev Manovich, who argues that new media is essentially cinematic because ‘the
visual culture of a computer age is cinematographic in its appearance, digital on
the level of its material, and computational (i.e. software driven) in its logic’.17
Here I think Manovich is right to distinguish digital media as a distinct cultural
object that demands a language of its own. But Manovich’s alignment of informa-
tion technologies with a generalized effect of cinema also dismisses the specific
materialities of these new media.18 And in the end, we still find ourselves asking
the same question: what is cinema? That is, what falls within the bounds of the
cinematic experience?
   Ever since the arrival of the digital, we have used film as a model in order to
shape it so that it fits within the idea of cinema. Of course this is nothing new:
we have always used ‘old’ forms of media as models for ‘new’ forms to establish
historical continuity. To do this, certain traits of film were manipulated, others
abandoned, and new ones were retroactively added. The two are more similar
than different — but the fact remains that they are still different. Here we go
back to how digital technologies appropriate the language used to describe film.
This may create a sense of continuity, but many of film’s characteristics do not
exactly translate. Many of these new devices appear to use similar tools, but these
terms do not adequately describe the processes by which digital moving images
are captured, reproduced, or experienced. We may want to use concepts like the
frame, frame rate, film gauge, and exposure, but it is a mistake to assume that
these functions are stable-yet-occupied by different technologies. In short, these
concepts serve as stand-ins for what could theoretically exist.
   It is clear, first of all, that digital cinema does not have a material frame, at
least not in a traditional sense. Instead, an image is captured by computer au-
tomation and filmmaking software. This information is then registered formally
(mathematically) as numerical digital code. The frame is simply not inherent to
the digital’s material base (data that can be stored in a file). This does not mean,
however that digital cinema ceases to use the frame — it continues to be used as
a metaphor for the field of perception, and also as a unit of duration. And, when
we shoot digital, we can still single out a still frame. In fact, it is common practi-
ce, for example, for a cinematographer to take a still photograph of their image
before shooting to form a better understanding of framing and check for light.
Thus, the frame is rendered simply a framing technique.
   Just as the meaning of the frame shifts when we distinguish between digi-
tal and analogue media, so do its related concepts. For instance, we may think
about the concept of film gauge, which is the width of the frame. It is frequently
mistaken for film format, which is a set of standard characteristics for image


17
  Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2001), p. 180.
18
  Lev Manovich, ‘Post-Media Aesthetics’ <www.manovich.net/DOCS/Post_media_aesthetics1.
doc> [accessed 3 March 2016].

                                                                                   61
                                    Rachel Schaff


capture; this incidentally includes the digital. Significantly, when we talk about
70mm, 35mm, 16mm, Super 16mm, 8mm and super 8mm, we are referring to a
potential frame of exposure. We use a 35mm frame for commercial feature films,
because it is much larger than a Super 8mm frame. This offers a larger area of
exposure, and registers more detail to produce a sharper image that yields less
grain. In contrast, digital formats tend to strip down the image, remove grain and
scratches, and trade indexicality for reliability of image quality.
   In some ways, film grain is like digital noise, which occurs when the camera
fails to accurately capture an image in low lighting; so points of low (or no) light
are registered fuzzy. In fact, with film, exposure is an automatic, organic process
that occurs as a direct effect of the encounter of light and light sensitive material.
What we call aperture in digital cine-cameras is actually a light sensor, which
approximates the light that is hitting the camera at any time. This digital sensor
reacts differently to light and colour values than an analogue camera would. But
digital is still light based technology. The options for calibrating exposure can be
manipulated and adjusted to achieve the most specific of image qualities giving
the digital a larger sense of control and the ability to capture a more pristine
image. This also rules out many accidental light effects — light leaks, flares, and
fogging of the image — that occur naturally with film. However, depending on
the frame rate and what values are being shot, unintentional lines may appear
to flicker over the top of the image. In this way, a digital camera can too revolt,
distort and break the image.
   Despite all of these differences, digital media still aims to mimic and improve
on the aesthetic qualities of film. Most importantly, it never questions if it should
abandon the qualities that are established by the film frame. So, the question is:
what is so important about the frame? Is the very concept of the frame a defining
feature of cinema?
   A good example of this is how, in 2008, the RED 1 was positioned as the first
digital cine-camera that could compete with analogue cameras. Whereas pre-
viously hi-definition digital cine-cameras topped out at the resolution 1920 by
1080 or a slightly higher-resolution format called 2K, the RED 1’s sensor prom-
ised to capture motion in 4K resolution (4096 lines of horizontal and 2304 of ver-
tical). This is predicated on the fact that the industry standard 35mm stock has a
roughly equivalent visual resolution to 4K. This requires that the camera use an
image sensor identical in size and shape to a single frame of 35mm motion pic-
ture film. Without this sensor, the camera would not have any control over depth
of field, colour saturation, tonality, or many other qualities of 35mm film. Further
placing emphasis on the frame is the fact that the RED records in the same bulky
raw file format as digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLR), which preserves im-
age data in what is essentially an unprocessed form (called REDCODE). This
gives us more latitude and allows us to manipulate images with editing software.
But the RED 1 was just the start. Now every digital cine-camera — RED, Canon,
Sony, Panasonic, ARRI — is at least 4K. In addition, these large-sensor cameras
offer an ever-increasing number of new and distinctly digital features that expan-

62
                         The Photochemical Conditions of the Frame


ds the camera’s firmware (e.g. gammas, codec, resolution, EI (ISO)).19 Given that
the digital is employing the form of the frame as standardized by analogue film,
we must acknowledge that in some ways it is only because we want a replacement
for a certain cinematic aesthetic that we bother with these digital solutions at all.
    From the notion of digital capture, I want to turn to another key element of
digital cinema, specifically post-production. In today’s all-digital age, almost all
films are edited digitally, even ones that were originally shot on film. It is not sur-
prising then that post-production and editing software in particular still adhere
to basic notions of film editing. This is true even of the rhetoric surrounding it;
we denote cuts and splice-in, shots, sequences, slates, assembly, rough and fine
cuts, and discuss cinematic looks. But we also discuss the technology in terms of
folders, multi-grouping, drop and non-drop frames, rendering, transcoding, and
consolidation. One major difference from film to digital is the codec. In the digi-
tal realm, we have a number of compression-decompression formats: Quicktime
.mov (H.264), Apple Pro Res 422 (HQ), Avid DNxHD for video; .mp4; .wav,
.aiff, AAC for audio. This is proprietary, and enables certain formats to conform
to a particular editing software. Sometimes we need an additional plug-in to even
interpret the footage. In a single cut, we may mix several codecs and frame rates,
kind of like stitching 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film together.
    Even with all of these differences in the ways we process digital images, we
still want them to look like film material. For example, it is commonplace to
use programmes like Adobe After Effects, DigiEffects, and built-in visual effect
filters (as well as plug-ins) to achieve so-called film looks, for example, hairs,
scratches, dust, and film grain. These visual effects are customizable, and can
be easily tweaked. One of the most desired of these visual effects is the rollout
effect, a brief sequence of overexposed frames that exist on the beginnings and
ends (and often throughout) of all raw film footage. To be clear: rollout is not a
dissolve, a break, a splice or a cut. It is usually a by-product of loading a roll of
film into a camera. To thread the film spool into the camera’s gate, several frames
must be exposed to light. On the developed filmstrip, rollout may appear to be
transparent or opaque — it may also appear to have the orange, red, yellow and
brown hues of bunt film. It may be what’s-skipped-over or what’s-overlooked,
but rollout is not exactly a series of blank frames or the absence of image. It is
especially prevalent within small gauge film formats like Super 8mm, which is
manufactured in a pre-looped film cartridge that allows amateur filmmakers to
take the roll out of the camera (overexposing several frames) and then put it back
in to resume shooting. The rollout effect is a defining characteristic of standard
(double) 8mm film. Because 8mm film uses a 16mm frame, only half of a roll is
exposed at a time. It must be manually flipped to expose the other half, which
overexposes the middle 6 feet of film. After it is developed, the roll is split down


19
  David Leitner, ‘Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2015: the Dust Settles’, Filmmaker Magazine
<http://filmmakermagazine.com/93957-digital-motion-picture-cameras-in-2015-the-dust-settles/#.
Vu9juUWkqnM> [accessed 11 March 2016].

                                                                                            63
                                       Rachel Schaff


the middle to form two 8mm filmstrips, which are bookended by this rollout
effect. Above all, the rollout effect is reflexive of its own material. It illustrates a
direct link to — and an affirmation of — human interaction with the film mate-
rial. Furthermore, it speaks to the materiality of the image as if to confirm that it
is indeed a sequence of frames running through a projector.
    Hence, the rollout effect speaks to an extra-dimension of film’s — and more
precisely, the frame’s temporality. Notably, rollout is found between significant
happenings — an unintended transition between different shots or scenes. These
frames imply an ellipsis, indicating that time that has passed since the last event
deemed worthy enough to record. It is thus a voluntary omission — a gap that
signifies a supplementary meaning — that signifies the possibilities of the many
connotations that may lie in-between. The way in which I am describing the rol-
lout effect recalls Stephen Heath’s ‘suture scenario’, which describes the process
by which the frame structures film experience by confronting representation and
perspective: or in sum, because a viewer’s imagination demands additional re-
presentation it requires a ‘suture’ that stitches the two together.20 In the context
of narrative film, the notion of the ellipsis refers to writing outside of the frame
of the film’s diegesis, which shortens plot duration by omitting some of the story.
More tellingly: elliptical editing refers to an editing strategy used to indicate shot
transitions that don’t show — that omit — parts of an event, causing an ellipsis
in plot duration.
    These are just some examples of how the traditional concept of the frame
shifts with the digital. This allows us to take a closer look at the formal proper-
ties of film and digital processes, so that we can start to think about how form is
shaped by material. Despite being made up of seemingly immaterial code, digital
cinema is still tied to a material object. It records on cards (like the P2 card), al-
though they can be cleared, wiped completely for re-use, and backed up on hard
drives, which contain the footage as well as the editing project and its attendant
graphics. These hard drives take up physical space on a shelf. In this respect, like
film, digital cinema is not divorced from the real world of objects.
    As I am arguing, questions about medium specific practices can be more pro-
ductive than the nostalgic laments that prematurely mourn cinema’s death, and
celebrations that herald its ongoing expansion. Ultimately, of course, the film
frame is a product of its photochemical condition. But it is clear that the frame
remains perhaps the only ever-present quality of cinema.




20
  Stephen Heath, ‘On Screen, in Frame: Film and Ideology’, in Questions of Cinema (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 1–18.

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