outmoding codes

“By adopting the rhetorics of real-time broadcast so characteristic of television and a certain economy of CCTV – not to mention that of webcam culture – cinema has displaced an impoverished spatial rhetoric of photo-chemical idexicality with a thoroughly contemporary, and equally semiotically “motivated” rhetoric of temporal indexicality” (Levin, 592).

 

This “temporal indexicality” is pretty much impossible (as far as I can see) in cinema.  These surveillance shots that are supposed to enhance realism in a film, have still been handpicked in the editing process of a big-budget film.  These are codes meant to increase scopophilic pleasure through the visual invasion of something “more real.”  One may take the “shaky camera” seen in the Blaire Witch Project as a tactic laced with temporal indexicality.  Impressive at first, but as time goes on, the code seems to have become naturalized.  Cloverfield is one movie that, although I admittedly liked it, seems to have relied too obviously on this particular method of signification.  The problem with this in cinema is that I every scene has intention…if not before shooting, then after shooting in the editing process.  Maybe these movies would be more effective if they were posted anonymously on Youtube.