The Location of the Image: Cinematic Projection and Scale in Modernity

產於十九世紀動態顯影的早期機器(頻閃動影盤(phenakistoscope)、活化動片(zoetrope)、手翻動畫書(flip book)等)投放能以手操弄且一次只供一個或一小群觀眾觀賞的小型影像。隨著電影的發展，產生了視覺對觸覺、抽象對物質，關鍵性，雖未臻全面的取代，這是在現代性中一個往消弭影像物質性，令無物的影像散佈、交換的運動。電影院把影像放大比例給觀眾看時，顯示活動幻影的製作，已從摸得到又可擁有的玩具商品，過渡到代表二十世紀影像製作與傳播的大規模形式；同時，前衛藝術家以投映的去物化，將投映的過程當作能夠躲避商品論宰制的新美學語言。納吉(Laszlo Moholy-Nagy)、雷傑(Fernand L?ger)、夢雷(Man Ray)、杜象(Marcel Duchamp)等早期前衛藝術家對光線、反射與投影的眷戀，正是對活動攝像現代性中的身體和地點的再度深探。1960與1970年代，受到早期前衛藝術的影響，前衛電影恢復對投影及以光線為媒介的執著。沃荷(Andy Warhol)、麥考(Anthony McCall)，以及1960年代拍製「閃光電影」(flicker films)的導演，皆關心投映影像的衝擊與效果。本文以精神分析理論與影像逐漸去物化的歷史蹤跡為框架，探討投映與投映衍生出的各類影像實踐。Early machines for the representation of movement produced in the 19th century (the phenakistoscope, the zoetrope, the flip book, etc.) involved small images that could be manipulated by hand and viewed by only one or several spectators at a time. With the development of the cinema, there is a crucial although incomplete displacement of touch by sight, materiality by abstraction–a movement toward dematerialization of the image that circulates and is exchanged in modernity. While the projection of an image on a large scale, in theaters, to a mass audience, marked a transition from the production of an illusion of movement as toy, as tangible and possessible commodity, to the spectacular forms of image production and dissemination characterizing the 20th century, that process of projection was also perceived, by the avant-garde, as a distinctly new aesthetic language, capable of dodging, in its dematerialization, the discourse of commodification. The fascination of the historical avant-garde—of Moholy-Nagy, of L?ger, of Man Ray and Duchamp—with light, reflection, and projection, can be seen as an engagement with the intensive rethinking of location and bodies in a cinematographic modernity. In the 1960s and 1970s, the filmic avant-garde, in a move deeply influenced by the historical avant-garde, resuscitated an obsession with projection and with light as medium. Andy Warhol, Anthony McCall, and the filmmakers who produced “flicker films” in the 1960s, were all concerned with the impact and effects of the fact that the cinematic image is projected. This article is an investigation of projection and its various ramifications in filmmaking practice, in psychoanalytic theory, and in a historical trajectory which traces the increasing dematerialization of images