Some Notes on High Definition with apologies to M. Blanchot / Ed Atkins

High De!nition as essentially banal. An oxymoronic loop where the image becomes so frighteningly, impressively proximate to the subject that it replaces it. Or is consumed by it. Or, in some well-documented cases, consumes it. Nevertheless: a murderous act in clockwise or anticlockwise, in a pu" of smoke or a sleight of hand. High De!nition (HD) has surpassed what we tamely imagined to be the zenith of representational a"ectivity within the moving image, presenting us with lucid, liquid images that are at once both preposterously life-like and utterly dead. The escape such images might o"er is perverse: back to reality. And only those ambivalent parentheses and an indescribable odour provide the cues to comprehend our actual location...

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In Public Enemies (Michael Manns biopic of the depression-era bank robber John Dillinger), Johnny Depp looks admirably real. His face in close-up is a country of pores, dry skin, chapped lips, wrinkles, pubescent scarring and irregular hair growth. Which is not to say that he looks remarkably ugly but that he looks authentically, unremarkably human. These are the convincing facets of any human face. Those blemishes and foibles give credence to an idea, half entertained, that Johnny Depp is discernibly human; that he is constituted of the very same stu! as us (grotesque "esh, grotesque bone, grotesque cartilage, grotesque fat, etc.); that he has, over time, aged; that, like all of us, he will not materially last forever. In the context of the movie, this is a disconcerting empathy to conjure. It has very little bearing on our feelings towards the character John Dillinger, but rather in some inadvertent Brechtian convolution it serves to emphasise the theatricality of the performance to camera and the moving but banal humanity of the actor beneath. And this innocent trope does not just a!ect Mr. Depps appearance, it seeps in to every aspect of the movie. Tommy guns rattle o! bullets with the hollow snap and muzzle "ash of meagre #recrackers and cap guns; wounds and makeup sit heavy and thick, blatant, on the skin of the actors; physical intimacies are exposed for the e!ects, props and costumes they are while the contemporaneity of each and every actor in the #lm is so oddly conspicuous their live humanity beating dully beneath that thin cinematic pall as to completely undermine any period pseudo-naturalism that might have been wrought. The overall e!ect is that of a making-of documentary: we are made privy to the workings of an illusion. Though in this case there is nothing so generically discernible as outtakes, scurrying crewmembers and green-screens to indicate that we are not, in fact, watching the main feature but an expository DVD extra. Here, the image itself is re"exively expository. The HD image, detailing a death of cinematic delusion, exposes the reality of each and every subject of the cameras gaze as deathly, as crucially deathly, brimming with death a deathliness for the sake of representation, wherein the surrogacy of representation approaches a pinnacle of such accuracy that it no longer represents but simply is the subject. This substitution of representation for subject, or image for reality (though perhaps thats a confusion) is the resolution of a paradox of there being more than one original. For the representation to fully realise its object it must murder its subject. Picture the Bodysnatchers mysterious comatosing of its subject while it develops, hidden inside its amniotic pod, from foetal indeterminacy to de#nitive maturity ultimately replacing its subject and consigning it to obsolescence (a process not dissimilar to that of capitalist technological progress). The crime is almost completely invisible, though the process is intractable: the representation will always be such and will always herald a death. In HD moving imagery, this is maintained through a banality an amateurism, a conviction for

the convincing, for the aspirationally accurate; a seeming whos mistakes, acne, glances and coughs achieve an extraordinary level of representational cogency, all the while serving to underline the fact that this is, nevertheless, a hollow representation, eternally distanced from life, from Being.

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Technologically speaking, the evolution of industrial cinema has always been incumbent upon an approach to representational realism. The quality of the #lm stock, its size, the lens of the camera, the mechanism within, the projector, the microphone, the editing facilities these have all changed inexorably over the past century, and almost exclusively within the realm of improving de#nition and cogency of representation. This technological race has no obvious goal its only transparent objective being to consistently support the industrys (and capitalisms) hegemony (its bleak, murky destination something like a suicide) describing progress for the sake of both the economy and for progress itself, where a partially abstracted notion of progress describes the schism that maintains capitalism in this form: a counter movement, a parallelism is perpetually enacted, with progressive innovation at the vanguard and obsoleteness collapsing in the rear. As exempli#ed by HD, however, this inde#nite movement (without #nitude, certainly) must be arrested in the instant, in the here and now enacted by whatever holds that novel station right now. The term High De#nition both apprehends this progress and helps it on its way. Its ambiguous yet minted enough to be understood as both transitory (how high is High?) and speci#c (De!nition). In other words, it lies within the zeitgeist and under that rubric, it is replaceable, it will be replaced. It must be noted, however, that the non-technical idiom the term lies within might also allow High De#nition to have been applied contemporaneously to any other previous progression within the industry. Its a term de#ned in relation: one need only notice the appearance overnight of the term Standard De#nition, sprung up like a mushroom from the rotting cadaver of its objects condemnation as anachronism. High De#nition, like all progressions, de#nes itself in relation to its precursor, adopting its lexicon, its boundaries, and its movement. This is the convention of progress. Delimited by the word, progress can only progress what already exists. Uprooting, destroying, overthrowing, instigating, founding are not within its temperament. Necessarily then, High De#nition has so far been understood and critiqued within the con#nes of its predecessors criteria, whether this is correct or not.

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High De#nition is very di!erent to its predecessors within the history of the moving image. There are the reasons sketched out above: the proximity to the real that determines the deathliness of the representation, the banality of the moving image as a di!erence but there is also its speci#c digital medium. HD is only possible in the fantasies and dreams of the immaterial. The index of the HD image and of truly contemporary digital data in general is impalpable. There is no body to inscribe, no document to consign to history. The HD index is always provisional; it can be erased and reformed without leaving the tiniest trace of what was there before. Today, a video can be shot, edited, produced and displayed without ever once resolving into a physical form. (And if it did, what sleek alien shape might it take?) The essentially immaterial aspect of HD is concomitant to its promise of hyperreality of

previously unimaginable levels of sharpness, lucidity, believability, etc., transcending the material world to present some sort of divine insight. Though of course, HDs occasion is entirely based upon the fantastic representation of the material and only the material. Its de#nitional abilities cannot improve representations of Being, only its tawdry housing. As with Mr. Depp in Public Enemies, HD renders material of paramount importance, with skin, hair and saliva taking precedence over language, character and emotion as the humanity within a movie. Humanity is pulped to a state of abject corporeality: I recognise Mr. Depp as dying really dying and in so doing #nally becoming the perfect representation of himself. In this summation, representation is characteristically devoid of Being instead focussing on appearance on seeming to be, rather than to be. The idea is one of illusion, however apparently purposeful.

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The Material has a habit of returning, however deeply buried, however apparently dissolved. Avenging its immaterial existence, the HD video constructs a body within its image. A paradox of extreme, sensuous materiality within an immaterial medium. There is no analogue for this; no ghost or zombie, but an entirely new manifestation: a vision of death that ultimate representation that is entirely unapproachable, unequivocal, impossible.

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Literature rears up, an outraged progenitor: Certain words High De!nitional words, if you like congeal in the mouth, sit heavily on the tongue, exciting some previously cloaked papillae, scouring, spanning the vocal chords and the epiglottis Words becoming representations of themselves (corpses!) for a fraction of a second, supplanting their semiotic being suiciding their symbolic selves to be tasted, !nally (tongued!); Amoeboid forms to be swallowed. Ingested, processed and stored like so much dead #esh, rotten, secreting hallucinogenic mould. The immaterial made material. (A pursuable thought: High De!nition moving images becoming literature.)