A HYPOTHETICAL CINEMA

These texts are inspired by a short passage from Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema "I will recount the life of cinema past, present and future, as though it had never existed, or had never been anything more than sheer conjecture. I will try to lay out some of the philosophical problems that this vanished art proposed, and I will seek to explain its journey incognito through the grammatical city known for the moment as ‘virtual reality’.

I’d like to recall that holding something up for dead is a philosophical artifice. Paul Valery felt it indispensable in order to rethink a phenomenon without entering the sequential labyrinth of ‘that most dangerous of poisons secreted by our mental alchemy: history’." (1)

What sets fire to the imagination is just this conjecture, opening up the possibility of a multiplicity of cinemas that no one apparatus can ever contain. This is why perhaps one of the richest philosophical toys is not an apparatus at all but a blueprint for an impossible machine.
A BLUEPRINT
Like many of the philosophical toys of this century, Duchamp’s instructions for a hypothetical cinematic apparatus, contained in the "Green Box" insists on inventing cinema after it had already been invented.

While "The large Glass" was doomed to be worshiped as a relic at the altar of modernism, "The Green Box" once opened has the force of Pandora’s box itself. Instructions acting with the force of a time bomb scattering debris into past and future alike.

It calls for the construction of an apparatus for the projection of ideas based on the principles of intermittent motion.

"We shall determine the conditions of [the] best exposé of the extra-rapid State of Rest of the extra-rapid exposure (= allegorical appearance)."

The resulting, "The Large Glass" is quite literally a giant glass lantern slide already an archaic object in 1914. Though Duchamp’s reference to it as "a delay in glass" might suggest a frozen frame.

And like the magic lanterns of the 19th century this machine is too be powered by an oil lamp, "The Bride, at her base is a reservoir of love gasoline (or timid power). See: DESIRING MACHINES and AN AMNESIAC CINEMA
More tantalizingly is Duchamp’s description of the gas that flows through the malic moulds, "a fog made up of a thousand spangles of frosty gas". This description at once conjures up the smoke onto which images were projected in the great Phantasmagorias of the end of the 18th century.
As well as the hypothetical cinematic apparatus described by Villiers de l’Isle Adam in "L’Eve Future". "A long strip of transparent plastic encrusted with bits of tinted glass moved laterally along two steel tracks before the luminous cone of the astral lamp…"(2)

At the same time Duchamp’s strange machine hints provocatively at a cinematic apparatus yet to be invented through a yet to be discovered particle physics.
"The group of these parasols form a sort of labyrinth of the 3 directions – the spangles dazed by this progressive turning imperceptibly loose [provisionally they will find it again later] their designation of left, right, up, down etc. Loose their awareness of position. The parasols thus straighten out the spangles which, on leaving the tube were free and wished to rise."(3)
In fact I was just reading about the invention of a new kind of computer memory, the building blocks of future cinemas. "According to quantum mechanics the electrons in a normal electric current are spinning in a random mix of quantum states known as up and down. By ordering this mayhem in a process analogous to the polarization of light – in effect, aligning the quantum spins to be either all up or all down – scientists can create the "off" and "on" states central to computer calculations and give the digital revolution a remarkable new dimension." (3)
THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE
It has been often thought of as a given that cinema consists of the illusion of a moving 3D world projected onto a 2D plane. However philosophical toys openly question this two dimensionality, opening up new dimensions or even more perversely collapsing them still further.

In "The Green Box", Duchamp posits the possibility of a one-dimensional cinema as quite literally a series of shots fired at a target. Reducing the concept of "shooting" film to its origin and its obliteration. "The figure thus obtained will be the projection (through skill) of the principle points of a 3 dimensional body – with maximum skill, this projection would be reduced to a point (the target)."

Wait! The shot fired through the looking glass reappears as the "negative apparition", n -1 or the presence of absence. Duchamp is fascinated by the mould or negative apparition as he terms it.

Simply Duchamp reminds us that cinema is in essence constructed around absence itself. Two dimensions being the absence of three dimensions. The afterimage the absence of the image. The somnambulist cinema of one being the memory trace produced through the body severed now from the actual traumatic event. And it leads us on to the consideration of the materialization seance as par excellence, the presence of absence, the apparition of the body after death.
See
Hypnogogic Cinema.

(1) Ruiz, Raul The Poetics of Cinema France Éditions Dis Voir p.p. 107-108

(2) Villiers de l’Isle Adam L’Eve Future Urbana : University of Illinois Press, c1982. p.117

(3) Duchamp, Marcel The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors,
Even. A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box translated by George Heard Hamilton . Edition Hansjörg Mayer 1960

(4) New York Times 6 April 1999 F5