So why did I tell you all this? Was it just to get around to saying "they don't make 'em like Rules of the Game anymore," or that Keanu is different from an animated Beatle? Certainly not. The Matrix is a different type of film from the others, and the pros and cons of this style of filmmaking, either celebrating its postmodern handling of reality or questioning its Debordian "spectacle" are easily found elsewhere6.
Robert Ray proposed reawakening the idea of photogénie in order to examine the attraction of any film, but with Keanu's "whoa" we end up favoring the verbal (or pre-verbal) over the charm of the pictorial. Perhaps this reveals a limit to the method. Perhaps it just reveals a change in our perceptions of movies. Photogénie and the Surrealists weren't that far removed from the charms of the magic lantern (or a music box), a charm that might be hard to explain when so much more is technologically possible now. But innovations don't erase past pleasures completely.
For strangely enough, the appeal of The Matrix still remains close to that found in the earliest examples of cinema. For a film so celebrated for its technical advances, at its heart it fascinates us for the way it presents human bodies in motion. In the way that motion is examined and dissected through "bullet time" slow motion and 360-degree pans, I was reminded of the early sequence photography of Eadweard Muybridge, which examined people engaged in a whole range of everyday activities.
But there's a significant difference. "Bullet time" was used to make you believe the impossible: that Neo could dodge bullets or Trinity could leap up to the ceiling in a fight. We see him or her suspended there and are unable to refute what we see. But Muybridge's work was devoted to the opposite ends. He took everyday reality and made it strange. Looking at his simple sequences of people in motion, we think, "Aha, that's what it is to walk or jump--how extraordinary!"
And so, maybe this is why The Matrix and photogénie seem alien to each other. The charm of photogénie comes from a recognition, an appeal to some level of memory, however dim or distant. Modern computer graphic effects don't seek to do that--they want to astound us with the new, and get us to say whoa. Ray unabashedly admits that photogénie treats the image as a fetish, evoking much more than is physically there. And for all the differences between films like Rules of the Game and those that are animated or that use computer graphics, certainly the fetishizing of images remains the same, since these latter types of films require exacting attention to create their images.
But The Matrix lets us see what was never there, and as a result can really evoke nothing in us in this same way. Earlier versions of special effects could be charming precisely because of their imperfections--you could often see the zipper in the monster costume. But the eerie perfection of computer graphics doesn't seem to allow that. Or at least yet, for maybe we haven't learned to see the gaps and let out imaginations roam there.
So what are the conclusions from this exercise in applied photogénie? Perhaps there are none, which is to be expected when engaging in the flâneur's approach. Film studies as they are generally practiced might consider the combination of these three films absurd, and indeed it just might be. But whether the movie is called a masterpiece, a cult item, or the latest in hi-tech spectacle, Ray won't abandon the question: "Why have two decades of rigorous critique done very little to undermine the glamour and seductiveness of movies?" (AH 9). By reawakening the memory of photogénie, Ray gets back to one dimension of that seductiveness, no matter how it's produced, and it's a question that is by no means exhausted.
1And Welles supposedly once told Johnny Carson that the two greatest films of all time were "Rules of the Game and Rules of the Game."
2The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, p. 5. Further references to this book are prefaced by the abbreviation AH and noted parenthetically with the page.
3 Christian Keathly writes about this at some length in "The Cinephiliac Moment," at www.frameworkonline.com/42ck.htm.
4 Come to think of it, the title Rules of the Game could fit The Matrix quite well, too.
5 A Google search for the paired terms "Keanu Reeves" and "Whoa" produces 2,590 hits.
6 For a positive view of the film's handling of Deleuzian themes, see Adrian Gargett's "The Matrix: What is Bullet Time?" at www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id851/pg1/. For a less generous view of its form in line with a Debordian critique, see Angela Ndalianis' "The Frenzy of the Visible," at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/3/matrix.html.
