Miami Vice
by Zanskar Chaudhari
The promise of film writing – as with any kind of writing – settles somewhere across the myriad liminalities and possibilities between what something is and how it ultimately appears. It is entirely possible to consider the whole of cinema’s history as a constituent strategy towards the formation of a totalizing atmosphere, or condition, that Mark Fisher refers to as capitalist realism. The history of the still image, the moving image, of sound, visual effects, the shifting topographies within which an idea of something collides with other histories; sound itself appears as the promise of its own absence. Something wasn’t, so it had to be. The image was still, so it had to appear to move. The cinema was silent, so it had to be made to sing. There are many accounts of the history of sound cinema – narratives that centre the technologies and protocols that anticipated its arrival, which make its histories legible across that continuum in which the present appears as the fleeting reflection of a tomorrow already entombed within the past.
Noise, that formless, haphazard dictum of oblivion, necessitates a different kind of account. Where sound deluges images with meaning and reifies the cinema and its spectators as legatees of an industrial and technological superstructure, noise eschews traditional meaning-making protocols toward alternative viewing practices, revealing new affective modes. How does noise appear within the cinematic?
Apropos of the vast corpus that constitutes cinema’s storied history, and more specifically one that locates French film critic Andre Bazin as one of its many central protagonists, one finds a tendentious account of cinema and photography in which the image-world, or the cinematic. appears as the theatre within which the divine takes form not just as a symbolic didact, but rather as an unencumbered and authentic reproduction of nature, towards “creating an ideal universe in the image of reality, endowed with an independent temporal destiny” (Bazin). It is the very nature of reality, its ideological valence, that emerges as an unknown. If Bazin’s Catholicism animated his thinking around the mechanically produced image as a container for the divine, within the contemporaneous atmosphere of cinema’s beginnings, present thinking around the medium needs to account for a secularized digital.
Movement is loud. Digital grain testifies to the amount of light a camera lets into its lens––to the legibility, ultimately, of stillness, and is generally a symptom of an image exposed incorrectly. As the camera strains to capture figures, landscapes, objects at night, in under-lit scenarios, grain appears as a frustrating texture, a fog made up of pixels that hinders our ability to clearly see what the photographer or filmmaker wants to capture. It is indeed a kind of noise that threatens to challenge the camera’s ability to reveal the idiosyncrasies of its conjured reality. Digital filmmaking is a relatively recent phenomenon and practice. In her book From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film, Giovanna Fossati narrates the transition from analogue to digital photography, locating digital film practices’ origins to the 70s and delineates the first chapter of its history as ending in 2012, when Kodak, founded as Eastman Company in 1889 by George Eastman Kodak and responsible for, among a great many things, the actual film stock that is used to shoot on analogue cinema cameras, declared bankruptcy. Since this time, in the last decade and a bit, and despite efforts to revive it as the apparatus par excellence in its ability to photograph the world, digital photography is largely the most practical and cost-effective way to make a film, along with, of course, a host of other digital practices. Most movie theatres across the planet have shifted to digital projection, with actual film projection relegated to repertory theatres and a handful of multiplex theatres like AMC Lincoln Square (New York) and BFI (London). One can speculate as to the degree to which standardised technologies and formats are aesthetic and ideological propositions, as opposed to the matrix to which practicality and expedience belong. Indeed, what follows is precisely an enquiry that eschews the latter to consider, on the one hand, the relationship between medium as mechanism and medium as automation, or the complex ways in which films appear to us through and as different technologies, as embodied by celluloid and digital respectively; and on the other, indebted as so much contemporary writing is, to the affective and spiritual frequency of Bazin’s thinking, to the spiritual void that celluloid filmmaking’s gradual diminution has created – what exactly animates the pixels whose profusion makes up the digital image?
In his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Walter Benjamin introduces the work of criticism as fundamentally about negotiating the entanglements between a work’s truth and material content, the configuration of which determines the possibility of its immortality. Miami Vice’s induction into the Criterion Channel’s hallowed collection, or its reputation as a repertory cinema favourite isn’t a testament to the immortality described by Benjamin, to the “living flame that continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and light ashes of what has been experienced” (Benjamin). There is just absolutely nothing that looks and feels quite like Michael’s Mann’s Miami-set soap-operatic tsunami of affect and narrative dexterity, that marries “temporal effect” with “eternal being” so deftly and inconspicuously, that calcifies time and space as a texture of form and medium and not just a footnote narrating what conditions necessitated nimble equipment and other behind the scenes sundries.
Adapted from the popular 80’s television show, on which Mann served as executive producer, Miami Vice stars Colin Farrell and Jaime Foxx as James Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs (previously portrayed by Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas), partners in the Miami Police Department’s vice squad. It has all the trappings of a season of popular television – there’s a job that requires Crockett and Tubs to go undercover as drug smugglers between the Caribbean and Florida; an ill-fated romance between Farrell’s Crockett and a resplendent Gong-Li as Isabella, a financial advisor for the drug cartel being investigated; and a soundtrack worth the price of admission alone that includes Linkin Park and Jay-Z’s Numb/Encore, Audioslave’s Wide Awake, and a remix of Nina Simone’s Sinnerman. And of course, most importantly and much discussed, by Mann himself whose recent filmography has reflected a deliberate, ecstatic reckoning with shifting film technologies, as well as critics and thinkers; the crowning achievement of Mann’s epic is the way it feels – deafening, porous, thousands of pixels thrashing about each frame, punctuated by the quiet maximalism of Crocket telling Isabella during a nighttime stroll along a promenade in Cuba that “probability is like gravity: you cannot negotiate with gravity’’. In Understanding Media, describing sound, Marshall Mcluhan writes, “just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane”. As Miami Vice careens into jubilant set pieces; Isabella’s hair unfurling against a powerful squall as she and Crockett speed across the Caribbean to Cuba for mojitos and an ill-advised dalliance; a night time shoot out against the drug cartel and their Aryan Brotherhood minions; and a wonderfully sexy montage set against Audioslave’s aforementioned Wide Awake; the pixels, divested of the materiality that endows celluloid grain with the ability to wrangle temporal effect and eternal being into a cogent theatre (memory), that allows it to resolve the distance that complicates a work’s sacralisation as immortal, are unleashed. It is no longer a facsimile, or an approximation of movement but movement itself, automated instead of technically reproduced; not 24 photographs a second but a single frame; the sound barrier has been broken and the pixels leave their deafening trace.
Mechanically produced images freeze the world, “snatch it from the course of time”, a bulwark against Death, “nothing more than the victory of time”.The light streaming through windows, that falls upon the ground with the click of a door, that laps softly against physiognomies to reveal the lineaments of a soul roiled by heartbreak, and that lashes against agents of evil and corruption, is endowed with the ferocity of judgement that can only possibly come from our subterranean depths and an incandescent firmament.
When Peter Wollen speaks of hot and cold media, he designates cinema and photography as fire and ice respectively.1 Perhaps digital is neither; the evaporated residue of a world in which all this is solid melts into air, the texture of a secular dialectics divested of some elemental battleground. The motion of Miami Vice, the sound it makes as each image threatens to whisk us spectators into its hallucinatory choreographies, the sense perception that is posited not as an attendant of the film apparatus but of some spectral code, ones and zeros that become pixels that create images, that create and are movement, is that “sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends”. All one sees and hears is how one feels, and we, like Crockett, Tubbs, and Isabella, are swept into Cuban nightclubs, romance seeped go- fast boats, and Miami Vice.
The question remains- why did God abscond from our movies?
“…film is all light and shadow… a source of Bachelardian reverie like the flames in the grate…photography is motionless and frozen…fire will melt ice but then type melted ice will put of out the fire”
About the Author
Zanskar Chaudhari is a writer and researcher at The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.
About the Column
1/10th of a Second is a bi-monthy column that clarifies cinema’s discursive potentialities, examining the canonical and the contemporary as they mediate our relationship with histories and ideologies. It is indebted to a tradition of film criticism inaugurated in 1951 by the legendary French magazine Cahiers du Cinema.