[Frameworks] Celluloid Now Call for Entries

[Jonathan Walley]

It’s a classic Frameworks discussion/debate - wonderful!

When I think of “analog” media, I think of media whose representations are “analogous” to the thing they are representing. Being etymology-obsessed (a word-nerd), I looked up analog and found much the same idea:

“1826, 'an analogous thing,' from French analogue (adj. and n.), from Latin analogus (adj.), from Greek analogos 'proportionate, according to due proportion,' from ana 'throughout; according to' (see ana- <https://www.etymonline.com/word/ana-?ref=etymonline_crossreference>) + logos 'ratio, proportion,' a specialized use (see Logos <https://www.etymonline.com/word/Logos?ref=etymonline_crossreference>). The word was used in English in Greek form (analogon) in 1810. Meaning 'word corresponding with another' is from 1837. Computing sense, in reference to operating with numbers represented by some measurable quantity (as a slide-rule does; opposed to digital) is recorded from 1946.”

“Celluloid” film is analog insofar as the arrangement of exposed and unexposed silver halide crystals produces something that looks like what it represents (in the same way that the grooves on a vinyl record are “analogous” to the sound waves they represent). A digital representation, on the other hand, being composed simply of 1s and 0s, does not look like whatever it represents. 

Which is to say, among other things, that analog had its own, perhaps different, meaning before there was ever such a thing as digital, but that the “film/digital” dyad has re-shaped its meaning. I think most people simply thing of analog as the equivalent of “old,” or in other ways as “not digital,” which of course creates all sorts of problems.

Getting more word-nerdy, this property of the cinematic image was potentially a stopping block for a semiotics of film, because the film image looked like (was analogous to) the thing it represented rather than a truly coded representation (as in the case of written/spoken language or digital’s 1s and 0s). Metz spent some time addressing this in his early writings. Eisenstein, comparing film with very early pictographic languages (which would later become coded or, in linguistic terms, “arbitrary”), was making a similar point - that the cinematic image has a relationship of resemblance to the thing it depicts.

For what it’s worth,
JW

> On Jun 11, 2022, at 9:15 PM, S. Mullen (DVCinLV) <dvcinlv at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "It seems like "analog” has come to mean simply NOT digital and, as Fred says, usage has now made this meaning correct.”
> 
> “Analog” is also a way reminding us that photochemical processes proceed in a “continuous” manner rather than the “discrete” steps employed in Digital.
> 
> There is also an implied virtue to a “continuous” process that we see in the old  Analog-Records vs CDs debate. Of course, that debate assumed a sampling rate of only 44.1kHz. A current debate — continuous verses sampling rates of 96kHz or 128kHz — might well flip virtue to discrete. Digital sample size — 16 bits verses 24 bits — might also make Digital more appealing.
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> 
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Dr. Jonathan Walley
Associate Professor
Department of Cinema
Denison University
https://denison.edu/people/jonathan-walley
Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia (Oxford University Press, 2020) <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/cinema-expanded-9780190938642?cc=us&lang=en&#>



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