Old Time Continuity: Illusion, Futility, and The Way Things Go

Art & Trash, episode 30
Old Time Continuity: Illusion, Futility, and The Way Things Go
Stephen Broomer, April 5, 2024

In 1987, the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss released The Way Things Go, a thirty-minute 16mm film that portrays the continuity of a single chain reaction. Across a series of long takes, maintaining the illusion of a single take, a chain of simple, at times absurdly comic physical reactions occur in a chemical-industrial game of dominos.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer explores the idea of continuity in cinema, as it appears in Fischli and Weiss's film, but also, as it evolved from early cinema through to its refinement in the poetics of the Soviet montage theorists, and its interaction with the work of filmmakers as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Breer and Michael Snow. At the same time, Broomer undertakes an exploration of another precedent for Fischli and Weiss's films, the marvellous imaginary machines of cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

SCRIPT:

The American cartoonist Rube Goldberg is namesake to one of the twentieth century’s great metaphors for futility: the overcomplicated machine that, through a series of chain reactions, performs a simple task. In the 1910s, Goldberg assumed this as the central conceit of his cartoons, illustrating the complex operations of simple, comically redundant devices, from the self-operating napkin, to the mosquito exterminator, to the beer-bottle-opener that begins with cutting a string that holds a bowling ball above a trough and ends with a phonograph recording of a woman’s voice, prompting the beer bottle to open itself out of courtesy. It was not simply the disconnect between the Goldberg complexities and their modest goals that made them comically absurd: like any other cartoon, they had an elastic ontology that spoke to the inherent ridiculousness of life on earth. The Goldberg Machines are a testament to the desire to expand and densify action, to enrich a process by labouring on it, as much as they are a critique of a modern industrial life riddled with obscure instructions. Industrialization had made it so that tools were no longer simple, propelled by advances of electricity and thermodynamics: bewildering, hidden forces animated the tools of a new century, informed though they were by the long evolution of scientific laws.

Continuity is the foundation of cinema, taken, by a broad definition, as the means by which serial images progress, or the way in which sequences are constructed to create an illusion of persistent action, or the willful annihilation of persistent action. In other words, the notion of cinematic continuity absorbs both continuity and all forms of discontinuity. In its smallest unit, it might be defined as the one-twelfth of a second that is shared by any two serial frames. Conceptual rules of continuity, from intellectual montage to invisible editing, were imposed on cinema as it evolved in the first decades of the twentieth century, to map out, or better yet, to test, the limits of an audience’s comprehension. The earliest audiences didn’t really duck and cover when the train slowed on entry into the station at La Ciotat; but twenty years after that, Hollywood’s first generation of film producers weren’t sure if audiences were smart enough to grasp the meaning of a close-up. Despite the conceptual emergence of continuity that went on to form a common grammar for cinema, continuity itself was always baked into any film strip. The animator Robert Breer would talk about his work, work which dominant culture would view as being against continuity, as a search for new continuities, like the search long-since undertaken in literature, in poetry, in the visual arts, in scientific inquiry. Might Rube Goldberg’s comic machines have been a mocking recognition of the emergence of new continuities? Complex actions could now be realized in an instant. Goldberg offered the absurd mirror of this: simple actions expending great effort, contemplation and time.

In cinema, there are many forms that continuity can take. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope is a film that is conceptualized around continuity. Although it has moments of conventional editing throughout, it also features long, seemingly unbroken takes, threaded together by carefully controlled match cuts. The thread calls attention to itself. The purpose of this act of long-take in-extremity? To achieve two contradictory things: to suspend the audience’s illusions, to give the film a heightened awareness of real time passing; and to imprint on the film, by highly artificial means, the style and tension of live theatre. When Hitchcock breaks that illusion, the project volunteers its artificiality. The unique power of the long take is just this, the ability to simulate the persistence of vision that we gain in everyday experience, a contrived simulation, through staging, asserting a level of control that acts against naturalism. In its long takes, Rope was staging the equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine for cinematic naturalism—an overcomplicated method in pursuit of a simple effect. Meanwhile, Goldberg’s template was elsewhere finding its own continuity in animated citations, to the point of cliché: ludicrous assembly lines that could march to the beat of Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse,” an orgiastic parade hewn to Goldberg’s themes of futility. What distanced Goldberg’s machines from the industrial assembly line? His machines operate through individual, spectacular chain reactions, while the assembly line is a current of monotonous repetition. Even when these animated assembly-line sequences do not explicitly reference the cause-and-effect chains of Goldberg machines, they share in its critique, as absurd visions of mechanization.

In 1987, the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss released The Way Things Go, a thirty-minute 16mm film that portrays the continuity of a single chain reaction. Across a series of long takes, maintaining the illusion of a single take, a chain of simple, at times absurdly comic physical reactions occur in a chemical-industrial game of dominos. Its setting is an industrial space, presumed to be the artists’s studio, and their materials, like those of Goldberg’s diagrams or the Powerhouse assembly lines, are ordinary and commonplace: household chemicals, jugs, chairs, tires. The motive in examining this chain reaction is obscure, but the component reactions become evidentiary proofs of the Newtonian laws of force: with a gentle, often incidental push, again and again, an object is set to accelerate and collide, to set in motion another object, another reaction. The monotony of these reactions are frequently interrupted with more violent and elemental reactions, from the fuelling of fire to ignite and, in its conflagration, continue the reactions; to the shattering of a glass through the sheer mass and swinging force of a pendulum. Such action is not in pursuit of a goal: the ‘goal’ here is simply the passage of energy from one object to another.

In The Way Things Go, screen-action gives the illusion of being continuous, with the camera shuttling along an epic tableau of strange, often slow reactions, one to the next with the operator dancing with the rhythms of the experiment, moving in on details in quieter moments, pulling out during more dramatic shifts from reaction to reaction. To describe its events is to engage its ridiculous materials: a rotating garbage bag, propelled tires, tilting surfaces, the spouts of recycled bottles, erupting candles, inflating balloons. As it goes on, these materials become more ridiculous, from a pair of shoes animated by the chain reaction to walk down a sloping path, to tires propelled by the weight of a circuit of water bottles arranged within, to a pair of knives mounted on wheels that are slowly melting through ice. Elemental reactions and sheer force of motion conspire to keep the party going: when the reactions seems to be reaching a natural conclusion, still force persists, for whatever has been placed in its path will lead to further reactions, some of them violent, but many of them offering more subtle dynamics of response. Suggestions of chaos and chance, in the fluctuating exchanges between objects and force, are the film’s greatest illusion: none of this has been left to chance. It is a misleading appearance: the playful surprises that occur within the film are operating on the expectations of the eye, but they are never arising from improvisation.

On the contrary, The Way Things Go is a work of absolute machined precision. It is both a mixed-media tableau, its events playing out in-time, and a film that shares common ground with Michael Snow’s playful, axiomatic films; where Snow’s work exhausted the zoom, the pan, the tilt, Fischli and Weiss exhaust continuity itself by staging these reactions in the form of a continuous survey in profile. In the interplay between these chain reactions and the responsive attention of the camera operator—the restless, staggered observation of this chain—the film becomes a grand meditation on continuity. When it violates its illusion of total continuity, it does so deceptively, using explosions, plumes of smoke, and close-ups on repetitive imagery to conceal dissolves and hard cuts. These violations become a betrayal of empirical method, even if the scientific basis of the film is ludicrous in the first place. With each dissolve, Fischli and Weiss undermine the role of precision in their actions, and reveal the film for what it is: the cinema of attractions, cinema reduced to the essence of spectator and effect.

The components of their illusion are primitive and modern: from carts of crudely handmade wheels to the mysterious interplay of sudsy chemicals on surfaces resembling wet cement, Fischli and Weiss have self-consciously prepared their set to have the unrehearsed, quotidian character of a Robert Rauschenberg assemblage. Mysterious and obvious functions collide to form a comic rhythm. If The Way Things Go is not a comedy of errors, it is at least a comedy of the absurd potential of ordinary things. That absurdity is present in two things: the apparent futility of its many silly proofs, which offers the foregone conclusion that the invisible forces of physics are perpetual and omnipresent; and the inevitable lack of resolution. Motivated first by a careening garbage bag, too easily perceived as a metaphor for the rotations of the planet Earth, these actions end with a spilled bucket of dry ice, smoke billowing out on the concrete floor as the camera moves down towards it, a primordial happening in the messy environment of the artist’s studio.

The challenge posed by Fischli and Weiss lies in the conceptual minimalism of their project: in offering the appearance of the single take, they align themselves with illusionism, in particular, that illusionism practiced by the long takes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. Rope, despite its invocations of traditional invisible editing, is a work of baroque style supported by a conviction towards naturalism; rather than have a mosaic of overlapping action and reverse shots, it achieves this through simple, often concealed transitions. Michael Snow’s Wavelength offers a counterpoint: often misdescribed as a continuous zoom, there is no deception on Snow’s part. The zoom is broken, staggering again and again, and through its revolutions, through the artist’s own interference in its continuity, Wavelength does away with the suspension of disbelief, endorsing an absolute material consciousness in its operations. By contrast, The Way Things Go draws its meaning from the illusion of its continuity, and that illusion is compromised: the comedy of the cartoon assembly line was often improved by the punctuation of the edit, and by parallel editing, but Fischli and Weiss are aligned with Rube Goldberg’s spectacular continuity, a machine of moving parts that achieves its will by the unbroken line that joins inciting action to ultimate reaction. With that model, each transition becomes a kink in the hose, a knot in the string, a signpost that the experiment has been stopped and reset.

The compromise of its concealed transitions is a hidden blessing, for it gives The Way Things Go a greater depth. Consider its literal illustration of the laws of physics: is this ‘the way things go’? Fischli and Weiss know that, in cinema, things go differently: by crooked gestures of illusionism, by the trickery of attractions, by the longing of the spectator to be shuttled into the heart of the occurrence. This is the way things go, image after image stamped out by a machine, to deceive the eye into recognizing a chain reaction in every interval, a chain reaction to make Fred Ott sneeze, a chain reaction to capture the illicit kiss, a chain reaction to safely guide the train to a gentle stop. That train is pulled nearer by the intermittent mechanism of the projector, just as it was captured by the intermittent mechanism of the camera, but it might also be pulled by another, less mechanized force, the will of the eye to see brought forth the object of attraction, the main event, the arrival that slows into being.