Seth Barry Watter

Unpublished galleys of the introduction to The Human Figure on Film: Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional (SUNY, 2023).

"This is a major contribution to the ontology of film. It extends our understanding of what the human figure on film is, what it does, and some very important ways in which it has attracted scholarly attention. It is still with me, haunting my thinking and teaching about film in the present, and one can hardly ask more of a book." — Jason Jacobs

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Human-Figure-on-Film

The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book.

Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept—the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional—that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.

Unpublished galleys of Chapter One of The Human Figure on Film: Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional (SUNY, 2023).

"This is a major contribution to the ontology of film. It extends our understanding of what the human figure on film is, what it does, and some very important ways in which it has attracted scholarly attention. It is still with me, haunting my thinking and teaching about film in the present, and one can hardly ask more of a book." — Jason Jacobs

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Human-Figure-on-Film

The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book.

Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept—the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional—that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.

Special Issue: 'Film, Observation and the Mind'

This article considers the implications for film analysis of the presence or absence of a manual crank. More specifically, it looks at the 16 mm Time and Motion Study Projector as used in behavioral research in the 1960s and 1970s. The controversial concept of ‘interactional synchrony’, or the dance-like coordination of people in conversation, emerged from the use of this hand-turned projector. William S. Condon developed the concept along with the technique of microanalysis. Starting with the projector manufactured by Bell & Howell, he made numerous improvements to facilitate observation—‘sweeping’ over segments of very short duration to discover the rhythmic synchrony of all filmed participants. It led him to a theory of ‘process’ in communication, and in the reception of speech in particular. People always ‘danced’ to the tune of their own voice, and their listeners ‘danced’ to the tune of the speaker—at intervals of one-sixth or one-eighth of a second. This also led Condon to an epistemology of discovery derived partly from philosophy but mostly from his machinery. The universe, he said, is a ‘continuum of order’ whose structures are preserved through translations of order: of thought into speech, speech into vibrations, vibrations into neurons, and back into behavior. The only exceptions are people with disabilities, like the autistics Condon studied from the 1970s onward. But the very distinction of normal and pathological was epiphenomenal to his scanning technique; it was rooted in material and formal qualities of film and of the projector whose crank he turned often.

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/grey_a_00292

This paper examines the history of an event recorder known as the Interaction Chronograph, along with the theory that guided its use. Anthropologist Eliot Chapple (1909-2000) devised the machine in the late 1930s while still faculty at Harvard. Frustrated by rampant anecdotalism in fieldwork, he sought greater precision of observational technique. Since he aimed to study the interactions of individuals, he reconceived (operationalized) interaction as simply the lengths of people's actions and inactions. His Chronograph measured these units diachronically. As a roll of paper moved through the machine at uniform speed, an observer depressed the key assigned to a given actor, thus triggering a stylus to lift and fall, releasing it only when the "action" was complete. With one depressible key per interacting party, two or more intermittent lines would result. These markings were then computed—by hand or, in future versions, by the timing machine itself—to determine levels of gross activity, of comparative initiative and dominance. What emerged was a kind of personality profile. The method was apparently most useful in predicting the success of salespeople, after earlier experiments with naval cadets. Later Chapple used it for the rehabilitation of “sociopaths” at Rockland State Hospital. The programmed "stress" interview, with scheduled silences and interruptions, was itself an integral part of Chronograph research; for it elicited basal rhythms of the acting personality. Thus Chapple stands at the nexus of applied anthropology, business organization, early computing, and rehabilitative therapy. His device had many uses and thus, many meanings, although we might see them all under the paradigm of "smartness."

The work of V. F. Perkins is sometimes said to exemplify “mise-en-scène criticism,” which is attentive to settings as they relate to film characters. It assumes that a setting should not simply sit there but should be charged with meaning for the figures within it. This first premise is often tied to a second, that the setting should be and remain strictly credible. That is to say, the ideal setting is simultaneously credible and expressive, and fiction films can thus be judged by how well they satisfy both. The aim of this article is to show the real difficulty of sustaining this dynamic in relation to characters, who continue to develop and among whom a film shifts. To make their settings somehow always expressive of their habits, thoughts, interests, and feelings is to place enormous strain on the limits of credibility. This strain can be felt in Perkins’s writing itself, and we can appreciate the problem by reading him closely. Insofar as we think setting is a fundamental concept, useful for criticism, his problem is ours as well.


contact: sethwatter@gmail.com

The “natural history” method in behavioral science flourished between 1950 and 1975. Its principal tools were the 16mm camera and the analytic or multispeed projector. With their aid an investigator could both preserve and parse the streams of behavior of proximate persons. Upon scrutiny it was seen that stream became structure, that behavior was interaction; and by interaction was meant the patterned exchange of verbal and nonverbal signals. In America, the foremost agent of such research was the anthropologist Ray L. Birdwhistell (1918-1994), the father of “kinesics.” Working first with Gregory Bateson and later the psychiatrist Albert Scheflen, he developed a set of standard procedures for the recording, storage, and symbolic transcription of interaction behavior. His early program was boosted by the needs of Cold War governance and found further application in linguistics, psychotherapy, and child development study. As a general rule of method he assumed that every movement or vocalism captured by the camera was an integral part of the recorded event—of the series of actions and reactions that made up the interaction. More often than not, the result was an infinite regress of data that technics and theory conjointly produced. Four years might be lavished on a thirty-minute record or one hundred hours on one single second.


contact: sethwatter@gmail.com

This article examines the simultaneous gendering and pathologization of screen space in two films directed by Anatole Litvak, The Snake Pit and Sorry, Wrong Number (US, 1948), released within months of each other. It focuses on two formal phenomena: the morbid close-up and the curlicue camera movement. Magnification of ordinary percepts, or a general and unpleasant accenting of objects in the visual field, is a common complaint in the phenomenology of mental illness, for example, in hysteria, obsession, phobia, and paranoia. An illness removes something from its ordinary context and brings it closer to the subject, who experiences its closeness as enigmatic or distressing. By bringing things closer, however, it also brings them closer together, compacting them into strange and novel figures. Magnification has its cinematic analogue in the close-up, while compaction can be visually rendered by montage or whip pans. The Snake Pit and Sorry, Wrong Number, like other films of the 1940s centered on female insanity, exploit the language of cinema in order to make spectators partake in their pathologized versions of the sensory world. This restructuring of perception by mental illness has also historically been conceived as a deviation of attention from its normal, goal-oriented routines. Attention seems to lose its proper object and so becomes aimless, free floating. In these particular films, the heroines' destabilized attention is figured in whimsical, decorative camera movements. Such curlicues are another means by which the spectator is gradually involved in a world of perceptual morbidity. The article concludes with an extended treatment of paranoia in relation to Sorry, Wrong Number.

This 1980 lecture is the last extended statement by Ray L. Birdwhistell, one of the principal contributors to the Natural History of an Interview. The tone is highly informal and the content wide-ranging, including a number of personal and sometimes dubious anecdotes. The principal theme, however, is the difficulty both of making research films and of looking at them properly. Birdwhistell returns repeatedly to the question of the observer's discipline, or the need to develop new orders of awareness, and comparison is drawn to the stain in microscopy that changes the view entirely despite no change in magnification. Other topics discussed include filming psychiatrists, filming football, the history of ethnographic film, the adoption of new instrumentation, watching movies during the Great Depression, and looking in the mirror. The introduction by Seth Barry Watter puts this lecture in the context of Birdwhistell's career and explains the choices made in editing it for publication.

This short text originally appeared in slightly different form on the website Seeing Science (http://seeingscience.umbc.edu/2017/03/seth-barry-watter-the-measurers-measured/) in March 2017. The present version is from Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe (Aperture, 2019), edited by Marvin Heiferman. An additional bibliography is appended.—SBW

contact: sethwatter@gmail.com

Books reviewed:

Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 253 pp.

Adrian Martin, Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture. Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2020, 432 pp.

From Millennium Film Journal, no. 70 (2019): 24-33. Coauthored with Faith Holland.

Errata: for "Moulton's deft use of the video medium has often been used to," read "... use of the video medium has often gone far to ..." (p. 29); for "know myself" read "know thyself" (p. 30)

contact: sethwatter@gmail.com faholland@gmail.com

"Marshall McLuhan once said that any work of art is a trap for our attention. At the Digital Museum of Digital Art this is quite true as one agrees to be strapped into an Oculus headset. The thing is so heavy it must be wiped clean of sweat. And its discomfort never quite exits consciousness even as the field of vision gives way to 3D. One can swivel one’s head to gain new perspectives but real locomotion is not recommended—you would step outside the sensors that make all this possible. Instead, game-like controllers slip over the hands to allow one to navigate the Museum’s exterior."

contact: sethwatter@gmail.com

"What strikes on first viewing of a loop by Lorna Mills is the apparent of ugliness of it all: ugliness in terms of subject or content and ugliness in terms of pictorial structure. Beauty, traditionally, prolongs its perception by swinging the eye on a grand tour of sorts; and ugly is that which distracts and confuses and makes the eye smart from its overexertion. The division once was common in handbooks for painters. Today it persists in arts education under loose talk of “balance” and the shopworn “rule of thirds.” Such are the claims to which Mills is the rejoinder: for hers is a kind of dynamics without beauty . . ."

contact: sethwatter@gmail.com

In 1962 the Rockland Research Institute at Rockland State Hospital, today Rockland Psychiatric, built a new research ward under the direction of Dr. Nathan S. Kline. The following year its computer lab opened and was at the forefront of computing by the end of the decade. This new type of ward allowed for observation of the ward’s entirety at all times of day. No matter the patient’s location in the ward, he (all were men) could be watched in his doings, in rec rooms and dorms and even in showers. This was made possible by the replacement of private rooms with open floor layouts; and also by placement of one-way glass booths so that four stationed nurses could see all rooms between them. The floors themselves were gridded—ruled off in squares—to facilitate location of the patient precisely. “We are fully aware of the ‘Big Brother’ nature of the arrangement,” wrote the designers, “but there exists no alternative.” It was, after all, less invasive than needles. Photography, film, and audio tape recording made segments of the behavior available for study. And the fuller the data obtained in this way, the more these could be processed and analyzed by computer. Disease in turn was redefined to make it computational—a logic that would culminate in the DSM-III (1980). In this paper I discuss the media-technical practices of two Rockland State scientists, Aristide Esser and Eliot Chapple. Esser used spot maps to study schizophrenics and their daily use of territory in the ethological sense. Chapple, on the other hand, built an “Interaction Chronograph” to measure speech intervals in dyadic interactions: measures that showed, he believed, that fundamental rhythm which we call a personality and which can be worked on by the doctor, therapeutically.

Contact: sethwatter@gmail.com

Read at the conference “Film as Film Today: On the Criticism and Theory
of V. F. Perkins,” Warwick University, September 4-5, 2018.

"While reading the various tributes to V. F. Perkins' life and work collected on Warwick's website, I was especially struck by a line in Adrian Martin's.... [which] reaffirmed what I had long felt to be a central aspect of all Perkins' writing: the unspoken concept of fictional character. What a character is, remains to be seen; yet the work it performs is in some ways clear and obvious. Characters give to film a certain moral force. We look at a scene not of hominids but characters, who live and love and act out their passions. And more: for the force of a character gives shape to its story, justifies what happens as the result of human action. It even helps to organize the details of an image, from the pertinence of backgrounds to the aptness of a framing. In this paper I wish to use Perkins' work as an occasion for rethinking the concept of character: a concept so commonly used by us all as to seem not a concept, but a datum or given."

email: sethwatter@gmail.com

This text began as an essay for a government website, which later censored the piece due to HIPAA concerns (per the website's format, two films were to be embedded with it for streaming). The essay has now been expanded to present three case studies in psychiatric filmmaking: Heinz Lehmann of the Verdun Protestant Hospital in Quebec; Alexander Leighton under the direction of Adolf Meyer at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore; and Robert J. Stoller of the UCLA Medical School. A work in progress, it asks what role cinema has played in psychiatric education and in our ever-changing notions of psychiatric diagnosis.--SBW