This piece was originally published in Issue 7 of Notebook magazine as part of a broader exploration of the unfilmable. The magazine is available via direct subscription or in select stores around the world.
Back in 1964, British director and producer Michael Apted interviewed a group of seven-year-olds from different social and economic backgrounds. The resulting program, titled Seven Up!, was aired on May 5 of that year by itv (Granada Television). Seven years later, Apted reached out to his subjects for a second interview, 7 Plus Seven, also broadcast by itv. Despite its origin on television, some episodes were theatrically released in the United States and elsewhere, speaking to the cinematic quality of the project. He repeated the process seven more times. The last installment in the series was 63 Up (2019); the next one would have been scheduled for 2026, but Apted died five years before then, in 2021. Both praised by critics (Roger Ebert listed 28 Up [1984] as one of his “Ten Greatest Films of All Time” alongside Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1942] and La Dolce Vita [Federico Fellini, 1960]) and reviled as folk psychology, the Up cycle is noteworthy not only as a chronological tour de force but also as a quintessential case study of what can or cannot be captured by a moving-image apparatus. At face value, aging is unfilmable: You can either keep the camera on, as in a surveillance video, or resort to time lapse, which is precisely what Apted did, the difference being that his subjects were growing older at the speed of life, along with their spectators.
In fact, there are three kinds of the Unfilmable at play: things that cannot (or could not) be filmed for objective or technical reasons (the inside of a volcano crater during an eruption; the floor of the Mariana Trench; a tectonic plate in motion); things beyond the realm of recordable visual perception (such as dreams, memories, senses other than sight); and events that should not be filmed from an ethical standpoint, or according to the moral codes of a given culture. The first agent of the Unfilmable is the camera itself. Many shots in the Up series would have been unimaginable in 1895, for the simple reason that operators could not put on record more than one minute or so of consecutive time. In that era, filmmakers had to contend with the “unfilmability” of color and sound, the former achieved with hand-coloring, stencil, and the first additive or subtractive processes; the latter with the many experiments of synchronized film and optical soundtracks, the harbingers of things to come. Many other things were not possible for the Edison and Lumière personnel, such as filming twilight, a microbe, or the belly of a furnace. Movement from the point of view of an observer was unfilmable too, but the railway soon took care of this by enabling so-called “phantom rides,” one of the most intriguing cinemas of attractions of the early years.
Cinema’s relationship with the physical world was rooted in a race between imagination and technology. Filmmakers soon learned how to shoot films from an airplane and underwater; cameras gradually became lighter and easier to operate; the sensitivity of film emulsion—that is, how the physical surface of a photochemical film reacts to light—also changed, enabling the recording of natural and artificial phenomena with an ever greater degree of accuracy. Still, some obstacles were insurmountable. Explorers in the North and South Poles had to figure out ways to turn the crank at extremely low temperatures, and they didn’t always succeed. Doing so in tropical climates was equally challenging, as Gaston Méliès—Georges’s maverick, ruthless, and unjustly maligned brother—found out to his own expense when he decided to try and produce exotic dramas and adventures in the Pacific: by the time his negatives reached the laboratories, high humidity and mold had compromised most of his efforts, which is why so little is left to be viewed of his short melodramas.
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975).
A technological history of the Unfilmable has not been written yet (as opposed to the countless histories of what has actually been filmed), but it is clear that its main characters would be the apparatus, the lenses, and the image carrier, alongside its makers. A substantial section should be devoted to the slow but steady progress made in improving camera mobility, with a dedicated chapter about portable devices: from amateur equipment to the caméra-stylo celebrated by the French Nouvelle Vague as a symbol of emancipation from the constraints of the studio system. There has also been progress in the study of film emulsions and their irresistible rise from the low reactivity of orthochromatic stock—the film used in the early years of cinema—to the 7000-asa negatives employed by Stanley Kubrick (courtesy of NASA) for his candlelight scenes in Barry Lyndon (1975).
The more one delves, however, into the limits of human perception, the more difficult it becomes to draw the line that separates the physically Unfilmable from its ontological counterpart. From a sensorial perspective, the hallucinations of an LSD trip are very real, but they can be portrayed on film only through an imitative process, creating new images that resemble those hallucinations. The same may be said of a mirage in the desert, whose detection is the sole prerogative of our visual apparatus. On the other hand, a century ago, filming the vision of creatures like frogs and mosquitoes would have been impossible, but there were scientists who refused to give up (Harry Eltringham, a biologist from the University of Oxford, managed to produce a photograph through the eye of a firefly as early as 1918).
Today, the simulation of animal sight is close to being old hat; all the same, there are things cinema can’t do. Kubrick himself would have liked to spend more time figuring out how to film phosphenes, the dots and swirls of light we perceive when our eyes are closed. A similar lust for breaking the barrier of the Unfilmable must have lurked behind his acquisition of the rights to Patrick Süskind’s novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985, about a criminal who is hypersensitive to smell), later left to the care of director Tom Tykwer in 2006, with underwhelming results.
Odorama card for Polyester (John Waters, 1981).
Other senses have been subject to more or less humiliating gimmicks, allegedly beginning in 1916 with the short film Story of the Flowers, the first film screening to be accompanied by scents, and continuing via Smell-O-Vision, a process created by Hans Laube for Jack Cardiff’s 1960 turkey Scent of Mystery. Few theaters were equipped to release scented air from under the seats, and one would be hard-pressed to find primary testimonies of such short-lived concoctions as General Electric’s Smell-O-Rama and Walter Reade Jr.’s AromaRama (Behind the Great Wall, Carlo Lizzani, 1959), but millions of people saw John Waters’s Polyester (1981), featuring ten aromas ranging from air freshener to flatulence (unused Odorama cards, printed in various languages, are now coveted collectors’ items). This part of the story isn’t over yet, judging from a yet-unverified “interactive” technology called Olorama, purportedly to be applied to touchscreens and virtual-reality devices.
The cinematic history of taste is much shorter and perhaps the least interesting, as it may be reduced to a catalog of the many films to feature a culinary subject; the best experts in the field may have been those analog film projectionists who would lick or rub their lips against film stock in order to determine the film emulsion side of a print (it’s the rugged one, but some might balk at the prospect). More can be expected from a survey of cinematic touch. Let’s skip, but not dismiss, the tactile relationship between the photographic image and the human eye, often summoned by those who have seen a beautiful 35mm black-and-white print, so saturated with silver salts as to make its black deeper than that of a Frans Hals portrait (a comparison with digital black would be instructive). Instead, rewind to the 1910s, when inventors flirted with the notion of a cinema for the blind, consisting of horizontal benches with special “prints” in bas-relief, to be experienced by visually impaired spectators like a document in the Braille writing system. What did these “viewers” see? What were their mental images?
For that matter, what are our own mental images, regardless of the retina’s condition? Blind people go to the movies and watch them at home. Among other things, they are often accompanied by people who complement their experience with a live oral chronicle of the action, or by technologies devised for the same purpose. If the difference between them and the other viewers is only a matter of modes of perception, we enter into a dangerous territory where everyone’s experience of reality is deemed different, therefore nothing is filmable. Aging is a fact of life, but if it cannot be filmed or talked about as cinema without tackling the notion of elapsed cinematic time, where does the distinction between “filmable” and “unfilmable” lie? How do you film restlessness? (Answer: See Charles Dekeukeleire’s Impatience, 1928, known for its ability to exasperate viewers.) How do you film a pause? (Answer: another Dekeukeleire film, Histoire de détective, 1929, a crime story which only shows the detective in meditative mode.) The final verdict may have come from another Belgian filmmaker, Boris Lehman, who professed and put into practice his radical utopia of an autobiographical cinema of non-events by poeticizing the most trivial aspects of everyday life.
Histoire de détective (Charles Dekeukeleire, 1929).
That’s not all, of course. The ontologically unfilmable includes memory, thought, and emotions. Even within the context of Michael Apted’s series, the protagonists’ recollections of their own pasts could only be evoked through the repeated display of excerpts of previous episodes of the cycle: the characters’ childhood, salient moments of previous interviews, fleeting references to what they had said or how they reacted to the interviewer’s questions. Basic feelings such as love, hatred, contempt, shame, regret—not to mention evil and good—are the bread and butter of narrative filmmaking, and yet we can only bring them to light with the intermediary of tangible (and easily filmable) traces such as body language, dialogue, and actions like violence, tears, or displays of affection. The emotions themselves are beyond our reach. They can only be surmised from the way they manifest in people’s behavior (given spectacular advances in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and image capture, how long this will hold true remains to be seen).
The third incarnation of the Unfilmable may be described as a dystopian vision of what should not be filmed or should never have seen the light on the screen. Let us assume that a repugnant act has been staged for the purposes of filming it, without the consent or the awareness of its participants. Let us also assume that the individuals in charge of filming were fully aware of what was about to be perpetrated. Finally, let’s pretend that the viewers of the resulting moving images knew that these images resulted from a nonconsensual interaction between the image-makers and their subjects. It can be taken for granted that the subjects are the victims of proceedings that qualify as unethical, or criminal, or both. Pinpointing the role of those who stood behind the camera is not as easy: For all we know, they may have been forced to do so under duress, but if they were not, they may have been the accomplices, the performers, or just the witnesses of the offense.
Indeed, things become even more complicated when examined from a spectatorial perspective. The viewer may or may not be aware that the crime committed in front of the camera is real. She or he may not even know what they are about to see. Whether we like it or not, censorship has existed and does exist not only in obedience to social codes (the now quasi-defunct embargo upon onscreen kisses in Indian cinema, the most common form of the Unfilmable in the twentieth century), but also in order to prevent or discourage actual or supposed wrongdoings from happening at all. To push the case to its extreme, consider the possibility that the event—say, a rape, a torture, a Nazi newsreel proudly showing the abuse of Jewish populations—was not fictional and that viewers knew it. This begs the question whether or not their choice to watch makes them participants in the crime.
49 Up (Michael Apted, 2005).
Then, there is the moving image itself, and the possibility that the events were incited for the purpose of being filmed. One may argue that the medium of the moving image is in itself innocent, because it is only a document in need of an interpreter; this being the case, a film that already exists cannot be held accountable for the reasons why someone would have wanted to watch, say, the antisemitic film in 1942 or in 2042. That film should not be destroyed, and seeing it is not a crime; what matters is what the viewer does or doesn’t do afterward. No moving image, however, exists on its own in a cultural and moral vacuum. It is there because it postulates a relationship between it and its spectators. This isn’t about censorship. It has to do with our moral obligations toward society, history, and a responsible use of our own freedom of expression.
Taken together, these three facets of the Unfilmable—the physical, the ontological, the moral—are so deeply interconnected that it would be unwise to treat them as the discrete expressions of a single concept. For an ethnographer, the filming of a secret initiation rite pertains to the first category, as it represents a valuable anthropological break into a hitherto inaccessible aspect of the real world; for others, especially those who belong to the community in which the ceremony was filmed, such a film exemplifies the third category, as it is the unforgivable breach of a taboo that should have remained as such. The moving image itself stands in the middle, both as the witness of the Unfilmable and a signpost of its limits. These frontiers are far from being mere abstractions: Like all messengers of human creativity, they are historically determined, evolving over time, and therefore subject to never-ending mutations. What makes the artificial moving image so unique in relation to other modes of communication is precisely its ability to expose and challenge the boundaries of its own ambitions.
Back to Issue 7’s table of contents.