Semiotica 2020; 236–237: 251–273

Michael Betancourt*
The “material function” in cinema:
Resolving the paradox of the glitch
https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2019-0006

Abstract: Glitches pose expressive challenges for digital motion pictures. These
problematics reveal a “material function” that determines their identification and
prescribes their semantics on-screen. These issues of materiality are familiar from
the ideological critiques of avant-garde film in the 1970s, but have not been
explored in relation to the semiotics of digital cinema. Developing an under-
standing of these problematics shows the complex problematics of using glitches
for critical and expressive purposes in motion pictures.

Keywords: film, digital, postcinema, glitch, realism

Indexicality haunts media and media art, an issue that continuously returns,
unbidden, as an automatic question raised by Modernist medium-specific aes-
thetics and the concept of “purity,” (Greenberg 1993: 86) as well as in the
appearance of those technical elements normally hidden by the operations of the
system itself (Hatfield 2003: 63–64). Motion pictures appear “transparent” –
whether on celluloid, in electronic analogue video, or via the digital encoding of
computers – when the audience ignores what contains/supports the appearance of
movement, and looks only at the denoted contents: the “invisible” physical sup-
port is seen through as an operative element of normal presentation–for–audience.
These dynamics of immanence and invisibility are important since they define the
technical failure or “glitch” as a relational designation, one that mediates between
cinematic realism, the claims of indexicality, and aspirations to being an onto-
logical symptom of “the real.”
Audience engagement has a central, dominant position in every construction
of cinematic realism. Through context and convention the “average reader” as-
sumes the normative organization of media articulation as the precondition for
realist coherence: this acceptance makes the “transparent” engagement with
media appear to be a natural consequence of signification, normalizing cinematic
realism and its narrative function as inevitable, a transformation that masks how
this presentation changes ideology into immanent demonstration on-screen. Film

*Corresponding author: Michael Betancourt, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA,
USA, E-mail: michael@michaelbetancourt.com
252 M. Betancourt

historian Richard Maltby explains this “average reader” through their distinction
from the “critical viewer”:

The reader’s competence is responsive: imaginatively active, perhaps, but not proactive; it
accommodates the reader to the world of the text … Unlike the critic, who inhabits an
alternative sphere of analytic liberty in which the fissures of the text are exposed and its
sutures unsewn, [semiotician Umberto] Eco’s “average reader” is a good bourgeois, never
seeking to occupy a position from which it might disrupt the text. (Maltby 1996: 435)

The “average reader” employs a series of recognitions based on past experience

that involves precisely a normative concern “with” the content of the text, and
although the mediated ‘event’ of cinema is not the same as what one sees without
its intervention, the caprice of cinematic realism takes the claims it can be
equivalent to lived experience, be interchangeable with “the real,” as the necessity
and sufficient condition of the medium. Cinema renders this claim as an aesthetic
system (Hanhardt 1976: 22). The ideological nature of representation derives from
the how this audience identification of equivalence turns connotation into reality.
This transformative action renders the ‘world on screen’ as an experiential reality
for the audience – theorized by André Bazin’s ontological argument, and
expanded upon by American philosopher Stanley Cavell in his book, The World
Viewed (Cavell 1979: 68–78, 108–118). Because celluloid films are composed from
photographs, for both Cavell and Bazin, their photography is evidence of an
“objective” presentation (Bazin 2009: 8–9) that reveals a socially-defined reality
(Rushton 2011: 44–47). Thus the term “transparency” is apt: the medium “disap-
pears” into the meaning it conveys – this acceptance of realist presentation forms
the essential basis for what Maltby describes; without it narrative disappears. The
role of the audience’s established knowledge in parsing realism distinguishes
these engagements, which can be summarized as:
(1). The “average reader” interprets the movie via the “transparency” of the
immanent encounter, an intratextual engagement that remains primarily
fixated upon the enunciations and order arising from accepting their realist
articulation in cinema=narrative.
(2). The “critical viewer” challenges the immanence of transparent articulation
through their recognition and use of intertextual information absent from the
realist presentation, a “reading” that complicates and expands the ‘event’ into
signification.

Denotation and enculturation implement a “transparency” of cinematic presen-

tation that the technical failure corrupts by denying the categorical separation of
empirical reality (ontology) from cultural constructs (realism). This aspiration to
actuality, to being an ontological symptom of “the real,” reveals the
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 253

gignomenological law of identity that defines the categories of encounter a priori to

their arrangement and modulation. Realism and lexical expertise interact as
“transparency”: the refusal of the presentation–for–audience is a foundational
articulation of order, a refractive judgment that distinguishes what is relevant from
irrelevant to consideration. Normative fluency pronounces errors, glitches, and
other technical failures as physical eruptions of “noise,” as irrelevant distractions
from the contents of digital media, a reflection of the aura of the digital which
asserts an imaginary perfection for reproduction transcending its physical pre-
sentation – thus, any apparent failing is merely a transitory problem with the
particular display that can and should be ignored (Betancourt 2016a: 61–74). This
automatic erasure of “noise” creates a teleological engagement where conclusions
about the on-screen ‘event’ such as narrative causality and fabula also justify their
identification.
Defining a motion picture as “glitched” depends on encultured hierarchies of
order and articulation which the idealized “average reader” employs to address
obstructions to articulation. The role of these immanent disparactions becomes
obvious in the absolute difference between “signal” (signification) and “noise”
(irrelevance). These dynamics are well theorized in relation to art, but their op-
position is also deeply unstable. The accommodation of the “average reader” when
engaging the physical presentation results in the disruptions of “noise” being
interrogated, then rejected as non-signifying, as philosopher Jacques Attali
explained in the book Noise, a foundational text in the theorization of digital errors
and other glitches:

With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its
opposite: subversion. In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among them.
Clamor, Melody, Dissonance, harmony; when it is fashioned by man with specific tools, when
it invades man’s time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of purpose and power, of
the dream – music. (Attali 1985: 6)

Attali speaks of music, but his acknowledgement that “noise” is a specific type of
technical failure, one that disrupts communication is true of all media: it must be
rejected in the “transparent” engagement of the “average reader.” This expression
of a dominant ideological power, cinematic realism, separates order from chaos.
Perceived intentionality mediates between the immanent “signal” (signification)
and the invisible “noise” (irrelevance). However, the automatic, necessary
dismissal of glitches implied by Attali’s opposition is illusory, dependent on their
identification as non-signifying elements, placed and appearing without a
conscious decision (without an assumed intent to signify). Designers’ and artists’
expressive use of glitches is distinguished by this intentionality, by not being
254 M. Betancourt

random or uncontrolled, while the appearance of technical failures in everyday life

often is arbitrary and unintentional. The central point of his observation is that
“noise” is an absence of meaning. Glitches that emerge for interpretation via the
“material function” posit an arbitrary and capricious doubling of signification
beginning with the recognition of this “noise” in those perceptual artifacts that are
identified as signifiers of failure–as–failure. The subtlety of this distinction is
central to its problematics of ‘transparency,’ which are not a question about
defining the abstract rules of semiotics (langue) or cinematic representation
(naturalism::stylization); these problematics concern the basis for meaning, the
audience’s recognition of which rules to apply, and when. It is the foundational
inscribing of the parameters separating documentary from fiction that are being-
factual and being-fictional. The glitch reveals this superstructural order in its
ambivalent hesitation over what constitutes the meaningful, ‘intentional function’
that identifies the articulation/statement itself.
Connections between indexicality, cinematic realism, and the encultured role
of past experience in the identification of “noise” are obvious. The use of lexical
discourse, the expectations formed by grammar, and all the orders of learned
expertise gained from past experience that communicate a meaning in motion
pictures are only enabled by the necessary initial decision to separate “signal” from
“noise.” The “average reader” is central to this process of imposition: “trans-
parency” asserts the normative order of cinematic realism and allows its
comprehension as either objective or subjective. Within this proximate enframing
of experience, a technical failure is never “only” a technical failure: it also always
signifies “technical failure.” Even potentially disruptive breakdowns are trans-
formed by this superficially paradoxical act (cinematic realism) into a component
of “transparent” articulation – glitches become signs that serve as a representa-
tional “diagnostic” which audiences use to identify them as symptoms of failure–
as–failure, as Umberto Eco explains in The Limits of Interpretation:

Signs are natural events that act as symptoms or indices, and they entertain with that which
they designate a relation based in the mechanism of inference (if such a symptom, then such
a sickness; if smoke, then fire). Words stand in a different relation with the thing they
designate (or with the passions of the soul they signify or, in Stoic terms, with the propo-
sition – lekton – they convey), and this relation is based on mere equivalence and bicon-
ditionality. (Eco 1994: 113)

The identification of glitches as being what they appear to be is an understanding of

them as empirical signs of ‘what has gone wrong,’ things-in-themselves that lack
other meaning than their own identity. This apparently easy recognition is an
ideological designation that is the end-product of the perceptual-interpretive
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 255

process. The problematics of this diagnostic approach to glitches as symptoms of

failure–as–failure is instructive when considered in relation to their generation. It
is the same whether in an analogue or digital motion picture: the protocol that
produces the glitch happens twice, first by the machine autonomously rendering
the movie for viewing, then again as the audience engages it. The designation of
glitches-as-symptoms seems obvious, inevitable, natural. The self-referential
diagnostic – their identification as a symptom – transforms Bazin’s indexical claim
for photography:

Whatever the objections of our critical faculties, we are obliged to believe in the existence of
the object represented: it is truly re-presented, made present in time and space … Seen in this
light, cinema appears to be the completion in time of photography’s objectivity. A film is no
longer limited to preserving the object sheathed in its moment, like the intact bodies of insects
from a bygone era preserved in amber … Only the impassive lens, in stripping the object of
habits and preconceived notions, of all the spiritual detritus that my perception has wrapped
it in, can offer it up unsullied to my attention and thus to my love. In the photograph, a natural
image of a world we no longer able to see, nature finally does more than imitate art: it imitates
the artist. (Bazin 2009: 8–9)

Bazin’s argument concerns not the link of photograph to subject, but rather the
unmediated appearance that enables the viewer to have a fantasy that what they
see on-screen corresponds to what they might see in person. The “material func-
tion” turns this claim that “we are obliged to believe in the existence of the object
represented: it is truly re-presented, made present in time and space” into an
immanent acknowledgement of/with the liminal products of “malfunctioning
technology,” redefining that encounter as a proof of that machine’s operation, a
claim to the veracity of the production–as–artifice, a revelation of cinema as a
reflection on “the real” (Williams 1980: 36). This understanding is literally manifest
in the material breakdowns of film – light flares, flutter, scratches, and dirt to name
only a few of the problems common to historical, archival footage that appear in
the fictive “newsreel” in Citizen Kane. The focus of Bazin’s argument is a naturalism
arising from its apparently direct – in his words, ontological – convergence with
our everyday perceptual experiences. Understanding cinema (and all motion
pictures) in these terms gives their visual appearance an innately documentary
dimension – thus also internalizing the proposal of their contents as being
simultaneously a “fictive construction” and a “proof” of what might exist in the
world. The physical failings of celluloid thus converge on the technical failures
that are the generative products of computational processes in digital media
because of their apparent revelation of the reality of cinema in the presentation–
for–audience.
256 M. Betancourt

Yet those analogue and digital process that render media for a human audi-
ence equally invoke Eco’s commentary about signs and words. These “errors” only
become meaningful in specific situations where they cannot otherwise be ignored
as “noise.” The audience’s identification of a technical failure as a symptom de-
pends on past experience to know it is a deviation from the established order. This
understanding of them as signs also threatens to dissolve the separation of signs
versus words precisely because of the protocol of their production. This conver-
gence is the paradox posed by glitches. Their aspiration to being an ontological
proof of “the real” is immanent: the glitch is not just a thing-in-the-world, it is also a
specific artifact existing within a symbolic system, representation. Thus they
constitute a stoppage apart from the designation of signal::noise where interpre-
tation cannot continue without first making a decision about engaging their sig-
nificance as-normative (representationally), or as-glitched (symptomatically).
Glitches thus reveal an instability in interpretation. This ambivalence is the pri-
mary character of the glitch as well as the source of its problematics. They behave
as-normative and as-glitched, giving them a capacity for conveying an excess
meaning beyond just a diagnostic empiricism. These peculiar dynamics can make
their indexical claims, aspiration to ontological demonstration, and structural role
in cinematic realism disclose the dynamics of how ideology normalizes disruptions
through enculturation to “critical viewers,” giving the glitch the false appearance
of being inherently critical.
Relegation to the ‘external realm’ of non-signification (except as a technical
problem to eliminate) means that the attention glitches receive only highlights the
elliptical role of the aura of the digital, evident in how the “average reader” en-
gages them only to eliminate them from consideration and consciousness. This
“transparent” approach handles glitches as Eco’s thing-in-itself, thus denying their
potential signification: his distinction between signs and words allows a recogni-
tion of the diagnostic approach to “material function” as an anti-representation
where ontology and indexicality converge in the aspiration to being a proof of “the
real.” Understanding digital glitches and other breakdowns as symptoms assumes
an immediate link between what appears on-screen and its cause that parallels
Bazin’s argument for photography. This ontological aspiration is not simply a
metaphor, but a literal methodology for engaging these failings, allowing a
diagnostic analysis to “fix” the problem: it is reified in the RCA Television Pict-
O-Guide repair handbooks for receivers published in the 1950s and 1960s, which
included photographs of various reception problems accompanied by instructions
for their correction (Figure 1) that resemble the distortions and other visuals
appearing in early video art (Meagher 1949). In treating glitches diagnostically, as
problems to eliminate, they cannot be anything other than “noise” that distorts
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 257

and corrupts the “signal.” The symptomatic identification as “technical failure” is

also a reflexive justification for the designation “noise.” What matters in Bazin’s
construct are neither the actuality of events shown, nor their continuous appear-
ance on-screen, but the formal semblance of such continuity to experience (Bazin
2009: 81). Separating lexical interpretation from experiential phenomena through
an appeal to ontology makes the aspirational claim to “the real” appear that much
more secure by simultaneously denying the conventional cinematic realism of
their depiction on-screen: glitches become an example of a contingent
“découpage” (Barnard 2014: 7) that presents itself objectively through the mis-
functions of the cinematic apparatus. This “empirical,” diagnostic approach must

Figure 1: Examples of technical breakdowns showed in the 1949 repair handbook RCA Television
Pict-O-Guide: An Aid to TV Troubleshooting, Volume 1 by John R. Meagher.
258 M. Betancourt

begin by rhetorically connecting the glitch to the technical medium: being the
thing–in–itself precludes any other meaning. The designation “glitch” or “tech-
nical failure” is an ontological argument about the nature of the image that reifies
its relationship to “the real” as an immanent demonstration expressed via a
diagnostic spectacle.
Defining the glitch in these aspirations to “the real” directly illuminates its
complexity. This diagnostic approach to the glitch-as-symptom continues with
digital media, despite the shift from analogous recording to instrumental code.
Although the nature of digital media complicates its assessment, the datastream
contained in a digital file is defined by the automatic encoding of information that
conclusively directs machine activity in rendering the motion picture as an
audio-visual form. This processing contrasts absolutely with the denoted con-
tents of that on-screen display for the human audience, whose understanding is
governed by the ambivalent codes of representational art, past experience, and
lexical fluency. Digital glitches, or breakdowns, or technical failures in compu-
tational media may seem entirely random to their human audience, but the
erratic truncations and deviations that transform what appears on-screen are not
arbitrary. When the expected realism of a digital movie becomes instead vivid
abstract patterns, something has “gone wrong” according to its human audience
(Figure 2). This aspect of digital glitches informs how breakdowns are used to
interrupt lexical engagement in the 9 second title sequence designed by Jonathan
Gershon for the first season of the television program Tosh.O (2011), which uses
compression errors to interfere with the reading process (Figure 3). Audio-visual
synchronization in Tosh.O transforms what might otherwise appear to be an
unintentional breakdown into the same arranged and organized presentation
typical of normative engagements (recognized via an ‘intentional function’). The
paired shots of this opening, one showing an animated logo, the other showing
the host Daniel Tosh, have been glitched in similar ways: what normally appears
as a continuous, uninterrupted field becomes in this design a collection of
squares that combine to form the image. It is an arrangement that alludes to how
digital compression fragments and structures digital cinema, but this technical
order is normally invisible. The “eruption” of this procedural basis remains
within the established parameters of cinematic realism precisely because the
“average reader” can engage it ‘transparently,’ understanding all the de-
formations as part of the conventional nature of the pseudo-independent title
sequence in which the normal presentation that is expected of the main text does
not apply. These designed glitches link to the show’s contents directly: it is a
program of humorous clips taken from the Internet with “color commentary”
provided by the host who makes jokes about what happens. It is a show that
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 259

adapts the same amateur video format as the program America’s Funniest Home
Videos, but draws from an international pool of material. The glitches in this
design make this connection to amateur, non-professional media production
explicit by incorporating the kinds of technical breakdown that were common to
webvideo into the design. Announcing the “sources” for these videos in this title
sequence is typical of how television programs identify their contents. The
conventional suspension of stylistic expectations for show openers ironically
allows cinematic realism to easily assimilate these deformations as a “material
function” that would otherwise prove highly disruptive, even in a show made
from web videos where such breakdowns are commonplace.

Figure 2: Two still frames from Malfunction showing encoding errors that produce aberrations in
the appearance of the image, converting it into a field of graphic patterns. Copyright © 2000
Michael Betancourt / Artists Rights Society (ARS).
260 M. Betancourt

Figure 3: Selected stills showing the integration of text, live action footage, and digital glitches
from the title sequence to Tosh.O (Season 1, 2011) designed by Jonathan Gershon.

The role of “material function” in cinematic realism becomes acutely impor-

tant because glitches, graphic abstractions, and other types of error can be only
understood through a ‘narrative function’ if those disruptions become narration
about what they disrupt, as with the glitches that appear as part of the story in the
ITV program Inspector Morse as a visualization of a computer malfunction that
destroys data (Figure 4). This self-referential assertion of the digital substance of
the images on-screen informs the recovery of “material function,” even if the
glitched imagery neither appears similar to everyday perceptions, nor progresses
as an elaboration of causality (Betancourt 2016b: 108–113). This transformative
capacity renders “material function” as a self-referential narration about the shots
in both the Tosh.O title sequence and in ‘the newsreel’ from Citizen Kane.
“Breakdown” (the glitches/scratches) act as an immanent ‘proof’ of the physicality
of the media being displayed, a historical testimony to its archival nature. The
scratches, dirt and technical “noise” of the “newsreel” shots in Citizen Kane
function as material claims to the “historical testimony” of its fictitious archival
footage in the same ways that the digital interruptions in the Tosh.O titles act to
identify these images as computational, rather than physical (the identification of
the glitches as being-factual proofs of their digital nature). The “material function”
acts as a self-referential demonstration of the generative basis for the abnormal
imagery, allowing the glitches to disappear into “transparent” articulation, a re-
turn to cinematic realism.
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 261

Figure 4: Selected stills from the ITV program Inspector Morse (1990: series 4, episode 4,
“Masonic Mysteries”) showing glitches that represent a computer malfunction.

Glitches are a product, not of invalid code, but of lapses in coding that the
machine renders normally, thus creating what the human audience understands
as deviations from expected norms of representation; however, the machine which
will only render valid instructions. There is nothing technically “wrong” with the
gltched file because the computer will still render it. The “problem” lies in the
apperception of the output for the audience – in the anticipated result (encultur-
ation). It does not cause a complete breakdown: if the file was actually “broken” it
would not “play” and the machine would stop working. There would be nothing to
see or hear – the “halt” in the expression “halt and catch fire” vividly explains the
results of real technical failure in early computers. Computer coding is instru-
mental, not poetic. This fact of digital technology means the unexpected results of
glitches are predictable in advance and necessarily determinate – encoded in-
structions are always uniform in what they render – provided the decoding system
remains constant. Digital artist Daniel Temkin explains how the direct manipula-
tion of this datastream disrupts the rendering of digital media by altering the
hexadecimal machine code (data) within the file itself to create glitches:

We can replace all the “DF”s with “1A”s. The result is an image which becomes glitchy in
appearance as the image data is altered. The exposure of the code-behind-the-image is part of
what helps us recognize this as glitch art. The raw data is exposed for us to hack – this is how
many of us began in glitch art, messing with an image data directly in a hex editor, working
blindly or referencing glitch tutorials or ancient white papers for file formats … What gives
JPEG corruption its signature look is the way that data for each pixel is not mapped one-to-one
to a place in memory but distributed within a matrix, along with the changes we introduce
(the “error”). We have not actually “broken” the image in any meaningful sense; we’ve
introduced no structural damage. (Temkin 2014)
262 M. Betancourt

This process is called “databending.” The glitch exploits the semiotic nature of
digital encoding and compression by adding deviant or extraneous instructions to
the process. It is a manipulation of the “raw” digital encoding itself, a methodology
that creates instructions for producing specifically anomalous results when a
computer renders that data into a human readable form. As Temkin’s commentary
makes apparent, computational operations in digital systems are purely rational.
The datastream or digital file only functions as a prescriptive instrumentality, but the
glitches resulting from its alteration dramatically distort and destroy the normative
coherence of what is displayed. Glitches confront the expectations of their human
audience, who have several related, potential responses to understanding them that
depend on an internalized conception of their role in interpreting cinematic realism:

[a] The diagnostic identification of malfunction aspires to be seen as an ontological

conception of technical failure, a symptom, treating the result as evidence of an actual
failure (unintentional) that potentially requires some response from the audience to correct it,
ending their interpretive engagement. Representation is denied by this diagnostic conception
of the depiction as-being the thing–in–itself. No further semiosis is possible for this diagnostic
engagement.

[b] The symbolic identification of misfunction can be understood as a reflexive narration

about the display. This interpretation of the “material markers” renders them as evidence of a
claim to being-factual (i.e. as historical testimony or proof of authenticity) that articulates
meaning through realism. This ‘transparent’ approach used by the “average reader” poses as
a “veil of nature” to limit interpretations of materiality to their role as a reflexive narration
about the image’s materiality, as with simulations of degraded historical footage that un-
derstand misfunction as symptomatic of malfunction.

[c] As a signifier of failure-as-failure, the “material markers” develop the semiotic potentials of
the ‘material function,’ defined by narrative concerns with representing failure within
diegesis (as in a narrative work). This ‘narrative function’ understands the ‘image-carrier’ as
illustrating a “breakdown” as a causal product of events depicted.

[d] In the ‘poetic functions’ of misfunction, the use of failure-as-aesthetic defines and
considers the “material markers” as an artifact engaged for aesthetic purposes.

Any use of glitches beyond their identification as the thing–in–itself gives the
“material function” a representational role as “signal” rather than “noise.”
Appreciating glitches for their aesthetic value depends on the initial identification
of a glitch as [a] an example of technical failure, then appraising it symbolically/
aesthetically [c/d], responses which are not mutually exclusive; the variety of
technical failures in [c] and [d] defines the range of narrative::poeisis in “glitch art.”
These ‘aesthetics of failure’ rely on understanding glitches as symbolic
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 263

representations of technical misfunction, not as aspirants to an ontology of ‘real’

breakdowns.
Conceiving glitches diagnostically, as a demonstration of being-factual, is
obvious in the connections between [a] symptom and [b] historical testimony,
along with their implicit role in [c/d] symbolic appraisals, demonstrates the power
of ontology as an axiomatic, yet inevitable fallacy because its recognition is a
product that only emerges in a relationship to encultured beliefs about ‘correct’
operation. This division between the digital realm and human-readable rendering
separates the codes of mechanical systems from the interpretive codes of human
language and art precisely over the issues of ambiguity and ambivalence: for the
machine, meta-stable responses that move within a range of potentials are
impossible “unknowns” that cannot be executed. In contrast, they are the essential
feature of human communication and art.
What the audience encounters with the “material function” is apparent in how
the particular technical failures of digital cinema are an intensification of earlier,
physical failures that impacted the celluloid filmstrip itself. Databending reveals
the continuity of “material function” between historical motion pictures and
digital cinema. The historical capacity of errors to carry across one frame and into
the next on celluloid – the scratch that runs across multiple frames, potentially
extending throughout an entire motion picture – is the analogue to the digital
glitch. But where the scratch remains at the surface, lying over the image, as with
the scrapes, marks, and dirt common to archival films that also appears in the
“newsreel” for Citizen Kane (Figure 5), the glitch is a structural transformation,
integral to the image itself in ways that physical scratches on film are not. This
difference is a reflection of technology, not ontology. Their distinction reveals that
although the formal range extends from the superficial (surface scratch) to the
foundational (structural breakdown), the indexical claims made about these in-
terventions in the base of motion pictures remain constant. Their common iden-
tification as a material engagement with the substance of the image is implicit in
the “transparent” approach of the “average reader,” who turns these indexical
symptoms or markers into an ontological proof, evidence of their entanglement.

Figure 5: Stills showing shots of “Charles Foster Kane” (Orson Welles) appearing with
Roosevelt, Franco, and Hitler in the “newsreel” from the opening sequence of Citizen Kane.
264 M. Betancourt

These encultured relationships between indexicality, objectivity, and those

claims to being-factual articulated as the identification of a glitch as the thing–in–
itself emerge simultaneously as mutually reinforcing formations; their historical
conflation demonstrates their linkage, defined as the “material function.” Cultural
expertise resolves them into the significance of “glitched” as artist and theorist
Brian O’Doherty’s discussion on the ambivalence of snapshots in his study Inside
the White Cube makes evident. He recognizes in these convergences of physicality
with learned experience the dominance of mediation, but what he describes as the
evidence for this process is enculturation:

Much of our experience can only be brought home through mediation. The vernacular
example is the snapshot. You can only see what a good time you had from the summer
snapshots. Experience can then be adjusted to certain norms of “having a good time.” These
Kodachrome icons are used to convince friends you did have a good time – if they believe it,
you believe it. Everyone wants to have photographs not only to prove but to invent their
experience. (O’Doherty 1986: 52)

O’Doherty’s recognitions might suggest narcissism, insecurity, or even pathos, but

his rejection of “transparency” belies their significance: what he has described is a
social relation between people around the realism of the photograph, imbuing it
with significance. These observations about memory and perception come as an
aside in a lager discussion about alienation and Modernist approaches to art
allowing only the “critical reader.” This context imposes a rejection of the “average
reader,” and conceives of “transparency” as uncritical, implicitly condemning it as
a trite expression of a naïf cultural belonging. The mobilization of familiar cultural
codes in O’Doherty’s example of holiday snapshots is not a question of uncertainty
or insecurity. It demonstrates the cultural basis of the norms of “having a good
time” his hypothetical images address. If the events depicted in the snapshots
seem credible, it is because of an encultured set of values that conceives the
photographs as indexes of “the real,” if they are not convincing, then their
indexicality also disappears. His recognition makes this ontological fallacy
obvious: the reality of the experience is separate from its representation – that
depends on social context, on the instructive role of enculturation. Snapshots
provide a truncated instance of established meaning and its elaboration. The
inherent distinction of fun/not-fun will be automatically supplied by the viewers
whose encultured knowledge gives the “world viewed” its internal coherence. For
cinema, these codes are not just vague representations of enjoyment; this same set
of recognitions and fluencies apply to how audio-visual materials become the
diegetic effects of 'narrative function' and the causality that creates fabula. And
these same cultural distinctions are also evident in the appraisal of glitches on-
screen: if they seem irrelevant or “unintentional,” they may be ignored as in
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 265

everyday life (as noise) or addressed symptomatically as errors to eliminate, but if

they seem to have a conscious dimension of control and arrangement, i.e. suggest
an ‘intentional function,’ this social recognition allows their consideration as part
of the articulation.
This “material function” describes how glitches act upon/through perception,
and are defined by signification. Their entanglement of perception::signification
reveals a distinction between interrelated levels of interpretation: by being symp-
tomatic, aspirants to an ontological proof of “the real,” they become empirical
demonstrations of autonomous processes; simultaneously, by belonging to a spe-
cifically historical network of denotation and connotation around glitches in digital
media they are examples of signification. These apparent paradoxes are important
for what they suggest about how glitches pose a linkage between indexical–onto-
logical approaches to “the real,” as Eco comments in his book on the problematics of
representation, Kant and the Platypus:

If we accept that even perception is a semiosis phenomenon, discriminating between

perception and signification gets a little tricky … We speak of perceptual semiosis not when
something stands for something else but when from something, by an inferential process, we
come to pronounce a perceptual judgment on that same something and not on anything else
… The fact that a perception may be successful precisely because we are guided by the notion
that the phenomenon is hypothetically understood as a sign … does not eliminate the
problem of how we perceive it. (Eco 2000: 125–126)

The digital system is a semiotic machine, producing its media from instrumental
instructions (code) that follow precise lexical guides. What appears in digital motion
pictures is thus encoded in parallel: first as the machine-readable file, then through
the encultured order of the presentation that is cinema. Understanding the
complexity of this articulation depends on acknowledging the problems posed by
“noise” generally and technical failures (glitches) especially. What interests Eco is
this process of recognition. Parsing bare sensations into significances and in-
significances is not an engagement with meaning or signification; it comes prior to
the “transparency” that concerns the “average reader.” Instead it attracts, deflects,
and organizes attention.
Eco asks questions of human engagement with “the real” generally, not
merely about motion pictures, but when addressed to representation (not reality)
they are also the wrong questions to ask. What appears in cinematic realism is a
specific cultural order, but what the “material function” seems to produce is a
perceptual judgement (by conflating indexicality–ontology in an aspiration to “the
real”) which changes the question Eco poses into the same ontological question
that Bazin develops as his theory of realism: what is the relationship between what
appears on-screen and “the real” that is the cinematic image’s presumed source? The
266 M. Betancourt

interpretive fallacy in an ontology of “material function” is obvious: the glitch

which the audience identifies on-screen is not necessarily a symptomatic
description of machinic breakdown. The fallacy arises in how the “average reader”
considers the representation that is “material function” as an ontological aspira-
tion that makes “what is seen” into the thing–in–itself. The scratches, noise, and
other marks on-screen in the “newsreel” for Citizen Kane argue for an archival
testimony to being-factual, but they articulate these apparent physical breakdowns
as evidence for a history that is fictional. However, their identification as the thing-
in-itself complicates this narrative role. The indexical claim this link to everyday
experience makes is conventionally determined by an apparent merging of “ma-
terial function” with the significance of it as the “historical testimony” defined by
theorist Walter Benjamin in the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction”: “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is trans-
missible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony
to the history it has experienced” (Benjamin 1969: 221).
The “material function” of the scratches in the “newsreel” in Citizen Kane is an
indexical marker establishes the reality of the cinematic production as an artifact,
but in this case their self-referential nature asserts these shots as documentary
footage, as being-factual. They suggest a history of screenings and exhibitions for the
footage shown – a proof that it is “archival” – thus asserting these shots come from a
repository of factual documents showing historically important events. As an
autonomous demonstration of the typically invisible material substrate of cinema,
“material function” suggests an objective presentation, not subject to the whims or
caprices of subjective modulation (i.e. not intentionally organized). The real
scratches that mark the fictional “archival” shots exploit this normative engagement
that understands glitches simultaneously as perceptual artifacts and signifiers of
failure–as–failure. These markers show the “authenticity” that Benjamin identifies is
a conclusion derived from the series of physically present features – the symptoms
visible as the scratches, dirt, grain, etc. in film that parallel the compression artifacts,
scanlines, aliasing, etc. of digital presentations – that directs the audience to make
inferences about its age and authenticity (indexicality). In this ‘newsreel,’ they evoke
a relationship between the current presentation–for–audience and all those that
may have occurred in the past. The kinds of hypothetical things that may have
happened to this footage are suggested by the “material function” combine with
observable details seen in the depiction itself. The “newsreel” reveals these as a
fallacy because the physical traces are employed semiotically, functioning as
representational cues that articulate an indexical claim to being-factual and “the
real.”
At least part of the aesthetic enjoyment in the “newsreel” is produced by
recognizing and understanding the role of “material function” and this claim to
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 267

indexicality lies in the level of craft and detail in its production. How cinema
portrays the “realist fiction” as “historically true” through the designation of some
parts of what appears on-screen as depictive and others as signs of an autonomous
physicality allows the identification of the “material function” as a “testimony to
the history it has experienced.” Material ‘damage’ becomes a signifier of the
physical impacts of time. This “authenticity” is visible in the composited shots of
“Charles Foster Kane” (Orson Welles) appearing with historical leaders – Roose-
velt, Franco, and Hitler – at different points in the “archival” footage that creates
the documentary effect (Figure 6). This appeal to existing knowledge is an obvious
“proof,” distinguishing it from the narrative role in Inspector Morse. The articu-
lation of cause/effect, the presentation of a ‘world on-screen’ depends on famil-
iarity with how the shots and edits combine that can only be gained from past
experience; coherent representation requires more than just a “capturing” of re-
ality on-screen. This processes of interpretation remains constant at all levels of
these articulations, producing the “material function” as an excess that refers to
the physical substance of the technical presentation itself.

Figure 6: Stills showing physical scratches and dirt included in the fictional “newsreel” at the
start of Citizen Kane (1941).

The aberrant stability of the glitch is what establishes its apparent indexicality
as comparable to that offered by scratches and other noise in celluloid film and
analogue media. Digital glitches are thus no different from any other claim to
being-factual. But their technical basis only allows digital glitches to imply the
“authenticity” of physical media; they are immanent, generative, unable to testify
to when or how long they have existed. Their presence on-screen is not a demon-
stration of existing in the world: the symptom of “historical testimony” that is the
physical mark in film is entirely replaced by representation. This “material func-
tion” – in analogue and digital media equally – creates an aspirant ontology via a
reflexive continuity between the imagery and its production precisely because the
technical failure resides not in a link to a profilmic event, but seems to be con-
nected instead to the mechanism of its exhibition, giving “material function” a
different valence than the other ‘events’ shown on-screen. The “historical
268 M. Betancourt

testimony” of the “newsreel” in Citizen Kane exploits this basis. Unlike the
definitively recorded nature of the representational content of the shot, the glitch
suggests an immediacy that is sequestered from representation via its presumed
ontological basis in the proximate operations of the presentation–for–audience.
This layered, multivalent use of the “material function” as an expressive
articulation is a more familiar concern in theorizing avant-garde cinema than in
narrative cinema or motion graphics. Structural/Materialist filmmaker and theorist
Peter Gidal distinguishes the “material function” from the Marxist concern with a
critical “materialist dialectics” that is entirely dissimilar to the representation
of cinematic realism. The axiomatic belief of cinematic realism collides with
on-screen technical failures, which are not physical objects, but a projected image.
This disparity clarifies the ideological dynamics of “transparency” surrounding the
assignment of indexicality and ontology to technical failures and their return to a
familiar representational role as diagnostic: “The assertion of film as material is, in
fact, predicated upon representation, in as much as ‘pure’ empty acetate running
through the projector gate without image (for example) merely sets off another
level of abstract (or non-abstract) associations” (Gidal 1978: 2).
Gidal’s connection of “materialist” approaches to representation enables the
consideration of these physical procedures as formal devices in themselves. His
analysis reiterates the assertion of media as a physical substance that can be
manipulated. “Transparency” demands the thing shown on-screen will be directly
identified as the thing–in–itself, not dependent on ontology, being instead an
epistemic product connected to the naturalism::stylization range and the modal
distinctions of objective and subjective presentation: the appearance of physical
and digital glitches are a specific type of cinematic realism where what appears on-
screen (the diagnostic identification) is also a symbolic representation of the me-
dium itself, defining the “material function” as an ideological construction and an
impediment to “critical viewing.” Instead of acting to break this indexical claim
(diagnostic approach), the “material function” is a symbolic identifier for digitality
that assumes this aspiration to “the real” as the guarantor of its identity, as dis-
cussed in Eco’s analysis. Gidal uses this distinction politically, to argue for an
ideologically challenging cinema that defies this “transparency.”
Gidal recognizes that any demarcation between the glitch shown on-screen
and the representational contents of the image is an artificial imposition of dif-
ference because in the presentation–for–audience both dimensions converge,
becoming the same thing: images on-screen. That convergence is why the prob-
lematics of “material function” and its aspiration to ontological proof cycle
through a series of interlinked positions. Their entanglements are redolent of a
circular logic that forms a spiral of mutually exclusive oppositions. The apparently
ontological assertion ascribed to the “material function” is an illusion created by
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 269

the historical relationships between analogue breakdowns and their proximate,

physical causes that given them diagnostic utility. Gidal identified this role for
cinematic realism in those perceptual artifacts, aesthetic objects, and signifiers of
failure-as-failure that are merely “another level of abstract (or non-abstract) as-
sociations” in which self-reference serves representational conclusions in a
recuperation of ideology:

The questions pertaining to representation-systems and codes has to do with the physical
reproduction and transformation of forms, a reproduction at some level of the pro-filmic, that
which the camera is aimed at – a transformation to the filmic, the filmic event, so to speak.
This transformation has to do with codes of cinematic usage. (Gidal 1989: 15–16)

The dominance of enculturation is unavoidable, obvious in how glitches convey

narrative and symbolic meanings, as with the “newsreel” in Citizen Kane: the dirt,
scratches, and other “damage” shown on-screen have been added to ingratiate the
artifice of their compositing as a more fully authentic example of archival footage –
invoking the knowledge that creates Benjamin’s “historical testimony.” They are
precisely an example of Gidal’s observations: their natural understanding as
indexical claims (historical testimony) creates a “documentary effect” that is anti-
thetical to their symbolic role, but also essential to their function as narration in the
fabula. They create this mutually exclusive superposition without creating cognitive
dissonance because the “average reader” guarantees the dominance of ‘narrative
function’ and cinematic realism in the normative role of “transparency.” Main-
taining this dominant ideology is central, establishing a consistent, comprehen-
sible, and complex framework that encompasses all of cinematic representation; the
“average reader” guarantees the constant return of the aspirations to ontology and
the problematics of indexicality in cinematic realism. Gidal’s comments critique this
formulation: ‘cinematic realism’ is an ideology imitating everyday perceptions, re-
straints, and controls whose role should not be surprising. Materiality is another
turn in this spiral of containment. Expectations about/for “transparency” guide the
“average reader” to identify the object of interpretation: as music, as language, as
realism, as documentary, as glitch. Naturalism::stylization resolves any paradoxes
and eliminates cognitive dissonance by containing all the challenges to its estab-
lished order through an ideology that directs the “average reader” in how to proceed
with interpreting movies: where and how to group images into statements, before
advancing into their arrangement in sequences, and then into the complexity of
fabula. Articulations aspiring to become the thing–in–itself are essential to how
cinematic realism assimilates already-known values and orders of everyday expe-
rience to establish the apparently ‘natural’ order of the world on-screen as reified
ideology (Tanaka and Taylor 1991: 121–149).
270 M. Betancourt

Although Gidal is discussing celluloid motion pictures – film – his emphasis on

the “material function” as a conventionally “natural” demonstration of the me-
dium applies equally well to digital movies, as demonstrated by Daniel Temkin’s
commentary on “databending.” The audience is expected to take note of these
errors as aspirations to make reality converge with what is shown on-screen. This
conversion of abstraction into representation is not the conceptual meaning Gidal
describes for “dialectical materialism,” but a procedural semantics. His “codes of
representation” are literally encoded as the processes computer operations render
coherent: machine language repeats the coding of realist aesthetics as the
instrumental nature of the digital file. Aspirations to ontology are immanent in his
analysis: the machine performs determinate actions precisely specified in
advance, either on the filmstrip or in the digital file. Exhibition is thus a process
that makes the “material function” into a symbolic ‘proof’ the medium is the
medium. What is in play with these encultured superstructures is the ways audi-
ences order their encounters into sensibility (Tanaka et al. 2005: 145–151). The
conversion of what might initially appear as highly abstract, as with a strip of clear
leader running though a projector so no photographic image appears on-screen,
becomes a very specific representation of cinema as the projection-on-to-screen, as
in the concluding sequence in The Holy Mountain (1973; Figure 7). The rupture with

Figure 7: Selected stills from The Holy Mountain (1973) showing the fade to white that is the
conclusion to the film.
 Resolving the paradox of the glitch 271

the diegesis produced and created by “The Alchemist” (played by director Ale-
jandro Jodorowsky) speaking directly to the audience as the camera pulls back to
reveal the crew and production equipment before fading into white creates a shift
from projected image to flat white screen, but depends on narrative cues that link
the “material function” produced by this shift to being a signifier for “cinema.” In
drawing attention to the physicality of projection – the filmstrip is a physical
object – The Holy Mountain exhibits the same self-referentiality as any other
“material function.” Even without the connection to the drama that introduces it,
the final white rectangle in The Holy Mountain is never really “empty,” devoid of
signification: it is precisely this revelation of materiality that is the representational
content. This self-referential moment returns the audience to the movie theater, to
the act of watching a film: cinema as the viewing of a projection-on-to-screen.
What is called a “glitch” has always been a part of cinema. The “average
reader” creates its role as the excess denied at the foundations of interpretation.
Understanding the “material function” as a “critical” resentiment of its repression
as “noise” is a reversion which restores the “transparent” elaboration of natural-
ism::stylization that (ironically) begins by ignoring the physical material evident in
the stoppages posed by glitches. The well-known Modernist desire to isolate art
from the distractions of physical context that are typically dismissed or rejected as
insignificant “noise” transfers those aesthetics that required the clean, sanitized,
gallery space known as the “white cube” to eliminate externalities from inter-
preting art to cinematic articulation as the identification of “glitch.”
Aspirations to ontology are a central theme in all these engagements with
audience perceptions of “technical failure.” Contrary to this apparent coincidence
of object and representation, the need for enculturation to identify the glitch
pushes the “philosophy of being” into the realms that epistemology and semiotics
also describe: identifications are predicated not on perception but on encultured
knowledge. Approaches to denotation proceed sui generis from an initial refractive
judgment by the viewer about which established fluencies (lexical, perceptual,
intertextual) might best enable the decipherment of the work. Superficially initial
decisions, such as identifying something as a glitch, “naming it,” is an imposed
role dependent on more basic perceptual identifications – the higher level in-
terpretations (such as the diagnostic or symbolic recognition of a “glitch”) are first
a giving form based on past experience that allows the engagement with what in
perception has “value” and needs attention, thus establishing the chain of signi-
fication. The audience is central to this teleological relationship where the clarity of
perception-interpretation serves to justify the foundational choices: the cultural
entangles the empirical. This decision exceeds the mere sensory encounter for
cinema because it, cinema, is articulated by codes of representation rather than
merely immanent perception; thus, disentangling the ontological nature of
272 M. Betancourt

glitches from their role in representation demonstrates how these empirical and
cultural values are connected, yet must also remain apart. They are interdependent
contingencies. “Material function” makes this inherent human element neither
exclusively, nor merely an en passant problem in the theorizations of cinema. The
glitch aspires to an apparently “direct connection” (ontological link) that makes
the particulars of that glitch appear to turn the presentation–for–audience
(denotation on-screen) into the reality of a technical failure – aspiring to “the real”
in itself defies representation by energizing the combination of ‘event’ with its
representation on-screen; however, the difference between cinema and everyday
life is always marked, known, obvious. The glitch complicates this relationship by
doubling its identity as allowing a symbolic and diagnostic engagement, pro-
ducing the recursion of indexicality–ontology. The ‘event’ of cinematic experi-
ence, while an audio-visual encounter in perception, is necessarily mechanically
arbitrated, a cultural product whose self-referentiality undermines these separa-
tions, allowing glitches to be simultaneously a presentation of Eco’s thing-in-itself
and a product of representation. Therein lies the difficulty. The technical failures in
cinema assert their connection to “the real” by apparently collapsing the
distinction between representation and represented. It allows the fallacy of “ma-
terial function” as an ontological revelation to hide its own signification. They are
glitches, but at the same time, they represent glitches, a superficial paradox that is
resolved through the clearly different levels of interpretation involved. This duality
encourages the audience to appreciate glitches in a way that they would not in
everyday life, giving glitches a role in cinematic articulation that serves to reiterate
the separation of indexicality from “the real” even as the glitch identified as the
thing–in–itself entangles them ever more closely. This approach becomes the
“transparent” media engagement that is the aura of the digital: an internalized
elision that shifts the erasure of specifics about location, presentation, and context
to the mind of the spectator. The imposition of normative “transparency” neces-
sarily erases the glitch as so much unintentional “noise” to ignore, or turns it into a
specifically realist narration about the medium initiated by its conception as a
demonstration: the “material function.”

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