The Brooklyn Rail

Lateral is a film made without a camera. That’s not true, exactly, or it’s a partial-truth worth saying and then clarifying. Lateral is a film made with many cameras, none of which ever occupy the same physical space as its author, Charlie Shackleton. Directing a film without a camera in hand is a tendency that runs throughout the avant-garde (Stan Brakhage and Derek Jarman), the essayistic (Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein), and the mash-up (Joe Dante and Anne McGuire). Uniting the seemingly disparate moods and modes of these artists is a sense of uncovering rather than inscription, of reading instead of writing. As a compositional strategy, cameraless composing problematizes canned notions of authorship and the medium of cinema itself, nudging the edit to the fore of a filmmaker’s toolbox and demanding a more plastic theory of filmmaking: what might it mean to make films around the camera’s eye?

The implication of “aroundness” is that it creates an alternative, in this case to the camera’s claim to capturing all reality equally. We find in critic Serge Daney precisely why we must approach this claim with suspicion. In an interview with fellow film critic Bill Krohn, and in the process of outlining his exact aversion to naturalism, Daney says: “Naturalism contains fakery, a fundamental trick: the camera just happens to be there and turns the spectator into a voyeur. Naturalism conflates the repressed with the invisible.” The question, then, is threefold: what is Lateral? Why is it composed without a camera? What repressions do its compositions reveal?

Lateral is an eleven-minute essay film by Charlie Shackleton. Notionally an experiment in 3D filmmaking—and in the experimental potential for 3D imagery to be already present in traditional 2D images—the film begins in darkness. Shackleton’s amiable narration recalls encountering an article about Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and the first recording of the human voice in 1860. That this is the first subject of Lateral highlights the importance of the specific human voice, in this case, Shackleton’s. It’s not the first time that his own voice has been a crucial part of the filmmaker’s composing: in a 2022 exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image called As Mine Exactly, viewers were invited to strap on a VR headset while Shackleton read his “lines” live, detailing his mother’s experience with epilepsy. While images from the filmmaker’s youth played out on the VR headset, Shackleton “conversed with” his mother, via a voice that played from speakers in the room. In conversation with Dan Schindel on the occasion of performing the piece, the filmmaker says, “I’d always had this slightly uneasy relationship with how I presented myself in my own work; it’s a strange semi-real, semi-unreal version. I knew that in telling a story that was so personal, I had to confront that within it.”

In Lateral, Shackleton’s (in the filmmaker’s words) “notionally conversational” voice is the narrative engine. Full of “likes” and “uhs,” the tone of Shackleton’s speech—the voice of the voice—dips from hesitant to bemused. Despite being a recording, it feels alive in the present moment with the viewer. As the voice’s interest shifts and moves, like shifting through a sequence of browser windows, it creates the film’s narrative. Over a mostly black screen with the occasional reveal of a still image, like de Martinville’s face or a phonautograph, the film unfolds, feeling more incidental than intentional—a challenge, perhaps, to that word “lateral” and its suggestion of one-way and singular motion. Because instead of continuing a film about de Martinville, or the human voice, Shackleton’s voiceover complicates the film in progress with a new idea: “I find something quite poignant about that idea that we’re all making these accidental traces of the world whenever we record anything. Anyway—” Mirroring the way our eyes might survey a room and find both what we’re looking for and something we didn’t know we’d missed, something novel in the landscape jumps out at Shackleton.

This moment reveals Lateral’s 3D experimentation. Shackleton continues to speak, soundtracking an on-screen doodle as it outlines the basis of stereoscopic 3D imagery: two cameras are placed next to one another, approximating two human eyes, showing the left eye the left image and the right eye the right, producing the illusion of depth in what we register as a 3D image. Shackleton’s theory is a variation on Carl Pulfrich’s theory, a 1922 3D image–generating phenomenon that receives citation at the conclusion of the short film, as Shackleton realizes that the German physicist beat him to the concept—but only by a hundred years! Novelty matters less than application, and theory less so than practice. Shackleton’s inspiration comes about when he realizes he could trick the human brain into detecting 3D images without using two cameras so long as the image appears first to one eye and then the other: “So you get the information that one eye needs followed very quickly by the information that the other one does.” This happens, as Shackleton concludes, all the time in lateral tracking shots, shots that could be projected for a spectator with this very slight temporal shift in order to approximate 3D where it never was.

What follows constitutes the bulk of the film’s runtime: lateral tracking shots from a constellation of films, including Chantal Akerman’s D’Est (1993), Bruce Baillie’s All My Life (1966), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Hiroshi Inagaki’s Miyamoto Musashi (1954). Figures glitter and glisten but it’s all evident on the screen: there is dimensionality where there previously wasn’t, a glitchy protrusion so long as the camera moves. Watching these sequences anew through 3D glasses and re-projected and presented to fit Shackleton’s gambit is theoretically provocative, a suggestion that we can always learn more from the moving image, that there is a kind of data and affective thrust encoded in the camera’s sight visible not only through capture and survey but through continued experimentation. The camera doesn’t see “reality;” it creates a frame to parse the world in and from. Shackleton renders a theory of re-seeing without writing with a camera of his own precisely because there is more to uncover in reapproach. Lateral is film history and film criticism, but it’s also a reminder that the most vital element of the cinematic apparatus is the quality humans add by witnessing the image. “It’s just all there, it’s all dormant waiting to come out,” Shackleton says.

If these implications could be seen only as a matter of history and memory, Lateral could be read as a simple, striking essay film about the constant speculation encoded in cinematic language and the enduring possibilities of 3D technologies. But this is not the world we live or see in, and not the world Lateral entered. The short film was able to make its world premiere at MoMI’s First Look this past March when it didn’t premiere at last year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Shackleton, along with at least seventeen other filmmakers, pulled their films in response to the festival decrying pro-Palestinian liberation protests that took place at its opening ceremonies. The filmmaker wrote: “IDFA’s statement offers a grotesque misrepresentation of a call for Palestinian freedom and equivocates over an ongoing genocide.”

The power of the camera to reveal a truth, secret, or atrocity is only as impactful as our willingness to fold that revelation into our reality. Otherwise, cinema only ever exists adjacent to reality, which is to say as a theory instead of force capable of imprint or impact. The treachery of “naturalism” is how long a tether we might theoretically accord images in frame to be (however ugly), a “natural” facet of a cruel world, rather than an intolerable element that must be actively opposed and then acted on outside of the frame. What is happening in Palestine is not natural. A continuous flow of images from Gaza and the genocide that continues to be enacted against the Palestinian people by Israel is, seemingly, not enough of a proof to force a change in mass consciousness and policy to redress that cruelty. If footage alone is not able to prove a truth—in this case, that we must oppose and end this genocide by any means—reapproach becomes necessary.

Lateral is a film that suggests such potential for reapproach. In composing it, Shackleton elects to divest two times over, first a camera in its construction and then an exhibition of itself. “Seeing” isn’t the kind of ontological proof that André Bazin once theorized through long-take. What once was indisputably, almost erotically, proof of life has been complicated by the reality-punking elements of digital and AI technologies, to say nothing of the selective blindspots of a spectator increasingly alienated by living under capitalism, winnowed away from anything resembling class or labor consciousness. Lateral nominally asks what hidden strategies are at work in the objects we perceive to be fixed. It demystifies settledness, existing as a perfectly sharp barb against things we read as “natural,” whether they be 2D images on celluloid or historical cruelties we might resign ourselves to living with. We can’t resign ourselves to cruel naturalisms any more than we can collaborate with artistic institutions unwilling to follow cinema through to its speculative, liberatory implications. If film as a medium is to help us re-see the world, as many of its innovators have claimed in both good and bad faith, Lateral suggests that we already possess the tools to do so. Cinema teaches us the ability to critically witness instead of merely see, to prank reality instead of accept it, to collaborate with historical analysis instead of mystifying spectacle. Framed a certain way, a world comes off the screen. It comes toward us, as we come toward cinema, to uncover the contours of each other’s voices, as in Charlie Shackleton’s: “the joy of it is finding such a clear signal.”