Because the director is also his own cinematographer and editor (under the pseudonyms Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard) the final product is a distinctive Steven Soderbergh experience — something in-between a medical procedural and an art-film. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the ambient score of longtime collaborator Cliff Martinez, whose anachronistic synth score makes the series all the more remarkable. It is precisely this fusion of cinema, television and personality that has critics resounding with near-universal praise for the show, resulting in a very heavy ride on the Soderbergh bandwagon.

Curiously enough, Soderbergh has actually received some of his highest praise for his work on The Knick. Reading the reviews, one almost forgets that only six years earlier, critics stormed out of Che at the Cannes Film Festival, beginning the filmmaker’s long and slow departure from the film industry. Soderbergh’s other engagements with history have barely registered in the critical canon. More accurately, they were all panned. Soderbergh’s second film, Kafka, with its concern with the 19th century, bad science, mad doctors and their experiments on live subjects fared so poorly that it has yet to be released on DVD. Nevertheless, The Knick and Owen’s Dr. Thackery share DNA with this early film. Likewise, The Good German was so poorly reviewed that it shares the same Rotten Tomatoes rating as Paul Blart: Mall Cop (both at 33% fresh).

As someone who has studied the filmmaker-cum-TV-showrunner for some time, this is the most fascinating part of this story, for me, as Soderbergh’s reputation has been rehabilitated entirely —  to the point of retrospectives emerging which praise movies that were universally accepted as failures (even Solaris!) as few as several years earlier.

So, what accounts for the change in opinion? Well, as Andrew deWaard and I argued in our volume The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: indie sex, corporate lies and digital videotape, the director has always been ahead of his time and oftentimes ahead of his critics and audiences. Thus, his direction doesn’t always match with the moment that his films are released, nor with the critical climate in which they are received. But when Soderbergh wins, he wins big — as evidenced by his Oscar win for Traffic in 2001, his Palme D’or for sex, lies and videotape in 1989, and his recent Emmy win for Behind the Candelabra (2013). Similar to the indie moment ushered in with sex, lies and videotape, (coincidentally, almost 25 years ago to the day of The Knick’s release) the series marks the director’s return to the spotlight at a moment when conversation about American culture is shifting away from “cinema” and towards quality TV. Not only does it presumably mark the arrival (or legitimacy) of television as an art form, but arrives as a sort of art-film/quality television fusion. The Knick lands at a moment when debates about TV include calls by critics such as Matt Zoller Seitz to consider television’s aesthetic qualities and studies by academics such as Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine’s, who chronicle television’s ascendence as a “legitimate” cultural form.

The Knick is, finally, an example of Soderbergh’s business savvy and his investment in his personal brand. Though Soderbergh has always pushed at the borders of creativity, industry, technology and commerce, his move to Cinemax (rather than HBO, even though he had the opportunity to) has certainly bought him more leverage and exposure with this series — not to mention control of the way it is being received. Soderbergh’s doubling down on the medium has him executive producing two more shows for upstart networks – one an anthology series based on his 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience for Starz, and another, Red Oaks, a series pilot for Amazon directed by his longtime collaborator and 1st Assistant Director Gregory Jacobs.

We’ll see how The Knick fits into the director’s ongoing and storied career after the series rolls out but I think that it’s safe to say that Soderbergh’s signature and influence will pop up in other unexpected places on the small screen for some time to come.

Kyle Conway began this series by wishing to explore that part of “our experience of a media object [that] exists prior to and outside of language.” In my contribution, I would like to take up the question of language from another angle.

Film and media critics tend to privilege the conceptual work of the moving image-maker when the visual image can be grounded in a linguistic or verbalized idea—an idea, so the reasoning goes, which the media artist used representational forms to express. This inferential process (fig. 1) in effect relies on a extended commutation test, whereby one imagines the images of a film or TV show (1) as philosophical words on a page—a representation of a system of ideas, an argument or a ponderous statement (2)—in order to ascertain the distinguishing features of moving image-maker’s motivating intentions (3).

Fig. 1. The verbal model of moving image intelligence.

The maker of moving images is taken as a writer. The caméra really does materialize as a stylo. But is this all there is to the image-maker’s intelligence?

What if media critics were to acknowledge that some of the intellectualizing that filmmakers and showrunners and video artists do results in pictorial concepts? Can moving images not be intelligent—abstract, puzzling, profound, astute, quick-witted—without acting as surrogates for a discursive intervention?

This would require us to revise our thinking about moving image intelligence—to reimagine the relationship between pictures and ideas. We might acknowledge that some media artists speak in images alone, directly in representational forms. In short, some moving image-makers may not make intellectual or conceptual contributions to the viewing experience by committing themselves to preformed verbal systems of thought prior to producing an image and then using the image to communicate it to the viewer. It might rather involve theorizing a prior verbalized puzzle or deep conundrum by making images, using light and shade, color and tone, varieties of movement and stasis, compositional line and depth.

This involves making some concessions. Principle among these is that we might want to consider how we program ourselves for verbalized notation when we call media objects “texts.” In Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994), the art historians Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall write of the Venetian painter: “…there is a sense in which painting like Tiepolo’s, in sharp contrast with what a text is able to do, lets us re-experience the process by which we first come to make sense of the world” (p.15). The authors skewer a dominant textual bias in Western aesthetics: “It has been a feature of European aesthetics…that painting does something roughly similar to what literature does.” Citing Lessing and others, they note that “the criteria of the comparison between painting and text have been textual ones” (p.2). The limits of the Lessing position are flaunted in Tiepolo, for he provides an example “of pictorial creativity from premises that are not literary” (p.3). “Instead of trying to tell,” they note, “Tiepolo shows” (p.40). One contribution to thought is the painter’s grand Treppenhaus ceiling, which makes a specifically pictorial “argument” about the “relation of the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional” (p.130) (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Treppenhaus ceiling (Tiepolo, 1752-3).

We need not look to the fine arts for examples of the pictorial intelligence, of the penetrating image. It’s on display in the French blockbuster. The digitally composited two-minute long take that opens District 13 (Morel, 2004) might be read “textually” as a statement relaying the social problems that afflict the French banlieue (in 2004, or in 2010, when the film is set), the same problems the film’s protagonist, Lëito (David Belle), a master of parkour (fig. 3 and 4), wishes to combat.

Fig. 3 and 4. District 13 (Morel, 2004).

On some level, the roving camera of the opening shot analogizes the ghettoized space with the notion of an imploding prison system, where the exterior walls still manage to contain the inhabitants but the barriers within have crumbled, the legal and social order has collapsed into vagrancy, intoxication and gang violence (Fig. 5, 6 and 7).

Fig. 5, 6 and 7. District 13 (Morel, 2004).

From this standpoint, the film opens with a blunt statement, little more than a string of clichés.

But the image, by Pierre Morel, warns that this is merely a verbalized projection. There is pictorial intelligence here working on its own terms. Morel, trained as a cinematographer, doesn’t offer a list-like collage of cut-together, typical views. Conceived as a fluid movement along an axial trajectory, the shot mounts a pictorial argument, contrasting the sluggish, feckless, repetitive forms of ambulation, posture and rest with graceful and nimble mobility that remains possible even through the various frames and apertures—abandoned cars, bullet-riddled windows—of this decaying space (fig. 8 and 9). Through the moving image, parkour, itself a non-verbal, bodily form, is expanded as a directly pictorial concept of creative and improvisatorial motion.

Fig. 8 and 9. District 13 (Morel, 2004).

An image like this accommodates projections of verbal paraphrase even as its specifically visual concept recommends that we taken some distance from them.

First, Nolan declares that the third Batman film will “finish the story.”  A strong sense of narrative closure would preclude the possibility of additional sequels – a dangerous thought for a series that has already grossed $1.37 billion in theaters alone.  Of course, Warners could simply reboot (Batman Begins Again?) after Nolan leaves; Marvel is currently taking this route with their Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Daredevil franchises, after having already rebooted the Hulk and the Punisher.  But will this practice of rebooting whenever a film underperforms (or, in the case of Spider-Man, when cast and crew salaries become prohibitively high) begin to wear on audiences?

Another issue unique to Nolan is his approach to superheroes – specifically, his efforts to situate them within a “realistic” dramatic environment.  To this end, Batman is the only superhero in his narrative world, and Nolan says he will take the same approach with Superman.  This inhibits Warners from pursuing projects that involve both characters (i.e. “World’s Finest” or “Justice League of America”).  Although DC (as All-American Publications) may have created the concept of the shared superhero universe in 1940 with All-Star Comics, seventy years later they have chosen the auteur over the potential for franchise synergy.  Marvel Studios, in contrast, is aggressively situating each of their upcoming superhero films in “the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”  This strategy will culminate in 2012’s The Avengers, which will feature Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Nick Fury, and Captain America.  Likewise, while Nolan’s Superman film and Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern will likely be quite different stylistically, Marvel seems to be utilizing a generic cinematic “house style”, based on Favreau’s Iron Man (2008), to provide continuity.

Of course, Warner Bros. and DC might get the last laugh.  It is still unclear that the synergy among Marvel’s superhero films actually leads to additional revenue.  Did more people see The Incredible Hulk (2008) because it contained a cameo from Robert Downey, Jr.?  Will the “all-star” roster of The Avengers still have value if Thor (2011) is a box office disappointment?  Do people really care if Edward Norton plays Bruce Banner in The Avengers?  And most importantly, will an Avengers film really make more money than plain old Iron Man 3 would have?  In order to keep Avengers reasonably affordable Marvel has kept cast salaries low, either by casting unknowns or low-wattage stars, or according to Variety (4/4/10), apparently by simply finding stars who are willing to take a pay cut for the career benefit of starring in a summer tentpole (or, more likely, for back-end money).  But we will have to wait another two years to see whether or not “more is more.”