Vision and Its Double. Cinema and the Revelation of Movement (original) (raw)
Related papers
“The Active Eye” (Revisited): Toward a Phenomenology of Cinematic Movement"
Studia Phaenomenologica, 2016
The foundational basis of the cinematic moving image is camera movement, which occurs not only in the image but also, and from the first, as the image. This essay approaches off-screen camera movement through phenomenological description of the gestalt structure of its four interrelated onscreen forms: the moving image as an intentional and composite “viewing view/viewed view”; the moving image as “qualified” by optical camera movement through subjective modes of spatiotemporal transcendence; the movement of subjects and objects in the moving image as seen by a world-directed camera ; and the spatial movement of the camera, whose perspectival vision affirms its status as an embodied, if anonymous, “quasi-subject,” whose visually perceptive motility responds to its world in visibly expressive mobility. Throughout, the essay develops Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the cinema is, perhaps, the phenomenological art par excellence, given that its "technical methods" correspond to an “existential” and phenomenological "mode of thought."
The Viewer's Embodiment into Cinematic Space. Notes on a Space-Image Cinema
Filipa Rosario & Ivan Villarmea (eds.), New Approaches to Cinematic Space, Routledge, 2018
This chapter is an invitation to consider cinematic space through a new analytical view – which actually is not only a ‘view’, but a carnal perception that deeply implies the spectator’s body. The focus of this paper is a notion I call the "space-image" (Gaudin, 2015), which echoes Gilles Deleuze’s well-known concepts “movement-image” and “time-image” (Deleuze, 1983, 1985). As the movement-image and the time-image, the space-image refers to a space that is not just a content or background of the image, but is at the same time a major philosophical issue and a fundamental plastic material of cinema. This concept is useful to study the poetics of space in the works of a few contemporary auteur filmmakers, such as Gus Van Sant, Jia Zhang-ke or Philippe Grandrieux, whose films call for a new paradigm of cinematic space. The space-image highlights the fact that before showing and staging an imaginary space "behind the screen", every film is first a spatial phenomenon in itself. Thus, space should also be considered as a primary plastic power inscribed within the moving image. This phenomenological approach is substantially different from classical approaches to space in film analysis.
Cinema 6 Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image Revista De Filosofia e Da Imagem Em Movimento
The article offers a survey of Deleuze's interest in images throughout his career. It suggests that his enduring fascination with time is the driving force behind his relatively late preoccupation with images, which started with an essay on Lucretius, followed by his book on Bacon's paintings, his two famous books on the cinema and a brief piece on Beckett's TVplays. During the ten years of not discussing time at all, time has changed the medium of reflection: Deleuze stops conceiving time-as most structuralists do-as infinite, onedirectional successiveness, similar to how utterances work. After the gap years, time gets involved in an "evental logic" that is designed after the role-model of images. From now on, time incorporates divergent flight lines (to a past, that never existed, to a future, that will never come true etc.). Far from being only chronological, time becomes a code name for a "reservoir" of simultaneity that undermines and overrides the actual process of sensemaking through the consecutive use of words. Here, the visible and the utterable step in: as the graphic "counter-realization" of philosophical problems that have remained unsolved since Kant linked the sublime to a conflict between successive apprehension and its simultaneous comprehension. Mirjam Schaub explains why the moving image helps to understand the troubling effects of this discrepancy: Through Nouvelle Vague techniques such as false connections, boredom or ostentatious sight-and-sound-gaps it becomes obvious, that time remains a disruptive force. For Deleuze the asynchronical use of sight and sound in film reveals the inner logic of time as universal differentiator. While the utterable naturally generates contractions (such as A and Non-A cannot exist simultaneously), the visible in film easily embraces divergent events (such as Citizen Kane being old in the foreground and young in the background). What is to be believed? The moving-image as a "fusion of the tear" is celebrated as a process of exchange between intertwined time lines, virtual and actual images that become mutual look-alikes.
Surface & Projection – an investigation of the event of cinema
Master of Fine Arts report/thesis - supervisor John Gillies UNSW College of Fine Arts, 2004
Surface and Projection is an investigation of the cinema event, defined as image, projection, space and audience. The project interrogates the place where cinema occurs for the viewer, starting with the special viewing conditions for film watching and the accepted roles they create for the film maker, the exhibitor and the spectator. The artworks in Surface and Projection have been a series of reassemblages of the elements of the cinematic event. The film installation Moving Still Life is the key work. The report starts by defining the event of cinema, drawing on French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry’s 1970 essay Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus. As Moving Still Life took shape, identifying its art and film historical contexts became part of the wider investigation of the cinematic event. Section 2 teases out resonances with Italian Arte Povera and outlines a brief history of super 8 art film making in Australia. It links these to the specific material grounds of Moving Still Life. Art in the public domain is discussed as the art work was initially conceived as an installation for outdoor public spaces. Section 3 discusses expanded cinema, a primary art historical context. There is a general survey of this early intermedia form as it developed in the US and Europe and its presence in Australia. While I make a case for the four elements that comprise the cinematic event, I expand upon the development of the artwork, where image became a dominant strand of its own. A specific form of film making evolved, focusing on the layered image. The final sections of the report, ‘Image’ and ‘Sequence’, focus on this image work, drawing on Umberto Eco’s 1960 essay The Open Work and American art writer Rosalind Krauss’ writing on installation and post-medium artwork. The deconstructive ethos of the project leads to an analysis of the frame within the sequence and the attacks on the frame made by Moving Still Life and my image work in general. The analysis of sequence within moving images, draws on a seminal 1945 essay by American writer Joseph Frank, Spatial Form in Literature. This builds to a discussion of new media, interrogating its claim for interactivity in moving images, an impossibility while the frame remains the primary unit.
Cinema: journal of philosophy and the moving image
2016
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, an international journal devoted to the philosophical inquiry into cinema. Since its beginnings, cinema has been the subject of philosophical investigation on the both sides of the Atlantic. Early in the twentieth century, Henri Bergson (1907) and Hugo Munsterberg (1916) offered, arguably, the first deep philosophical reflections on the recently born art. From the outset, their inquiries reflected different philosophical engagements and traditions. Bergson's ideas were highly influential in continental Europe and inspired a significant amount of artistic production that persisted, at least until the beginning of the Second World War. Munsterberg's pioneering study was almost forgotten, until the revived interest from cognitive film theorists in the nineties. During the twentieth century, in continental Europe, cinema inspired deep philosophical investigations about its nature, functioning, and reception-integrating, for the most part, the influences of
Reality, Moving Image: In Search for the Flow of Time in Cinema
Film is said to be the most accessible medium to represent the presence of reality within its nature. Since the emergence of cinema in the late 19th century, film as a seductive medium, has not only dominated over the previous achievements in moving images, but it has also broadened and evolved over the years. The evolution of the mass media is to an extent that it is now seemingly replacing the believability of the reality of actual events with their instant exhaustive representations. However, within the back and forth demands between art and technology, both challenging and inspiring each other in today’s post-medium condition, producing an image of reality as the state of the existence of actual things is seemingly a never ending hopeless attempt as it always fails to capture the whole reality. The reason behind this notion in the case of the film itself is that it, in spite of its apparent realness, represents a portion of time as the duration of events and movements. The issue is not only due to the inevitable temporality of moving images (which constrains them to have no choice other than showing a portion of the reality), but also because of the fact that the fundamental structure of the film itself is based on a not-real/false quality of our visual perception. This 1 research is after questioning the creditability of cinema to illustrate the reality. The methodology is to study the representational quality of the passage of time through static and moving images, its history and its evolution. Here, the subjectivity of time and the way cinema has always been dealing with is a key topic. The theories around the subject will be addressed and by applying them to various durational works, old and new, other hypothesis will be formed. At the end, the research will suggest a possible framework in which the aforementioned critical aspect of cinema could meet some treatments. Time perception, Subjective time, real time, movement, moving images, cinema, stop motion.
New Literary History, 2016
n his prescient 1978 essay "The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory," cinema scholar Dudley Andrew anticipates the renewed interest in phenomenology within film studies that was to come to full flower some three decades later. Echoing Andrew's title and theme, at the start of that major revival in the early 1990s, Vivian Sobchack also wrote of a "general neglect and particular ignorance of phenomenology" in then contemporary film theory. 1 Today, however, as a result of Andrew's, Sobchack's, and other theorists' advocacy, phenomenology-more specifically its existential version associated with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy-is no longer at the margins of film theory but close to its center. Indeed, within this context the word "phenomenology" has become a generally recognized shorthand expression for attention to more immediate sensory and expressive features of films, and to films as perceptual objects instead of, or in addition to, cognitive, narrative, and cultural-ideological ones. Now that by general consensus phenomenological and related affectand sensation-based paradigms have largely supplanted structuralistsemiotic, psychoanalytic, and Marxist-ideological ones in the mainstream of film theory, my present concern in this essay is with another related "neglect": that of phenomenological aesthetics. In the midst of the current phenomenological and more broadly philosophical turn in film theory, this rich tradition of thought has received comparatively little attention from theorists and philosophers of film. Yet it played an important if still largely unanalyzed role in the development of modern film theory (having notably influenced the ideas of such prominent theorists as Jean Mitry and Christian Metz) and is still highly relevant, including in the present digital cinema environment. 2 Elsewhere I have traced the outlines of one phenomenological approach to cinematic art indebted to French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne's ideas concerning the created and experienced "worlds" of films as aesthetic objects. 3 Here I wish to focus on Merleau-Ponty's new literary history 160 chronologically earlier understanding of phenomenology and cinema. Also focused on aesthetic perception and expression, it not only departs in significant respects from what I will call first-generation phenomenological film theory and criticism, but differs even more markedly (and perhaps ironically) from some contemporary phenomenological accounts of film rooted in Merleau-Ponty's general philosophy of perception. Most notable among the latter is Sobchack's phenomenology of film, as articulated in her influential study The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Sobchack's overriding focus on what are presented as fundamental visual, spatial, and affective features of all live-action films, as tied to perceptual conditions of the film medium and its technology, stands in sharp contrast to Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on variable artistic form, style, and expression in cinema, together with temporality and rhythm. The reasons for this seldom-noted discrepancy are complex, bound to the evolution of both film theory and film practice from the 1940s onward. Yet, and as I hope to show, the differences in question are of much more than historical interest alone and go to the heart of how the phenomenological aspects of cinema and of individual films may be best understood. While I have framed the situation in terms of a general neglect, or omission, it must be acknowledged at the outset that the orientations of at least some contemporary, post-Address of the Eye accounts of film experience are relatively closer to the concerns of Merleau-Ponty's writings on cinema and art, as well as Dufrenne's. 4 Sobchack's own later film critical and theoretical reflections fall into this category, as partly informed by attention to artistic realities explicitly bracketed from her general phenomenology of film, such as the "cinematic vision" and "world view" of filmmakers embedded in their recognizable personal styles. 5 Yet the particular dynamics I wish to focus upon, as prompted by Merleau-Ponty's observations on cinema and art and the typical concerns of phenomenological aesthetics (as also applied to literature in the work of Roman Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser, and Hans Robert Jauss, for instance), are not widely represented in contemporary anglophone film and phenomenology discourse. The alternative, equally phenomenological and aesthetic approach that I am concerned with explicating and offering qualified support for via Merleau-Ponty's writing clearly dovetails, however, with more recent developments in French phenomenology. Specifically, its notable "return" to aesthetics that Julien Guillemet has traced with reference to cinema and the work of philosophers such as
2014
The main activity of consciousness is not to allow us to perceive the world, but to allow us to orient ourselves in it. Its work, in other words, allows each one to create a relationship with himself or herself only by directing it towards others and towards things: it ensures the presence of the self to itself only by relating it to what is different from it. The fact that the conscious being overlaps and intersects the being in relation means that the body, far from being a tyrant that imposes his laws, grows and develops itself only by means of a symbiosis with social life: it manages to give an accomplished form to consciousness only by means of symbolic interactions. This relationship between the human body and society manifests itself in the form of an ongoing struggle in which the stakes are the internal intersection points – in the heart itself of the cognitive problem – and the external ones – in the languages, in the objects, in all the social forms. It is around these eve...