The World as a Media Maze: Sensual and Structural Gateways of Intermediality in the Cinematic Image (original) (raw)
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(Re)Mediating the Real. Paradoxes of an Intermedial Cinema of Immediacy
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film and Media Studies, 2009
The paper focuses on tendencies in cinema that qualify for the label of reflexive and hypermediated cinema, nevertheless, which also have the purpose of achieving the sensation of immediacy. Three different types of such hypermediated cinematic experiences of the real are analysed: Agnès Varda’s film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), presented as a sort of “encyclopaedia of the real,” then Godard’s essay film cycle, Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–1998), presented as primarily a hand-made cinema derived from photomontage and the calligrammatic fusion of image and text. The third type is exemplified by José Luis Guerin’s twin films En la ciudad de Sylvia and Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia (2007), in which we can see an example of how the most transparent techniques can also end up as remediations. All these examples seen as re-mediating to an excess the indexicality of modernist cinema and challenging cinema’s lack of auratic quality through the director’s marked personal implication and traces of his “handling” of media. The paper also proposes the possibility of a “remediational metalepsis” in which cinema exposes the paradoxes of the everyday experience of metaleptic leaps between “real” and “mediated” and thus calls attention to metalepsis as integral part of reality itself.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2011
Film is from its beginnings an ‘intermedia fact.’ A film screening about e.g. 1900 consists of a celluloid ribbon with a series of images cranked through a projector situated among the audience, accompanied by a piano player and commented by a fi lm lecturer … At the end of the 1940s a movie like Marcel Carné’s Le silence est d’or, which tells us about the early film performance, includes all these elements as a cinematographic medium in favour of the all-embracing illusionary effect of an audiovisual moving picture on the screen of a movie theatre. But after television took over the film as part of its programme for its electronic broadcast, the media properties of film changed dramatically. First analogously and then in digital productions and representations of films as pure data streams no pictures and sounds are used any more to represent moving images and sounds on computer monitors. This leads to the conclusion that there is no single answer to the question ‘What is film?’ (André Bazin) but only a media history of the permanent changing medium will help us understand the ‘film as a multi-media form.’
Immediacy as an Attribute of Cinema as Art
1 Questions about what we see when we watch a film were raised and discussed many times over since the beginnings of cinema. These questions immediately implied not only seeing in most basic sense of the word – as what becomes an imprint on the retina of an eye – but also, perceiving, recognising, comprehending and understanding. So the very act of visual sensing triggers a process of broadly understood thinking. What thinking is without language? And what function the preposition " without " operates in this question? Of course, " stepping out of language " into a so called non-verbal form of thinking is made conceivable only in and not outside a relation to language. Therefore, it seems that any perception of objects or perception of the so called outside world is a kind of " reading. " Such intuiting of the world highly probably owes its presence to film that made apparent a widely shared confidence in the epoch of the universal literacy that sensory activities work as reading and through reading. However, after the incursion of moving pictures into the field of reality, which, as ever, consists of a mix of subjectivity and objectivity. Sensual activity and passivity then inherently affect both. Very idea of reading, no matter how much metaphorically it functions, makes such a difference that there is no way to imagine what kind of legibility has existed before the intrusion of, first photography and then cinema. Hence, the term " reading " serves here not only metaphorically but at the same time immediately. Film theorist and anthropologist Rachel Moore was strongly impressed by Epstein's observations and conclusions in his effort to define cinematic art, claiming that he " aligns his pure cinema with primitive language " (Moore, 2000: 30). In order to gain a new concept that suits her own theoretical pursuit she quotes Epstein from his early writings on cinema (Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna-1926): " Moreover cinema is a language, and like all languages it is animistic; in other words, it attributes a semblance of life to the objects it defines. The more primitive a language, the more marked this animistic tendency. There is no need to stress the extent to which the language of cinema remains primitive in its terms and ideas " Video from the conference and discussion following the presentation are available at this links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qanZGj1VAt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFy1mG4iwsQ
This essay problematizes, from a theoretical standpoint, both the concepts of off-screen and of cinematic image. Taking into account both Deleuze's definition of time-image and the concept of limit, it's possible to compare the filmic image to that of a threshold. Such a threshold is to be experienced by establishing a parallelism with the condition of the spectator. This image has a memory of itself and, at the same time, contains traces of what it is going to become thanks (also) to the off-screen. It is thus both visible and invisible: indeed, it provides two faces of the same coin in a relationship of mutual implication. The filmic image will then be understood as something provisional, a path, not the final destination; a mediation in a perpetual dialogue conjured up between the visible and the invisible, between the represented and the representable --a medium that exceeds its own limits, figuring and reconfiguring itself between excess and absence. An image that hints to an invisible or, rather, to a not (yet) visible, whose traces have been already placed in it (thanks, for example, to the looks exchanged between the actors, and their movements within the frame). An image that never stops to question us, and to act as a mediator, thus becoming, simultaneously, both an "instigator" and a figure of our mind. An image which is ambiguous, allusive, hybrid, metamorphic, simultaneous, sometimes conciliatory, as in a given idea of classic cinema, but more often than not, conscious of an absence; conscious of the fact that it 'tolerates the absence of unity" in a perpetual (and paradoxical) process that, as it posits boundaries, simultaneously overcome them.
Towards a poetics of the cinematographic frame
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2011
In delineating a poetics of the cinematographic frame, this essay presents a typology of framing styles, and demonstrates ways in which filmmakers use the frame as an expressive resource*and ways in which the frame uses them. The examples discussed are modernist in orientation, and each has a particular association with a city*its history, architecture, and cultural character. Although it is common practice to refer to various*especially, modernist*framing situations as instances of deframing, the essay also enquires into the problematic nature of this term, suggesting alternative visual and cinematographic contexts more amenable to the deconstructive implications of this term. As the boundaries between cinema and the other arts continue to converge and relations between frame, image, and screen become more complex, this essay offers a reassessment of some first principles of film language, especially the aesthetic integrity of the cinematographic frame. Des O'Rawe teaches Film Studies at Queen's University, Belfast. His current research and writing focuses on film aesthetics and modernism. Recent articles have been published in: Kinema: Journal of Film and Audiovisual Media; Quarterly Review of Film and Video; Studies in Documentary Film; Literature/Film Quarterly, and Screen. He currently co-edits the 'Cinema Aesthetics' series for Manchester University Press with Sam Rohdie, with whom he also recently coedited a special issue of Screening the Past ('Cinema/ Photography'