Tuesday 16 February 2010

Saturday 6 February 2010

Notes from "The Future of the image" by Jacques Ranciere part II

I.The Future of the Image
The Alterity of Images

These images refer to nothing else. This does not mean, as is frequently said, that they are intransitive. It means that alterity enters into the very composition of the images, but also that such alterity attaches to something other than the material properties of the cinematic medium.
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...operations : relations between a whole and parts; between a visibility and a power of signification and affect associated with it; between expectations and what happens to meet them.
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Let us look at the beginning of the film (Au hasard Balthazar)[...]the screen is still dark, with the crystalline notes of a Schubert sonata. It continues, while the credits flash by against a background conjuring up a rocky wall, a wall of dry-stone or boiled cardboard, when braying has replaced the sonata. [...] a little donkey's head sucking at its mother's teat in close-up. a very white hand then descents along the dark neck of the little donkey, while the camera ascends in the opposite direction to show the little girl whose hand this is, her brother and her father. A dialogue accompanies this action ('We must have it' - 'Give it to us' - 'Children, that's impossible'), without us ever seeing the mouth that utters those words. The children address their father with their back to us; their bodies obscure his face while he answers them. A dissolve then introduces a shot that shows us the opposite of these words : from behind, in a wide-angled shot, the father and the children come back down leading the donkey. Another dissolve carries us over into the donkey's baptism - another close-up that allows us to see nothing but the head of the animal, the arm of the boy who pours the water, and the chest of the little girls who holds a cande.
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In these credits and three shots we have a whole regime of 'imageness' - that is, a regime of relations between elements and between functions.
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Bresson's 'images' are not a donkey, two children and an adult. [...] They are operations that couple and uncouple the visible and its signification of speech and its effect, which create and frustrate expectations.
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By separating the hands from the facial expression, it reduces the action to its essence [...] By compressing the action into a sequence of perceptions and movements, and short-circuiting any explanation of the reasons, Bresson's cinema does not realize a peculiar essence of the cinema. It forms part of the novelistic tradition begun by Flaubert : an ambivalence in which the same procedures create and retract meaning, ensure and undo the link between perceptions, actions and affects.
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The image is never simple reality. Cinematic images are primarily operations, relations between the sayable and the visible, ways of playing with the before and the after, cause and effect.
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It is simply that when we speak of Bresson's images we are not referring to the relationship between what has happened elsewhere and what is happening before our eyes, but to operations that make up the artistic nature of that we are seeing.
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'Image' therefore refers to two different things : likeness of an original / alteration of resemblance (art)
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The images of art are operations that produce a discrepancy, a dissemblance. Words describe what the eye might see or express what it will never see; they deliberately clarify or obscure an idea.
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But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationship which plays on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them.

Thursday 4 February 2010

Notes from "The Future of the image" by Jacques Ranciere


still from Au hasard Balthazar (1966) Robert Bresson

I. The Future of the Image

Let us start at the beginning. What is being spoken about, and what precisely are we being told, when it is said that there is no longer any reality, but only images? Or, conversely, that there are no more images but only a reality incessantly representing itself to itself?
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If there is now nothing but images, there is nothing but the image. And if there is nothing other than the image, the very notion of the images becomes devoid of content.
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Image, which refers to an Other, and the Visual, which refers to nothing but itself.
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The television image has no Other by virtue of its very nature. In effect, it has its light in itself, while the cinematic image derives it from an external source. [...] "The image here has its light built-in. It reveals it self. With its source in itself, it becomes in our eyes its own cause. Spinozist definition of God or substance.
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The nature of the amusement the television offers us, and of the affects it produces in us, is independent of the fact that the light derives from the apparatus. And the intrinsic nature of Bresson's images remains unchanged, whether we see the reels projected in a cinema or through a casette or disc on our television screen or a video projector. The Same is not one side, while the Other is on the other.