"György Eszter, a major character in the film, gives a monologue propounding a theory that Werckmeister's harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in all music since, which need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony."
"Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is." - The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben
"What is the relation between the work of art and communication?
None whatsoever. The work of art is not an instrument of communication. The work of art has nothing to do with communication. The work of art strictly does not contain the least bit of information. To the contrary, there is a fundamental affinity between the work of art and the act of resistance. There, yes. It has something to do with information and communication as acts of resistance. What is this mysterious relation between a work of art and an act of resistance when men who resist have neither the time nor sometimes the necessary culture to have the least relation to art? I don't know. Andre Malraux develops a beautiful philosophical concept; he says something very simple about art; he says it is the only thing that resist death. Let's return to where we began: What does one do when one does philosophy? One invents concepts. I think this is the basis of a beautiful philosophical concept. Think -- What resists death? One need only see a statuette from three thousand years before our time to find that Malraux's response is a rather good one. From our point of view, we could then say, rather less elegantly, that art is what resists even if it is not the only thing that resists. Where does such a close relation between the act of resistance and the work of art come from? Each act of resistance is not a work of art while, in a certain sense, it is all the same. Each work of art is not an act of resistance and yet, in a certain sense, it is."
- Having an Idea in Cinema (On the Cinema of Straub-Huillet), Gilles Deleuze
12. Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.
13. Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn't exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this inexistence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art : the effort to render visible to everyone that which for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn't exist.
14. Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.
15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.
- from Alain Badiou's Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. Longer excerpt here
"We must try to keep the mind in tranquility. For just as the eye which constantly shifts its gaze, now turning to the right or to the left, now incessantly peering up or down, cannot see distinctly what lies before it, but the sight must be fixed firmly on the object in view if one would make his vision of it clear; so too man's mind when distracted by his countless worldly cares cannot focus itself distinctly on the truth." - Basil of Caesarea
"General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" by Eddie Adams
"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'" - Eddie Adams
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"a photograph does feel more like a verification of an event than an eyewitness statement (often for good reason). A story is just a story, and it's as easy to make them false as true, but a photo, or a film recording, is a literal imprint of the world (until it gets altered, of course -- the epistemological difficulties that photo manipulation cause for, e.g., consumers of the daily newspaper, are an interesting problem). Without very aggressive framing, it's hard to communicate to an audience that what they're seeing might not be true ... We're trained to think of the camera's eye as impartial, unless we have good reason to think otherwise." {emphasis mine} - Crimen Falsi
"Seeing is believing" - proverb
A photo or film recording is not a literal imprint of the world. In the capturing and transmission of the image much is lost. We can call this lost material context, which is the supplement to the image: both the missing piece, and the extra one.
An image is framed, chosen, represented; it lacks history, smell, sound. All this serves as alteration whether or not what lies inside the frame is "manipulated." "Manipulation," though, also exists in choices most viewers aren't conscious of. Lenses - which affect depth of field, among other things; the size of the image (a combination of lense choice and distance from camera from subject); the angles chosen (is the camera above or below the subject? are speakers shot head-on, at a slight angle, or at a greater one? Is a conversation shown by a shot / reverse shot patter, or in a two shot? What does lighting emphasize/deemphasize/obscure?) These choices create emotional resonances in images that do not mirror the world itself. The camera does not see as the eye sees. The eye shifts attention along with consciousness, adjusts to varying lighting conditions, grabs peripheral information without directing attention on it. The tricks of the filmmaker or photographer can attempt to mimic these perceptual schema. The tools of cinema (focus, editing, lighting et al) can be controlled to simulate human perceptual conditions and construct the perception of a narrative.
Filmmakers create meaning and context through montage. The image, like the word, contains meaning only in the interplay between context and image, whether the context is intrinsic or extrinsic to the image itself.
"Montage means the assembly of pieces of film, which moved in rapid succession before the eye create an idea." - Alfred Hitchcock
The basic psychological principles of montage have been known since at least the late 1910s, when Lev Kuleshov showed how juxtaposed images cause audience members to assert certain relationships between the two images (Hitchcock explains this process in his third example in the video clip).
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"The cinema is truth 24 times a second." - Jean-Luc Godard
"The cinema lies 24 times a second." - Brian DePalma
Godard is almost universally skeptical of the truth-value of the image (strictly defined, by which I mean: the kind of truth that Mike assigns to the photographic image in his post). Godard's "truth" is the revelatory impact of the image, but for Godard the truth and the lie of cinema is it's ability to represent the material conditions of reality. If my turn of phrase sounds explicitly Marxist, it's because Godard's political radicalism informs his ideas about the truth-value of the moving image with increasing directness as the 1960's progress. After the near-miss of revolution in France in 1968, Godard's work becomes more explicitly didactic. His work as part of the Dziga Vertov Group sets itself up as a lesson plan but rather than obfuscate the manipulations of the image, Godard and his comrades (Jean-Pierre Gorin, among others) foreground the manipulations of the image so as to undercut them. He's laying bare the structures by which this manipulation takes place, undercutting the cinematic illusion as a lesson in radical media literacy [Godard's use of the image to this effect begins well before this, but 1968 is the breaking point, the moment when his ideological agenda moves to the fore]. The final Dziga Vertov Group film, Letter to Jane, explores the process of assigning meaning to a single photograph of Jane Fonda with a North Vietnamese communist soldier.
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"Look however in Kapo, the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt." - Jacques Rivette's “Of Abjection”, a review of Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo for Cahiers du cinéma, June 1961; cited by Serge Daney in his seminal essay The Tracking Shot in Kapo
"Tracking shots are a question of morality." - Jean-Luc Godard
The choices of presentation of an image are moral concerns precisely because they are images and not the world.
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If Godard is interested in the truth as a lie, DePalma seems intent on creating truth by using lies as his raw material. DePalma understands all images as considered, i.e., "fictional," even (especially?) documentary ones. His newest film Redacted follows through on his previous work by addressing the 'reality' of images as images; it ends with a montage that takes "true" (i.e., documentary) images and combines them with a culminating "false" one (i.e., created by DePalma rather than documentary) that supports the 'truth' behind his political point. Why didn't he use a "real" image here? Were there no appropriate "real" images to be had?
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"Art is a lie that tells the truth" - Pablo Picasso
"There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." - Werner Herzog; from Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema
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"We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see." - Michelangelo Antonioni (via)
DePalma's best work, Blow Out, remakes Antonioni's Blow Up and stars John Travolta as a Hollywood sound man who accidentally records the sounds related to the "accidental" death of a politician. DePalma's film, unlike Antonioni's, arrives at certainty about the mystery at the film's core. Antonioni's film is not about sound but about image; a photographer captures an image that provides evidence of a murder. Or perhaps the image offers illusions instead of evidence; the image is too hard to analyze, the photographer doesn't know all the facts, and the physical evidence is not verifiable (or rather, it is verifiable but not reverifiable). In Blow Up, Antonioni explores the creation of ambiguous images and the roots of meaning in the physical, contextual world.
Antonioni's is frequently a cinema of ambiguity for the viewer, as his films create images whose meaning can't be discerned at first glance - or even upon closer examination. Rather than emphasize the illusions of the image as moral concerns (a la Godard), Antonioni focuses on the epistomological dilemmas of the uncertainty of the process of image-making. See, for example, the incredible final shot of The Passenger. We see only ambiguous evidence, the leadup and aftermath of the climactic moment. Antonioni calls forth the unimaginability and unrepresentability of death; he shows us things we cannot know by emphasizing the fact that we cannot know.
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“We translate every experience into the same old codes.” - David Locke, in Michelangelo Antonioni's Professione: reporter / The Passenger (via)
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Hitchcock makes flawless use of these codes into which we translate experience, manipulating his audience by way of tension and misdirection. His characters, like Shakespeare's, frequently misapprehend the narrative of which they a part. Hitchcock differs from Shakespeare because in Hitchcock's narratives we see through the eyes of these characters and misapprehend what they misapprehend. Take Suspicion, one of his myriad masterworks of subjective point of view. Hitchcock's creation of point of view isn't limited to subjective camerawork; it's the creation of a worldview in which knowledge is constructed through one person's understanding. Our information is incomplete but suggestive enough to allow us to draw conclusions; only later will we be presented with enough information to make sense of events in a concrete way.
Some suggestive stills from Suspicion:
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Mike's point is not about the actual fact-value of the cinematic image; he asserts that audiences have a "greater susceptibility to moving-pictures-plus-sound than words"; and that "the degree of processing that needs to occur between the art and its consumption is higher with novels, leading to a greater opportunity to audit for a sense of falseness." There's no comparison here; it's like comparing apples and Chicago. The modes of procesing might be more conscious in literature, assuming the cinematic illusion is well-kept. The mode of cinematic storytelling that sidesteps any the sense of 'artificiality' draws on a preexisting set of codes that signal verisimilitude. We may be "trained to think of the camera eye as impartial," but this is a lie. The cinematic image is not a priori more capable of creating the illusion of reality than any other form is. Most cinema situates itself within a certain Regime of Truth (Foucault) that represent reality using certain forms. These forms qualify as 'realism' in the cinema because viewers have been trained to accept these codes as real; David Bordwell has done extensive formalist work on the develoment of the codes in Hollywood's Regime of Truth. [To counteract the Hollywood Regime of Truth, "art cinema" has created (itself as) an alternate Regime of Truth with codes of its own. I'm not sure that this is a positive development]. The establishment of any artistic Regime of Truth consists of the codification of a set of approaches toward the representation of truth. What begins as an exercise in appearance-making (as opposed to copy-making, the two types of artistic endeavor in Plato's The Sophist) becomes instead hyperreal, dependent on the Regime of Truth for its truth value. The problem of hyperreality is one of quidditas: Does an image have quidditas any more than a word does? Do 24 images shown in rapid succession contain an essence? Can an image ensconced in a Regime of Truth reveal truth?
For Heidegger, truth (ἀλήθεια / Aletheia) is a process of revealing, an uncovering. The image at once covers and uncovers. In Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art, art reveals the thingliness of things [Heidegger doesn't say 'quidditas,' though he might]; Heidegger considers this revealing to be the purpose of art. A pair of shoes painted by Van Gogh differs from the shoes themselves in that they serve different purposes: the shoes themselves cover feet; the work of art reveals the nature of shoes ("lets us know what shoes are in truth"). A work of art differs from its subject even when the image is exact, for it takes its place as an image, a tool of uncovering.
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"What the moving pictures lack is the wind in the trees." - D.W. Griffith
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Another essential commentary to refute the radical reality of the camera’s eye: Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris examines 2 iconic images from the Crimean War to determine in which order they were shot. A fascinating, multifaceted, essential series, taking place on his blog Zoom at the New York Times website. (Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three) and Cartesian Blogging, Part One (in which Morris answers reader questions on the first three parts)
"In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly." - Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art
"In general the real philosopher will always look for clearness and distinctness; he will invariably try to resemble not a turbid, impetuous torrent, but rather a Swiss lake which by its calm combines great depth with great clearness, the depth revealing itself precisely through the clearness." - Arthur Schopenhauer On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason via Tractatus Blogico-Philosophicus
"If the human artifice par excellence is language, if that is our true nature, then the word constitutes the weave of existence itself."
[...]
"If the migrations of the soul are unutterable, if the possible transgressions seem too autistic, then the other is nothing more than a pretext for complaint or for one’s reasoning; meanwhile, life escapes us inexorably, as fleeting as the water of that river which flows on the other side of the train’s window, as the film shows us again and again. In the end, of these many forms of existence, no one is able to capture more than some vague explanations offered to the wind, whose secret seems to safeguard some sort of original sin of impossible redemption, lost in the darkness of time."
I was going to write an in-depth piece on the significance of Wittgenstein's early work in establishing language as the only way to engage meaningfully with the world, yet still entirely lacking as a tool for engagement with certain meaningful things. Instead, I stumbled across a piece that cites all the passages I had intended and then some, and makes my case as effectively as I could have hoped for. So, with my endorsement, I point you to paragraphs 2 through 7 of Wittgenstein, Hofstadter, Varela by Matthew Segall. The rest of the piece goes in directions I don't agree with - the section on Hofstadter is especially disconcerting, as I think it misunderstands some main arguments from Gödel, Escher, Bach. Though I can't speak to his thoughts on Varela's idea of autopoesis, I do find his approach to Wittgenstein very much in line with my own. On the assumption that you've read the Wittgenstein section of the piece, I will now speak of Manoel de Oliveira.
I would say that Oliveira's work rests on the supposition that by speaking, we falsely believe that language contains the whole of truth (thus falling into the trap of Logical Positivism). What Oliveira does is perhaps to add the "that which cannot be spoken of," by way of hinting at it through rhythym, through observation, and through the image. Oliveira's camera, through its steadiness, subverts the passionate assertions of truth on the part of his characters (the 'objective' camera puts 'subjective' speech in context). By letting his characters carry through their arguments to their logical possible ends, we see the limits of argument - which is to say, language. It is as if Oliveira's work is the Tractatus in its complete form, without the Logical Positivist misinterpretation, where the emphasis has been re-placed on the final sentence. Oliveira, like Wittgenstein, explores language as a possibly complete system for engaging with the world; like Wittgenstein, he gives language a full chance and still finds it lacking. Oliveira's work fully explores that which can be spoken of to give a sense of that which lies beyond the posssibilities of speech.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." ("Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen") - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
This is a comment I left on Danny's post on O Quinto Império - Ontem Como Hoje. Read my previous, more in-depth post on this film here.
"I wonder how much of Oliveira’s project is Wittgensteinian… I’m thinking not so much of the Investigations, but of his earlier work (esp the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), which asserts that the analysis of language is the only way to meaningfully discuss the facts that make up the world [”Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”]. That is the last sentence of the Tractatus, which to me means that Wittgenstein sees other things as important but they are, literally, unspeakable. Does the weighty absence of these things in Wittgenstein’s work connect to those moments in Oliveira’s work when things are not spoken (the Jesus in the tapestry, for instance)?"
The above is in need of an expansion, but not now; I'm off to see O Lucky Man! now, and If... a bit later on. Here's your bonus Wittgenstein content of the day: three clips from Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (via the new Wittgenstein blog The Wittgenstein Forum):
My memory for events, for the pieces of my life that I've lived through, is fragmentary. I attach myself to moments, replaying them to relive them. They differ from the moments of cinema, which can be replayed the same way each time, infinitely revisitable, the same yet each time unique. The cinema is memory as I'd prefer it to be, life as I'd prefer it to be - full of the possibility of living in a moment again.
"War is war, l’art pour l’art, in politics there’s no room for compunction, business is business, — all these signify the same thing, all these appertain to the same aggressive and radical spirit, informed by that uncanny, I might almost say that metaphysical, lack of consideration for consequences, that ruthless logic directed on the object and on the object alone, which looks neither to the right nor to the left; and this, all this, is the style of thinking that characterizes our age."
"General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" by Eddie Adams
