P27
Does he not mean that the movement-image (the shot) consists of a first articulation in relation to a change or becoming which the movement expresses, but also a second articulation in relation to the objects between which it is established, which have become at the same time integral parts of the image (cinemes)?
movement-image has become a reality which ‘speaks’ through its objects.
language system of reality is not at all a language.
P28
but ‘semiotics’, as the system of images and sign independent of language in general.
Narration is grounded in the image itself, but it is not give.
P29
If we ask what the function of the sign makes its object know; on the contrary, it presupposes knowledge of the object in another sign, but adds new elements of knowledge to it as a function of the interpretant.
P35
The movement-image does not reproduce a world but constitutes an autonomous world, make up of break and disproportion, deprived of all its centre of his own perception.
It is a homage to psychoanalysis, which has only even given cinema one sole object, one single refrain, the so-called primitive scene.
P43
Conversely, the pure optical image may be only a description, and concern a character who no longer knows how or is no longer able to react to the situation; the restraint of this image, the thinness of what it retains, line or simple point…
sensory-motor image was useful because it linked a perception image to an action image; it already modelled the first on the second and extended the one into the other.
P44
Perhaps we should also image other possible answers, more or less related, more or less distinc: what would enter into relation would be the real and the imaginary, the physical and the mental, the objective and the subjective, description and nrration, the actual and the virtual . . .
P45
The purely optical and sound situation (description) is an actual image, but one which instead of extending into movement, links up with a virtual image and forma s circuit with it.
subjectivity already emerged in the movement-image; it appears as soon as there is a gap between a received and executed movement, an action and reaction, a simulation and a response, a perception-image and an action image.
P60
Colour is dream, not because the dream is in colour, but because colours in Minneli are given a highly absorbent, almost devouring, value.
P77
The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror.
The virtual image (pure recollection) is not a psychcological state or a consciousness: it exists outside of consciousness, in time, and we should have no more difficulty in admitting the virtual insistence of pure recollections in time than we do for the actual existence of non-perceived objects in space.
P96
What the past is to time, sense is to language and idea to thought.
P122
regimes of the image
p143
We may, then, consider the story as the development of two kinds of images, objective and subjective, their complex relation in an identity of the type Ego=Ego; identity of the character seen and who sees the character and is what the charater sees.
P147
The character is continually becoming another, and is no longer separable from this becoming which merges with a people.
P156
Metaphor is sometimes extrinsic, sometimes intrinsic.
What Einstein called ‘the new sphere of filmic rhetoric, the possibility of bearing an abstract social judgement’.
The whole is constantly open (the spiral), but so that it can internalize the sequence of images, as well as becoming externalized in this sequence.
SOUND
P225
We are sometimes reminded that there is not just one soundtrack, but at least three groups, words, noises, music.
p231
In fact, all the sound elements, including music, including silence, form a continuum as something which belongs to the visual image.
music interacts as a foreign body.
Deconstruction & Criticism
Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman, Miller
pvii
Deconstruction, as it has come to be called, refuses to identify the force of literature with any concept embodied meaning and shows how deeply such logocentric or incarnationist perspectives have influenced the way we think about art.
pviii
(Derrida’s double analysis is an emblem of this, an expanding hendiadys, exegesis within or upon exegesis.)
pix
Though they understand Nietzche when he says “the deepest pathos is still aesthetic play,” they have a stake in that pathos: its persistence, its psychological provenance.
Geoffrey Hartman
BREAKING FORM: HAROLD BLOOM
(DECONSTRUCTING LANGUAGE)
p1
The word meaning goes back to the root that signifies “opinion” or “intention,” and is closely related to the word moaning. A poem’s meaning is a poem’s complaint.
p2
the making/breaking of form
p3
What dominates Freud’s notion is the child’s fantasy-making power….but the child’s fantastic interpretation of its parents.
p4
Walter Benjamin did, or else one must yield to a thoroughgoing linguistic nihilism, which in its most refined form is the mode now called Deconstruction.
For Deconstruction, irony is not a trope but finally is as Paul de Man says, ‘ the systematic undoing . . . of understanding.”
De Man
The possibility now arises that the entire construction of drives, substitutions, repressions, and representations is the aberrant, metaphorical correlative of the absolute randomness of language, prior to any figuration or meaning.
p5
Freedom of meaning is the chance to endure, and so to be heard. Freedom of meaning is wrested by combat, of meaning against meaning. But this combat consists in a reading encounter, and in an interpretative moment within that encounter.
P10
Rhetoric has been always unfitted to the study of poetry…
Helen Vendler
It remains true that the figures of rhetoric, while they may be thought to appear in a more concentrated form in lyric, seem equally at home in narrative and expository writing. Nothing in the figures of paradox, or irony, or metaphor, or imagery—or in the generic conventions of, say, the elegy—specifics a basis in verse.
P12
an achieved death of meaning.
P14
The breaking of form to produce meaning, as I conceive it, depends upon the operation of certain instances of language, revisionary ratios, and on certain topological displacements in language that intervene between ratios, displacements that I have been calling “crossings.”
P16
critical trope “misreading’”
Friedrich Schlegel
“The irony of irony is the fact that one becomes weary of it if one is offered it everywhere and all the time.”
To evade such destructive weariness, I return to the poetic equivalent of Freud’s concept of defense. (the wound or narcissistic scar provokes the poetic self into the aggressivity that Freud chose to call ‘defense’)
The center of the poetic self, of the speaking subject that Demanian Deconstruction dissolves into irony, is narcissistic self-regard.
Even Freud, like all the rest of us, idealized the arts
such prevalent idealization.
P19
Freud’s patterns of psychic images are the defenses, a tropological system masking itself as a group of operations directed against change,
TROPE = a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression
P26
A mind that can turn to its own figurations and constitute an ego by love of those figurations, is a Whitmanian, transcendentalizing mind of summer. Such a mind is also that of a Freudian man, since Freud defines narcissism as being the self’s love of the ego, a love that by such cathexis veritably continues the ego.
CATHEXIS: in psychoanalysis, cathexis is defined as the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea.
P37
Creation being out of our hands, our distance from even out own art seems to become greater. In this intensification of estrangement, Ashbery’s meditation gradually rejects the paradise of art,
P38
Deconstruction’s ironies a supermimesis achieved by an art that will not abandon the self to language, the art of Ashebery’s earlier Fragment:
The words sung in the next room are unavoidable
But their passionate intelligence will be studied in you.
Walsh, Maria, Believable Fictions, Art Monthly no342 p11-14, 2010/ Ja 2011
NOTES!
In an interview in 1999, Issac Julien responded to the question of why so many artists are using cinema as subject matter by saying: 'It was as if so-called cinema has replaced huge paintings such as Julian Schnabel's. Artists like Stan Douglas, however, seem interested in making work that has cinematic interest beyond the textual surface of the image -- or its deconstruction. Yet in his show at Dia Center for the Arts he seemed concerned with something more old fashioned and Brechtian -- with changing the rules of representation for its own sake.'
Contrary to underscoring the illusion of film performance, what is more pertinent today is the creation of believable fictions in order to create what Hito Steyerl described in a recent article in Frieze as 'an audiovisual politics of intensity'.
I want to begin my exploration with a classic example of foregrounding the mechanics of performance from the 1990s, Pierre Huyghe's Remake, 1995, a video reproduction of Hitchcock's Rear Window, 1954. In this piece, the actors perform 'the acting found in the original film rather than the actor's role', leading the critic Jean-Christophe Royoux to state in his 1999 essay 'Remaking Cinema' that Remake is an updated version of Brecht's alienation effect where the performance of an actor is put in parenthesis by the karaoke effect of quoting Hitchcock's film by memory. While such work is interesting and clever, and coincided with 1990s death knells being sounded about cinema, the deconstructive approach to cinema in moving-image work by artists often misses the extent to which classical film worlds -- for example Hitchcock's -- are already littered with what we might now call reflexive moments but without foreclosing on the pleasures of imaginary identification. Jimmy Stewarf s view from his apartment of the apartments in the building opposite is already a staging within the film of the position of the cinematic voyeur and, in Vertigo, Hitchcock plays with intra and extra diegetic worlds by giving the spectator knowledge about the film world that is unknown to the film protagonist, again played by Stewart, who remains unaware he is being duped by Kim Novak for a large part of the film. These reflexive moments are integrated with the continuum of the film world and its performances in ways which allow us to access a range of emotional flows and rhythms rather than simply presenting ideological stereotypes of the machinations of desire.
the peripatetic nature of gallery space can be so unaccommodating to audience reception and attention, many artists have absconded to the cinema. Recent successes such as Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood have largely accepted the conditions of what we recognise as narrative cinema, but more relevant to my exploration here of how the strategies used by artists to deconstruct the illusion of film performance can instead engage affective truths of human experience
Film performance is a very powerful mechanism for enabling us to inhabit bodies and spaces that we would not normally enter into. Artists' moving-image work generally tries to deconstruct identification with on-screen personages, situating them in self-reflexive scenarios that suspend the fascination a character's performance might hold for us. But fascination does not mean we don't realise it is a performance. Projected performances enable us to explore imaginative understandings of what it might be to be human. While 'Brechtian' strategies might inspire formal innovation, the projected photographs of the moving image emit performances whose energies and rhythms resonate with the core selves of captivated audiences.
Roland Barthes
Rhetoric of the Image
P33
Important problem facing the semiology of images: can anaological representation (the ‘copy’) produce true systems of signs nd not merely simple agglutinations of symbols?
‘language’ of gesture — the moment such communications are not doubly articulated
linguistic nature of the image
the image is re-presentation, which is to say ultimately resurrection.
the limit of meaning, it permits the consideration of a veritable ontology of the process of signification. How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
advertising the signification of the image is undoubtly intentional;
p35
linguistic message
the composition of the image, evoking memory of innumerable alimentary paintings, sends us to an aesthetic signified: the ‘natural morte’ or, as it expressed in other languages, the ‘still life’; the knowledge on which this sign depends is heavily cultural.
I am speaking, except in a deliberately reflexive system such as literature.
I continue to ‘read’ the image, to ‘understand’ that it assembles in a common space a number of identifiable (nameable) objects, not merely shapes and colours.
the relation between thing signified and image signifying in analogical representation is not ‘arbitary’ (as it is in language), it is no longer necessary to dose the relay with a third term in the guise of the psychic image of the object.
message without a code.
P36
That knowledge is not nil, for we need to know what an image is
the photograph analysed offers us three messages: a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a non-coded iconic message.
(EXPLAINATION GIVEN IF NEEDED)
linguistic sign of a signifier and signified
explanation of the role of the image in society
literal message appears as the support of the ‘symbolic’ message. Hence, knowing that a system which takes over the signs of connotation, we may say immediately that the literal image is denoted and the symbolic image connoted.
Does the image duplicate certain of the informations given in the text by a phenomenon of redundancy or does the text add a fresh information to the image?
P37
Today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is indeed present in ever image: as title, caption, accompanying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon. Which shows that it is not very accurate to talk of a civilisation of the image — we are still, and more than ever, a civilisation of writing.
What are the functions of the linguistic message whith regard to the (twofold) iconic message? There appear to be two: anchorage and relay.
denoted description of the image (a description which is often incomplete)
helps me to choose the correct level of perception, permits me to focus not simply my gaze but also my understanding.
When it comes to the ‘symbolic message’, the linguistic message not longer guides identification but interpretation, constituting a kind of vice which holds the connoted meanings from proliferating, whether towards excessively individual regions (it limits, that is to say, the projective power of the image) or towards dysphoric values.
P38
The text is indeed the creator’s (and hence society’s) right of inspection over the image; anchorage is control, bearing a responsibility — in the face of the projective power of pictures — for the use of the message.
While rare in the fixed image, this relay-text becomes very important in film, where dialogue functions not simply as elucidation but really does advance the action by setting out, in the sequences of messages, meanings that are not to be found in the image itself.
distinction between the literal message and the symbolic message is operational; we never encounter (at least in advertising) a literal image in a pure state.
P39
Does the coding of the denoted have consequences for the connoted message?
P40
This is without a doubt an important historical paradox: the more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning. [. . .]
