All sources for ‘mental space’ (the concept in general)

Below are all my sources relevant to my research paper. Not everything was actually used. 3 Following posts will explore the concept as found in each of the 3 films studied.

Deleuze, G. (1983) Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

p169:
« espaces deconnectés ou vidés »
« crise de l’image-action: les personnages se trouvaient de moins en moins dans des situations sensori-motrices « motivantes », mais plutôt dans un état de promenade, de balade ou d’errance qui définissait des situations optiques et sonores pures. L’image-action tendait alors à éclater, tandis que les lieux déterminés s’estompaient, laissant monter des espaces quelconques où se développaient les affects modernes de peur, de détachement, mais aussi de fraîcheur, de vitesse extrême et d’attente interminable. »

p170:
« L’école allemande de la peur, notamment avec Fassbinder et Daniel Schmid, élaborait ses extérieurs comme des villes-déserts, ses intérieurs dédoublés dans des miroirs, avec un minimum de repères et une multiplication de points de vue sans raccord. »

p280:
« Ce qui a remplacé l’action ou la situation sensori-motrice, c’est la promenade, la balade et l’aller-retour continuel. La balade avait trouvé en Amérique les conditions formelles et matérielles d’un renouvellement. Elle se fait par nécessité, intérieure ou extérieure, par besoin de fuite. Mais maintenant elle perd l’aspect initiatique qu’elle avait encore dans le voyage allemand (encore dans les films de Wenders), et qu’elle conservait malgré tout dans le voyage beat (« Easy Rider » […]). elle est devenue balade urbaine, et s’est détachée de la structure active et affective qui la soutenait, la dirigeait, lui donnait des directions même vagues. […] C’est en effet le plus clair de la balade moderne, elle se fait dans un espace quelconque, gare de triage, entrepôt désaffecté, tissu dédifférencié de la ville, par opposition à l’action qui se déroulait le plus souvent dans les espaces-temps qualifiés de l’ancien réalisme. »

p281:
« la réalité dispersive et lacunaire, le fourmillement de personnages à interférence faible, leur capacité de devenir principaux et de redevenir secondaires, les évènements qui se posent sur les personnages et qui n’appartiennent pas à ceux qui les subissent ou les provoquent. »
« Ce sont ces images flottantes,ces clichés anonymes, qui circulent dans le monde extérieur, mais aussi qui pénètrent chacun et constituent son monde intérieur, si bien que chacun ne possède en soi que des clichés psychiques par lesquels il pense et il sent, se pense et se sent, étant lui-même un cliché parmi les autres dans le monde qui l’entoure. Clichés physiques, optiques et sonores, et clichés psychiques se nourissent mutuellement. Pour que les gens se supportent, eux-mêmes et le monde, il faut que la misère ait gagné l’intérieur des consciences, et que le dedans soit comme le dehors. »

p282:
« L’idée d’une seule et même misère, intérieure et extérieure, dans le monde et dans la conscience, c’était déjà l’idée du romantisme anglais sous sa forme la plus noire, notamment chez Blake ou Coleridge: les gens n’accepteraient pas l’intolérable si les mêmes « raisons » qui le leur imposaient du dehors ne s’insinuaient en eux pour les faire adhérer du dedans. »

p286:
« Dans la ville en démolition ou en reconstruction, le néo-réalisme fait proliférer les espaces quelconques, cancer urbain, tissu indidéfférencié, terrains vagues, qui s’opposent aux espaces déterminés de l’ancien réalisme. Et ce qui monte à l’horizon, ce qui se profile dans ce monde, ce qui va s’imposer dans un troisième moment, ce n’est même pas la réalité crue, mais sa doublure, le règne des clichés, tant à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur, dans la tête et le cœur des gens autant que dans l’espace tout entier. »

Deleuze, G. (1985) Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

p15:
« Quant à la distinction du subjectif et de l’objectif, elle tend aussi à perdre de son importance, à mesure que la situation optique ou la description visuelle remplacent l’action motrice. On tombe en effet dans un principe d’indéterminabilité, d’indiscernabilité: on ne sait plus ce qui est imaginaire ou réel, physique ou mental dans la situation, non pas qu’on les confonde, mais parce qu’on n’a pas à le savoir et qu’il n’y a même plus lieu de le demander. C’est comme si le réel et l’imaginaire couraient l’un derrière l’autre, se réfléchissaient l’un dans l’autre autour d’un point d’indiscernabilité. »
« une description réaliste traditionnelle: c’est celle qui suppose l’indépendance de son objet, et pose donc une discernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire (on peut les confondre, ils n’en restent pas moins distincts en droit). Tout autre est la description néo-réaliste du nouveau roman: comme elle remplace son propre objet, pour une part elle en gomme ou en détruit la réalité qui passe dans l’imaginaire, mais d’autre part elle en fait surgir toute la réalité que l’imaginaire ou le mental créent par la parole et la vision. L’imaginaire et le réel deviennent indiscernables. »

p16:
« les situations optiques et sonores pures peuvent avoir deux pôles, objectif et subjectif, réel et imaginaire, physique et mental. Mais elles donnent lieu à des opsignes et sonsignes, qui ne cessent de faire communiquer les pôles, et qui, dans un sens ou dans l’autre, assurent les passages et les conversions, tendant vers un point d’indiscernabilité (et non pas de confusion).

P35: conscience-camera
« elle [la caméra] subordonne la description d’un espace à des fonctions de la pensée. Ce n’est plus la simple distinction du subjectif et de l’objectif, du réel et de l’imaginaire, c’est au contraire leur indiscernabilité qui va doter la caméra d’un riche ensemble de fonctions, et entraîner une nouvelle conception du cadre et des recadrages. S’accomplira le pressentiment d’Hitchcock: une conscience-caméra qui ne se définirait plus par les mouvements qu’elle est capable de suivre ou d’accomplir, mais par les relations mentales dans lesquelles elle est capable d’entrer; Et elle devient questionnante, répondante, objectante, provocante, théorématisante, hypothétisante, expérimentante. »

p58: « le cinéma dit moderne »
« Des personnages, pris dans des situations optiques et sonores pures, se trouvent condamnés à l’errance ou à la balade. Ce sont de purs voyants, qui n’existent plus que dans l’intervalle de mouvement, et n’ont même pas la consolation du sublime, qui leur ferait rejoindre la matière ou conquérir l’esprit. Ils sont plutôt livrés à quelque chose d’intolérable, qui est leur quotidienneté même. »
« Les images-rêve à leur tour semblent bien avoir deux pôles, qu’on peut distinguer d’après leur production technique. L’un procède par des moyens riches et surchargés, fondus, surimpressions, décadrages, mouvements complexes d’appareil, effets spéciaux, manipulations de laboratoire, allant jusqu’à l’abstrait, tendant à l’abstraction. L’autre au contraire est très sobre, opérant par franches coupures ou montage-cut, procédant seulement à un perpétuel décrochage qui « fait » rêve, mais entre objets demeurant concrets. La technique de l’image renvoie toujours à une métaphysique de l’imagination: c’est comme deux manières de concevoir le passage d’une image à l’autre. A cet égard, les états oniriques sont par rapport au réel un peu comme les états « anormaux » d’une langue par rapport à la langue courante: tantôt surcharge, complexification, sursaturation, tantôt au contraire élimination, ellipse, rupture, coupure, décrochage. »

p94: Image-cristal
« L’image-cristal, ou la description cristalline, a bien deux faces qui ne se confondent pas. C’est que la confusion du réel et de l’imaginaire est une simple erreur de fait, et n’affecte pas leur discernabilité: la confusion se fait seulement « dans la tête » de quelqu’un. Tandis que l’indiscernabilité constitueune illusion objective; elle ne supprime pas la distinction des deux faces, mais la rend inassignable, chaque face prenant le rôle de l’autre dans une relation qu’il faut qualifier de présupposition réciproque, ou de réversibilité. […] L’indiscernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire, ou du présent et du passé, de l’actuel et du virtuel, ne se produit donc nullement dans la tête ou dans l’esprit, mais est le caractère objectif de certaines images existantes, doubles par nature. »

p161:
« la distinction bergsonienne entre le « souvenir pur », toujours virtuel, et « l’image-souvenir », qui ne fait que l’actualiser par rapport au présent. […] le souvenir pur ne doit surtout pas être confondu avec l’image-souvenir qui en découle, mais se tient comme un « magnétiseur » derrière les hallucinations qu’il suggère. »

p169:
« espaces quantiques chez Robbe-Grillet, espaces probabilitaires et topologiques chez Resnais, espaces cristallisés chez Herzog et Tarkovsky »
« les espaces cristallisés, quand les paysages deviennent hallucinatoires dans un milieu qui ne retient plus que des germes cristallins et des matières cristallisables. »

p171: Puissance du Faux
« présents incompossibles »
« passés non-nécessairement vrais »
« la narration cesse d’être véridique, c’est à dire de prétendre au vrai, pour se faire essentiellement falsifiante. Ce n’est pas du « chacun sa vérité », une variabilité concernant le contenu. C’est une puissance du faux qui remplace et détrône la forme du vrai, parce qu’elle pose la simultanéité de présents incompossibles, ou la coexistence de passés non-nécessairement vrais. La description cristalline atteignait déjà à l’indiscernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire, mais la narration falsifiante qui lui correspond fait un pas de plus, et pose au présent des différences inexplicables, au passé des alternatives indécidables entre le vrai et le faux. L’homme véridique meurt, tout modèle de vérité s’écroule, au profit de la nouvelle narration. Nous n’avons pas parlé de l’auteur essentiel à cet égard: c’est Nietzsche, qui, sous le nom de « volonté de puissance », substitue la puissance du faux à la forme du vrai, et résout la crise de la vérité, veut la régler une fois pour toutes, mais, à l’opposé de Leibniz, au profit du faux et de sa puissance artiste, créatrice… »

p174:
« La narration véridique se développe organiquement, suivant des connexions légales dans l’espace et des rapports chronologiques dans le temps […] la narration implique une enquête ou des témoignages qui la rapportent au vrai […] c’est toujours à un système du jugement que la narration se rapporte. […] La narration falsifiante, au contraire, échappe à ce système, elle brise le système du jugement, parce que la puissance du faux (non pas l’erreur ou le doute) affecte l’enquêteur et le témoin tout autant que le présumé coupable. […] Les évènements eux-m^mes ne cessent de changer avec les rapports de temps das lesquels ils entrent, etles termes, avec leurs connexions. La narration ne cesse de se modifier toute entière, à chacun de ses épisodes, non pas d’après des variations subjectives, mais suivant des lieux déconnectés et des moments dechronologisés. Il y a une raison profonde de cette nouvelle situation: contrairement à la forme du vrai qui est unifianteet tend à l’identification d’un personnage (sa découverte ou simplement sa cohérence), la puissance du faux n’est pas séparable d’une irréductible multiplicité. « Je est un autre » a remplacé Moi = Moi. »

p177:
« S’il y a unité du nouveau cinéma allemand, Wenders, Fassbinder, Schmid, Schroeter ou Schlöndorff, elle est là aussi, comme résultat de la guerre, dans le lien toujours variable entre ces éléments: les espaces réduits à leurs propres descriptions (villes-déserts ou lieux qui ne cessent de se détruire); les présentations directes d’un temps lourd, inutile et inévocable, qui hantent les personnages; et, d’un pôle à l’autre, les puissances du faux qui tissent une narration, pour autant qu’elles s’effectuent dans de « faux mouvements ». La passion allemande est devenue la peur, mais la peur est aussi bien la dernière raison de l’homme, sa noblesse annonçant quelque chose de nouveau, la création qui sort de la peur comme passion noble. »

p192:
« ce que sont l’objet et le sujet dans les conditions de cinéma. Par convention, on appelle objectif ce que « voit » la caméra, et subjectif ce que voit le personnage. »
« le récit [traditionnel/véridique] est le développement des deux sortes d’images, objectives et subjectives, leur rapport complexe qui peut aller jusqu’à l’antagonisme, mais qui doit se résoudre dans une identité du type Moi = Moi: identité du personnage vu et qui voit, mais aussi bien identité du cinéaste-caméra, qui voit le personnage et ce que le personnage voit. […] C’est la distinction de l’objectif et du subjectif, mais aussi bien leur identification, qui se trouvent mises en question dans un autre mode de récit. »

p194: Pasolini « « cinéma de poésie » par opposition au cinéma dit de prose »
« Dans le cinéma de poésie, la distinction s’évanouissait entre ce que voyait subjectivement le personnage et ce que voyait objectivement la caméra, non pas au profit de l’un ou de l’autre, mais parce que la caméra prenait une présence subjective, acquérait une vision intérieure, qui entrait dans un rapport de simulation (« mimesis »)avec la manière de voir du personnage. […] S’établissait une contamination des deux sortes d’images, telle que les visions insolites de la caméra (l’alternance de différents objectifs, le zoom, les angles extraordinaires, les mouvements anormaux, les arrêts…) exprimaient les visions singulières du personnage, et que celles-ci s’exprimaient dans celles-là, mais en portant l’ensemble à la puissance du faux. »

p195:
« Ce que Nietzsche avait montré: que l’idéal du vrai était la plus profonde fiction, au coeur du réel, le cinéma ne l’avait pas encore trouvé. »

p208:
« Même quand le cinéma européen se contente du rêve, du fantasme ou de la rêverie, il a pour ambition de porter à la conscience les mécanismes inconscients de la pensée. »

p210:
« S’élabore un circuit qui comprend à la fois l’auteur, le film et le spectateur. Le circuit complet comprend donc le choc sensoriel qui nous élève des images à la pensée consciente, puis la pensée par figures qui nous ramène aux images et nous redonne un choc affectif. Faire coexister les deux, joindre le plus haut degré de conscience au niveau le plus profond d’inconscient: l’automate dialectique. »

p276:
« Nous ne croyons plus à un tout comme intériorité de la pensée, même ouvert, nous croyons à une force du dehors qui se creuse, nous happe et attire le dedans. Nous ne croyons plus à une association des images, même franchissant des vides, nous croyons à des coupures qui prennent une valeur absolue et se subordonnent toute association. Ce n’est pas l’abstraction, ce sont ces deux aspects qui définissent le nouveau cinéma « intellectuel ». […] Le cerveau coupe ou fait fuir toutes les associations intérieures, il appelle un dehors au delà de tout monde extérieur. […] C’est un cinéma d’inspiration néo-psychanalytique: donnez-moi un lapsus, un acte manqué, et je reconstruitai le cerveau. C’est une structure topologique du dehors et du dedans, et c’est un caractère fortuit à chaque stade des enchaînements ou médiations, qui définit la nouvelle image cérébrale. »
p278: « cinéma moderne »
« un renversement tel que l’image est désenchaînée, et que la coupure, ou l’interstice entre deux séries d’images, ne fait plus partie ni de l’une ni de l’autre des séries: c’est l’équivalent d’une coupure irrationnelle, qui détermine les rapports non-commensurables entre images. […] Au lieu d’une image après l’autre, il y a une image plus une autre, et chaque plan est décadré par rapport au cadrage du plan suivant. »

p356: Conclusion of the book!!!
« Ce qui met en question ce cinéma d’action après la guerre, c’est la rupture même du schéma sensori-moteur: la montée de situations auxquelles on ne peut plus réagir, de milieux avec lesquels il n’y a plus que des relations aléatoires, d’espaces quelconques, vides ou déconnectés qui remplacent les étendues qualifiées. Voilà que les situations ne se prolongent plus en action ou réaction, conformément aux exigences de l’image-mouvement. Ce sont de pures situations optiques et sonores, dans lesquelles le personnage ne sait comment répondre, des espaces désaffectés dans lesquels il cesse d’éprouver et d’agir, pour entrer en fuite, en balade, en va-et-vient, vaguement indifférent à ce qui lui arrive, indécis sur ce qu’il faut faire. Mais il a gagné en voaynce ce qu’il a perdu en action ou réaction: il VOIT, si bien que le problème du spectateur devient « qu’est-ce qu’il y a à voir dans l’image? » (et non plus « qu’est ce qu’on va voir dans l’image suivante ? »). »

p357: Different types of time-images:
1)opsignes (vision-images), sonsignes (sound-images): purely audio visual situations, the very first types of time-images (described in previous quote)
2)image-rêve/onirosigne (dream-image) and image-souvenir/mnémosigne (memory-image)
3)image-cristal/hyalosigne (cristal-image): « la situation d’une image actuelle et de sa propre image virtuelle, si bien qu’il n’y a plus d’enchaînement du réel et de l’imaginaire mais indiscernabilité des deux dans un perpétuel échange. »« en s’élevant à l’indiscernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire, les signes de cristal dépassent toute psychologie du souvenir et du rêve, autant que toute physique de l’action. » « C’est le temps en personne qui surgit dans le cristal, et que ne cesse de recommencer son dédoublement, sans aboutissement, puisque l’échange indiscernable est toujours reconduit et reproduit. L’image temps directe ou la forme transcendantale du temps, c’est ce qu’on voit dans le cristal; aussi bien les hyalosignes, les signes cristallins, doivent-ils être dits miroirs ou germes du temps. »
4)chronosignes (time-image): « les rapports intérieurs de temps sous forme topologique ou quantique » « Nous ne sommes plus dans une distinction indiscernable du réel et de l’imaginaire, qui caractérisait l’image-cristal, mais dans des alternatives indécidables entre nappes de passé, ou des différences « inexplicables » entre pointes de présent, qui concernent maintenant l’image-temps directe. Ce qui est en jeu, ce n’est plus le réel et l’imaginaire, mais le vrai et le faux. Et de même que le réel et l’imaginaire devenaient indiscernablesdans des conditions très précises de l’image, le vrai et le faux deviennent maintenant indécidables ou inextricables: l’impossible procède du possible, et la passé n’est pas nécessairement vrai. C’est une nouvelle logique qu’il faut inventer, non moins que tout à l’heure une nouvelle psychologie. »
5)génésignes: images à la puissance du faux (images to the power of false): « Tantôt […] ce sont les personnages qui forment les séries comme autant de degrés d’une « volonté de puissance » par laquelle le monde devient une fable. Tantôt c’est un personnage qui franchit lui-même la limite, et qui devient un autre, sous un acte de fabulation. »

p361: Consequences of time-image on framing and editing:
« L’image dite classique devait être considérée suivant deux axes. Ces deux axes étaient les coordonnées du cerveau: d’une part les images s’enchaînaient ou se prolongeaient, suivant des lois d’association, de contiguïté, de ressemblance, de contraste ou d’opposition; d’autre part les images associées s’intériorisaient dans un tout comme concept (intégration), qui ne cessait à son tour de s’extérioriser dans des images associables ou prolongeables (différenciation). […]C’était le double aspect de l’image-mouvement,définissant le hors-champ: d’une part elle communiquait avec u extérieur, d’autre part elle exprimait un tout qui change. Le mouvement dans son prolongement était la donnée immédiate, et le tout qui change, c’est à dire le temps, était la représentation indirect ou médiate. Mais il ne cessait d’y avoir circulation des deux, intériorisation dans le tout, extériorisation dans l’image, cercle ou spirale qui constituait pour le cinéma, non moins que pour la philosophie, le modèle du Vrai comme totalisation. »
image moderne: « les images ne s’enchaînent plus par coupures rationnelles, mais se ré-enchaînent sur coupures irrationnelles. […] Il n’y a plus lieu de parler d’un prolongement réel ou possible capable de constituer un monde extérieur: nous avons cessé d’y croire, et l’image est coupée du monde extérieur. Mais l’intériorisation ou l’intégration dans un tout comme conscience de soi n’a pas moins disparu. […] La pensée, comme puissance qui n’a pas toujours existé, naît d’un dehors plus lointain que tout monde extérieur, et, comme puissance qui n’existe pas encore, s’affronte à un dedans, un impensable ou un impensé plus profond que tout monde intérieur. En second lieu, il n’y a donc plus mouvement d’intériorisation ni d’extériorisation, intégration ni différenciation, mais affrontement d’un dehors et d’un dedans indépendamment de la distance, cette pensée hors d’elle-même et cet impensé dans la pensée.»

p363: Consequences on sound design:
« Il faut que le sonore devienne lui même image au lieu d’être une composante de l’image visuelle; il faut donc la création d’un cadrage sonore, tel que la coupure passe entre les deux cadrages, sonore et visuel; dès lors, même si le hors-champ subsiste en fait, il faut qu’il perde toute puissance de droit, puisque l’image visuelle cesse de se prolonger au delà de son propre cadre, pour entrer dans un rapport spécifique avec l’image sonore elle même cadrée (c’est l’interstice entre les deux cadrages qui remplace le hors-champ). »
p364:
« le cinéma moderne a tué le flash-back, autant que la voix off et le hors champ. »

Dean, T. & Millar, J. (2005) Place. London: Thames & Hudson.

The Stalker talking about the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film:
“Our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings can bring about change here. And we are in no condition to comprehend them. Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can either be plain and easy, or impossibly confusing. That’s how the Zone is. It may even seem capricious. But in fact, at any moment it is exactly as we devise it, in our consciousness… everything that happens here depends on us, not on the Zone.

P68: Sartre on the Fantastic again
“The law of the fantastic condemns it to encounter instruments only. These instruments are not … meant to serve men, but rather to manifest unremittingly an evasive, preposterous finality. This accounts for the labyrinth of corridors, doors and staircases that lead to nothing, the innumerable signs that line the road and that mean nothing. In the “topsy-turvy” world, the means are isolated and posed for their own sake.”

“Power and paranoia: history, narrative and the American cinema, 1940-1950”, Dana Polan quotes Jean-Paul Sartre on the Fantastic:
“Objects don’t have the mission of serving ends but rather of relentlessly manifesting a fleeting and unsettling finality: thus, this labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that dot routes and signify nothing.”

Sartre, J. (1947) Aminidab ou du fantastique considéré comme un langage. In: Sartre, J. Situations. Paris: Gallimard.

P127:
‘Le fantastique n’est plus, pour l’homme contemporain, qu’une manière entre cent de se renvoyer sa propre image.”

P130: the original quote
“Mais le fantastique s’évanouirait à l’instant; la loi du genre le condamne à ne rencontrer jamais que des outils. Ces outils, nous l’avons vu, n’ont pas mission de les servir mais de manifester sans relâche une finalité fuyante et saugrenue: de là ce labyrinthe de couloirs, de portes, d’escaliers qui ne mènent à rien; de là ces poteaux ndicateurs qui n’indiquent rien, ces innombrables signes qui jalonnent les routes et ne signifient rien.”

My translation (more literal and faithful to style than the 2 others):
“The law of [the fantastic] condems him [the hero] to encounter instruments only. The mission of these instruments is not to serve him, but to relentlessly manifest a fleeting and preposterous finality: hence this labyrinth of corridors, doors and staircases that lead nowhere; hence those signposts that indicate nothing, those innumerable signs that line the roads and signify nothing.”

Bachelard, G. (1957) La Poétique de l’espace. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

P18:
il semble que l’image de la maison devienne la topographie de notre être intime

P78:
Dans le règne des valeurs, la clef ferme plus qu’elle n’ouvre. La poignée ouvre plus qu’elle ne ferme.

P90:
il y aura toujours plus de choses dans un coffret fermé fermé que dans un coffret ouvert. La vérification fait mourir les images. Toujours, imaginer sera plus grand que vivre. Le travail du secret va sans fin de l’être qui cache à l’être qui se cache. Le coffret est un cachot d’objets. Et voici que le rêveur se sent dans le cachot de son secret.

P196:
le cauchemar est fait d’un doute subit sur la certitude de l’en dedans et sur la netteté de l’en dehors.

Vidler, A. (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

P x:
the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally unlivable modern condition

p10:
the “uncanny” is not a property of space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming.

P33: about dark eyes as opposed to blue eyes in Hoffman’s the Sandman. The sandman only threatens to steal dark “uncanny” eyes (not for essay but I liked that, probably because I’ve got brown eyes… It’s nice to know they’re “uncanny”… 😉
“The latter, dark-sighted eyes are described as flashing with inner light, with fire; they project rather than reflect, thrusting inner forces onto the outside world, working on it to change and distort it. To the possessors of such potentially lethal instruments, simple mirrors seem lifeless […] Those who possess only mirrors, those of the homely eyes, however, are not afraid of losing them: the Sandman will not, Klara affirmed, “harm my eyes”. But those with inner, uncanny eyes are always fearful of losing their powers of sight; disconnected from the physical eye, the mental eye can all too easily be extinguished, or even vanquished by stronger eyes. Thus freud will interpret the fear of losing sight as a substitute for the dread of castration.”

p43: Melville “I and My Chimney”
“going through the house you seem to be forever going somewhere and getting nowhere.”

P186:
In this last film [Blue Velvet], the total breakdown of a determined sense of Bachelard’s “coefficient of adversity”is marked by the continuous sliding between states of terror, amusement, and sheer banality.

Vidler, A. (2000) Warped space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

P25: “derealization” (‘psychological alienation’ caused by the modern city, term invented by the Vienna Circle)

p72: For Marienbad (quotes Siegfried Kracauer Hotelhalle)
the hotel lobby (Hotelhalle), seen by Kracauer as the paradigmatic space of the modern detective novel, and thus epitomizing the conditions of modern life in their anonymity and fragmentation.

P148:
Minkowski writes of “black” or “dark” space, that space which, despite all loss of vision – in the dark or blindfolded – a subject might still palpably feel: the space of bodily and sensorial if not intellectual existence.

P216: on Kafka, double quotes are Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga “Kafka’s concepts of space”
This sense of cosmic anxiety, already noted by Benjamin, creates a virtual architecture in Kafka’s novels and short stories that varies constantly “according to the mood of the character,” that “changestogether with the physiological momentum of the character”: “one recalls the endless corridors which offered K an ever-longed-for escape but simultaneously one notices that these long corridors could never be contained within the limits of perspective.” […] All Kafka’s spaces, as described, are banal and normal enough – offices, corridors, bedrooms, and the like – but are transformed into a frightening abnormality by the projections and introjections of their inhabitants.

P240: Nietzsche was the first to describe the modern experience as “labyrinthine”, then reused by Benjamin (my note: and Sartre in Aminidab)

p250: more on Foucault’s heterotopia I’ve already read about in the Lynch essay, but still not defined!
“The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at this moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.”
(Michel Foucault “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics (Spring 1986) )

“Power and paranoia: history, narrative and the American cinema, 1940-1950”, Dana Polan quotes Jean-Paul Sartre on the Fantastic:
“Objects don’t have the mission of serving ends but rather of relentlessly manifesting a fleeting and unsettling finality: thus, this labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that dot routes and signify nothing.”

Benjamin, Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia (1929)

“ perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects .that have  begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. […] No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors/enslaved and enslaving  objects- can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism.”

Freud, The Uncanny

“”every affect arising from an emotional impulse – of whatever kind – is converted into fear by being repressed, it follows that amongst those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. […] something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed. […] ‘Something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open’.”
“an uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolizes.”

Mark Cousins, introduction to Freud the Unconscious

“Without noticing it, Freud makes here a contribution to the very idea of ‘reality’. We might think that most philosophers would assert that ‘reality’ is whatever is the case; the human science might adjust that by thinking that ‘reality’ is all that people think is the case. Freud’s concern to think out the difference between phantasy and reality leads him to the novel proposal that reality is an obstacle. It follows that the boundary between reality and phantasy is no longer something like the difference between a mental event and a real event. I am always within a phantasy as long as I meet no obstacle to its satisfaction. Reality is not a topographical category, it is not that which is outside my skin, it is whatever is an obstacle to the satisfaction of a wish. One way of charting the progress of Freud’s thought is that he finds the obstacles of reality more and more efficacious in the block they offer to desire just as he becomes increasingly convinced by the archaic character of desire and its relative ineducability by reason and the world. The very existence of the unconscious had alienated the subject from his own consciousness. Now the unconscious alienates the subject from full acceptance of external reality. Ultimately, the subject is the very battleground over which reality and phantasy lay their claims.”

“Fantasy, the Uncanny and Surrealist Theories of Architecture”, Anthony Vidler (2003)

“Rather what Surrealism motivated was the uncanny of the Other, which for Surrealism was the ‘real’ – the uncanny sense that the normal was nothing more than a complex of repressed objects. In the aesthetic sense of Surrealism, this normal was modernism itself and the uncanny of Surrealism was no more than the repressed of modernism, an apparent normal that in fact was a mask for the ‘real’ pathological.
In architectural terms, this search for modernism’s repressed underlife was concentrated in three domains – domains that the modernists had clearly and polemically identified as the basis of their attack on tradition: the solid, load-bearing wall that afforded traditional protection and privacy; the bourgeois house and its kitsch-like trappings of ‘home’ or ‘Heimat’; and the objects of everyday life, which, while for the most part mass-produced, were still encumbered with ornament and encrusted with historical references. Against these three hold-outs of tradition in modernity “

“The Uncanny”, Margaret Iversen, 2005

“The scene for the emergence of uncanny strangeness is, after all, the familiar, conventional or banal. This is so because the ‘familiar’ is constituted by the repression of childhood traumatic experience or the real of unconscious fantasy. The familiar must inevitably have a simulacral quality because the real has been expelled. David Lynch beautifully demonstrates this mutual dependence in his film, Blue Velvet (1986). The white picket-fenced world of Lumberton shown in the opening sequence has such stereotypical clarity that one’s gaze slides right off the image, unable to get any purchase. Lynch makes it clear that the bourgeois residential area has this two-dimensional simulacral quality precisely because reality (here a criminal underclass and the unconscious) has been marginalized, banished to the other side of the tracks. For me, the uncanny is not the simulacrum itself, but that which agitates its shiny surface.”

Film Noir / Sartre on the Fantastic / Lost Highway & Mulholland Drive

In her book about film noir “Power and paranoia: history, narrative and the American cinema, 1940-1950”, Dana Polan quotes Jean-Paul Sartre on the Fantastic:

“The fantastic is no longer for modern man anything but a way of seeing his own reality reflected back at him.” And Sartre goes on to find the traces of this fantastic precisely in the resistance of everyday human objects to everyday human projects in an ordered world in which “each [tool] represents a piece of worked matter, their ensemble is controlled by a manifest order, and the signification of this order is an end, an end that is myself or, more precisely, the human in me, the consumer in me”.”

“Objects don’t have the mission of serving ends but rather of relentlessly manifesting a fleeting and unsettling finality: thus, this labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that dot routes and signify nothing.”

I like the way this quotation refers to the warped spaces in David Lynch’s movies or Resnais’ “ Last year in Marienbad”.

“As Sartre notes in his analysis of the fantastic, much of the horrific uncanniness of a new fantastic art of everyday life derives from its disturbance of systems of communicated meaning; uncannily anticipating Lacan’s argument. Sartre suggests that horror comes from a letter that reaches its destination, but reaches it wrongly.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Aminidab, ou du fantastique considere comme une langue”, Situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)

In “More than night: film noir in its contexts”, James Naremore talks about david Lynch’s “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive”:

“In regard to Lost Highway, Zizek argues that “one should absolutely insist that we are dealing with a real story (of the impotent husband, etc.) that, at some point (that of the slaughter of Renee), shifts into psychotic hallucination in which the hero reconstructs the parameters of the Oedipal triangle that again make him potent. … [We] return to reality, precisely when … the impossibility of the hallucination reasserts itself””

About the witchy hobo living near the dumpster at Winkie’s Diner in “Mulholland Drive”:
” “He’s the one who’s doing it”, a character says at one point, and at the end of the film we see the derelict in possession of the blue metallic cube that provided a hinge between “dream” and “reality”. Whatever his or her symbolic function might be (abject reality? the Lacanian “Real”? the Freudian id or “it”? the dirt and poverty we’re afrais to recognize?), he os she exists both within and beyond the time-space inhabited by Betty and Diane, and he or she might well be dreaming everything.”

“Diane dreams (or in my view the film dreams) that she is Betty, a fantasmatic ego ideal who achieves blissful sexual love with Rita; afterward, Rita takes Betty to the beautifully tawdry, patently artificial Club Silencio, a melancholic netherworld where fantasy begins to break down and where, in McGowan’s words, “we experience the loss of a relationship we have never had”. Unlike the male character in Lost Highway, Diane elaborates her fantasy to the point where Betty attains a moment of fulfillment, but this entirely imaginary experience is followed by a scene of painful mourning, then by the black hole of the unrepresentable, and then by an awakening into desire – a repetitive, excruciating longing for an object always out of reach, which can be ended only in death.”

“like all Lynch’s films, Mulholland Dr. is affectively complex, oscillating between humor noir and pathos, between horror and sweetness, between irony and sincerity. No director aside from Hitchcock has been able to invest subjective travelling shots with such uncanny and suspenseful effects, as when Betty first moves through her apartment at Havenhurst or when she and Rita walk along a decaying courtyard toward Diane Selwyn’s bungalow.”

Madness and Cinema – Patrick Fuery

Key influences: Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault
Key concerns: meaning and madness
Investigates meaning through “its opposite: madness” [the author’s definition, not mine]
More concerned with the role of the cinema spectator than with the depiction of madness on screen

Useful quotes from the book:

Don’t we analysts know that the normal subject is essentially someone who is placed in the position of not taking the greater part of his internal discourse seriously? Observe the number of things in normal subjects, including yourselves, that it’s truly your fundamental occupation not to take seriously. The principal difference between you and the insane is perhaps nothing other than this. And this is why for many, even without their acknowledging it, the insane embody what we would be led to if we began to take things seriously. So let us, without too great a fear, take our subject seriously.
(Lacan 1993: 123–4)

“To take cinema seriously is not just to work up the analytic side of things; becoming a spectator involves taking what is being seen on the screen seriously, that is, as if it is something real, something meaningful. […]when we become spectators of cinema there is something beyond the interplay between reality and pretence. There is something that dissolves the distinction between film and what could be called the everyday existence of reality.” p7

“In a lecture on madness, Foucault argues that the opportunity to contest (his concern is with the social order in general) has been lost in the contemporary age.5 For Foucault, this is tied up with the relationship of knowledge and madness, and it is what motivates much of his thinking. Foucault wanted to trace the process so he could investigate social institutions. Elsewhere he states: ‘Thus, in order for the big centres of internment to be opened at the end of the seventeenth century, it was necessary that
a certain knowledge of madness be opposed to nonmadness, of order to disorder, and it’s this knowledge that I wanted to investigate’ (Foucault 2000: 261–2). Part of the argument here is that becoming a spectator of cinema – and recall that this does not
simply mean just watching films, but of taking things seriously – is one of the ways the populace has continued the contesting of reason and order through a type of madness. This becomes part of cinema’s seductive qualities.” P9

p12 “Foucault’s sense of transgression (via Bataille) is interesting in this regard:
Transgression is an action that involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays a flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses. The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line that closes up behind it in a wave of extremely
short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable.
(Foucault 2000: 73)”

Summarise Foucault p13:
“The two orders of representing madness then become either the reconfigured madness (sexuality as mad, possession as mad, excess as mad, vapours and bile of madness, madness as it breaks the law or threatens the ethical order) or that which is othered as madness (other cultures, other meanings, other sensibilities, other representational systems).”

“If it were possible to represent madness then all those other things that are seen as beyond the representational field (such as ecstatic pleasure, freedom, impossibility itself) may also come into focus.” p14

His central idea throughout the book: “the impossibility of representing madness outside of madness” p15

“Cultural paranoia acknowledges the need to colonise the unconscious in order to control, and represents the fear of this. A key to the processes of ideological power in these terms is the ascribing of madness to difference.” P19

P19: the figure of the wanderer/outsider associated to madness because “represent the existence outside the stabilising/stable realm of the cultural ideal of the family and its social structure.”

P23: Foucault, intertextual referencing of madness within art (works quote/copy each other)

P24: “Even something like the Surrealist and Dadaist attempts to create a mad cinema fail at this level because they must necessarily commence from the Symbolic (that is, Lacan’s version of the cultural order) and continue to borrow from it.”
OK, but isn’t the symbolic the realm of language whereas the imaginary is the realm of images ? In that case, the surrealist attempts through cinema are not as vain as their attempts through writings (simulated madness in “Immaculate Conception”).

P30: “In this delusive attachment to himself, man generates his madness like a mirage. The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive.”
(Foucault 1987: 27)16
“one of the implications is that there is knowledge of the self to be found in the images of madness.”

P31 “madness as reducing the mad person to a bestial state, or madness as illumination”

P32: ‘The ultimate language of madness is that of reason, but the language of reason enveloped in the prestige of the image, limited to the locus of appearance which the image defies. It forms, outside the totality of images and the universality of discourse, an abusive, singular organization whose insistent quality constitutes madness’ (Foucault 1987: 95)

P33: “This is the relationship of morality as a cause of the madness (for example, Breaking the Waves (von Trier 1996), Psycho, and Sister, My Sister (Meckler 1994)) as an inversion of the idea that madness is a challenge to the moral order. The oppressive moral order is positioned as causal, or the acts of madness are seen as the
reason for such moral rigour to prevent such madness.”

P41 Fear of madness
“it not simply the fear of madness, its unpredictability, the implied sense of violence, the disruptive force, that carries this aspect of the representation. It is also the fear that in madness exists not the distant, removed other, but the self. One of the things that make the representations of the excesses of passion so compelling is that it is a version of emotions that the spectator has expressed and experienced before. And in this self-recognition lies the fear of that excess and madness.”
“This is the fear of suburbia gone mad, of what is known and understandable suddenly becoming irrational and threatening.”

There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable – a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown’ and ‘There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to the contents of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.
(Freud 1985: 186; 671) p46

P52: scopophilic (the obsessed pleasure of looking) and epistemophilic (the obsessed pleasure for knowledge) drives (see, for example, Freud 1990b: 124).

P53: how psychoanalysis positions anxiety (Angst) in terms of the ego and the libido – that is, with the (obsessive) agencies of the self and pleasure.
‘The Angst in Angst-dreams, like neurotic Angst in general, corresponds to a sexual affect, a libidinal feeling, and arises out of the libido by a process of repression’
(Freud 1990a: 85, translation modified). 1926
Idea changes:
the source of Angst is from the ego (with its dominance of the sense of self) rather than the id (where the libido resides). This, in turn, allows him to posit that it is an issue of different types of Angst – that of the ego and that of the id (see, for example,
Freud 1987: 320–1) – and that the ego-Angst must utilise psychical energy that is desexualised. Freud’s reasoning here is difficult to summarise, but at the core of the argument is the idea of defence. By arguing that Angst is ego based, Freud sees a relationship between the preservation of the self through the recognition of danger. Still, Freud does not dismiss the idea of id-Angst, and its shadowy possibilities remain. Freud’s issue is with origins – the issue of aetiology that appears at the outset (in 1895) and eventually leads to this theorising of an ego-based Angst. Finally,
Freud offers a solution that allows for both ego and libidinal processes. Angst is ego derived, and therefore tied to flight from danger as an act of self-preservation, and at the same time it has an origin in the repression of libidinal urges. Freud’s answer is
that in neurotic Angst we find that the ego ‘is making a similar attempt at flight from the demand by its libido, that it is treating this internal danger as though it were an external one’ (Freud 1986: 453). This further reveals the internal conflict involved in
the neurotic Angst.

P55 realistic Angst and a neurotic Angst:
P58: Freud defines realistic Angst not simply as that which exists in the real world, but as something ‘very rational and intelligible’ (Freud 1986: 441). A real presence of danger will understandably produce this form of Angst, but so too will any perceived sense of threat even if it has no basis in reality.

P62: neurosis is both a compromise and part of a system of defence.30 It is both compromise and defence because this is what is required to negotiate repression, and also to allow the neurotic subject to continue functioning. Without some compromise the neurotic passes into profound madness; without the acts of neuroses the neurotic is defenceless.

P63: We have, according to Freud, two paths when presented with continuing frustration. We can employ the pent up psychical tension into some act in the external world that will give libidinal satisfaction, or we can transform that frustration
into a sublimated act. If either (or both) these acts fail there is the danger of an introverted libido, which ‘turns away from reality, which, owing to the obstinate frustration, has lost its value for the subject, and turns towards the life of phantasy’ (Freud 1987: 120).
Such a scenario sets up a conflict between the internal world of the psyche and the external world of reality; and from this conflict we have neurosis.

P67: the formation of the spectator’s relationship between psychical reality, reality and film’s reality

P70: ‘Both neurosis and psychosis are thus the expression of a rebellion on the part of the id against the external world, of its unwillingness – or, if one prefers, its incapacity – to adapt to the exigencies of reality’ (Freud 1987: 223). The outcomes to this are that neurosis attempts to avoid or ignore reality, whereas psychosis disavows it and creates alternatives to it.39 Either way, one of the most significant aspects of all this is that the subject’s desires are attached to a world of phantasy. Freud argues that this world is ‘separated from the real, external world at the time of the introduction of the reality principle’ and ‘it is from this world of phantasy that the neurosis draws the material for its new wishful constructions’ (Freud 1987: 225; 226). Once more, the difference between neurosis and psychosis in this aspect of phantasy is important. Neurosis, Freud argues, will be attached to a part of a reality. This means it can enjoy a status neither strictly in the world of phantasy nor reality, but a combination of the two.
Such a status has a number of important implications for the neurotic spectator and the idea of cinema as neurosis. The cinematic text is always positioned precisely as a part of a world of phantasy attached to a part of reality; and the reality principle is used by the spectator to demarcate the pleasures and travails of watching a film beyond, and within, a sense of reality. The sense of neurosis comes not simply from these relational contexts of phantasy and reality, however. The neurotic spectator is not just enveloping phantasies in senses of realism (and vice versa), but is actually creating substitutes for reality through the attachment of one world order to the other. To do so requires a disturbance beyond the idea of film as a fictional world order. Such an idea insists on the condition that all spectators exist in potentia neurotic, and the pleasure of cinema is the continual capacity to construct narratives of neurosis. In other words, it is never a straightforward repetition of the pleasures of escapist phantasies, but rather the pleasure is derived from exploring (largely in an unconscious fashion) the different ways to attach phantasy to reality. Thus the
compulsion of this repetition is the mechanism of constructing attachments, rather than the attachments themselves. This is why the neurotic spectator may never be concerned with working out a particular type of neurosis – and so cinema is not a type of therapy – but instead is using the scopic drive to construct a subjectivity that plays with what it is to be neurotic.

P75:
“This cleaving of the sign is what constitutes the onset of psychosis for Lacan. It is the moment when the sign is divided into its constitutive elements of signifier and signified (see, for example, Lacan 1993: 268) so that it cannot function in quite the same manner.”
P78:
“It is also what allows for a merging of the Symbolic with the Imaginary, especially in terms of psychoses, where the Imaginary is highly significant.”

Now, aren’t those 2 in contradiction? He seems to say that the Symbolic and the Imaginary merge in psychosis, yet before he says that psychosis is a breakdown of the sign into signifier and signified. Problem is the Symbolic is the realm of signifiers and the Imaginary the realm of the signified, so this seems in contradiction to me!?

P82:
“the cinematic Imaginary – the relationship between the becoming spectator and the cinematic”

P83:
“the spectator is like the psychotic because of the paranoia involved in reading a film. Just as when we watch a film all elements have the possibility of meaning, so too does the psychotic interpret the world. Lacan argues the psychotic finds him/herself as a foreigner in the world, and as such finds meaningfulness in every act and object, every event and moment.”

P89: Lacan and psychosis
‘In psychosis. . . reality itself initially contains a hole that the world of phantasy will subsequently fill’
‘Let’s start with the idea that a hole, a fault, a point of rupture, in the structure of the external world finds itself patched over by psychotic phantasy’ (Lacan 1993: 45).

“Foreclosure, both Freud and Lacan insist, is quite distinct from repression. Freud’s commentary on the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff) case includes the idea that Pankejeff
rejects part of reality as if it does not exist. Lacan extends this, arguing that foreclosure also takes place at the level of the unconscious. So the parts of reality that have been rejected (so they do not exist for that subject) are also not part of the repressed material of the unconscious. In this sense it is also rejected from the unconscious. Lacan defines foreclosure as ‘what has been placed outside the general symbolization structuring the subject – return from without’ (Lacan 1993: 47).

P90:
“Foreclosure is not repression, but the disavowal, the rejection and fending off, of a part of reality. In psychoanalysis the hole that is left must be ‘filled’ so to speak; two possibilities are phantasy and fetishism.”

P92:
‘If the neurotic inhabits language, the psychotic is inhabited, possessed, by language’ (Lacan 1993: 250).

P93:
“in point of fact the madman doesn’t believe in the reality of his hallucinations. . . . Reality is not the issue. The subject admits, by means of all the verbally expressed explanatory detours at his disposal, that these phenomena are of another order than the real. He is well aware that their reality is uncertain. He even admits their unreality up to a certain point. . . . Reality isn’t an issue for him, certainty is.”
(Lacan 1993: 75)

P94:
“What indicates a hallucination is this unusual sense the subject has at the border between the sense of reality and the sense of unreality, a sense of proximate birth, of novelty. . . . It is a created reality, one that manifests itself well and truly within reality as something new. Hallucination, as the invention of reality, here constitutes the support for what the subject is experiencing.”
(Lacan 1993: 142)

P96:
“Lacan, via Freud, argues that the principle difference between neurosis and psychosis is that in the latter the delusional is so powerful that there is a complete abandonment of reality. Or, to be more precise (and it is a significant difference),
what is at stake is the rejection of the Symbolic order, with its interpretation of the world and the subject.”

Sum up of chapter: the spectator acts as psychotic because he participates in creating the cinematic illusion by investing his narcissistic/egocentric drives in it, and gets satisfaction from doing so.

P97: mixing of realities
“Lacan’s idea of the l’entre-je, the between-I, which is the inmixing of subjects (Lacan 1993: 193). When the spectator participates in the delusional acts of watching a film part of the formation of pleasure is precisely this inmixing of subjectivities. In this case, it is the between-I of being a subject, a spectator, and the forces of the film itself. When we are film spectators we are something different to our everyday existence, and have a subjectivity that is a mixture of delusion, textuality and the self. And in this we witness part of the reason why being a film spectator is so pleasurable,
for there is a great deal of power and seduction in the site of the between-I. In this position, the spectator finds him/herself in an extraordinary blend of realities and certainties that feeds delusions of immense force.”

P98:
“As with psychoses, the act of becoming a spectator involves a continual negotiating of the self and Other. So the delusion becomes not a loss of a sense of the self (that is, what has been previously seen as character identification51 and processes such as the willing suspension of disbelief), but a different relationship of the self to the Other.”

P108:
“Lacan’s mistrust, perhaps even hatred, of what he described as ego psychology. For him, much of this mistrust for, and resistance to, this version of psychoanalysis stems from the analytic quest to make people happy. This would seem to be an admirable aim, for it involves the easing of pain and the solving of disturbing problems. But Lacan’s idea of psychoanalysis was far from such a model that contrived to get people to fit comfortably into, and without questioning (perhaps even unable to question), the social order. So much so that in 1954 he travelled to Lake Zurich to meet Jung hoping to find out something that would support his idea that Freudianism is inherently subversive – that is, runs counter to the notion of the Good. And from that private, almost clandestine, interview (which Jung himself had difficulty recalling) Lacan produced his famous statement the following year regarding Freud and Jung’s trip to
the USA. As they came to the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, Freud turned to Jung and said ‘They don’t realise we are bringing them the plague’. For Lacan, psychoanalysis should not feign the production of happiness, and so a version of complacency, but rather distress – ‘the state in which man is in that relationship to himself which is his own death . . . and can expect help from no one’ (Lacan 1992: 304). These are the great themes that Lacan discusses in his interpretation of desire through Kant and Sade. It is the problem of desire as a disruptive process that cannot be ignored, that will never go away, and the need to live cooperatively in a social environment. It is the question of how desire can be managed within the Law of the social order.59 This idea that analysis should produce distress can be extended to include that broader field of analysis driven towards meaning and interpretation.”

P110: concept of double bind (contradicting injunctions each backed up by threats of punishment, making it impossible to take a painless decision)
“anyone caught in the double bind situation cannot escape, and cannot act without some form of suffering resulting. Transgression and punishment are invested in the very materiality of the double bind. Part of the consequence of this is that in the double bind we are made to feel responsible for the events that unfold, even if in the back of our minds is a sense of things being unfair, and our position in it all feels foreign. And the back of the mind that we have in mind here relates in no small way to the unconscious and desire.”

P110: Derrida
‘every resistance supposes a tension, above all, an internal tension’ (Derrida 1998: 26). This is a resistance which ‘provokes both the analytic and the dialectic to infinity, but in order to resist them absolutely’ Derrida 1998: 26).

P110: Lacan and social conflit
“Lacan’s play is with Good as the moral good, and Good as the goods (in the sense of property) of economy. For him the Good is tied to a conflict between the good of the
Symbolic order (moral good and production) and the desires of the unconscious. This is the idea we observed earlier in terms of the Good and power. This is the enfolding and unrolling sets of knots that Lacan sets up: the desires for the good of the self (ego)
are almost inevitably in contrast to the good of the Symbolic order; and that these contrasts become linked to power and desire. The surprising twist that Lacan applies to this is what he terms ‘an element of the field of the beyond-the-good principle’ (Lacan 1992: 237), which we might expect to be excessive desire or jouissance, but which turns out to be the beautiful. But Lacan does not stray too far from the issue of desire here, and shortly after introducing this idea of the beautiful he states: ‘The appearance of beauty intimidates and stops desire’ (Lacan 1992: 238). So the function of the beautiful is at least twofold in these terms: it resists the power structures of the Good; it helps us cope with the potentially destructive moment of desire, and in particular jouissance. The beautiful comes to be positioned outside of the Symbolic
order, and any manifestation of the beautiful is a weakened signifier, for it has been translated into a language system. It is culturally beautiful, but it is not the beautiful, and so does not have this function in terms of desire and jouissance.”

P112: Kant’s idea of “radical evil” “beyond the good”. However there are no quotations so check Kant directly!

P113: Kant on the disruptive nature of the Sublime
“if something arouses in us, merely in apprehension and without any reasoning on our part, a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear, in its form, contrapurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that.”
(Kant 1987: 246)61

P114: Freud “tripartite morality” (62)
1)Symbolic/Conscious/superego
2)Our unconscious drives
3)“civilised morality”: the need to conform to the morality of the cultural order

P115: Lacan on power (the good here refers to external morality in the Symbolic order, which I think corresponds to Freud’s “civilised morality”)
“The true nature of the good, its profound duplicity, has to do with the fact that it isn’t purely and simply a natural good, the response to a need, but possible power, the power to satisfy. As a result, the whole relation of man to the real of goods is organized relative to the power of the other.”
(Lacan 1992: 234)

P115: Foucault on power
‘The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individuals
or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power . . . which is assumed to exist universally or in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action’
(Foucault 1983: 219).

P116: the author’s thesis taking on Lacan’s and Foucault’s ideas of Power
“the Good” (civilised morality) is only someone’s drives defined as cultural good through the use of power. “the Good” is the drives of the most powerful individual(s) imposed to others through culture.

P116: Lacan and the beautiful
‘This relationship is strange and ambiguous. On the one hand, it seems that the horizon of desire may be eliminated from the register of the beautiful. Yet, on the other hand, it has been no less apparent . . . that the beautiful has the effect, I would say, of suspending, lowering, disarming desire. The appearance of beauty intimidates and stops desire’ (Lacan 1992: 238)
‘Moreover, it seems that it is in the nature of the beautiful to remain, as they say, insensitive to outrage, and that is by no means one of the least significant elements of its structure’ (Lacan 1992: 238).

P118: Lacan “Das Ding”
“This is the secret of how Need (as distinct from needs) ends up driving us from reality, so that the reality principle in fact ‘isolates the subject from reality’ (Lacan 1992: 46). Das Ding is the ‘absolute Other of the subject’ (Lacan 1992: 52) that, according to Lacan, we continue to search for through our desires, swept along through the manifestations of the pleasure principle. Opposed to this is the Good of the reality principle. So in effect das Ding is that which we know nothing of – the eternally strange – and yet at the same time it is the absolutely familiar. We are tempted, no doubt, to look for aspects of the unheimlich here – and there certainly are connections.”

P118: Lacan “Extimacy”
“Extimacy is Lacan’s term to deal with the issue of the Real in the Symbolic; it is that which is more intimate than the most knowable, intimate detail, yet to confront it is to see a fearsome thing. The Lacanian Real is extimacy, being as it is more real than reality, so much a part of our psychical processes, and yet so foreign to our conscious mind. The extimacy of our desires resides in a Radical evil for they define our subjectivity, and yet resist any Symbolic compromise.”

P122: Derrida on the double bind
“a double bind cannot be assumed; one can only endure it in passion. . . if a double bind is never one and general but is the infinitely divisible dissemination of knots, of thousands and thousands of knots of passion, this is because without it, without this double bind and without the ordeal of aporia that it determines, there would only be
programs. . . and no decision would ever take place.”
(Derrida 1998: 36, 37)

P127: Derrida on the scapegoat
“the figure of the pharmakos – the scapegoat who is both the remedy for, and the cause of, suffering. Derrida proposes that the character of the pharmakos involves both ‘the evil and the outside, the expulsion of the evil, its exclusion out of the body (and out) of the city’ (Derrida 1981: 130). Furthermore, the pharmakos occupies an unusual site, neither apart of or a part from the cultural order: ‘The ceremony of the pharmakos is thus played out on the boundary line between inside and outside, which has as its function ceaselessly to trace and retrace’ (Derrida 1981: 133)

P130: Lacan on the Hysteric
“The domain of knowledge is fundamentally inserted into the primitive paranoid dialectic of identification with the counterpart. The initial opening of identification with the other, that is, with an object, starts from here. An object is isolated, neutralized, and as such particularly eroticised. This is what makes an infinitely greater number of objects enter the field of human desire than enter animal experience. In this interweaving of the Imaginary and the Symbolic lies the source of the essential function that the ego plays in the structuring of neurosis.
(Lacan 1993: 177–78) (translation modified)

P134:
“One of Freud’s most profound contributions is the idea that the rational, civilised
person is driven by an unconscious that deals in madness, and that to the conscious mind is madness.”

P138:
‘having oneself psychoanalysed is like eating from the tree of knowledge. Knowledge acquired sets us (new) ethical problems; but contributes nothing to their solution’
(Wittgenstein 1978: 34).

P140:
“The ‘polymorphous techniques of power’ (Foucault 1984: 11) must be able to make sense – that is, seem to produce meaning – within a range of disciplines in order to remain effective.”

->false meaning isn’t it? government/corporate speak that only makes sense “internally” within its very restrictive view. It only appears to have meaning, but the only thing it has is perfect internal coherence. True meaning leaves more unanswered questions than answered ones: true knowledge is answering a few minor questions but ending up formulating twice as many deeper new questions left unanswered in the process.

Related issue P138: “Once we have the sureties of certain types of knowledge (usually produced within our cultural contexts), once their limits have been negotiated and set, it is up to madness to disrupt within them and seduce beyond them.”

why is it “up to madness” to do the questioning? “up to” seems to imply nothing else can do this job. And I don’t understand how an intellectual can ever reach any type of “sureties”? Sure madness questions, but it certainly is not the most efficient nor desirable way for the questioning individual. Individuals retreat in psychosis/neurosis once dominant ideology has just become “too much for them”, and they have no other escape route left. I would think that intellectual questioning, detachment, would be the thing that prevent individuals from being driven into madness due to having waited too long?

P140: Lacan on subjectivity/knowledge/truth: the 4 discourses (very long quote)

“In L’Envers de la psychanalyse (1991), Lacan creates the four discourses – four beautifully constructed models that operate with a sense of revolving relationships in order to denote different effects. The four elements of these models are:

S/ [(that’s supposed to be a capital S crossed out in diagonal I think)] – the ichspaltung. This is the split subject (ich = I; Spaltung = rupture, cleavage) and refers directly to a Freudian legacy. Lacan sees it as both an inevitable and problematic formation of the self. It is based on the idea that subjectivity is based on an irreparable split within the self as the subject moves through the Symbolic order. It is combined with the self-reflexivity of the Imaginary, originating as it does from the Mirror stage.

a – the objet petit a.73 This is the manifestation of desires as they are articulated through the subject’s relationship to otherness. Significantly, Lacan calls this the Plus-de-Jouir, which suggests a knowledge of jouissance emerging from the objet petit a. It also suggests a beyond to pleasure, particularly that inscribed by the cultural order.

S1 – master signifiers. At one level these are the signifiers of power and presence that have been developed in the Symbolic order. Thus they carry with them connotations of truth, knowledge, interpretation, and so on. These are also the signifiers that the subject has invested a sense of the self in. They are the discursive processes that allow the subject to relate to the signifiers, and for the signifiers to have meaning and relevance for the subject. In this way they become an essential component in the relationship of the defining of the self through the Other.

S2 – the systems of knowledge. This includes the sense of knowledge we might normally associate with such a term, and other interpretations of knowledge that the subject, and his/her Symbolic order, construct and are constructed by other systems.
Because they are systems there is a sense of a shared (that is, cultural) basis of knowledge, although it would also be possible to locate something as unique as Shreber’s interpretation of events as a system of knowledge. In other words, it is important not to conflate these with notions of truth, even if that is precisely what they come to stand for. To these four elements Lacan specifies four positions:

désir Autre
____ _____
vérité perte

These can be translated as desire, Other, truth, and loss (or, perhaps more correctly, the production of loss).74 These positions within the model later become attributed with certain qualities (Lacan 1975: 196):

agent travail
_____ ________
vérité production

These are positions of agency, work, truth, and production. That which is located within the top left hand position is active and desired; below that is the site of truth (about which Lacan pointedly states: ‘Quelle est la vérité? C’est bien là qu’elle se place, avec un point d’interrogation’ (Lacan 1975: 199). In admitting as much he seems to reflect his own uncertainty about such a position). The location of the top right is a positioning process – it is what the subject is interpellated into; and the bottom right is the resulting status of the subject who has allowed themself to be in a relationship with the factors on the left.

Now for the four discourses themselves:

The discourse of the university

S2 a
__ __
S1 S/

For Lacan, the discourse of the university commences with the agency of the system of knowledge, and the subject as an other of that system. This, then, is a highly systematic production of knowledge as knowledge. We are, as subjects, born into the existing Symbolic order, defined by the signifiers (of knowledge, of declared truths and meanings) that precede us. The discourse of the university operates as if there is an ideal I, full of mastery and control; and in doing so fails to eliminate this from the place where it finds its truth (Lacan 1975: 70–1). In other words, a very specific sort of truth is constructed – one which fits in with the production of (cultural) knowledge. (It is a discourse that Lacan defines himself as being, and working, outside of). It is noteworthy that in the graphic representation we find the left-hand side dominated by the system of knowledge and the master signifiers; the right hand side is composed of the subject as objet petit a and as a split subject.

The discourse of the master

S1 S2
__ __
S/ a

This is the discourse that demands the relinquishing of a great many things. It demands total acceptance of the master signifiers as they interpret and define. Here the relationship between the master signifiers and the systems of knowledge places the plus-dejouir – the excess and pleasure – in a suppressed position. Lacan states: ‘le discours du maître exclut le fantasme’ (Lacan 1991: 124) – that is, Lacan’s recurring formula of S_a.75 The discourse of the master is a powerful and pervasive element in a great deal of our lives – it is also a tyrannical one. Lacan asks: ‘Mais comment l’arrêter, ce petit mécanisme?’ (Lacan 1991: 207). Not through revolution because, argues Lacan, that is simply a perpetuation of the discourse, or at the very least of the relationships within the discourse. Rather the way to stop or escape this is through the discourse of the analyst. So far we have two discourses that position themselves as absolute producers of knowledge and truth. The certainty of institutionalised knowledge (the discourse of the university) and the excluding acts of the master signifiers are part of their constitution. Lacan proposes two alternatives to these discourses, two systems that operate outside of the absolutism of these other two.
These are the discourses of psychoanalysis and the hysteric, and it is the latter that concerns us the most here.

The discourse of the hysteric

S/ S1
__ __
a S2

In the discourse of the hysteric we observe that the primary position – the top left hand side – is occupied by the split subject. The ichspaltung is the subject type that has been repressed in the discourses of the master and the university. This is a site of resistance against the master signifiers (that is, those that stand for
unquestioned/unquestionable truth) and the established discourses of knowledge; and in this way we read the structure of S//a as a distinct area contra S1/S2. This becomes clearer if we refer to comments by Lacan in the seminar entitled The Psychoses. In this he states: ‘What is repression for the neurotic? It’s a language, another language that he manufactures with his symptoms, that is, if he is a hysteric or an obsessional, with the imaginary dialectic of himself and the other. The neurotic symptom acts as a language that enables repression to be expressed’ (Lacan 1993: 60). In such a model, then, the hysteric is the one who resists the powers of systems of knowledge and the dominance of the master signifiers. And this takes place not necessarily as a revolutionary act, but because he/she is defined, that is their subjectivity is defined, through the manifestation of the repressed material. That which cannot be expressed in discourses dominated by the master signifiers and the institutions of knowledge (in this case the example given by Lacan is the university) becomes the voice in the discourse of the hysteric. And such discourses necessarily produce a different sort of language because so much of what is expressed cannot be represented in the discourses of institutionalised knowledge and master signifiers.

Cinema as madness can be placed, and can be seen to operate, within the discourse of the hysteric in a number of ways. Graphically it is rendered as:

S/ – Cinema-Spectator S1 – master signifiers as other
__________________ ____________________________
a – excess jouissance S2 – knowledge as production/loss”

The author does not explain Lacan’s discourse of the analyst. Is it what I called questioning not involving madness in previous comment?

P145:
“As with hysteria (and neurosis, and so forth, for Lacan does not limit this model to the hysteric), cinema and its spectators are sites for the resistance to master signifiers because those signifiers are seen as inadequate in the representation of the subject and desire. Such signifiers are incapable of handling the repressed material, and this becomes the function of cinema.”

P147:
“For Lacan, psychoanalysis becomes the discourse capable of reading such a knowledge [of the unconscious]– or at least this should be the aim of psychoanalysis – and this is the foundation for the fourth discourse model (the discourse of the analyst).”

Why doesn’t the author investigate the discourse of the analyst? By only investigating the discourse of the hysteric as a form of contestation, he may fall prey to what the male surrealists were accused of by one female surrealist, that is of romanticizing hysteria while having no idea of the true suffering it causes. I think the accuser was Leonora Carrington, who tells her own experience of madness in “Down below”.

P147:
“‘Reality is approached with apparatuses of jouissance’ (Lacan 1998:55). How curious this is! Here we see those elements – desire, excessive pleasures, the socially disruptive, pleasure and delight – normally associated with a loss of reality now forming the subject’s relationship to reality.”

P157:
‘meaning is by nature imaginary. Meaning is, like the imaginary, always in the end
evanescent, for it is tightly bound to what interests you, that is, to that in which you are ensnared’ (Lacan 1993: 54).
Meaning is images not words, the signified, not the signifiers.

P157:
“cinema is part of the Imaginary, and its meanings and pleasures are derived from what interests us as spectators. This is the difference between seeing a film as having meaning (the culturally inscribed) and being meaningful (derived from the spectator). This aspect of being derived from the spectator – what we take to the film and how we manipulate the realities of the film to fit within ourselves – finds a parallel in psychosis […]. As with psychosis, the spectator negotiates aspects of the reality he/she is experiencing (the real world, psychic reality, and cinematic reality, as well as the combinations of them) from the position of jouissance. This is the excessive pleasure of watching a film and becoming a spectator.”

P169: Wittgenstein on the dream image :
‘It can certainly be said that contemplation of the dream-image inspires us, that we just are inspired. Because if we tell someone else our dream the image will not
usually inspire him. The dream affects us as does an idea pregnant with possible developments’ (Wittgenstein 1978: 69)

Deleuze – Cinema

Cinema 1: L’Image-Mouvement (Movement-Image)

p169:
« espaces deconnectés ou vidés »
« situation de l’après-guerre avec ses villes démolies ou en reconstruction, ses terrains vagues, ses bidonvilles »
« crise de l’image-action: les personnages se trouvaient de moins en moins dans des situations sensori-motrices « motivantes », mais plutôt dans un état de promenade, de balade ou d’errance qui définissait des situations optiques et sonores pures. L’image-action tendait alors à éclater, tandis que les lieux déterminés s’estompaient, laissant monter des espaces quelconques où se développaient les affects modernes de peur, de détachement, mais aussi de fraîcheur, de vitesse extrême et d’attente interminable. »

p170:
« L’école allemande de la peur, notamment avec Fassbinder et Daniel Schmid, élaborait ses extérieurs comme des villes-déserts, ses intérieurs dédoublés dans des miroirs, avec un minimum de repères et une multiplication de points de vue sans raccord. »

p280:
« Ce qui a remplacé l’action ou la situation sensori-motrice, c’est la promenade, la balade et l’aller-retour continuel. La balade avait trouvé en Amérique les conditions formelles et matérielles d’un renouvellement. Elle se fait par nécessité, intérieure ou extérieure, par besoin de fuite. Mais maintenant elle perd l’aspect initiatique qu’elle avait encore dans le voyage allemand (encore dans les films de Wenders), et qu’elle conservait malgré tout dans le voyage beat (« Easy Rider » […]). elle est devenue balade urbaine, et s’est détachée de la structure active et affective qui la soutenait, la dirigeait, lui donnait des directions même vagues. […] C’est en effet le plus clair de la balade moderne, elle se fait dans un espace quelconque, gare de triage, entrepôt désaffecté, tissu dédifférencié de la ville, par opposition à l’action qui se déroulait le plus souvent dans les espaces-temps qualifiés de l’ancien réalisme. »

p281:

« la réalité dispersive et lacunaire, le fourmillement de personnages à interférence faible, leur capacité de devenir principaux et de redevenir secondaires, les évènements qui se posent sur les personnages et qui n’appartiennent pas à ceux qui les subissent ou les provoquent. »
« Ce sont ces images flottantes,ces clichés anonymes, qui circulent dans le monde extérieur, mais aussi qui pénètrent chacun et constituent son monde intérieur, si bien que chacun ne possède en soi que des clichés psychiques par lesquels il pense et il sent, se pense et se sent, étant lui-même un cliché parmi les autres dans le monde qui l’entoure. Clichés physiques, optiques et sonores, et clichés psychiques se nourissent mutuellement. Pour que les gens se supportent, eux-mêmes et le monde, il faut que la misère ait gagné l’intérieur des consciences, et que le dedans soit comme le dehors. »

p282:
« L’idée d’une seule et même misère, intérieure et extérieure, dans le monde et dans la conscience, c’était déjà l’idée du romantisme anglais sous sa forme la plus noire, notamment chez Blake ou Coleridge: les gens n’accepteraient pas l’intolérable si les mêmes « raisons » qui le leur imposaient du dehors ne s’insinuaient en eux pour les faire adhérer du dedans. »

p286:
« Dans la ville en démolition ou en reconstruction, le néo-réalisme fait proliférer les espaces quelconques, cancer urbain, tissu indidéfférencié, terrains vagues, qui s’opposent aux espaces déterminés de l’ancien réalisme. Et ce qui monte à l’horizon, ce qui se profile dans ce monde, ce qui va s’imposer dans un troisième moment, ce n’est même pas la réalité crue, mais sa doublure, le règne des clichés, tant à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur, dans la tête et le cœur des gens autant que dans l’espace tout entier. »

Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps (Time-Image)

p15:
« Quant à la distinction du subjectif et de l’objectif, elle tend aussi à perdre de son importance, à mesure que la situation optique ou la description visuelle remplacent l’action motrice. On tombe en effet dans un principe d’indéterminabilité, d’indiscernabilité: on ne sait plus ce qui est imaginaire ou réel, physique ou mental dans la situation, non pas qu’on les confonde, mais parce qu’on n’a pas à le savoir et qu’il n’y a même plus lieu de le demander. C’est comme si le réel et l’imaginaire couraient l’un derrière l’autre, se réfléchissaient l’un dans l’autre autour d’un point d’indiscernabilité. »
« une description réaliste traditionnelle: c’est celle qui suppose l’indépendance de son objet, et pose donc une discernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire (on peut les confondre, ils n’en restent pas moins distincts en droit). Tout autre est la description néo-réaliste du nouveau roman: comme elle remplace son propre objet, pour une part elle en gomme ou en détruit la réalité qui passe dans l’imaginaire, mais d’autre part elle en fait surgir toute la réalité que l’imaginaire ou le mental créent par la parole et la vision. L’imaginaire et le réel deviennent indiscernables. »

p16:

« Chez Fellini déjà, telle ou telle image est évidemment subjective, mentale, souvenir ou fantasme, mais elle ne s’organise pas en spectacle sans devenir objective, sans passer dans les coulisses, dans « la réalité du spectacle, de ceux qui le font, qui en vivent, qui s’y prennent »: le monde mental d’un personnage se peuple si bien d’autres personnages proliférant qu’il devient inter-mental, et aboutit par aplatissement des perspectives « à une vision neutre, impersonelle (…), notre monde à tous. » »
« Le regard imaginaire fait du réel quelque chose d’imaginaire, en même temps qu’il devient réel à son tour et nous redonne de la réalité. »
« les situations optiques et sonores pures peuvent avoir deux pôles, objectif et subjectif, réel et imaginaire, physique et mental. Mais elles donnent lieu à des opsignes et sonsignes, qui ne cessent de faire communiquer les pôles, et qui, dans un sens ou dans l’autre, assurent les passages et les conversions, tendant vers un point d’indiscernabilité (et non pas de confusion).

P35: conscience-camera
« elle [la caméra] subordonne la description d’un espace à des fonctions de la pensée. Ce n’est plus la simple distinction du subjectif et de l’objectif, du réel et de l’imaginaire, c’est au contraire leur indiscernabilité qui va doter la caméra d’un riche ensemble de fonctions, et entraîner une nouvelle conception du cadre et des recadrages. S’accomplira le pressentiment d’Hitchcock: une conscience-caméra qui ne se définirait plus par les mouvements qu’elle est capable de suivre ou d’accomplir, mais par les relations mentales dans lesquelles elle est capable d’entrer; Et elle devient questionnante, répondante, objectante, provocante, théorématisante, hypothétisante, expérimentante. »

p58: « le cinéma dit moderne »
« Des personnages, pris dans des situations optiques et sonores pures, se trouvent condamnés à l’errance ou à la balade. Ce sont de purs voyants, qui n’existent plus que dans l’intervalle de mouvement, et n’ont même pas la consolation du sublime, qui leur ferait rejoindre la matière ou conquérir l’esprit. Ils sont plutôt livrés à quelque chose d’intolérable, qui est leur quotidienneté même. »
« Les images-rêve à leur tour semblent bien avoir deux pôles, qu’on peut distinguer d’après leur production technique. L’un procède par des moyens riches et surchargés, fondus, surimpressions, décadrages, mouvements complexes d’appareil, effets spéciaux, manipulations de laboratoire, allant jusqu’à l’abstrait, tendant à l’abstraction. L’autre au contraire est très sobre, opérant par franches coupures ou montage-cut, procédant seulement à un perpétuel décrochage qui « fait » rêve, mais entre objets demeurant concrets. La technique de l’image renvoie toujours à une métaphysique de l’imagination: c’est comme deux manières de concevoir le passage d’une image à l’autre. A cet égard, les états oniriques sont par rapport au réel un peu comme les états « anormaux » d’une langue par rapport à la langue courante: tantôt surcharge, complexification, sursaturation, tantôt au contraire élimination, ellipse, rupture, coupure, décrochage. »

p94: Image-cristal
« L’image-cristal, ou la description cristalline, a bien deux faces qui ne se confondent pas. C’est que la confusion du réel et de l’imaginaire est une simple erreur de fait, et n’affecte pas leur discernabilité: la confusion se fait seulement « dans la tête » de quelqu’un. Tandis que l’indiscernabilité constitueune illusion objective; elle ne supprime pas la distinction des deux faces, mais la rend inassignable, chaque face prenant le rôle de l’autre dans une relation qu’il faut qualifier de présupposition réciproque, ou de réversibilité. […] L’indiscernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire, ou du présent et du passé, de l’actuel et du virtuel, ne se produit donc nullement dans la tête ou dans l’esprit, mais est le caractère objectif de certaines images existantes, doubles par nature. »

p135: Bunuel
« une pluralité de mondes simultanés, à une simultanéité de présents dans différents mondes. Ce ne sont pas des points de vue subjectifs (imaginaires) dans un même monde, mais un même événement dans des mondes objectifs différents, tous impliqués dans l’évènement, univers inexplicable. »

p136: L’année dernière à Marienbad
« Le second niveau serait celui du réel et de l’imaginaire: on a remarqué que, pour Resnais, il y a toujours du réel qui subsiste, et notamment des coordonnées spatio-temporelles qui maintiennent leur réalité, quitte à entrer en conflit avec l’imaginaire. C’est ainsi que Resnais […] établit une topographie et une chronologie d’autant plus rigoureuses que ce qui s’y passe est imaginaire ou mental. Tandis que chez Robbe-Grillet, tout se passe « dans la tête » des personnages, ou, mieux, du spectateur lui-même. »
« La dissolution de l’image-action, et l’indiscernabilité qui s’ensuit, se feraient tantôt au profit d’une « architecture du temps » ([Resnais]), tantôt au profit d’un « présent perpétuel » coupé de sa temporalité, c’est à dire d’une structure privée de temps ([Robbe-Grillet]). »
« C’est que Resnais conçoit « L’année dernière », comme ses autres films, sous la forme de nappes ou régions de passé, tandis que Robbe-Grillet voit le temps sous la forme de pointes de présent. »
« De toute façon, les deux auteurs ne sont plus dans le domaine du réel et de l’imaginaire, mais dans le temps, nous le verrons, dans le domaine encore plus redoutable du vrai et du faux. Certes, le réel et l’imaginaire continuent leur circuit, mais seulement comme la base d’une plus haute figure. Ce n’est plus, ou ce n’est plus seulement le devenir indiscernable d’images distinctes, ce sont des alternatives indécidables entre des cercles de passé, des différences inextricables entre des pointes de présent. »
p157:
« Il y a probabilisme statistique chez Resnais, très différent de l’indéterminisme de type « quantique » chez Robbe-Grillet. »
p159:
« Resnais conçoit le cinéma non comme un instrument de représentation de la réalité, mais comme le meilleur moyen pour approcher le fonctionnement psychique. »
p161:
« la distinction bergsonienne entre le « souvenir pur », toujours virtuel, et « l’image-souvenir », qui ne fait que l’actualiser par rapport au présent. […] le souvenir pur ne doit surtout pas être confondu avec l’image-souvenir qui en découle, mais se tient comme un « magnétiseur » derrière les hallucinations qu’il suggère. »

p169:
« espaces quantiques chez Robbe-Grillet, espaces probabilitaires et topologiques chez Resnais, espaces cristallisés chez Herzog et Tarkovsky »
« les espaces cristallisés, quand les paysages deviennent hallucinatoires dans un milieu qui ne retient plus que des germes cristallins et des matières cristallisables. »

p170:
« si l’on considère l’histoire de la pensée, on constate que le temps a toujours été la mise en crise de la notion de vérité. »

p171: Puissance du Faux
« présents incompossibles »
« passés non-nécessairement vrais »
« la narration cesse d’être véridique, c’est à dire de prétendre au vrai, pour se faire essentiellement falsifiante. Ce n’est pas du « chacun sa vérité », une variabilité concernant le contenu. C’est une puissance du faux qui remplace et détrône la forme du vrai, parce qu’elle pose la simultanéité de présents incompossibles, ou la coexistence de passés non-nécessairement vrais. La description cristalline atteignait déjà à l’indiscernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire, mais la narration falsifiante qui lui correspond fait un pas de plus, et pose au présent des différences inexplicables, au passé des alternatives indécidables entre le vrai et le faux. L’homme véridique meurt, tout modèle de vérité s’écroule, au profit de la nouvelle narration. Nous n’avons pas parlé de l’auteur essentiel à cet égard: c’est Nietzsche, qui, sous le nom de « volonté de puissance », substitue la puissance du faux à la forme du vrai, et résout la crise de la vérité, veut la régler une fois pour toutes, mais, à l’opposé de Leibniz, au profit du faux et de sa puissance artiste, créatrice… »

p174:
« La narration véridique se développe organiquement, suivant des connexions légales dans l’espace et des rapports chronologiques dans le temps […] la narration implique une enquête ou des témoignages qui la rapportent au vrai […] c’est toujours à un système du jugement que la narration se rapporte. […] La narration falsifiante, au contraire, échappe à ce système, elle brise le système du jugement, parce que la puissance du faux (non pas l’erreur ou le doute) affecte l’enquêteur et le témoin tout autant que le présumé coupable. […] Les évènements eux-m^mes ne cessent de changer avec les rapports de temps das lesquels ils entrent, etles termes, avec leurs connexions. La narration ne cesse de se modifier toute entière, à chacun de ses épisodes, non pas d’après des variations subjectives, mais suivant des lieux déconnectés et des moments dechronologisés. Il y a une raison profonde de cette nouvelle situation: contrairement à la forme du vrai qui est unifianteet tend à l’identification d’un personnage (sa découverte ou simplement sa cohérence), la puissance du faux n’est pas séparable d’une irréductible multiplicité. « Je est un autre » a remplacé Moi = Moi. »

p177:
« S’il y a unité du nouveau cinéma allemand, Wenders, Fassbinder, Schmid, Schroeter ou Schlöndorff, elle est là aussi, comme résultat de la guerre, dans le lien toujours variable entre ces éléments: les espaces réduits à leurs propres descriptions (villes-déserts ou lieux qui ne cessent de se détruire); les présentations directes d’un temps lourd, inutile et inévocable, qui hantent les personnages; et, d’un pôle à l’autre, les puissances du faux qui tissent une narration, pour autant qu’elles s’effectuent dans de « faux mouvements ». La passion allemande est devenue la peur, mais la peur est aussi bien la dernière raison de l’homme, sa noblesse annonçant quelque chose de nouveau, la création qui sort de la peur comme passion noble. »

p192:
« ce que sont l’objet et le sujet dans les conditions de cinéma. Par convention, on appelle objectif ce que « voit » la caméra, et subjectif ce que voit le personnage. »
« le récit [traditionnel/véridique] est le développement des deux sortes d’images, objectives et subjectives, leur rapport complexe qui peut aller jusqu’à l’antagonisme, mais qui doit se résoudre dans une identité du type Moi = Moi: identité du personnage vu et qui voit, mais aussi bien identité du cinéaste-caméra, qui voit le personnage et ce que le personnage voit. […] C’est la distinction de l’objectif et du subjectif, mais aussi bien leur identification, qui se trouvent mises en question dans un autre mode de récit. »

p194: Pasolini « « cinéma de poésie » par opposition au cinéma dit de prose »
« Dans le cinéma de poésie, la distinction s’évanouissait entre ce que voyait subjectivement le personnage et ce que voyait objectivement la caméra, non pas au profit de l’un ou de l’autre, mais parce que la caméra prenait une présence subjective, acquérait une vision intérieure, qui entrait dans un rapport de simulation (« mimesis »)avec la manière de voir du personnage. […] S’établissait une contamination des deux sortes d’images, telle que les visions insolites de la caméra (l’alternance de différents objectifs, le zoom, les angles extraordinaires, les mouvements anormaux, les arrêts…) exprimaient les visions singulières du personnage, et que celles-ci s’exprimaient dans celles-là, mais en portant l’ensemble à la puissance du faux. »

p195:
« Ce que Nietzsche avait montré: que l’idéal du vrai était la plus profonde fiction, au coeur du réel, le cinéma ne l’avait pas encore trouvé. »

p208:
« Même quand le cinéma européen se contente du rêve, du fantasme ou de la rêverie, il a pour ambition de porter à la conscience les mécanismes inconscients de la pensée. »

p210:
« S’élabore un circuit qui comprend à la fois l’auteur, le film et le spectateur. Le circuit complet comprend donc le choc sensoriel qui nous élève des images à la pensée consciente, puis la pensée par figures qui nous ramène aux images et nous redonne un choc affectif. Faire coexister les deux, joindre le plus haut degré de conscience au niveau le plus profond d’inconscient: l’automate dialectique. »

p215: Antonin Artaud
« Artaud croit davantage en une adéquation entre le cinéma et l’écriture automatique, à condition de comprendre que l’écriture automatique n’est pas du tout une absence de composition, mais un contrôle supérieur unissant la pensée critique et consciente à l’inconscient de la pensée: l’automate spirituel. »
« Artaud cessera de croire au cinéma quand il estimera que le cinéma passe à côté, et ne peut faire que de l’abstrait, du figuratif ou du rêve. Mais il croit au cinéma tant qu’il estime que le cinéma est apte essentiellement à révéler cette impuissance à penser au cœur de la pensée. »
« Ce n’est plus la pensée qui se confronte au refoulement, à l’inconscient, au rêve, à la sexualité ou à la mort, comme dans l’expressionnisme (et aussi dans le surréalisme), ce sont toutes ces déterminations qui se confrontent à la pensée comme plus haut « problème », ou qui entrent en rapport avec l’indéterminable, l’inévocable. »
« « rejoindre le cinéma avec la réalité intime du cerveau », mais cette réalité intime n’est pas le Tout, c’est au contraire une fissure, une fêlure. Tant qu’il croit au cinéma, il le crédite, non pasde pouvoir faire penser le tout, mais au contraire d’une « force dissociatrice » qui introduirait une « figure de néant », un « trou dans les apparences ». »

p266:
« [Antonioni] explique que notre connaissance n’hésite pas à se renouveler, à affronter de grandes mutations, tandis que notre morale et nos sentiments restent prisonniers de valeurs inadaptées, de mythes auxquels plus personne ne croit, et ne trouvent pour se libérer que de pauvres expédients, cyniques, érotiques ou névrotiques. Antonioni ne critique pas le monde moderne aux possibilités duquel in « croit » profondément: il critique dans le monde la coexistence d’un cerveau moderne et d’un corps fatigué, usé, névrosé. »
« Le monde attend ses habitants, qui sont encore perdus dans la névrose. »

p268: Resnais and memory
« Cette membrane qui rend le dehors et le dedans présents l’un à l’autre s’appelle Mémoire. […] Car la mémoire n’est certes plus la faculté d’avoir des souvenirs: elle est la membrane qui, sur les modes les plus divers (continuité, mais aussi discontinuité, enveloppement, etc.), fait correspondre les nappes de passé et les couches de réalité, les une émanant d’un dedans toujours déjà là, les autres advenant d’un dehors toujours à venir, toutes deux rongeant le présent qui n’est plus que leur rencontre. »

p276:
« Nous ne croyons plus à un tout comme intériorité de la pensée, même ouvert, nous croyons à une force du dehors qui se creuse, nous happe et attire le dedans. Nous ne croyons plus à une association des images, même franchissant des vides, nous croyons à des coupures qui prennent une valeur absolue et se subordonnent toute association. Ce n’est pas l’abstraction, ce sont ces deux aspects qui définissent le nouveau cinéma « intellectuel ». […] Le cerveau coupe ou fait fuir toutes les associations intérieures, il appelle un dehors au delà de tout monde extérieur. […] C’est un cinéma d’inspiration néo-psychanalytique: donnez-moi un lapsus, un acte manqué, et je reconstruitai le cerveau. C’est une structure topologique du dehors et du dedans, et c’est un caractère fortuit à chaque stade des enchaînements ou médiations, qui définit la nouvelle image cérébrale. »

p278: « cinéma moderne »
« un renversement tel que l’image est désenchaînée, et que la coupure, ou l’interstice entre deux séries d’images, ne fait plus partie ni de l’une ni de l’autre des séries: c’est l’équivalent d’une coupure irrationnelle, qui détermine les rapports non-commensurables entre images. […] Au lieu d’une image après l’autre, il y a une image plus une autre, et chaque plan est décadré par rapport au cadrage du plan suivant. »

p356: Conclusion of the book!!!
« Ce qui met en question ce cinéma d’action après la guerre, c’est la rupture même du schéma sensori-moteur: la montée de situations auxquelles on ne peut plus réagir, de milieux avec lesquels il n’y a plus que des relations aléatoires, d’espaces quelconques, vides ou déconnectés qui remplacent les étendues qualifiées. Voilà que les situations ne se prolongent plus en action ou réaction, conformément aux exigences de l’image-mouvement. Ce sont de pures situations optiques et sonores, dans lesquelles le personnage ne sait comment répondre, des espaces désaffectés dans lesquels il cesse d’éprouver et d’agir, pour entrer en fuite, en balade, en va-et-vient, vaguement indifférent à ce qui lui arrive, indécis sur ce qu’il faut faire. Mais il a gagné en voaynce ce qu’il a perdu en action ou réaction: il VOIT, si bien que le problème du spectateur devient « qu’est-ce qu’il y a à voir dans l’image? » (et non plus « qu’est ce qu’on va voir dans l’image suivante ? »). »

p357: Different types of time-images:

1)opsignes (vision-images), sonsignes (sound-images): purely audio visual situations, the very first types of time-images (described in previous quote)

2)image-rêve/onirosigne (dream-image) and image-souvenir/mnémosigne (memory-image)

3)image-cristal/hyalosigne (cristal-image): « la situation d’une image actuelle et de sa propre image virtuelle, si bien qu’il n’y a plus d’enchaînement du réel et de l’imaginaire mais indiscernabilité des deux dans un perpétuel échange. »« en s’élevant à l’indiscernabilité du réel et de l’imaginaire, les signes de cristal dépassent toute psychologie du souvenir et du rêve, autant que toute physique de l’action. » « C’est le temps en personne qui surgit dans le cristal, et que ne cesse de recommencer son dédoublement, sans aboutissement, puisque l’échange indiscernable est toujours reconduit et reproduit. L’image temps directe ou la forme transcendantale du temps, c’est ce qu’on voit dans le cristal; aussi bien les hyalosignes, les signes cristallins, doivent-ils être dits miroirs ou germes du temps. »

4)chronosignes (time-image): « les rapports intérieurs de temps sous forme topologique ou quantique » « Nous ne sommes plus dans une distinction indiscernable du réel et de l’imaginaire, qui caractérisait l’image-cristal, mais dans des alternatives indécidables entre nappes de passé, ou des différences « inexplicables » entre pointes de présent, qui concernent maintenant l’image-temps directe. Ce qui est en jeu, ce n’est plus le réel et l’imaginaire, mais le vrai et le faux. Et de même que le réel et l’imaginaire devenaient indiscernablesdans des conditions très précises de l’image, le vrai et le faux deviennent maintenant indécidables ou inextricables: l’impossible procède du possible, et la passé n’est pas nécessairement vrai. C’est une nouvelle logique qu’il faut inventer, non moins que tout à l’heure une nouvelle psychologie. »

5)génésignes: images à la puissance du faux (images to the power of false): « Tantôt […] ce sont les personnages qui forment les séries comme autant de degrés d’une « volonté de puissance » par laquelle le monde devient une fable. Tantôt c’est un personnage qui franchit lui-même la limite, et qui devient un autre, sous un acte de fabulation. »

p361: Consequences of time-image on framing and editing:
« L’image dite classique devait être considérée suivant deux axes. Ces deux axes étaient les coordonnées du cerveau: d’une part les images s’enchaînaient ou se prolongeaient, suivant des lois d’association, de contiguïté, de ressemblance, de contraste ou d’opposition; d’autre part les images associées s’intériorisaient dans un tout comme concept (intégration), qui ne cessait à son tour de s’extérioriser dans des images associables ou prolongeables (différenciation). […]C’était le double aspect de l’image-mouvement,définissant le hors-champ: d’une part elle communiquait avec u extérieur, d’autre part elle exprimait un tout qui change. Le mouvement dans son prolongement était la donnée immédiate, et le tout qui change, c’est à dire le temps, était la représentation indirect ou médiate. Mais il ne cessait d’y avoir circulation des deux, intériorisation dans le tout, extériorisation dans l’image, cercle ou spirale qui constituait pour le cinéma, non moins que pour la philosophie, le modèle du Vrai comme totalisation. »

image moderne:
« les images ne s’enchaînent plus par coupures rationnelles, mais se ré-enchaînent sur coupures irrationnelles. […] Il n’y a plus lieu de parler d’un prolongement réel ou possible capable de constituer un monde extérieur: nous avons cessé d’y croire, et l’image est coupée du monde extérieur. Mais l’intériorisation ou l’intégration dans un tout comme conscience de soi n’a pas moins disparu. […] La pensée, comme puissance qui n’a pas toujours existé, naît d’un dehors plus lointain que tout monde extérieur, et, comme puissance qui n’existe pas encore, s’affronte à un dedans, un impensable ou un impensé plus profond que tout monde intérieur. En second lieu, il n’y a donc plus mouvement d’intériorisation ni d’extériorisation, intégration ni différenciation, mais affrontement d’un dehors et d’un dedans indépendamment de la distance, cette pensée hors d’elle-même et cet impensé dans la pensée.»

p363: Consequences on sound design:
« Il faut que le sonore devienne lui même image au lieu d’être une composante de l’image visuelle; il faut donc la création d’un cadrage sonore, tel que la coupure passe entre les deux cadrages, sonore et visuel; dès lors, même si le hors-champ subsiste en fait, il faut qu’il perde toute puissance de droit, puisque l’image visuelle cesse de se prolonger au delà de son propre cadre, pour entrer dans un rapport spécifique avec l’image sonore elle même cadrée (c’est l’interstice entre les deux cadrages qui remplace le hors-champ). »

p364:
« le cinéma moderne a tué le flash-back, autant que la voix off et le hors champ. »

Documentary, fiction and the problem of truth

The documentary chronotope, Michael Chanan

from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 56-61
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 2000, 2006

“When Bakhtin speaks of how “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history,” he is advancing a notion which becomes more concrete in Henri Lefebvre’s work on representational space. In Lefebvre, a representational space is a system of symbolic representations, constituted by artistic and other media and forms, each with its own material characteristics, comprising a culturally and historically specific system which in some way maps the elements and relations of the physical, the social and the mental worlds. In doing so, the medium incorporates or signifies the physical space of the actually existing world, and makes symbolic use of it. Representational spaces thus tend towards a more or less coherent system of nonverbal symbols and signs. The products of representational spaces (to follow Lefebvre) are symbolic works, in this case, films, either fiction or documentary, or some admixture of the two. Does this also mean we can distinguish different types of representational space which correspond to different modes of filmic utterance? Is documentary perhaps a different screen world from fiction?”

“the almost universal prohibition in fiction (with certain notable exceptions) against actors looking directly at the camera, so as not to be seen by the spectator as staring directly at them. […] The rule functioned to maintain the illusion of the camera as an unseen observer, always in the right position to show the unfolding action, the appropriate scene; thus transporting the disembodied viewer into the space of the screen world. This ban does not have the same force in documentary, even in the most conventional examples. In documentary, the illusion the camera seeks to maintain is unnecessary. Indeed, it may well go against a stronger imperative — to present a sense of actuality, of testimony, and of the presence of the camera as a witness in the same space as the events unfolding. […] the acknowledgment of the camera serves to reinforce the reality effect, whereas later, in fiction, it will break it.”

“Fiction is the work of pro-filmic construction, even, one might add, when it is constructed in order to imitate documentary. Documentary, however, even when it imitates fiction, is a form of selection from the actually existing world. Although it runs the gamut from the filmographic interpretation of what is already there, to a constructed or reconstructed rendering of selected elements, the incursion of noise and accident provides evidence that the image is taken from the space of lived experience. Therefore it has a quality or degree of veracity which is not greater than that of fiction, but different. In short, the representational space produced by documentary has different co-ordinates from those of fiction.”

“If documentary depends on a disposition to believe, then fiction evokes what is traditionally spoken of as “the suspension of disbelief””

“Fictional screen space creates the unities of the scene and the plot. Through the ubiquitous camera and altering frame, the spectator becomes a vicarious unseen observer, transported into an imaginary space which is very similar to real space but behaves according to its own generic rules. These rules are different in the case of documentary from those of fiction. Where the space of the fictional narrative produces continuity, documentary space is composed of discontinuities, both spatial and temporal, produced by dialectical (and dialogical) associations across time and space. Neither of these modes of articulation is absolute or totalizing, but fictional screen space, ever since the ban was first raised against the actor gazing at the camera, has an ineluctable tendency towards closure and abstraction from lived experience. In contrast, in the space of documentary the represented world is not separated from the viewer by reason of narrative principle. On the contrary, the social reality portrayed here is one in which a viewer could in principle find themselves present, putatively, or as a potential historical subject, and sometimes palpably. It is a world, in other words, which is continuous with the space in which the viewer lives their own life, not separate from it.”

Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory, Paula Rabinowitz, 1993

“The sense of immediacy-as-truth/truth-as-immediacy was central to the earliest scientific and modernist uses of the cinema”

“History is where pain and death occur but it is in representation that the facts and events gain meaning.” As “star” of the documentary, the presence of the body, especially the body in pain, signifies a truth and realness which seems to defy contextualization.”
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 265.
“the purely psychosexual manifestations of lack and plenitude, differentiation and identification, which characterize the fetishistic forms of narrative desire”
“The spectator of documentary, this subject of agency, also desires, but desires to remember and to remake history. But how is this spectator hailed by the documentary if the psychosexual processes of identification and disavowal central to narrative address are routed away from interiority and located in evidence? Primarily through an appeal to feeling over thinking.”

“the fragmentary quality of truth”

Jill Godmilow, director of Far from Poland (1984) calls for “deconstructing the documentary . . . to reformulate language -not just verbal language but visual language as well. To poke holes in the existing language, to make spaces, so that there is a possibility for imagination and action to work through it.”
Jill Godmilow, “Far from Finished: Deconstructing the Documentary, An Interview by Brooke Jacobson,” in Reimagining America: The Arts of Social Change, ed. Mark O’Brien and Craig Little (Philadelphia, 1990), 181.

“This desire to dream, to provoke imagination, seems to lead the documentary away from the realm of history and truth into the realm of art and artifice. How are we to judge historical documentaries if they call themselves dreams? In documentary the viewer is asked to participate in a series of contracts -between film and its object, between filmmaker and audience, between reality and representation. In the traditional documentary- including its use for historians -the response to the film is usually confined to whether the viewer agrees or disagrees with the content. On rare occasions the “protagonist” of the film succeeds in convincing the viewer to follow its position- save the dolphins by boycotting tuna, for example- but the construction of the cinematic argument is left unexamined. In the deconstructionist documentary like Shoah and Far From Poland, the object of the film is to produce a new and disturbing knowledge of history and of its rhetoric-of both its content and its form. Like the Angel of History, we are asked to become complicit in the process of making meaning, of making history. We are made uncomfortable, not by images of cute dolphins bleeding on the deck of the tuna boat or by the emaciated limbs and swollen bellies of hungry children in Somalia, but by the codes which allow the images to make us say “Oh, how awful” and go on about our lives.”

The Concept of Chronotope (and its relevance to cinema)

The concept of Chronotope has been invented by Russian literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin (who actually borrowed it from Einstein’s theory of relativity) and literally means “time-space”.

“almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space).” p 84
‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84).
‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space
becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (p. 84).
Bakhtin, M (1981): The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin, University of
Texas Press.

Memory and Exile: Time and Place in Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Dr. Peter King

“Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope: the singular linkage of time and place – how place is always a place in time – and how this creates the significance of memories of a particular place.”

“As Natasha Synessios (2001) has suggested, this concept was influential on Tarkovsky’s thinking for this particular film [Mirror]. Speaking generally, we might suggest that film is particularly suitable for this fusing of space and time, with its attempt, as Tarkovsky himself saw it, to stop time (Tarkovsky, 1986). Film is an artistic medium specifically intended to hold up time and to create impressions using time and space.”

The symbolism of the mirror in Tarkovsky’s films:
“According to Green (1993), it is used as ‘the metaphorical looking-glass that provides man with a reflection of himself. In its surface, time is refracted; and it is a transitional device through which one may pass to other worlds, other states of consciousness’ (p. 80).”

Green (1993):
“the view Tarkovsky seeks is that of the child, with which we glimpse Utopia or paradise. The point in man’s history where he takes the wrong path is where the child loses its innocence and begins to comprehend the world in documentary form. (p. 85)”
“marks an attempt to recover the vision of childhood as well, not just the memories, but the unexplained mysteries, with all their discontinuities and distortions of time; a child’seye view of the world and history, which accounts in part for the elusive fascination and haunting quality of the film. (p. 85)”
Green, P (1993): Andrei Tarkovsky: the Winding Quest, Basingstoke, Macmillan

“We do not remember our lives in a linear manner, viewing one incident following another, but rather as a mix of the actual and the hoped-for, of promise and regret.”

Bakhtin’s Chronotope on the Road: Space, Time, and Place in Road Movies Since the 1970s, Alexandra Ganser, Julia Pühringer, Markus Rheindorf, 2006

“the relation between images of time and space in the text, out of which any representation of history must be constructed. The chronotope of a particular text thus functions as an ideological index, but can also be used to discuss a whole genre. In some chronotopes, mainly those of travel and uprooted modern life, time takes precedence over space; in the more idyllic, pastoral chronotopes, space dominates
time.”

“of special importance is the close link between the motif of meeting and the chronotope of the road (‘the open road’), and of various types of meeting on the road. In the chronotope of the road, the unity of time and space markers is exhibited with exceptional precision and clarity. (Bakhtin p98)”

“While Bakhtin was primarily concerned with chronotopes of the novel, critics such as Robert Stam have recently suggested that the chronotope seems in some ways even more appropriate to film as a medium in which “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete” (Bakhtin 11)”
Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1989.

“the suspension of movement and its corresponding space-time relation entails the hopelessness and dreariness of film noir”

Interesting articles from “Papers of Surrealism” journal

“Fantasy, the Uncanny and Surrealist Theories of Architecture”, Anthony Vidler (2003)

“Rather what Surrealism motivated was the uncanny of the Other, which for Surrealism was the ‘real’ – the uncanny sense that the normal was nothing more than a complex of repressed objects. In the aesthetic sense of Surrealism, this normal was modernism itself and the uncanny of Surrealism was no more than the repressed of modernism, an apparent normal that in fact was a mask for the ‘real’ pathological.
In architectural terms, this search for modernism’s repressed underlife was concentrated in three domains – domains that the modernists had clearly and polemically identified as the basis of their attack on tradition: the solid, load-bearing wall that afforded traditional protection and privacy; the bourgeois house and its kitsch-like trappings of ‘home’ or ‘Heimat’; and the objects of everyday life, which, while for the most part mass-produced, were still encumbered with ornament and encrusted with historical references. Against these three hold-outs of tradition in modernity “

“All posed a volatile and elusive sensibility of mental-physical life against what was seen as a sterile and over-rationalized technological realism: the life of the interior psyche against the externalising ratio.”

Freud in the Uncanny: ‘over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality,’

Sigfried Giedion observes of the interiors of Ernst’s Une Semaine de bonté:
“The room, as nearly always, is oppressive with assassination and non-escape”

“Surreal Dreamscapes: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades”, Michael Calderbank (2003)

On Benjamin’s essay of 1925 entitled ‘Dream-Kitsch’:
“this inter-penetration of the two realms is not a ‘natural’ constant, but a historically specific phenomenon. 10 Kitsch objects, the banal by-products of culture subsumed under the logic of industrial production, are assimilated into dreams, thereby obscuring the oneiric ‘blue horizon’ of the Romantics, with a ‘grey coating of dust’. Correspondingly, as Marx first diagnosed with his analysis of the commodity fetish, at the height of capitalist modernity, ‘ordinary’ commodities become invested with a magical, quasi-religious and dreamlike aura.”

“In ‘Konvolut L’, Benjamin notes: ‘Arcades are houses or passages having no outside – like the dream.’”

Comparing Benjamin and Breton:
“For both writers, what is significant is not the waking state per se, which could quite easily carry on in the same drearily prosaic way, but the moment when consciousness is shocked into the recognition of possible forms of cognitive experience from which it is excluded in reality. Both writers also, therefore, develop a notion of a single material reality, in which ‘dream’ and ‘waking’ experience are both inextricably grounded, and which progresses not in a gradual, seamless, linear continuum, but instead proceeds unevenly in jolts, leaps and unexpected reversals.”

“Giorgio de Chirico and surrealist mythology , Roger Cardinal (2004)

What is most modern in our time frequently turns out to be the most archaic.
GuyDavenport

“a collection of talismanic embodiments of the twinned novelty and absurdity of modern life. By deliberately fetishising the bric-à-brac of twentieth-century urban culture, surrealism was able to draw up a formula for the surrealist Marvellous and to elicit a striking mythology out of the banalities of the contemporary world. “

On Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris:
“a kind of archaeology of the contemporary unconscious “
‘the vertigo of the modern’ [‘le vertige du moderne’]. (Aragon’s words)

Breton’s essay on de Chirico (1920):
‘re-appraise the basic perceptions of time and space’ [‘reviser les données sensibles du temps et de l’espace’].

Aragon’s quotation, unknown book:
‘Though substituted for the natural myths of antiquity, [the new myths] cannot be truly opposed to them, for they derive all their strength, all their magic, from the selfsame source.’
‘Substitués aux antiques mythes naturels, [les mythes nouveaux] ne peuvent leur être réellement opposés, car ils puisent leur force, leur magie à la même source.’

“The Uncanny”, Margaret Iversen, 2005

“Schelling defined it [The uncanny] as something that should have remained hidden but has come to light. In a more Freudian idiom, it is a feeling prompted by the return of the repressed.”

“The scene for the emergence of uncanny strangeness is, after all, the familiar, conventional or banal. This is so because the ‘familiar’ is constituted by the repression of childhood traumatic experience or the real of unconscious fantasy. The familiar must inevitably have a simulacral quality because the real has been expelled. David Lynch beautifully demonstrates this mutual dependence in his film, Blue Velvet (1986). The white picket-fenced world of Lumberton shown in the opening sequence has such stereotypical clarity that one’s gaze slides right off the image, unable to get any purchase. Lynch makes it clear that the bourgeois residential area has this two-dimensional simulacral quality precisely because reality (here a criminal underclass and the unconscious) has been marginalized, banished to the other side of the tracks. For me, the uncanny is not the simulacrum itself, but that which agitates its shiny surface.”

Dana MacFarlane, 2003, reviews “City Gorged With Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris” by Ian Walker

“One of the explicit claims Walker makes is that the ‘stricter’ the reality presented by the photograph, the more potentially subversive and surreal its effect. In the process of being represented photographically, the everyday world is transformed. The surreal appears in those photographs in which the logic of realism presented by the photograph is interrogated, undermined and transformed.”

Breton’s Nadja: ‘the space between’

‘Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.’ Susan Sontag, ‘Melancholy Objects’ in On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1979), p. 52.

Walter Benjamin on Surrealism and Photography

Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia (1929)

“Life only seemed worth living where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous images flooding back and forth, language only seemed itself where, sound and image, image and sound interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called “meaning”.”

“In the world’s structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This I loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the domain of intoxication.”

“ But the true creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination,  a materialistic, anthropological inspiration.”

“ perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects .that have  begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. […] No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors/enslaved and enslaving  objects- can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism.”

“convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point of explosion.”

“And no face is surrealistic in the same  degree as the true face of a city. No picture by de Chirico or Max Ernst can match the sharp elevations of the city’s inner strong-holds, which one must overrun and occupy in order to master their fate and, in their fate, in the fate of their masses, one’s own.”

“The Surrealists’ Paris, too, is a “little universe”. That is to say, in the larger one, the cosmos, things look no different. There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day. It is the region from which the lyric poetry of Surrealism reports.”

“ the deeply grounded composition of an individual who, from inner compulsion, portrays less a historical evolution than a constantly renewed, primal upsurge of esoteric poetry”

“ the philosophical realism of the Middle Ages was the basis of poetic experience. This realism, however—that is, the belief in a real, separate existence of concepts whether outside or inside things—has always very quickly crossed over from the logical realm of ideas to the magical realm of words. And it is as magical experiments with words, not as artistic dabbling, that we must understand the passionate phonetic and graphical transformational games that have run through the whole literature of the avant-garde”

Apollinaire, L’esprit nouveau et les poetes:
“ their synthetic works create new realities the plastic manifestations of which are just as complex as those referred to by the words standing for collectives”
about Dostoyevsky:
“No one else understood, as he did, how naive is the view of the Philistines that goodness, for all the manly virtue of those who practise it, is God-inspired; whereas evil stems entirely from our spontaneity, and in it we are independent and self-sufficient beings.”
I think the Surrealists moved away from this preoccupation and it’s rather George Bataille that continued to pursue this idea ?

“ we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday […] The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.”

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

“Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. […] With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.”

“The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuse for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime,
too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.”

Severin-Mars:
“What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression.”

Werfel:
“The film has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities. . . these consist in
its unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.”

“art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive”

“the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.”

“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion”

“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”

“this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction
whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. […] Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who
concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of an the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.”

A small History of Photography

“The most precise technology can give its product a magical value, such as a painted picture can never have for us. No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.”

“optical unconscious”

“photography reveals in this material the physionimic aspects of visual worlds which dwell in the smallest things, meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic.”

“Atget was an actor who, disgusted with the profession, wiped off the mask and set about removing the make-up from reality too. […] He looked for what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift, and thus such pictures too work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they pump the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship. What is aura, actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be. […] The stripping bare of the object, the destruction of the aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness – by means of its reproduction.”

“ a salutory estrangement between man and his surroundings”

“The camera is […] ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder.”

History and theory of Surrealism (through historical Surrealist texts)

André Breton , What is Surrealism? (Lecture in Brussels on 1/6/1934)

In this lecture, Breton explains the principles of Surrealism to a non specialist audience, and the history of the movement 15 years after its creation in 1919.

He distinguishes 2 eras:

1919-1924 (From the publication in 1919 of the first surrealist automatic writing experiment “Les champs magnétiques” to the publication of the First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924: a “purely intuitive epoch” characterised by “ the view that thought is supreme over matter”.
1924-ongoing: a “reasoning phase” characterised by the belief in “the necessity of crossing over the gap that separates absolute idealism from dialectical materialism” and “the supremacy of matter over mind”. This a phase of politicisation of the movement, triggered by the “outbreak of the Moroccan war” in 1924 and deepened by the rise of Fascism and the opposition with Stalinism during the 1930’s.

Oddly enough, it is this politically motivated desire to bridge the gap between dream and material reality that will take Surrealism away from its original experiments with automatism which, though fascinating in principle, tended to lead to repetitive results, and lead to the concepts of “the everyday marvellous” and “modern mythology” explored in Aragon’s “Paris Peasant”, Breton’s Nadja, the fascination with Atget’s photograhs, and the Surrealist unstaged photography tradition (Brassaï, Eli Lotar)

“a desire to deepen the foundations of the real, to bring about an even clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses.”
“avoid considering a system of thought as a refuge, to pursue our investigations with eyes wide open to their outside consequences, and to assure ourselves that the results of these investigations would be capable of facing the breath of the street.”
“ to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, or finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of surrealism”
Description of Surrealism as an “invisible ray”.

Aragon, Une Vague de rêves (1924):
“It should be understood that the real is a relation like any other; the essence of things is by no means linked to their reality, there are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream. These various groups are united and brought into harmony in one single order, surreality… This surreality—a
relation in which all notions are merged together—is the common horizon of religions, magic, poetry, intoxications, and of all life that is lowly—that trembling honeysuckle you deem sufficient to populate the sky with for us.”

René Crével, L’Esprit contre la raison (1928) “Mind against Reason”

“ the drift of surrealism has always and chiefly been towards a general and emphatic crisis in consciousness”

Salvador Dali’s “Paranoïac-critical” method

La Femme Visible (1930):
“I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active advance of the mind, it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit completely the world of reality.
In order to cut short all possible misunderstandings, it should perhaps be said: “immediate” reality.”
Paranoia uses the external world in order to assert its dominating idea and has the disturbing characteristic of making others accept this idea’s reality. The reality of the external world is used for illustration and proof, and so comes to serve the reality of one’s mind. “

‘Surrealist Intervention’ number of Documents 34, Dali Essay ‘Philosophic Provocations’:
“Paranoia: Delirium of interpretation bearing a systematic structure.
Paranoiac-critical activity: Spontaneous method of “irrational knowledge” based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations.
Painting: Handmade colour “photography” of “concrete irrationality” and of the imaginative world in general.”

Breton comments:
“In order to form a concise idea of Dali’s undertaking, one must take into account the property of uninterrupted becoming of any object of paranoiac activity, in other words of the ultra-confusing activity rising out of the obsessing idea. This uninterrupted becoming allows the paranoiac who is the witness to consider the images of the external world unstable and transitory, or suspect; and what is so disturbing is that he is able to make other people believe in the reality of his impressions.”

Influence of Rimbaud

“The Manifesto of Surrealism has improved on the Rimbaud principle that the poet must turn seer. Man in general is going to be summoned to manifest through life those new sentiments which the gift of vision will so suddenly have placed within his reach.”
“Rimbaud’s sibylline pronouncement: “I say that one must be a seer, one must make oneself a seer”. As you know, this was Rimbaud’s only means of reaching the unknown.”

“Surrealism can flatter itself today that it has discovered and rendered practicable many other ways leading to the unknown.”
Breton list examples of methods used to reach the “unknown” within surrealist practice:
“The abandonment to verbal or graphic impulses”
“the resort to paranoiac-critical activity”
“simulation of mental diseases (acute mania, general paralysis, dementia praecox), which Paul Eluard and I practised in The Immaculate Conception (1930), undertaking to prove that the normal man can have access to the provisorily condemned places of the human mind”
“the manufacture of objects functioning symbolically”
“the analysis of the interpenetration of the states of sleep and waking, tending to make them depend entirely on one another and even condition one another in certain affective states, which I undertook in The Communicating Vessels”

“the automatism from which we started and to which we have unfailingly returned does in fact constitute the crossroads where these various paths meet.”

“bring about the state where the distinction between the subjective and the objective loses its necessity and its value”

“Surrealism, starting fifteen years ago with a discovery that seemed only to involve poetic language, has spread like wildfire, on pursuing its course, not only in art but in life. It has provoked new states of consciousness and overthrown the walls beyond which it was immemorially supposed to be impossible to see; it has—as is being more and more generally recognized—modified the sensibility, and taken a decisive step towards the unification of the personality, which it found threatened by an ever more profound dissociation.”
I think this last sentence is a reference to the Marxist concept of alienation (inspired by Hegel’s concept of work as expression human creativity). Alienation is the idea than human beings are estranged from their true selves because Capitalism expropriates the fruit of their labor which, under Hegel’s concept, is the expression of man’s unique ability to create from scratch (as opposed to animals). Human beings are estranged from themselves because the act of working ceases to be a mean to express one’s inner self within the material world.

André Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924)

« Je crois à la résolution future de ces deux états, en apparence si contradictoires, que sont le rêve et la réalité, en une sorte de réalité absolue, de surréalité, si l’on peut ainsi dire. » p24
“I believe in the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak.”

« Ce qu’il y a d’admirable dans le fantastique, c’est qu’il n’y a plus de fantastique: il n’y a plus que le réel. » p25
“What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer a fantastic; there is only the real.”

« Le merveilleux n’est pas le même à toutes les époques; il participe obscurément d’une sorte de révélation générale dont le détail seul nous parvient: ce sont les ruines romantiques, le mannequin moderne ou tout autre symbole propre à remuer la sensibilité humaine durant un temps. Dans ces cadres qui nous font sourire, pourtant se peint toujours l’irrémédiable inquiétude humaine. » p26
Pierre Reverdy p31:

« L’image est une création pure de l’esprit. Elle ne peut naître d’une comparaison mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus ou moins éloignées. Plus les rapports des deux réalités rapprochées seront lointains et justes, plus l’image sera forte – plus elle aura de puissance émotive et de réalité poétique… » p31
« La valeur de l’image depend de la beauté de l’étincelle obtenue; elle est, par conséquent, fonction de la différence de potentiel entre les deux conducteurs. » p49

« SURREALISME, n.m. Automatisme psychique pur, par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale.”
“ Le surréalisme repose sur la croyance à la réalité supérieure de certaines formes d’associations négligées jusqu’à lui, à la toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désintéressé de la pensée. Il tend à ruiner définitivement tous les autres mécanismes psychiques et à se substituer à eux dans la résolution des principaux problèmes de la vie.” p37

Description of the surrealist artist as a psychic or a radio receptor p39:
“nous qui ne nous sommes livrés à aucun travail de filtration, qui nous sommes faits dans nos oeuvres les sourds réceptacles de tant d’échos, les modestes appareils enregistreurs qui ne s’hypnotisent pas sur le dessin qu’ils tracent, nous servons peut être encore une plus noble cause. Ainsi rendons-nous avec probité le « talent » qu’on nous prête. […] Nous n’avons pas de talent. »
« We, on the contrary, who have not given ourselves to processes of filtering, who through the medium of our work have been content to be the silent receptacles of so many echoes, modest registering machines that are not hypnotized by the pattern that they trace, we are perhaps serving a yet much nobler cause. So we honestly give back the talent lent to us. […] We have no talent…”

Breton, Surrealism and Painting – Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1928)

“L’oeil existe à l’état sauvage” p11
“The eye exists in a savage state.”
By this, Breton means that sight is the one sense that perceives signals in the most intuitive way, without the need to be “trained” whether by education, taste etc… Therefore the Surrealists will favour visual arts, contrary to the Symbolists who considered that every artwork should aim to become music.

“L’oeuvre plastique, pour répondre à la nécessité de révision absolue des valeurs réelles sur laquelle aujourd’hui tous les esprits s’accordent, se référera donc à un modèle purement intérieur.” p15
“douer l’esprit humain de ce qui lui faisait tellement défaut: je veux dire d’un véritable isolant grâce auquel cet esprit, se trouvant idéalement abstrait de tout,commence à s’éprendre de sa vie propre où l’atteint et le désirable ne s’excluent plus et prétend dès lors soumettre à une censure permanente, de l’espèce la plus rigoureuse, ce qui jusque-là le contraignait; si, depuis eux, la notion du permis et du défendu a pris cette consistance élastique que nous lui connaissons.” p15

“Il faut avoir pris conscience à un si haut degré de trahison des choses sensibles pour oser rompre en visière avec elles, à plus forte raison avec ce que leur aspect coutumier nous propose de facile” p16

“Tout ce que j’aime, tout ce que je pense et ressens, m’incline à une philosophie particulière de l’immanence d’après laquelle la surréalité serait contenue dans la réalité même, et ne lui serait ni supérieure, ni extérieure. Et réciproquement, car le contenant serait aussi le contenu. Il s’agirait presque d’un vase communicant entre le contenant et le contenu. C’est dire si je repousse de toutes mes forces les tentatives qui, dans l’ordre de la peinture comme l’écriture, pourraient avoir étroitement pour conséquence de soustraire la pensée de la vie, aussi bien que de placer la vie sous l’égide de la pensée.” p69
“All that I love, all that I think and feel inclines me towards a particular philosophy of immanence according to which surreality will reside in reality itself and will be neither superior nor exterior to it. And conversely, because the container shall be also the contained. One might almost say that it will be a communicating vessel placed between the container and the contained. That is to say, I resist with all my strength temptations which, in painting and literature, might have the immediate tendency to withdraw thought from life as well as place life under the aegis of thought.”
This metaphor of the container and the contained will be developed in 1932 in “Communicating Vessels” (“Les vases communicants”)

André Breton, Second Manifeste du Surréalisme (1930)

« Tout porte à croire qu’il existe un certain point de l’esprit d’où la vie et la mort, le réel et l’imaginaire, le passé et le futur, le communicable et l’incommunicable, le haut et la bas cessent d’être perçus contradictoirement. Or c’est en vain qu’on chercherait à l’activité surréaliste un autre mobile que l’espoir de détermination de ce point. […] En ce lieu mental d’où l’on ne peut plus entreprendre que pour soi même une périlleuse mais, pensons-nous, une suprême reconnaissance. » p73
« Everything leads to the belief that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, are not perceived as contradictions. It would be vain to attribute to surrealism any other motive than the hope of determining this point. It is clear, moreover, that it would be absurd to ascribe to surrealism either a purely destructive or a purely constructive character—the point at issue being precisely this: that construction and destruction can no longer be brandished against each other. […] On this mental plane from which one may for oneself alone embark on the perilous, but, we think, supreme reconnaissance»

« arracher la pensée à un sevrage toujours plus dur, la remettre sur la voie de la compréhension totale, la rendre à sa pureté originelle. » p73
«  uprooting thought from an increasingly cruel serfdom, of bringing it back to the path of total comprehension, of restoring to its original purity »

« L’idée de surréalisme tend simplement à la récupération totale de notre force psychique par un moyen qui n’est autre que la descente vertigineuse en nous, l’illumination systématique des lieux cachés et l’obscurcissement progressif des autres lieux, la promenade perpétuelle en pleine zone interdite. » p86

« la pénétrabilité de la vie subjective par la vie « substantielle » » p88

« Intellectuellement la vraie beauté se distingue mal, a priori, de la beauté du diable. » p95

André Breton, Les Vases Communicants (1932)

« Le monde du rêve et le monde réel ne font qu’un, autrement dit que le second ne fait, pour se constituer, que puiser dans le « torrent du donné » – qu’à tenter de faire apercevoir sur quelles différences de relief et d’intensité repose la distinction qui peut être faite entre les opérations véritables et les opérations illusoires qui s’inscrivent respectivement dans l’un et dans l’autre, de cette distinction très précise dépendant, de toute évidence, l’équilibre mental. » p68
« La vie humaine, conçue hors de ses limites strictes que sont la naissance et la mort, n’est à la vie réelle que ce que le rêve d’une nuit est au jour qui vient d’être vécu. » p136

André Breton, Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme (1941)

Quoting Balzac « Chef d’œuvre inconnu »
« La mission de l’art n’est pas de copier la nature, mais de l’exprimer. » p75

« Au bout de ce chemin semé d’embuches réelles ou non il y a la traversée du miroir par Alice » p76
Alice through the looking glass is used as a metaphor for Art that ceases to copy reality, and rather chooses to express it.

« L’automatisme, hérité des médiums » p94

« Une œuvre ne peut être tenue pour surréaliste qu’autant que l’artiste s’est efforcé d’atteindre le champ psychophysique total (dont le champ de conscience n’est qu’une faible partie). Freud a montré qu’à cette profondeur « abyssale » règnent l’absence de contradiction, la mobilité des investissements émotifs dus au refoulement, l’intemporalité et le remplacement de la réalité extérieure par la réalité psychique, soumise au seul principe du plaisir. L’automatisme conduit à cette région en ligne droite. » p97

André Breton, Du Surréalisme en ses œuvres vives (1953)

« la Gnose, en tant que connaissance de la Réalité suprasensible, « invisiblement visible dans un éternel mystère » p173

Canterbury University Symposium: “Video art: between documentary and fiction”

In June 2010, I attended a Symposium at Canterbury University: “Video art: between documentary and fiction”. Below are reading notes from this symposium. I was interested in it because it focused on lens-based images creating an awkward feeling of ambiguity regarding their documentary or staged nature, something I came to identify as a key concern in my practice.

Jon Dovey ‘The Limits of Vernacular Video’

Gaza Sderot: interactive video
The Himan Pet: Fake hostage video asking viewers to save the filmed subject
Derrida – Kate Modern on youtube ? the camera crew is no longer invisible

“Creative manipulation of reality” (author?)

Sarah Turner ’On documentary and Perestroika’

In Perestroïka, Sarah Turner repeats a journey to Siberia done 20 years ago (1987-88). Two friends present in the original trip are now dead at the moment of refilm in dec 2007- jan 2008

external events internalised
“Why and when does a documentary work display the truth of fiction ?”
memory, loss, photography, truth/fact, evidence
ourselves vs others and how it makes us
uncanny/real
refuses the duality between facts and the fiction of memory
psychogeography/dream

questions from audience:
Does the web esthetic of autobiographical filmmaking infect normal filmmaking?
I thought of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. Someone names Eli Harrison
“Who holds our story if the other is not here to do it?”
There is a more democratic access to cinema than to Art (just buy a ticket and be anonymous in the dark, compared to gallery environment)
Stiegler – Montage

Elizabeth Cowie  ‘The Contingency of the encounter in  documentary video art’

Rien que les heures – Cavalcanti – 1926 shows the city of paris and images of poverty
Badiou
Deleuze – intervals ????
Walter Benjamin “dialectical image” = image charged with history

Lauren Wright ‘The time between reality and fiction’

Curator at Turner Contemporary, Margate

picture by Turner of an imaginary landscape: he had read the description of it but never seen it
temporality shaped by artwork shaped by artwork and exhibition space
Bergson “creative evolution”

Matthew Buckingham: situation leading to a story
The visitors hears the sound but they have to walk around some walls to see the images (the sound continues in 2nd space with image)
the images are found footage: 4 rolls of 1920s home movies. The soundtrack is the artist’s comments/reflexions about what these films are about, who are the people in it, why the films have been thrown away, suppositions about unknown family drama and the possible cause of it.
Time as a collection of different temporal frames ? it does not let us collapse the different temporal frames

Robert Smithson, spiral jetty

Irit Rogoff ‘Bared Life – On the Documentary Turn in Visual Culture’

I missed most of this because I was watching the screenings.

Foucault: territorial ->population

Adam Chodzko ‘Latitudes’

ghost, echo, journey

Salam Cinema, 1995, Teheran

1998: Meunien ? he tried to find the 16 young victims from Pasolini’s Salo. Only one responded, he found doubles to replace the other original actors
The actor that responded was the one whose character did not do the final execution scene !!!
originally, Pasolini wanted footage from the cast party at the end of the film. But he finally decided against it, decided it was more disturbing not to explicitly tell the audience it was “only fiction”
-> makes me think of the ending of Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon

fabricated images from Milosevic trial ?check?

1967: David ?Holsman? Diary. Story of a director who obssessively records everything. Against the claims of “direct cinema”

Strawberry pickers
archive show “migrant workers” from East London come to pick hop in Kent in the 20’s and 30’s
the archives were edited by contemporary Romanian strawberry pickers. They said that the workers in the archive looked happier than themselves. By the end of the archive watching session, their attention start to drift and they start talking about themselves and their dreams

Chris Marker, Sans soleil: People sleeping in the tube, intercut with scary images of their dreams

An actor comes to an audition for a movie and pretends to be blind. When asked why by the director, he says he did it for the love of cinema.

A man burns himself with a cigarette, saying it is the only way to show the effect of Napalm (which causes a 3000°C burn compared to 400°C for a cigarette.
-> Does trauma/hurt guarantee authenticity ?
-> My own work on Magdalene/asylums ? Is it a cheap trick ?

Agnostic anxiety: not to know whether what you see or think is real or not, correct or not.

As a spectator, do you expect transformation from an artwork ?

Questions:

My question: in “A letter to Uncle Boonmee”, “soldiers occupied the place, killed villagers, forced them to flee to the jungle”. Yet the deserted houses are very clean (and houses in ireland show how very quickly they deteriorate). So this image hints at recent trauma/violence. This is reinforced by the presence of fictionnal soldiers played by local teens. Are they real houses or stage design ?
-> previous speaker: trauma/hurt guarantee of authenticity
-> I point out to a urbex forum discussion of the moral implications for the artist/urbexer of picturing recent trauma. Are the moral implications different between taking pictures of Tchernobyl and post Katrina NOLA?

Michael Newall

Pyramid – Adam Chodzko: Folkestone residents reaction to the appearance and disappearance of an otherworldly object, the pyramid.

International God Look-alike competition – Adam Chodzko

Philosophy of Art
Cognitivism: the value of Art is to offer knowledge/deepen understanding
Bourriaud – relational aesthetics: art that facilitates communities
-> critic of it: it designs only social situations where there are no conflicted interests. Different from real life.
-> he argues that activist art can change social situations, as opposed to relational
-> my objection: Activist art gives an answer to the audience (thesis, propaganda) whereas relational art make audience make their own meaning
-> later I actually get the opportunity to ask this and here is the answer: he refered not to propaganda/thesis art but to activist art in situ that have uncontrollable consequences where the happening takes place. And also other things like Antisocial Networking which used Google advertising revenues in order to buy google shares.

Brian Dillon

André Breton and Dogma 95 have in common a confusion between fact and fiction, and put serious and comedy together.

Artists are increasingly encouraged to be academics (“practice led research”). The relationship between Art and Academia is ambiguous. He says that the artist does not like the label of intuition and wants the image of rigour (my unvoiced objection: Certainly not all artists !!!)

The museum values what is not Art in Art: what looks like Art is called kitsch! That’s how the Avant guarde gets into the museum, because it looks different. The Avant guarde blurs the line with everyday life. In order to be successful, the artist produces something that does not look like Art. My unvoiced objection: this is a recent “postmodern” phenomenon. Dada and surrealists certainly did not make it to museum when they first started making strange objects, rather they were insulted n the press by respectable art critics.

What is now valued in Art is the research/knowledge underneath the work. References to other disciplines, “the world as such”. My unvoiced objection: “the world as such” is not the same as “the world as observed by academics”. What did art refer to before ? Didn’t it refer directly to “life” as opposed to an academic representation of life?

Jeremy Millar

Human Forms in Art (2008)
-> taken from the name of a display case in the Pit Rivers Museum (Oxford) that was emptied for building works
-> When interviewing someone for a documentary, people first say what they want to say. You have to keep looking at them without saying anything or stopping the camera and after a while they end up saying what they did not want to say, which often turns out more interesting.
Withdrawal of responsibility by pretending to be just passing on some found material: this is an old tradition in literature.
-> he found something about Duchamp by making a film, a fact that no academic knew of, but someone commented to him that a Phd would be more valued than the movie: the Big Duchamp stained glass “The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors” was apparently inspired by sash windows he saw for the first time in a little town in Kent.
-> My idea: there may be a pun behind this. Sash window = fenêtre à guillotine. A nickname for the guillotine was “La Veuve” (= “The Widow”) which sounds a lot like window. This coincidence may have amused Duchamp -> sacrificing a bride to make a widow?

Jeremy Millar filmed “Ajapeegel” (“Time-Mirror” in Estonian), a video set in the abandoned plant where Andrei Tarkovsky filmed “Stalker”.

Ajapeegel (2008)
Digital Video / PAL 16:9 Anamorphic / Stereo
Narrated by Simon Paisley-Day

The work has been developed from an earlier, abandoned video of the same name, that was to explore the relationship (or lack thereof) between groups of English men on stag-weekends in Tallinn, Estonia, and the three men in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film ‘Stalker’ (1979), which was also shot in and around the city. In ‘Stalker’, the eponymous guide, a scientist and a writer all travel to a room in the ‘Zone’ where, it is said, their inner-most wishes will come true; similarly those men on stag-weekends also make a transitional journey, where, they hope, their desires will be made real also. However, after having filmed a great deal of footage on the original locations in 2005, I found it impossible to realise this planned film, and this new work is, in many ways, a documentary of this failure; an ‘unmaking of’ rather than a ‘making of’ film.

Time-Mirror (2007)
Duration 00:19:20:10
Digital Audio File

This project has been developed from another work, ‘Ajapeegel’, (2008) inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, ‘Stalker’, much of which was shot just outside Tallinn, in Estonia. ‘Time-Mirror’ — the English translation of the Estonian ‘Ajapeegel’ — was made by mixing recordings made at the site of a disused hydroelectric power station outside Tallinn, where parts of ‘Stalker’ where shot, with recordings made at Grain Power Station during an artist’s placement there. The similarities between the ‘Zone’ and Grain — the power stations, the desolate landscape, even the military installations — mean that they act as ‘Time-Mirrors’ to one another, or perhaps, more appropriately in this context, as echoes; these are places that reverberate.

Ajapeegel (2005)
Colour Photographs

These are photographs taken in and around Tallinn, Estonia, on locations used for the filming of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece, ‘Stalker’; these locations were also used for my own film, Ajapeegel (2008).
The title of these works was taken from that of a book by Tatjana Elmanovits, the first monograph on the Russian director, which was found in a second-hand bookshop in the centre of Tallinn; it means, in Estonian, ‘Time-Mirror’.

Untitled Drawings (2002-onwards)
50 x 70cm
Colour Photograph

Part of a series of photographs that take as their motif the throwing of a metal nut and bandage which is found in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979). In the film, the Stalker ties bandages to the nuts and uses them to navigate around the mysterious Zone; if the nut travels true through the air and lands safely, then the Stalker and his two companions may travel that way also. While the actions were carried out in similarly uncertain spaces, between nature and industry, and suggest an uncertain presence also, they might also be considered as a rather elaborate means of merely making a line on a piece of paper. The first photograph was made in 2002 in Blean woods, between Whitstable and Canterbury; the remaining photographs were made in Hungary in 2003, during a brief artist’s residency.

One of the speakers?: the inventor of anthropology invented fieldwork techniques because he was forced to stay extensively in Australia in order to avoid being drafted in 1st world war.