What a Difference a Difference Makes.

In a text I’ve been working on titled What is an act of creation? Deleuze addresses a group of filmmakers in 1979 and asks them a number of questions pertinent to the cinema: “What is an act of creation?” “What is the truly cinematic?” and “What is a cinematic idea?” I’d like to share his answer to the third question because I was thinking and writing about Solaris in pretty much the same way but in a more “concrete” manner. The translation of Deleuze’s text is kinda choppy—you can ascribe that to the translator (yours truly) or to the fact that it was based on an audio transcript... I didn’t try to smooth it out any more than this because I wanted to show Deleuze’s formulation of ideas as he presented them.

“It’s in what’s proper to the cinema that one finds cinematographic ideas. To dissociate the visual from the aural, is… why can’t it be done in theatre? Why? It is possible, but when it is done in the theatre, unless the theatre has the means to do it, we say that the theatre has adopted it from the cinema. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is such a cinematographic idea to ensure the dissociation of the seen and the heard and the spoken—of the visual and the aural, that... that it would seem to address the idea of what is it to have a cinematic idea? Everyone knows what that consists of. I will answer in my own terms because... a voice speaks of something, at the same time. Thus, we speak of something, while at the same time, they make us see something else, and finally, that which they speak to us about is underneath what we are being made to see. That third point is really important. You can feel that, and that is a place the theatre cannot follow. The theatre can adopt the first two propositions. They show us something but we are made to see something else. Meanwhile, that which is spoken of lies beneath that which we are made to see—and it is necessary, or else the first two operations would have absolutely no sense, they would be utterly uninteresting. If you prefer, we could say, in other terms more..., the word rises into the air. The word rises into the air at the same time that the earth, which we can see, sinks more and more, or rather at the same time that this word which rises into the air speaks to us, that which it speaks to us about sinks beneath the ground.”

I had been thinking about Solaris (what else is there to think about?)and about what makes it such an engrossing film. From the point of view of the average North-American spectator whose sci-fi expectations have been modelled around Hollywood sci-fi fare such as Bladerunner (1982) or The Terminator (1984), Solaris has no sexiness or pazazz. In comparison to The Matrix (1999), the visual effects are totally unspectacular. As entertainment, Solaris lacks an action-motivated plot that is engaging and easy to hook into like Star Wars (1977) or War of the Worlds (2005). In contrast to Alien (1979) the horrific aspect of the “alien monster” is totally played down and unlike Close Encounters (1977), the alien contact angle is anti-climactic. In comparison to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) or 12 Monkeys (1995) the time-travel aspect is totally downplayed. The narrative itself is intractable and refractory: as a drama, the average viewer would likely have no patience or common-ground with Tarkovsky’s humanistic intellectual vision and would find the whole thing boring. There’s also a disconnect from the alienating and distancing effects of non-North-American cultural artefacts (art direction, unfamiliar wardrobe, foreign language, unhabitual concerns, unfamiliar talent, etc). From a North American perspective and its deeply entrenched generic expectations, we are presented with a film that on all surficial considerations comes up short on every front.

In spite of this, the film is consistently mentioned on the lists of best sci-fi films of all time. What exactly is it about the film that makes it so engrossing? If this cannot be gleaned from the surface aspects of the filmic image, where do we find the value-added content? We have no choice but to look at the film in a different way, not for what’s there on screen but to how it means or to what it points to. But just how does the film mean other than what is on screen? What is it about the image being shown that points us to look at the image in a different way? What exactly constitutes this different way?

If we take our everyday reality as a phenomenological benchmark and compare that to the everyday reality on the space station in Solaris, we see that what happens in outer-space does not happen on Earth the same way. How the characters interact with each other, the various situations depicted, the concerns expressed, the switch from color footage to black-and-white, the way the characters and objects appear and disappear within the drama, are not the way that events usually manifest themselves i.e. would happen, in our shared objective reality. The fact that language exists, that it serves as a common base that enables us to communicate with one another, allows one to postulate that objective reality constitutes a shared basis for consciousness. And although it is impossible to ascertain whether or not this objective reality presents itself in the same way to all individuals participating in a shared consciousness, most of us behave as if it does. If we describe through language or present through moving images a subjective reality which differs from that which we have come to expect as reality, and we compare the differences which emerge from this alternative consciousness or variance with reality to what we usually conceive as consciousness or objective reality, that residuum constitutes abstract meaning. And depending on which aspects of the subjective reality are compared to the common manifestation of these aspects in objective reality we end up with a taxonomy of images that emerges in Deleuze’s Cinema 1—The Movement Image and Cinema 2—The Time Image.

In linguistics, this methodology is known as the analysis of deep structure and allows us to analyse the temporal manifestation of abstract meanings as a narrative whose parts are constituted by what we are seeing on screen but not necessarily a part of it. This kind of analysis allows us to discern narrative structures based on the progression of pictorial stylistics, issues of temporality, the representation of consciousness, the manifestation of the intrusion of memory, individuation, becoming, psychological concerns, etc. i.e. any metaphorical or conceptual process, in terms of its manifest temporal unfolding.

Cognitive science makes use of these elements of abstract meaning based on embodied metaphors as constitutive of sets which can be analysed through set theory or Boolean logic to analyse their constitution and interaction in order to create blocs of conceptual meaning as duration. Set theory in itself provides an interesting metaphor for conceiving the plane of immanence as the open, divergent infinite set of all possible elements of meaning and subsets as durations as presented in the philosophies of Bergson, Bachelard and Deleuze. The process of constituting and deriving meaning in cinema can be looked at in terms of set theory, where the infinite but closed number of cells of manifest and abstract meaning constitute the work. The subsets constituted by these various elements can be dissolved and reconstituted into different sets with different scope, emphasis, scale i.e. a variety of intervals, in order to investigate different concerns or affinities such as auteurism, the evolution of meaning of camera movement within the works of a particular filmmaker, etc. And these affinities do not only manifest themselves at a surficial level but at a hidden or abstract level.

Heidegger in Identity and Difference writes:
“Always and everywhere Being means Being of Existence... In the case of the Being of Existence and the Existence of Being we are concerned every time with a difference. We think of Being, therefore, as object only when we think it as different from Existence and think Existence as different from Being. Thus difference proper emerges. If we attempt to form an image of it, we shall discover that we are immediately tempted to comprehend difference as a relation which our thinking has added to Being and to Existence. As a result, difference is reduced to a distinction, to a product of human intelligence. However, let us assume for once that difference is an addition resulting from our forming of a mental image, the problem arises: An addition of what? And the answer we get is: to Existence. Well and good. But what do we mean by this “Existence”? What else do we mean by it than such as it is? Thus we accommodate the alleged addition, the idea of a difference, under Being. Yet, “Being” itself proclaims: Being which is Existence. Wherever we would introduce difference as an alleged addition, we always meet Existence and Being in their difference... Existence and Being, each in its own way, are to be discovered through and in difference... What we call difference we find everywhere and at all times in the object of thought, in Existence as such, and we come up against it in a manner so free of doubt that we do not pay any particular attention to it... What is the meaning of this oft-mentioned Being? If under these conditions Being exhibits itself as a being of..., in the genitive of difference, then the question just asked would be more to the point if rephrased: What in your opinion is difference if both Being as well as Existence each in their own way appear through difference?

There is something here, except I don't know what it is... equating the process of subtraction as differenciation. It would seem to mean that the parallel in the processes imply that the secondary meanings operate as a state of Being... Interesting...

Perception’s force field

« Le grand William James a été l’objet de nombreuses critiques injustifiées pour avoir suggéré que
chez certaines personnes,
l’inhalation de l’oxyde nitreux conduisait à la manifestation brève
d’un état psychique qui est toujours virtuellement présent. »
Richard P. Marsh, « La signification des drogues mentales »
paru dans Essai sur l’expérience hallucinogène,
Éditions Pierre Belfond, 1969, p. 53.

Le concept « champ de force de la perception » me fait penser à ce que j’ai voulu exprimer par l’expression « situation configurationnelle » en ce qui a trait aux forces qui soutiennent l’expérience psychédélique. Seulement, la configuration situationnelle fait état de toutes les forces autant virtuelles qu’actuelles à l’œuvre dans l’expérience pure. C’est comme une photo instantanée qui serait capable de montrer l’aspect d’ensemble de tous les éléments composant la singularité que l’expérience pure véhicule. Cela dit, la configuration situationnelle incarne l’expérience pure à son niveau le moins abstrait, soit dans l’actuel, mais juste avant l’expérience de registre de cette qualité.

En contre partie, le champ de force de la perception me semble se situer en tant que mouvement qui va de l’expérience pure au registre de l’expérience. Autant que la configuration situationnelle est statique, le champ de force de la perception appelle au mouvement pour se présenter. Alors que la configuration situationnelle peut même se présenter en tant que simple énumération, le champ de force de la perception apporte une perspective de durée aux éléments de la relation. Une surface incorporelle donc, qui est aussi pur mouvement et qui englobe beaucoup plus que ce que la conscience réflexive peut contenir, mais que la conscience affective absorbe pour composer l’expérience.

C’est un peu comme si la conscience affective était composée de milliards d’yeux et pouvait tout voir, alors que la conscience réflexive condense toutes ces données en un seul œil, une seule synthèse : « It’s not just that we see what we’ve already seen – it’s that what we’ve already seen contaminates what we feel we see and re-composes what we’re actually not seeing. » (Erin Manning)

Pour ceux que ça intéresse! Une programmation hors pair conçue par Marco de Blois, conservateur pour le cinéma d'animation à la cinémathèque québécoise, qui regroupe les meilleurs films d'animation de la planète.

If anyone is interest. This is a fabulous selection of the best animation movies of the year. This is at the cinémathèque québécoise next week end. After all, we were in an animation course!

The Close-up bites

Nadine Gordimer

Andrew Wyeth

I just received a link to a site/film/book/process presentation called Wisdom which has some very interesting portraits of "celebrities" at http://www.wisdombook.org/

The director/photographer, Andrew Zuckerman, http://www.andrewzuckerman.com/ comes from the nether-world of advertising where he does some fast-shutter speed pics of animals and of various objects/products exploding. The Grey Goose Vodka video with slo-mo pours and air bubbles through vodka on ice was kinda nice.

Zuckerman gives a good interview in the making-of video of Wisdom and the various portraits are quite interesting. Although most of the celebrities presented are not part of my firmament of star celebrities, the portraits present a stillness that I have not seen in portraits by Avedon, Newman, Bourque-White, Penn, Arbus or Liebowitz. The portraits are the antimatter of Weegee's crowd shots. Not all the portraits have this "still" quality about them, but the ones that seem to exude it (to my eye) would be: Dave Brubeck, Zbeniew Brzezinski (though it is more distant), Dr. Terrence FitzGerald, Frank Gehry, Dr. Jane Goodall, Nadine Gordimer, Henry Kissinger, Willie Nelson, Michael Parkinson, Helen Suzman, Andrew Wyeth.

The portraits seem to be part of a different tradition than what we conceive today as a head shot. They mix Avedon's white background portaits with romanticized 1930's portraiture: the informality of Avedon travels inside while exhibiting a romanticism devoid of passion, as if the face conveyed their individual process of spatializing ideas but without the ideas.

Traditionally, it is contended that the eyes are the mirrors of the soul, but the framing would seem to argue for a different stance: Zuckerman would have it happen on the bridge of the nose and parts of the cheeks! The framing gives undue weight to the lower part of the face--and though usually this means below the nose, in these images it would mean everyting below the eyes. The eyes are relegated to the back-seat as the face is presented as a whole rather than as a association of provileged parts. There is something going on between the nose and eyes that makes you look at the face in its entirety. It's as if Zuckerman tries to decenter the gaze and force you to see the face as a totality. In the way that we would pull out features from the background, i.e. she has a stong chin or he has soft eyes, the face conflates the individual features into a whole that metaphorically exudes their take on life. If I say that metaphor is the process by which concepts are spatialized, it could mean that these images of faces individually impose intervals and duration whose particular time signatures would be stamped on these faces. I don't know what they are thinking, but I feel like I might have an idea as to how they process the world... perhaps this is why I look so puzzled and bewildered in photographs? Peace out. Felix

Anime and Games: transcending style and time in the east

It can be said, that Japanese Anime is a culturally specific form of animation that based its visual style on its early limitations. Budget and time limits ended up defining, what Lamarre calls "limited animation", in which many short-cuts where developed in order to create illusions of movement that where less time intensive to produce. Processes such as repeated loops, sliding figures across backgrounds, segmentation of body parts, and cut and paste facial features,  first developed out of necessity and later became part of the inherent style of this unique form of animation. What was a concession later became a strength. 

What struck me most about this revelation (as I admittedly, have almost no knowledge of the Anime art form) was its very marked similarity to 2D video game animation. All the limited animation processes mentioned in Lamarre's article as well as others mentioned in Mark Stein's lecture where almost identical to the techniques used in sprite animation in video games. 

While this in itself is not a major revelation, it is worth noting that whereas in traditional animation (western) as well as video games, the tendency is often to approach the cinematic whenever possible. With emphasis on techniques such as motion-capture to create realistic movements (animation and video games), removal of looping or sliding to encourage movements based on set fps fixed meter segments, or rotoscoping (drawing the animated cells over captured film or video footage), it seems like in the west we still judge movement according to "reality" which really means the cinematic. As it is commonly thought that cinematic movement is analogous to "real" movement.

Conversely, in Japan, from what I gathered from the Stein's lecture, after having found creative solutions to their limitations, the animators started to embrace these limitations as a unique style or process. They became the seeds to a new way of conceiving animation and movement. And this is strangely similar in the video game world as I mentioned earlier. While technology in video games has grown even more explosively that of film or TV animation, games in the west are still working towards the holy grail of the cinematic experience. Hardware is being pushed to the limit to allow for more polygons (triangles that make up the mesh of modeled 3d Characters), higher resolution textures and more motion-captured key frames for animation. The general feeling is that of a constant struggle to reach "real movement".

In games coming out of Japan, like with anime, this does not seem nearly so important. The concept of movement seems less rigid and more open to experimentation within the limits of the genre. In fact, it sometimes even appears that they exaggerate the limitations purposefully. It feels like a form of self affirmation. They know they are making games and they are not afraid to say so. Examples like the legendary "Street Fighter" series are still animating with sectioned, looped, pixels based character sprites like in the good old days of 8-bit systems, in lieu of more modern 3D motion capture techniques. 

Though I couldn't tell you why this seems to be the case, it is interesting nonetheless to know that culture could play a large part in how we are willing to work with movement and how we judge it in different situations. Of course I am generalizing greatly here as there are many games and animations that transcend these concerns in both cultures. I feel it is worth mentioning that there does seem to be a division in the way movement is generally expressed. I find it interesting that two vehicles (cell animation and video games) separated by over 80 years could still parallel each other so faithfully across time and culture.

expérience = substance

Dans Le Bergsonisme, Gilles Deleuze affirme que, pour Bergson,
la « durée pure » est « changement » qui est la substance même, la
« donnée immédiate » d’un devenir qui dure. Mais de quoi est-elle faite, cette substance ? En cherchant dans mon coffre à trésors jamesien, il me vient à l’esprit que la substance à partir de laquelle tout se compose n’est ni plus ni moins que « l’expérience ».

La « durée pure » est encore une « multiplicité hétérogène », précise-t-il. Et cette multiplicité est virtuelle, et aussi continue, et surtout irréductible au nombre. Le seul nombre pouvant être considéré est l’unicité à laquelle se réfère le multiple, soit l’individualité dans le cadre duquel ce dernier se réalise, me dis-je.

Le multiple doit donc se référer à tout ce qui compose la substance que l’on vient d’appeler expérience, soit toutes les lignes de convergeance qui guident l'expérience vers elle-même, centre de son propre univers.

L’expérience respire : elle inspire affect et expire émotion. Elle est ce vers quoi culmine le multiple et ce qui façonne l’unique.

La durée pure pourrait ainsi être confondue avec ce souffle de vie virtuel : une quantité qualitative qui cadre l'expérience pour la projetter vers l'accomplissement de son plein potentiel.

Abstract Space

Two of Sarah’s films that were screened at the last class made me reflect upon the power of the black color in particular. In this regard, Wassily Kandinsky in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art underlines that “Black is something burnt out, like the ashes of a funeral pyre, something motionless like a corpse. The silence of black is the silence of death. Outwardly black is the colour with least harmony of all, a kind of neutral background against which the minutest shades of other colors stand clearly forward” (39). The viewer’s sense of space is significantly distorted because a black background erases the feeling of depth. Since Sarah mentioned that those films were related to the death of her close friend, the interplay between the figure of the white dancer and the black mise-en-scène accompanied by strong rhythmic sound brought me somehow closer to experiencing the unknown feeling of space. I think that Sarah brilliantly articulated in these films the space the viewer cannot inhabit – he or she can only slide on the black surface alongside the dancer’s figure without going inside.