Touch and See? Regarding Images in the Era of the Interface

Not only are we now surrounded by a plethora of images that derive from automatic mechanical protocols, “technical images” as Wilém Flusser would call them, but vision itself is controlled by technological processes—manually activated interfaces that condition the appearance of images in terms of size, quality and resolution, as well as duration. Our experience as viewers increasingly become that of “users”: we touch the screen to activate a menu and select a resolution, to choose and enlarge an image, zoom into it or reduce its size, to start or pause a video, to scroll through or superimpose images, to slow down or speed up their course, to make them disappear. Not that the involvement of the hand turns the interface into the equivalent of a tool, which is a prolongation of the body. Unlike the tool, touch screens belong to the realm of the programmed machine. To evaluate the effect of technology over the culturality of gestures as well as vision was one of Flusser’s key projects, one whose import comes to the fore with particular force in the digital era, when visuality appears to increasingly escape the realm of purely visual phenomenon. In what follows, I refer to Flusser’s far-sighted work, as well as concepts of the fold as derived from Leibnitz and Gilles Deleuze by Laura U. Marks, in order to look at the ways in which interfaces and gestures, that are associated with tactile display devices, determine the form and effect of image reception in the context of our contemporary “economy of attention.” To this end, I rely also on the description and critical assessment of a work of art by artist Thomas Hirschhorn, Touching Reality (2012), whose combination of classical video display with an interface, showing deliberately controversial images, brings the question of reception into sharp focus

Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty

International audienceAudiovisual culture often privileges the instantly identifiable: the recognizable face, the well-timed stunt, the perfectly synchronized line of dialogue. Yet order and clarity do not come ‘naturally’ to the moving image. Light, motion, definition, compression: the conditions of recording, storing and screening can subject audiovisual media to countless variations, pulling them towards the indefinite and illegible. Filmmakers and artists often seek out and work with the resulting uncertainty, from the warping of space to the melding of senses, from glare to shadow and blur to glitch. This collection concerns itself with the aesthetics, concepts and politics of indefinite and obscured moving images, examining what is at stake in their foregrounding of materiality and mediation, evanescence and flux. Pursuing a range of approaches (spanning history, theory and close analysis), the authors in this volume investigate techniques, effects and themes that emerge from the wilful excavation of the moving image’s formal and material base

‘C’était moi mais ce n’était pas moi’: portrayal of the disabled body in Catherine Breillat’s Abus de faiblesse (2013)

Writer/director Catherine Breillat’s most recent film, Abus de faiblesse (2013), explores an important moment of bodily transition: the change from able to disabled body. This semi-autobiographic film follows the story of film director Maud (Breillat’s alter ego), who forms a destructive relationship with a conman, Vilko, after she suffers a disabling stroke. This film shows consistency with Breillat’s previous work in its exploration of the constructed nature of the female body onscreen. In the past the filmmaker has portrayed moments of trauma and transition (such as childbirth, loss of virginity or rape) to subvert processes of objectification. The article argues that Abus de faiblesse challenges and subverts representation of the post-menopausal and disabled body onscreen. The film interrogates binary oppositions such as able/disabled and independence/dependency to challenge representations of the disabled body as ‘other’. With reference to scholarly work on disability and the ageing female body, the article suggests that Maud’s sadomasochistic relationship with Vilko is driven by a quest to retain her subjectivity after her stroke. The article demonstrates that the film dissects the feared and the unknown territory of the ageing female body

The Alterity of the Image: the Distant Spectator and Films about the Syrian Revolution and War

Images of the Syrian crisis, circulating on the international film festival circuit as well as in mainstream and social media, help to construct narratives about those events, people and places. This article explores how three Syrian documentaries – Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait, The War Show and Little Gandhi – appeal to their distant spectators and how the international film festival circuit shapes their aesthetic form. While the use of citizen videos in news reporting has generated a sense of familiarity with the audio-visual style and iconography of Syrian conflict imagery, these films invite us to look at their footage in a different way, foregrounding an experience of cultural distance through an emphasis on the formal qualities of the image. By focusing on the aesthetic rather than merely evidentiary qualities of these documentaries, I draw out a particular kind of transnational cinematic encounter in which, to borrow John Berger’s words, ‘meaning is a response not only to the known, but to the unknown’. Drawing upon the work of Berger and Laura Marks, the article offers a new conceptualization of distant spectatorship in terms of the alterity of the image

Claire Denis

International audienceThis book provides a thematic and stylistic framework within which to consider Denis' work, as well as a comprehensive analysis of individual films. It highlights the resonance of her films in relation to ongoing debates about French national identity and culture, and issues of colonial and postcolonial identity, alienation and transgression

L'attrait du flou + On the History and Aesthetics of Blur in Film

International audienceLe flou, dans son acception commune, est d’abord le signe d’une déficience, un manque de définition. Aussi le langage cinématographique, dans ce qu’il a de plus convenu, nous a-t-il habitués à considérer le passage du flou au net comme une forme d’actualisation : la forme floue, l’image bougée, sont de simples substrats de l’image nette et stable dans laquelle elles s’accomplissent et se stabilisent, en attei- gnant, dans l’idéal, la précision de contours et de détails propre à la HD. Tout semble pourtant prédisposer l’image de cinéma au flou : captée et perçue dans la durée, soumise aux variations de la lumière et du mouvement, elle est aussi sujette à toutes sortes de métamorphoses optiques et chimiques qui déclinent à l’infini la palette du vague, du brumeux, du filé.Entre évanescence et opacité, le flou tantôt tire l’image vers l’immatériel (c’est pourquoi le fantôme hante volontiers les zones floues de l’image) ou vers la matière (vers le pictural). Il est sensation, translation de la vitesse ou des mouvements du corps à l’image, glissement de la vision vers le toucher, perception du chaos extérieur. Mais il est aussi aussi manifestation de l’image mentale, du rêve, de la réminiscence. Le flou inscrit enfin l’image de film dans un champ artistique ouvert : flou d’ensemble, il brouille la frontière entre cinéma et peinture ; flou d’apparition (de mise au point), il renvoie le cinéma à ses origines photographiques, argentiques – à l’émergence progressive de l’image sous l’effet du révélateur – et à l’orchestration du désir de voir.Dans la mesure où elle exclut toutes les formes irréalisées de l’image floue, l’image nette n’en est-elle pas, au bout du compte, une version appauvrie ?Blur, in its common acceptation, is synonymous with deficiency, a lack of definition. Thus, conventional cinematographic language has accustomed us to liken the transition from blurred to defined image to a form of actualisation: the vaguely contoured figure, the blurry shape, are considered mere substrates of the clear and distinct image in which they finally materialize, ideally achieving stability as well as the precision of outlines and details that meet the standards of High Definition.Yet everything seems to predispose the film image to blur: captured and perceived through time, sensitive to variations of light and movement, the moving image is also subject to all kinds of optical and chemical metamorphoses that bring about the fluctuating palette of the vague, the misty, the cloudy.Blur pulls the image toward evanescence or opacity, the immaterial (from its very beginnings, the film image has harbored the hazy silhouettes of ghosts) or the material (the visceral, the haptic and synesthetic). Blur is sensation, the translation of speed or bodily movements to the screen, a shift of the visual towards the tactile, a manifestation of external chaos and the lurking horror of formlessness. But it is also an expression of mental states and emotions, anxiety and elation, hallucinations, dreams and reminiscences. Blur reveals film’s intermedial nature: on the one hand, sfumato, impressionistic and distorting effects pull the film image towards the painterly. On the other, where it determines the process of appearance of a figure, blur reminds us of the film image’s photographic origins - the progressive emergence of the latent image under the effect of the developer. Ultimately, blur is the orchestration of the desire to see.In sum, if the fuzzy, vague, or formless is an expression of potentiality, then is the fully defined image not, in the end, but an impoverished version of the blurred image